Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee — House of Lords, 2022-05-26
Topic: Mixed Topics
Rupert Ponsonby (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, the breadth of wisdom, experience and accomplishments of Her Majesty the Queen, as well as the extent and depth of her service to our nation, are such that a single Member of your Lordships’ House can never do her justice. Most noble Lords have spoken of that service and of her great contribution. As Her Majesty’s Master of the Horse, I want to focus on the aspects of the Queen’s life which involve horses, an area where I like to think she gets her enjoyment, relaxation and excitement, but where she also makes a significant contribution to our public life Perhaps her best-known equestrian passion is for her racehorses. She has owned winners of all five English classics, except—tantalisingly—the Derby, in which her Aureole came second in 1953. Aureole, incidentally, itself sired a Derby winner. Among her best horses were Carrozza, which won the Oaks in 1957; Pall Mall, which won the 2,000 Guineas in 1958; Highclere, which won the 1,000 Guineas in 1974; Dunfermline, which won both the Oaks and the St Leger in 1977, an astonishing performance; and Estimate, which, despite not winning a classic, was one of her best horses, winning the Queen’s Vase in 2012 and the Gold Cup the following year. Each of these horses won other important races and Her Majesty has had, and continues to have, other very high-class and successful horses; these are just some of her bigger winners Despite the difficulty of competing at the top today, against the world’s massive racing establishments, which are equipped to breed a multitude of foals to produce one good one, compared to Her Majesty’s relatively modest number of brood mares, I think I am right in saying that the Queen had her highest ever number of winners last year and has had no fewer than five winners in the month of May this year alone—and, in addition, five seconds. She looks sure to have a fistful of runners at Royal Ascot The Queen’s approach to the breeding of racehorses is that of an intellectual. Which bloodline will nick with which? Is the aim a sprinter or a classic horse? What are the logistics of getting the mare to the stallion, many of the best of which are overseas? The breeding of racehorses is a long-term game. The classics are run by three year-olds and the planning of the breeding will not have been undertaken overnight. Luckily, patience is an asset of which the Queen is not in short supply. The naming of racehorses is, for the Queen, something akin to an advanced crossword. What would one call a foal by the stallion Night of Thunder, out of a mare called Free Verse, but Slipofthepen Other noble Lords have commented on the Queen’s sense of humour. We were discussing the other day a horse she was, unusually, rather disappointed with. At the age of 96, she told me, "I could run faster than it in gumboots" Her Majesty’s expertise is not restricted to racehorses. As my noble friend the Leader of the House said, at the Royal Windsor Horse Show two weeks ago she entered, among others, her homebred Highland mare, Balmoral Leia. Leia triumphed, not only in her class but as champion, and then as supreme champion in- hand mountain and moorland pony The Queen takes a considerable interest in breeding and has been a strong supporter of some our rarer breeds, just some examples of which are the fell pony and the Cleveland bay, the latter important to the world of carriage driving in general and the Royal Mews in particular. The Queen also pays considerable attention to the life after racing of her horses, a notable example of which is her retrained racehorse Barbershop, formerly trained by Nicky Henderson, which ran with distinction in the Queen’s colours, winning eight races and being placed in the 2009 King George VI Chase. He followed this up with a string of successes in the show ring The Queen is well known to be an excellent horse- woman and horse-master herself, most notably when riding in her birthday parade in 1981. As my noble friend the Leader mentioned, when a teenager let off a starting pistol next to her, her charger, Burmese, bounced, but Her Majesty patted its neck and carried on as if nothing had happened. She rode in nearly 40 birthday parades between 1947 and 1986, 16 of them on Burmese, a gift from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and has subsequently attended in a carriage I had a stark personal experience of the Queen’s horse-mastership when accompanying her round the stables at the Royal Mews before Christmas in 2019—so, comparatively recently. We came to one rather excitable young horse whose stable door had been flung open, between the sovereign and which there was only fresh air—and not very much of it. As its forefeet left the ground, I was calculating how it would be possible for me to insert myself between the Queen and the horse, bearing in mind that I had to navigate around or over either the Crown equerry or the head coachman, to neither of whom it appeared to have occurred that a disaster of global importance was about to occur. While I was still working on it, and indeed while said horse’s feet were still airborne, the monarch lifted a forefinger and firmly said, "No"—at which the horse in question sprang to attention, and disaster was averted I know that the entire horse world, like the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, would want to record its huge congratulations to the Queen on yet another extraordinary achievement in her Platinum Jubilee.