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spot ones that were not ready to run their best – ones that he could lay (a layer takes others’ bets). Once he and Charlotte had started to make money, he was confident that he could use his knowledge to get wealthier still, and to acquire social status. He determined to become a racehorse owner, and not in a small way: he wanted to own the stables and the stud too.
    Dennis’s aim was not simply to acquire a few racehorses and to land prizes and betting coups with them. The real money, he saw, was in breeding. He would send his best racers to stud, hype up their achievements, and promise owners of mares the prospect of breeding offspring of similar ability. A fashionable stallion might cover forty mares or more in a season, at fees for his owner of upwards of twenty-five guineas a time. The owner might also mate his own mares with the stallion, and then sell the offspring, or – with a view to finding further stallions and mares for the stud – race them. In pursuing this ambition with dedicated professionalism, Dennis was ahead of his time. His methods anticipated the business philosophy of Coolmore, the Irish bloodstock empire that is the most powerful force in the racing world today. Coolmorehas a training centre, Ballydoyle, run by Aidan O’Brien; but the real money rolls in when O’Brien’s champions (and other horses in Coolmore ownership), such as Galileo and Montjeu, transfer to the firm’s stud farms. Winning races is merely the means to an end, as it was for Dennis. 53
    The base Dennis was considering for his stud was in Epsom, Surrey – then, as now, one of the racing centres of the south of England. Like Newmarket, Epsom is a racecourse with a raw quality. It does not belong to a park, an area of regulated space; it is a route through a landscape. The horses gallop over downs that, beyond the course, roll into the distance. The running rails describe a horseshoe: one tip is past the finishing post below the grandstand; the other, opposite, is where the runners set off at the start of the Derby, the most famous horse race in the world.
    The starting stalls clang open, and the Derby runners begin their mile-and-a-half journey with a steep uphill climb. There are thick canopies of trees on their right until, after two furlongs, a gap reveals Downs House, once Dennis O’Kelly’s stables. The course continues to climb until beyond the mile marker; then it curves left and descends towards Tattenham Corner, where during the 1913 Derby the suffragette Emily Davison stepped in front of King George V’s horse Anmer, with fatal consequences. Some horses hate this bend. The 1986 Derby favourite Dancing Brave, later to prove himself one of the greats, raced downhill so awkwardly that by the time he had entered the finishing straight he was at the back of the field and many lengths behind the leaders. He came storming down the outside, but just failed to catch the winner, Shahrastani. Five years earlier, Shergar had put up a similar performance in the straight, but with the advantage of starting hisacceleration from near the front of the field: he won by ten lengths, the biggest margin in Derby history. The ground here has a camber, sloping down to the far rail, and, with just over a furlong to go, it begins a final ascent. Only at this point, having coolly delayed, did Lester Piggott urge his mount Sir Ivor to chase and overtake Connaught to win the Derby of 1968.
    There is grandeur about a classic race in such a setting. History is a presence here. The horses racing for the Derby join that history, and indeed represent bloodlines tracing back through Sir Ivor and other great winners to Diomed, who won the first Derby, in 1780, and further back still, to a time before the Derby course was laid out, when Eclipse galloped to the Epsom finishing post from nearby Banstead, with his rivals a distance behind.
    In the dry summer of 1618, a herdsman called Henry Wickes, or Wicker