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everything Oriental first induced him to start breeding Arab horses for his own pleasure, and he soon found that, both when riding to hounds and handling the ribbons, his experiment had made him particularly fortunate. For many years it was his habit to harness a team of four horses, which had never, or hardly ever, been in the shafts before, and drive them straight away to the Derby, and one of his favourite plans for breaking in his horses is still to take a team out for a long driving-tour every summer. He pitches a tent on a common and tethers his horses outside it in true Bedouin fasion, only regretting that the customs of the country prevent recourse to nomadic habits for picking up his dinner. Of course, in the desert an Arab horse is chiefly remarkable for its powers of endurance, but Mr. Blunt is too careful of his cattle to put this to a practical test over here. He is quite content to find that his team can easily accomplish from thirty to thirtyfive miles a day without turning a hair.
Arab Horses in England August 3, 1898, The Sketch, pp 46–47. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, who married Byron’s granddaughter, who went to prison for Ireland, who is a poet and an explorer, glories in Arab horses.
His experiment has now proved such a success that, from a fancy breeder, he has turned into a kind of missionary for the propagation of Arab stock. He is convinced that the advantage of an admixture of Arab blood in English horsebreeding must be of advantage, and if he does not attempt any cross-breeding himself, it is because he has enough to do with producing the original article. But he holds it to be an infallible recipe for the production of a good hunter to mix one quarter of Arab blood with three-quarters of English thoroughbred. He believes also that the same procedure may easily prove effective in producing racers, and he can mention instances of some of his mares having presented English thoroughbred sires with winners of good races in the first generation.
Major Shakespear, one of the best-known authorities on all manner of sport in India, writing about Arab horses a generation ago, expressed himself as Hafiz might have done about a bottle of wine. “As to price,” said he, “count not the money you give for a real Arab. Go sell all you possess and make him your own.” Anyone who has known and tried Arab horses in England might say the same to-day, except that they are cheap enough to make no such sacrifice necessary. The average price at Mr. Blunt’s sale the other day at Crabbet Park was well under a hundred guineas for the purest breed obtainable anywhere, not excepting the realm of the Prince of the Nedjed. One of the chief claims of Ulysses to immortality was that Homer never mentioned his name without adding the epithet “horsenourishing.” Mr. Blunt is an excellent poet, and a politician whose patriotism has never been impugned, but the odds are that he will best be remembered as “Horse-Nourishing Blunt.” His love for
It is not merely however, for breeding that Arabs are to be recommended. An English thoroughbred will doubtless beat them at mere speed, but the one that will do so will cost very much more at present prices. Speed is not, and has never been, the chief point
ED: The horse images in this article were very crudely cut out from their backgrounds and then coarse outlines drawn around them. In some cases, body parts are missing and in others, background is included as part of the horse. These have been corrected as far as is practical without having the original image to work from.
“Mr. Blunt in Arab Dress at Sheykh Obeyd.” On the very young Mesaoud (APS).
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