That’s devotion.Īlong with picking up some fine Kentucky-bred foals out of her mares, the Queen fell in love with the Kentucky Bluegrass, those lush, rolling limestone-based horse country counties around Lexington whose mineral-rich water and grass is said to build such fine bones in its Thoroughbreds. Which is to say: The Queen and her racing managers in Britain and in the States have been entering her horses in races right down into the very last weeks of her life. Of course, owners and trainers don’t book their horses on the day of a race. Two days after the Queen’s death, one of her U.S.-based turf racers, West Newton, put on a stellar stretch run at Baltimore’s Pimlico and handily took his one-and-one-eighth mile race. Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty ImagesĮlizabeth II didn’t quit anything if she could help it, not philanthropy, not government, not public appearances, not her Christmas speech, and certainly not racing. Victory Party: At the 1993 Epsom Derby with (front row, from left): the Queen Mother, the Earl of Carnavon, the Queen, and Prince Charles. ![]() It was “Porchey” who engineered the Queen’s move with her mares into American bloodstock in Kentucky. Carnavon, who died twenty years ago, knew his stuff, and it helped. Sitting astride the Herbert family fortune of several hundred million sterling back in the day when the pound meant something other than a dollar, he became the Queen’s (unpaid) racing manager, calling her almost daily from racetracks, barns and sales, rooting ceaselessly around in the pedigrees, urging her to buy this foal or that runner. In real, non-televised life, the 7th Earl of Carnavon was in fact a close, long-standing-and as he took great pains to point out, entirely platonic-friend of the Queen’s. Put bluntly, when the Queen visited “Porchey” over at Highclere, even she knew she was some place special. Adding to his aristocratic luster, the Herbert/Carnavon earls own Highclere Castle, most famous as the monumental cinematic setting for the Julian Fellowes’ period television series Downton Abbey. (Photo by Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Getty Images)īeginning in the mid-1980s, the Queen began sending many of her breeding stable’s twenty-odd mares to Kentucky to be bred to leading American Thoroughbreds, considered to have greater speed than British racers, who are generally bred more for endurance in longer turf and steeplechase events.Īt her side during the Eighties and Nineties- and dutifully played by Joseph Kloska in The Crown-was the inimitable socialite and leading gadabout-of-the-Realm Henry George Reginald Molyneux Herbert, the 7th Earl of Carnavon, aka “Porchey,” a jocular semi-derogatory Eton-ish contraction of “Porchester,” one of the earl’s pre-inheritance courtesy titles. ![]() However, the survey also shows that a surprisingly low amount (38%) aim to buy as an investment.Winner's Circle: Queen Elizabeth congratulating her horse, Aureole, after a victory at Royal Ascot in 1954. More than half of first-time buyers and remortgagers think the UK is in danger of becoming a nation of renters within five years, while almost two thirds of landlords feel pushed out of the rental sector at the same time. Renting is losing its attractiveness as an investment “More people are working for themselves, or employed as contractors, meaning they have unstructured incomes while factors like the shift to hybrid working following the global pandemic are changing what they want from a home, and therefore their borrowing needs,” he said. How the demand is changingīen Merritt, director of mortgages at YBS, pointed out how the demand has shifted in the market, including buyers looking for larger properties and places with higher energy efficiency ratings. ![]() More than one-third of first-time buyers are still planning to purchase next year, with the majority saying it would allow them to stop wasting money on rent.
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