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training establishments. She likes to know. ‘Oh,’ she might say, ‘X, the stallion man, is
feeling pretty low, his wife’s giving him a hard time…’ News from her racing
establishments is a welcome relief from the often unrelieved diet of bad news which she
gets in her working life. ‘People don’t realize that most of the time the Queen gets bad
news,’ her racing manager said. ‘Our ambassador somewhere’s died, or there’s been an
air crash and a lot of people killed, or bad news politically – all sorts of things. It all
comes to her and so… when the horses run well, the right sexed foal has been born, it’s
a bit of an uplift to her and I think she gets a kick out of that… when we buy a horse
we’ll try and be on the telephone to her whilst it’s being bought, so she gets the thrill of
the thing – the horse we’re interested in coming into the ring and then listening to the
auctioneer…’ 3 As in her working life, Elizabeth is a master of her subject: ‘The
wonderful thing about the Queen is that she knows the whole of racing and breeding
and you don’t have to explain anything to her. For instance, if she has a runner at
Warwick, she will know it’s a left-handed course, she knows the people on the ground
itself, what that means, and she knows the runners…’ When it came to breeding, which
possibly interests Elizabeth more than just racing, her expertise, having started when
she was still in her teens, was growing all the time. Her racing manager said:
The Queen’s knowledge of her own mares and the make and shape of the animal, what it should look like and
what it shouldn’t… all this sort of thing [is remarkable]. She would have been very good at stable
management and she would have been a very good trainer if she’d been able to. She’s very interested in stable
management, stud management, the way the staff handle the horses, all those sorts of things… 4
It was through a shared passion for racing that she got to know one of her oldest and
closest friends, Lord Porchester, known as ‘Porchy’, who was just over two years older
than her. The friendship between Elizabeth and Porchy went back to 1944, when he was
just twenty and she seventeen. Porchester had joined the Royal Horse Guards, the 1st
Household Cavalry Regiment, during the war. When he returned, his first ceremonial
appearance was on the first Whitehall guard that took place after the war and then as
part of the Sovereign’s Escort riding beside the royal carriage to St Paul’s for the
Thanksgiving Service at the end of the war. From then on he and his brother officers
were frequent guests at Buckingham Palace for evening parties or for dinners as escorts
for the Princesses. The mutual bond was horses, or rather racehorses. Porchester had
owned a racehorse since he was eighteen, a present from his father, which was also in
training at Beckhampton with Fred Darling. Elizabeth, the King and Queen noticed, had
developed an enthusiasm for racing which made Porchester an ideal companion for her
and they encouraged the friendship.
Porchester, who became 7th Earl of Carnarvon in 1987, was not one of the chinless
wonders whom Noël Coward noted contemptuously in Princess Margaret’s circle. Half-
American, he was the more serious son by his first wife of the 6th Earl, also confusingly
known as ‘Porchy’, whose exploits in pursuit of women were legendary. Carnarvon was
a man of good judgement, responsible, the chairman of a multitude of councils and
charities, most of them concerned with the conservation of the countryside and sport,