A Racehorse and a War Horse

Sometimes a horse comes along and captures the public imagination. Desert Orchid, Moscow Flyer, Best Mate and Denman being a few of the names in recent years who have done that. These horses have the ability to make you shout out loud, experience amazing highs and occasionally, sickening lows too.

Sea the Stars was a great horse and I remember shouting him home in the Arc but we really only had a year to enjoy him and the public were just starting to get to know him when off he went to stud.

Then along comes a horse called Frankel.

In a time when racing (especially the flat) desperately needs its stars, this freakish, difficult and unbelievable talented horse bursts his way onto the scene. And what’s more, the fates give him to a man whose has both scaled the heights and witnessed the depths of despair, the fragile and publicly adored genius that is Sir Henry Cecil.

We have loved and been fascinated by Frankel since he was a two year old. The horse who could out gallop a train, whose stride was twice as long as anything else’s and yet who was always one slip of the rein away from an uncontrollable bolt into the next county.

In the wrong hands, Frankel would have been a basket case. But in the right hands Cecil has brilliantly used his lifetime of experience to nurture this quite exceptional talent, control his complex temperament, but has never broken the colt’s spirit. 

To be at Ascot last Saturday was one of those great days that will stay with you forever. Necks craning as the horse first stepped into the pre-parade ring, the crowd screaming as he surged to the front a few furlongs out, the mad dash to get back to the winner’s enclosure and then the euphoric cheers for both Cecil and his horse that seemed to go on for ever and which no one wanted to end.
I was so glad to be there.

Frankel enters the pre-parade ring on Saturday

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Yesterday morning, Brough Scott sent me through his copy on the Frankel Story for our forthcoming Racing Post Annual www.racingpost.com/shop – it is an absolute genius piece of writing.

To another great horse now and we were absolutely thrilled to have a double page spread on Warrior in the Daily Mail last Saturday http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2049362/Steven-Spielberg-film-The-war-horse-Germans-kill.html

The book is also appearing on the One Show tonight, and we really hope that it is going to capture the public’s imagination.

Warrior was born on the Isle of Wight before the First World War and was one of the first horses off the boat to France with his owner, Jack Seely, in 1914.
Spending four years on the Western Front, he survived every imaginable disaster and was at all the major battles such as the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres.
But Warrior came home in 1918 when 8 million horses, mules and donkeys did not.
Four years to the day after he had led a famous charge at Moreuil Wood, Warrior won the local point to point. 
He was still being ridden in 1938, as depicted in our book, with the horse and rider having the combined ages of 100 years (Seely, 70, Warrior, 30). 
Few horses have obituaries in the national newspapers when they die. But this one did.
They hailed him as ‘The Horse the Germans Could Not Kill’.

Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse contains the original line drawings and paintings by Sir Alfred Munnings  who first painted Warrior at the front in February 1918 and again at home on the Isle of Wight after the war.
The forthcoming Spielberg film, War Horse, is fiction. Our story is 100 per cent true. http://www.warriorwarhorse.com/

Queen Mary comes to visit Warrior at home on the Isle of Wight after the war