sheds. Signs pointing you in every direction. Passport control. All bathed in the halogen orange glow from the array of tall lights that suck yet more life out of an already depressing scene. Huge juggernauts wait in line, their engines humming away as their drivers, experts in long waits, fiddle with their phones or doze. And among the lines of freight are horses. Lots of horses. For this is the primary (and shortest) route along which thousands of racehorses, from valuable stallions in their prime to newly born foals just a few days old, will pass each year between the UK and Ireland.
Sometimes they are easy to spot; the Coolmore transporters are giant billboards. The commercial horse movers have sleek wagons and the livery to announce their trade. There are maybe a dozen or more horses on board each lorry, plus accompanying grooms. But oftentimes the horse boxes are so discreet that you would barely recognise them as such. White lorries, not much bigger than a box van, with little to identify the cargo of two inside. And a Juddmonte lorry, on a bleak February evening awaiting the night ferry, was a six-year-old mare called Kind with her first foal, a bay colt who had been born at Banstead Stud just nineteen days earlier. As the lorry mounted the ramp into the oily aura of the cargo deck, the foal might have felt some trepidation. The swaying of the boat. The shouted instructions. The echoing roar of diesel engines that reverberate in the hugeness of the hold, booming for one last time before falling silent. The banging and clanking is alarming even to those who understand such things, as the stevedores haul chains to lock down the chassis to the steel floor. A winter Irish Sea is rarely calm.
I’d like to think Kind was a good mother to her young foal on that journey, reassuring him as each new day brought new things to learn and experience. Though I can’t be sure, I’m fairly confident I’m right.
I’ve met Kind, who is sweet and kind. The last time I saw her, she was with her newly arrived filly. The pair were in one of the stalls in the American-style barn at Coolmore while Kind underwent acupuncture. The past years have not always been easy for Kind. After five consecutive foals, she had a barren year when she did not conceive, then had another live foal who raced as Proconsul, then slipped (that is to say, aborted), then was barren again, then slipped the next two seasons to finally produce in her seventeenth year the filly foal that I met.
As the stable hand held her head and the acupuncturist did her work, the leggy foal wandered out of the gaze of her mother to join me at the half-opened door, curious at the new arrival. As she nuzzled her head into my chest, I stroked her young hair, which was clumpy rather than smooth, more like soft wool to the touch. Looking over, I saw mother turn her head away from watching the pin woman to check on her foal and check me out. It was kindness exemplified. For in that nanosecond, you could see in those brown eyes concern, care and then contentment all in a flash of maternal assessment. She’s definitely a good mother.
You probably know, or at least have gathered, that Kind is Frankel’s mother. In many ways, I feel a bit mean not starting out by telling you about Kind first but it seems that, at least in terms of headline grabs and eye-watering valuations, it is the sires that win out. But not everyone feels that way. There are plenty in the bloodstock world who value the female line above the male. In fact, it is no accident that the Arabs sold stallions to the avaricious English. They did then, and do now, hold on to their fillies. The truth is that sires get star billing through sheer weight of numbers. Even the most fecund mare will likely not produce more than a dozen or fourteen foals in her lifetime; as we have seen, for a leading sire the number can run into thousands. Whichever way you cut it, for good or ill, the odds are weighted in favour of the guys, and the sheer familiarity of their names, so frequently repeated in race cards and race reports, reinforces any stallion brand. So, let me tell you about Kind.
She was born in Ireland, bred by Frankel’s owner Prince Khalid who still owns her today. Her father was a great stallion called Danehill, also bred by Prince Khalid. Her mother was the daughter of a Derby winner and her great-grandfather was Northern Dancer, that bloodline so coveted by Coolmore. If all these various names become something of a blur, I understand; it is maybe enough to know that Kind, and so in turn Frankel, had great parentage. Her racing career, it is probably fair to say, was successful without being stellar. Like her famous son she raced at two, three and four, notching up a run of five consecutive wins in her middle year and with one further win in her last. She was retired to Banstead Manor that summer to become a broodmare, and it was to be there rather than on the racecourse that her destiny truly lay.
She arrived at her new home at what was to be the perfect time in her life for her new calling. Though as a filly she would have been sexually mature at two, ready to breed in a wild herd, at four coming up to five she was now fully developed. And that is important for there is little point rushing these things – a healthy, well-looked-after mare will be able, accidents and difficulties aside, to produce a foal every year into her early twenties.
Her new life would have been both similar and different to that of being in training. The stables are not so different, laid out in rectangular blocks amid which the daily routine of a horse yard – feeding, grooming and light exercise – ticks on by. But the testosterone-charged young colts are absent. The highs and lows of racing success that inevitably both fire up and disappoint the stable staff are no longer present. In fact, it is noticeable that everyone is generally a generation older. They’ve done their time in the cauldron of a racing yard or come straight into the stud industry, opting for a life where the results of what you do today will be measured in the years to come rather than in the months or weeks. You sense they know they are the guardians of the future. Doing something that takes a certain care and patience.
For Kind, she has been ridden for the last time; nobody will ever sit on her back again. Nor will a bit part her mouth or a bridle be placed on her head. No saddle girths tightened around her middle. The farrier will remove her shoes; she will remain unshod until the day she dies. Gradually, she will lose the musculature of a fit racehorse as her frame fills out a little. More rounded. More feminine. Gallops are replaced with paddock life. It is, in a beautiful place, with people who care for your every need, about as perfect a life as you might imagine.
Arriving from the racecourse, Ed Murrell, then the Banstead Manor stud groom (now assistant stud manager), describes her as a ‘slab of a horse’, weighing in at a racing-fit 550 kg. Out of context that figure doesn’t mean much, but if you consider that Frankel was not much heavier, you’ll understand what a tremendously strong filly she is. It sounds a little unkind when Ed adds that she has a ‘massive behind’, but it is a statement of what Kind was: a sprinter. A mare endowed with exceptional acceleration and speed, powered by those ‘massive’ rear quarters that made her such a potent force in races of under a mile. There is not much subtlety about sprinting. Tactics are not the thing. Break fast from the stalls. Keep out of trouble. Cruise at speed in the middle section and then fire up that equine body for all it is worth once the winning post looms. In the shortest of the sprint races held in the UK and Ireland of five furlongs (five-eighths of a mile), it will all be over in sixty seconds. In understanding Frankel, you need to know how important the speed genes of Kind were. It is vital to the tale.
But all this was a little way off as Kind was let slip to run free in an empty field. For close on four years she had led the life of a prime athlete with training, conditioning and diet all focused on the single aim of making her fast. But now with Quiff, her turn-out companion, also on the way to becoming a broodmare, they explore the tiny paddock, no more than a quarter of an acre, in a remote corner of Banstead’s 379 acres. Day and night they have nothing but the skies above. Gone is the life in a stable. The daily gallops. The wind up, or the wind down, from competitive racing.
Free of all the paraphernalia of being a racehorse, bar a single head collar, they roll in the dusty turf of summer. Standing head to tail in the heat of the day, gently flicking flies from around their respective heads. At night they stare at the stars. At dawn they lick the fresh dew from the grass. Sometimes, with a sudden burst of energy, one of them will kick up heels and do a rapid circuit of the field, but for the most part little moves, fast or slow. A few times a day, one of the stud hands comes by to check all is well. They soon understand the rhythm of these visits, anticipating with remarkable precision the ones that include a bucket of feed. Sometimes, the farrier drops by to inspect their feet but it is routine; no