Ahhh, Lady Wentworth. Baroness Wentworth, by the end of her life. The only surviving child of Lady Anne Blunt and her husband Wilfrid, a poet, a political agitator, a womaniser of note, and a shooter of horses that did not belong to him. Judith Blunt seems to have had a complex relationship with her parents, based on the bits of her writings about them that I have read, and a difficult relationship with pretty much everyone else, including her own children. Given that her parents spent large parts of her childhood absent on journeys in Asia Minor, Algeria, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, with their first trip undertaken before she was a year old, I suppose it is no wonder there were dysfunctional family dynamics.
She was five years old when the first Arabian horses arrived at Crabbet Park, and grew up thoroughly immersed in horsemanship; by the time she was fifteen, she was so accomplished a rider that “all the intractable horses of the countryside were brought to her to train” (Baily’s Magazine of Sports & Pastimes, No. 784, June 1925). After her parents purchased the Sheykh Obeyd estate in Egypt, Judith spent time there regularly; in fact she married Neville Bulwer-Lytton in El Zeitoun, Cairo, just a few days before her twenty-sixth birthday.
Earlier, in 1884, Lady Anne and Wilfrid had been to the Potocki stud, Antoniny. Lady Anne records some highly complimentary remarks on the Polish mares in her journal, and observes wistfully “I should very much like to have something from this stud if we could find a pure one for sale”. (Journals and Correspondence, p. 399). However, it was not to be, as none of the Potocki horses met Lady Anne’s requirements that they be mazbut. Nonetheless, the Polish horses made a strong impression on both Lady Anne and Wilfrid, who wrote to Judith, on a subsequent visit to the Sanguszko stud, that he intended to buy three of their flea-bitten grey mares. This purchase did not materialise, for reasons unknown, but in 1920, Judith, now the owner of the Crabbet Stud after a protracted and ugly legal battle with her father, threw the criteria of mazbut out the window and purchased Skowronek, whose first-born foal at Crabbet she named Revenge - and so began re-shaping the Crabbet Arabian.
Judith, or Lady Wentworth as she is usually known, having inherited the barony of Wentworth on her mother’s death in 1917, was a powerful shaping force in the public perception of the Arab horse in the first half of the twentieth century. She had ownership of the well-known and internationally admired Crabbet Stud, a lifelong exposure to Arabian horses, and forty years of Crabbet breeding to back her up. She also had a good deal of social clout thanks to her family connections, and contemporary articles written about her frequently mention that she was the great-granddaughter of Lord Byron. In addition, she had a gift for writing, and was also an artist. So she had all the tools she needed to re-create the image of the Arabian horse as it suited her.
During Lady Wentworth’s tenure as the head of Crabbet Stud and the doyenne of Arab horse breeding in England, the look of the Crabbet Arabians changed significantly over time. Lady Wentworth justified this in her books, such as The Authentic Arabian Horse And His Descendants, and other writings, explaining how her horses were the best bred, the most authentic, the most true to type. She bolstered her authority on the subject by referring back to her parents’ knowledge, especially that of her mother, gained during their desert travels and their time in Egypt, and wielded it as a weapon to dismantle the arguments and ideas of others. For instance, in this Country Life article, from 18 January 1946, she attacks Carl Raswan:
I note also with considerable surprise that Mr. Raswan, in a recent article in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, evidently sets himself up to know better than the Grand Mufti of Egypt, head of the Azhar University, and Lady Anne Blunt, contradicting them both on their interpretation of certain Arabic words. In this connection it is useful to remember that “Carl Raswan" is an assumed name, adopted, in fact, from one of my horses. In 1936 he was known by what he told me was his real name, Karl Rheinhardt Schmidt. The oriental name may therefore be misleading, as suggesting a racial authority which he does not possess.
Here she appeals to the authority of her mother as an expert in Arabic, and also points out that Raswan’s name comes from one of her horses, to shore up her impeccable pedigree as an Arab horse expert, and to argue that Raswan was a parvenu, who owed his alleged “racial authority” to Lady Wentworth herself.
She also used her skills with a paintbrush to touch up the images of her horses, and even her parents’ horses, to make them better fit the criteria she was propagating. Exhibit A (photos below from the first edition of The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants, unless otherwise specified):
At first glance, there is nothing obviously altered in this picture of Shareer, but a closer look at his eye changes that, as Lady Wentworth has enlarged it and (bewilderingly) set it higher up his head. If the eye doesn’t seem unusual, here are a few more samples of her anime eyes on horses.
Naufal’s is very obvious, and shows the features to look for: the higher-set eye, the bugged-out look, the increased definition of the eyelids, and the dot of light in the upper part of the eye.
Irex’s eye is so enlarged that it gives him a cartoonish expression.
Lady Wentworth’s insistence on exaggerating the eyes of her horses is strikingly reminiscent of the show ring fashion of shaving around the horse’s eye, which both makes the black skin easier to see, and also creates the illusion of the eye being larger.
It is not only eyes that Lady Wentworth enlarged.
The horse in this photo is not identified; I think it may be Skowronek or one of his sons or grandsons, but the horse’s features have been sufficiently distorted that it is hard to tell. In this case, Lady Wentworth has not only painted on her classic big eye, but she has also extended the nostril in a way that is most uncanny. It is also, interestingly, blown right out to the tip of the muzzle, just as many modern Arabians have had their nostrils migrate from the top of the muzzle to the end.
She was also a proponent of the forward-set foreleg, once she started producing horses with that conformation.
(The horse in Figure 8 has a lot of problems if its scapula stands straight up and the cartilage that forms the withers has come detached.)
In the same book this diagram is from, this is a photo of one of her Crabbets.
The suspiciously blurred background directly behind Indian Gold suggests that she may have retouched the horse’s topline and neck, and close scrutiny of the underside of the neck shows that it is very smooth, with no detail. At any rate, Lady Wentworth’s breeding was producing horses with a short, upright humerus, and so she had to claim, contrary to reality, that this shoulder arrangement provided a better range of motion.
Another feature of Lady Wentworth’s later Arabians was the increasingly tubular bodies with shallow heart girths, and lengthening backs, which often softened as the horse aged.
Photo from The Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News, 11 August 1948.
Raktha demonstrates the forward-set shoulder and the long, soft back, coupled with high haunches and mutton withers. His heart girth is virtually level with his elbow.
Lady Wentworth also retroactively touched up some of the photos of her parents’ horses, to bring them more in line with the new standard she was pushing. An obvious example is her version of the well-known picture of Lady Anne on Kasida.
Lady Wentworth has retouched the tail, to give it more of an arch, and also worked on the mare’s head, to create a more dished profile. Compare with the horribly low-resolution untouched version, in which Kasida’s profile is straighter and her tail is less full.
Not only did Lady Wentworth reshape the images of her horses, to create an idealised version of them, she also spread her horses around the globe, with buyers from the United States, Australia, Spain, Russia, South Africa, Argentina, and many other countries. This meant that the Wentworth horses had many opportunities to pass their genes and their type on, opportunities heightened by their prestigious origins in the Crabbet stud belonging to an English baroness, who never failed to noise their show ring victories abroad. These horses were champions, as the captions on their photographs proclaimed. These horses were winners and therefore they must be of the correct and most authentic type, because they won classes and because Lady Wentworth was, after all, an authority on Arabians, being the daughter of the Blunts. Never mind that the horses had an increasing number of conformational flaws, they were winners and that was what counted.
I’m not even going to get into the trainwreck that is the allegations of clandestine Thoroughbred use in the Crabbet Stud by Lady Wentworth; suffice it to say that I have seen a letter from Musgrave-Clark and have also been told independently by another person that Thoroughbred horses, both stallions and mares, were crossed with the Crabbets, with the produce that looked most Arabian being registered as Arabians, and the ones that did not being registered as Anglos. This was, according to Musgrave-Clark, how she bred height into her horses. One does have to look at some of the horses that have been fingered as half Thoroughbred and wonder.
Indian Magic, I have been told, was out of a Thoroughbred mare. Photo from Herbert Reese, 1967, The Kellogg Arabians: Their Background and Influence.
The mare Sharima, below, has long been rumoured to have been the daughter of the Thoroughbred stallion Mighty Power.
So, really, Lady Wentworth was very shady when it came to her handling of the Crabbet Arabians. There is so, so much more, but I am drawing the line here for the time being.
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