Crabbet Arabian Stud – Hardback

£39.99

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By Rosemary Archer, Colin Pearson, Cecil Covey and Betty Finke.
Forword by H.R.H. Princess Alice Countess of Athlone

This is not only the story of the world’s most famous Arabian stud. It is also the story of three extraordinary people whose genius has preserved for posterity the most beautiful and sought-after horse of all time – Wilfrid Blunt, poet, politician and scandaliste; his wife Lady Anne, the first European woman to penetrate the very heart of Arabia, and Judith, later Lady Wentworth, their brilliant and determined daughter whose bitter dispute with her father for the stud ended only in the law courts.
‘We have made a plan,’ wrote Lady Anne from Syria in 1877, ‘of importing some of the best Anazeh blood into England and breeding it pure there … it would be an interesting and useful thing to do.’ By the time she died, forty years later, the Crabbet Arabian Stud had grown to be the largest collection of pure Arabians in existence outside the desert, and under Lady’ Wentworth the word ‘Crabbet’ became synonymous the world over with the highest possible class of Arab horse. Kings and commoners alike made their way to the Stud in Sussex and there is scarcely a country where Arabians are bred that does not rei upon Crabbet blood.
Told here for the first time from the family’s papers, and with the personal reminiscences of Cecil Covey, who spent most of his life at the Stud and inherited it when Lady Wentworth died, this triumphant and often turbulent history will fascinate all who read it.
First published in 1978 to celebrate the centenary of the Stud’s foundation and now reissued in an updated version with additional photographs, a new table showing the influence internationally of Rodania Or. Ar., and a revised and extended section on the importance of Crabbet blood in Europe.

392 pages 355 illustrations