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prevents her doing so.
For Elizabeth the science of breeding is more than the mere thrill of the sport. Her
understanding with Carnarvon was on code wavelength: ‘She’s very knowledgeable and
when you get to her age and have started very young, like she and I did… You send a
mating up to the Queen and suggest something and straight away she’ll see what a
fascinating ingredient it might be – “I love that idea.”’ ‘Where the mating of broodmares
is concerned,’ wrote a recent historian of the royal studs, ‘in the majority of cases it is
the Queen herself who plays the principal role, putting her own ideas to Lord Porchester
[Carvarvon] and Michael Oswald who both proffer their advice, but the final decision is
always Her Majesty’s.’ 8 Elizabeth is such an expert on thoroughbred bloodlines that she
instinctively knows a pedigree, usually without checking it in a book. The kind of
expertise which her grandmother, Queen Mary, would apply to the spider-like web of
German princely genealogy, Elizabeth concentrates on the permutations of breeding
thoroughbred racehorses.
Elizabeth, as a quasi-professional owner and breeder, does not really enjoy the purely
social side of racing or the new glitz with which it has become associated. When she
wants to talk about the finer points of a race and of a horse’s performance with people
who really know what they are talking about, she is not particularly amused to find
herself caught up with the Ascot Hat Brigade and the trophy wives. She likes her own
expert team and the old-school owners, people with whom she stays for race meetings,
although many of them nowadays are the children or grandchildren of the parents she
used to know, like Lord Halifax, her host for the race meeting at York.
There is no glitz either about her racing establishments. The main buildings at
Sandringham stud remain as they were in Edward VII’s day, a neat one-storey complex
built of the local brown carstone pointed with brick, topped with a traditional stable
clock. In front, and almost dwarfing the building, is a life-size bronze of Edward’s Derby
winner, Persimmon, now green with verdigris. There is no atmosphere of luxury about
the offices or the stables. Michael Oswald, perhaps because of the fierce financial
scrutiny now focused on Elizabeth’s affairs, was keen to emphasize her thrift and her
conscientiousness about her private business. She communicates with him on scraps of
paper and the envelope which this author received from him was not franked as Palace
stationery is (and, therefore, free as On Her Majesty’s Service), but normally stamped.
Apart from her brief ‘horse visits’ to America every three years or so, Elizabeth never
has a holiday as such, despite hostile press reports about her ‘six weeks’ at Balmoral and
Sandringham. Wherever she goes, her boxes and her secretarial staff follow her. Even on
Sundays one of her Private Secretaries is in attendance. ‘Sandringham is an escape place
but it’s also a working place,’ she said in EIIR. ‘It’s a commercially viable bit of England.
I like farming, I like animals. I wouldn’t be happy if we just had arable farming, I think
that’s very boring… Because it’s an inherited place, one’s known it since one was a
child. I know how much my father loved it… we are very involved with the people on
the estate – you have a responsibility towards them.’
Sandringham is very much a family place for Elizabeth. It was built by her great-