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to win top dog prizes in the Game Fair International four times and achieved field trial
champion status.
Elizabeth’s real passion is for breeding and racing thoroughbreds, something which
she inherited from her grandfather, George V, who named a bay filly Lilibet after her.
‘No owner was keener or took a greater interest in his horses than he did… not only in
racing… but even more in the breeding and welfare of the young stock,’ the King’s
Sandringham stud manager wrote. When George VI succeeded, he admitted to his
father’s stud manager that he knew ‘nothing about breeding or anything else’, but he
took a great interest in his two strings of racehorses – ‘the Hirelings’, Big Game and Sun
Chariot, which his racing manager, Charles Moore, leased from the National Stud and
trained with Fred Darling at Beckhampton from 1940, and his own horses, divided
between studs at Hampton Court, Sandringham and Wolferton (which is at
Sandringham), which were trained at Newmarket by Cecil Boyd-Rochfort. During the
war, the King used to give Elizabeth his trainers’ reports to read and took her down to
Beckhampton to see the horses, when Fred Darling noticed that it was Elizabeth who
identified the horses for her father. It was on this occasion that she was allowed to pat
Big Game and later she admitted that she did not wash her hand for some time
afterwards because she felt it was such a privilege to have touched such a high-class colt.
In 1945 she attended her first Royal Ascot and saw the royal colours win with her
father’s horse, Rising Light; and when the Aga Khan gave her a filly foal named
Astrakhan as a wedding present, she registered her own racing colours – scarlet, purple
hooped sleeves and black cap – in 1949. That summer she and her mother bought a
steeplechaser, Monaveen, but after he was killed racing at Hurst Park on New Year’s
Day 1951, she never bought another jumper. By then her most successful racehorse,
Aureole, had been born (on 14 April 1950) and named by Elizabeth. He was a colt of
uncertain temperament and had the temerity to lash out at Her Majesty when she
offered him an apple at Boyd-Rochfort’s Freemason Lodge in the spring of 1952. He
was, however, foremost in her thoughts on her Coronation Day. Just as she was about to
leave Buckingham Palace for Westminster Abbey, a lady-in-waiting asked her if
everything was all right. Elizabeth replied that everything was fine: Boyd-Rochfort had
telephoned to tell her that Aureole had gone well in the final run-up of his preparation
for the Derby. On that occasion he came second to Pinza, but after he won his final race,
the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, at Ascot in July 1954 an excited
Elizabeth was seen running to the unsaddling enclosure to greet him, arriving in front of
her racing manager. She was the leading winning owner in 1954, but for her racing, as
for other areas of her life, things were going downhill. By 1956 the Royal Stud was in
the doldrums and 1959 was its worst year since 1944.
Racing and the breeding of racehorses is a therapeutic alternative to the strain of her
daily life (even on Sundays her Private Secretary is on hand and there is no day in the
year on which she does not have to deal with her ‘boxes’). For someone normally so
isolated from everyday life, her racing world involves her closely with the people
concerned, not so much the other owners but with the personnel at the studs and