DIADEM AND STEPHEN DONOGHUE.

​Some horses gain immortality in our sport more for having a race named in their honour than in the majority of us having any idea of their achievements. At Ascot’s Champions Day there is, or was, the Diadem Stakes, named in honour of a filly owned by Lord d’Abernon and ridden to most of her victories by Steve Donoghue, a great horseman/jockey and legend of the weighing-room.
Steve Donoghue, or Stephen as he signed his name to his autobiography, was born in Warrington and aged fourteen he decided he wanted to be a jockey and set off on foot, without bothering to inform his parents, with his brother to Stockton races to ask Dobson Peacock, who trained at Middleham, for a job, determined to make good. Of course, he wanted to be a jockey not a stable lad and soon became disillusioned. He tried working for John Porter with the same disappointed. Did he get disheartened? Not Steve Donoghue. Game as a pebble he went to France to try his luck, finally achieving his dream first winner at Hyeres, a provincial track in the south of the country. In fact, he established his reputation in Europe and Ireland long before he rode a winner in the land of his birth and going on to become champion jockey 8 times.
Donoghue described Diadem as a charming mare and he was so attached to her that at the St.Leger meeting, even though he was actually out injured with a broken wrist and missed riding the favourite in the big race two days earlier, he took the ride on her, top-weight in a 7-furlong handicap, and riding her with one hand won by a head.
I often write about the unwillingness of owners and trainers to expose their horses to determine the limitations of their ability, though that cannot be said of George Lambton or Lord d’Abernon. Diadem raced from 1916 till 1921, running 39 times, winning 24. She won the Coventry as a 2-year-old, the 1,000 Guineas, the King’s Stand Stakes twice, the July Cup, was second in the Oaks, having run in the Derby only two days before, twice second in the Champion Stakes and incredibly, at least from the perspective of today, was also second in the Cambridgeshire.
She was also unwittingly involved in an incident at Glorious Goodwood that is perhaps not as well recorded as perhaps it should be. At the start of the King George Stakes, as the tapes went up, she was knocked sideways by one of the other runners, Sun d’Or, described as a ‘brute’ by Donoghue in his autobiography. In a five-runner race only one got an even break, going on to win comfortably. This was just after the end of the 1st World War and according to Donoghue horse racing had attracted ‘a very riotous and undesirable element’ and as he cantered back past the enclosures he was addressed by loud boos and jeers. As he unsaddled the mare, elements of the crowd, ‘the very dregs of humanity’, he was openly accused of pulling the mare and threats to his life were insinuated.
Victor Smythe, the jockey riding Sun d’Or was so upset by the rebellion that he thought he had caused that he apologised profusely to both Lord d’Abernon and George Lambton. Then the stewards questioned Donoghue and he recommended they call an enquiry. Though they agreed, to his surprise it was not to be conducted in the sanctuary of the stewards’ room but on the open verandah outside, in hearing distance of the ‘contemptible creatures’ who considered the best outcome was Donoghue either having ‘his throat cut’ or his license taken away. It was in this public auditorium that for twenty-five minutes they conducted the enquiry, the bear-pit atmosphere rendering it impossible for anyone to hear clearly what was being said. The only satisfactory outcome of it all was that Donoghue was exonerated from blame. In his autobiography he wrote ‘I should not think that the experiment was considered to have been so successful as to warrant its being established as a precedent for any more open-air enquiries’. Explanation, if it were required, for why it took so long for television cameras to be allowed to witness modern-day stewards’ enquiries.
It is only when you compare the racing record of a horse such as Diadem to the horses of today that you begin to question what might have changed in the thoroughbred in the interim years so that owners and trainers today keep their charges to the same distance of race throughout their careers? And secondly, why they do not race their top horses for the length of time that Diadem endured?
Of course, the answer is that the race programme and especially ‘the European Pattern’ encourages them to do so. There are many more races these days for the top horses over all distances throughout Europe and indeed the world. This makes life for trainers much simpler, though whether it improves the race-fare on offer to the race-goer is a matter for debate. Or indeed whether it does anything to improve the quality and soundness of the breed.
Finally, Jockeys of Donoghue’s era are perhaps thought-of as being more cavalier with the use of the whip than the jockeys of today. To counter this assertion, I will quote a paragraph from ‘Men and Horses I Have Known’ by George Lambton. ‘Stephen is a great lover of horses, but I am sure Diadem held first place in his affections and she thoroughly reciprocated it. I have seen her after a hard race, as he unsaddled her, turn round and rub her nose against his hands, more like a dog than a horse. Win or lose you could not have made Stephen hit her for anything in the world.’
Perhaps a nod in the direction of why Diadem raced so willingly for so long.