Saving the Arabian Horse: a connection between the first two Arab studs

by Tomos Nutt

With the coming of the Chinese New Year of the Horse, we take a look at an archive showing how two horse breeders worked together to save the Arabian Horse from extinction.

With the turn of the Chinese New Year this week, and the ushering in of Spring and the Year of the Horse, I thought I would take the opportunity to write about a rather special archive related to Arabian horses that we recently acquired.

This collection represents over eighty years of correspondence between the first two Arabian Horse Studs in England: the famous Crabbet Stud of Lady Anne Blunt, and the Courthouse Farm Stud established by Henry Vyvyan Musgrave Clark.

Henry Clark was inspired to start his own Arabian horse stud, following a visit to Lady Anne’s Crabbet Stud in 1910, and struck up a keen and warm correspondence until her death in 1917. We have nineteen letters between the two, full of the business of horses and details of the Arab breed. Lady Anne’s letters are full of nuggets of information, such as how the Bedouin convey prestige on certain strains depending on their prowess in desert battle.

For the next forty years, Clark continued his correspondence with Lady Anne’s daughter Judith, Lady Wentworth, who took over both the Blunt studs (Crabbet and Sheyk Obeyd). While their relationship was never as warm, their business dealings were still vital in the preservation of the Arabian breeds.

There are a few documents in the archive that are worth highlighting. One is an original manuscript pedigree of the horse Safarjal (b. 1915), written and signed by Lady Wentworth with the original wax seal. Original documents such as these rarely survive, particularly of an important bloodline, so to see one here remaining as evidence of the efforts taken by such pioneers is a real treat.

Another important document is the certificate of Fedaan, bought by Clark directly from Moudjhem ben Mehed Sheikh of the Feda’an tribe (Ibn Sbenyi). With this is the manuscript copy of the Arabic letter written to the Feda’an Sheikh. To have a direct link with the pure Bedouin horse strains is as special now as it was a hundred years ago, and really brings the magic of this collection to life.