McGrath hurrah - Frank McNally on the first Kentucky Derby, 150 years ago

Irish Times

17-05-2025

Run 150 years ago this weekend, the inaugural
Kentucky Derby
produced something of an upset, even for the colourful
Irish
-
American
who won it.
Henry Price McGrath had two horses in the race, and as often happens, the wrong one won. The diminutive Aristides was meant to be a mere pacemaker for his more fancied half-brother and stable mate, Chesapeake, with a view to burning off the formidable favourite, Ten Broeck.
That part of the plan worked: Ten Broeck was in second place at halfway, then faded to finish fifth. Alas for McGrath, the blistering early pace burned off Chesapeake too.
Meanwhile, having done his job in front, little Aristides – described by racing historian David Alexander as 'a nothing of a horse ... a shrimp with a scampering gait' – was ready to fold, and his jockey, African-American Oliver Lewis, was ready to let him. The owner and breeder needed to issue new orders, urgently.
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Alexander takes up the story: 'Then old McGrath ran out on the track. He waved his hat frantically to signal Lewis, the hundred pound jockey who was riding Aristides, that he couldn't quit now, that Chesapeake was beaten … and that Aristides must break his heart to win.'
Happily, cardiac injury was not required. Responding to the jockey's renewed urgings, 'the little red horse with a heart that wouldn't break' rallied again and won by a length from Volcano.
The Louisville Courier rhapsodised: 'It is the gallant Aristides, heir to a mighty name, that strides with sweeping gallop toward victory … and the air trembles and vibrates again with the ringing cheers that followed.'
In fact, the horse was named not for the great 5th century BC Athenian statesman, but for a friend and fellow breeder of McGrath's, Aristides Welch. It was a win for the ages, even so.
Writing about it 90 years later, Alexander struck a poetic and philosophical note: 'The same horse always wins the Derby, no matter what name he bears. Always the winner is the ghost of the little red horse, Aristides, who answered his owner's hat.'
Less seems to be known now about the origins of McGrath than of his horse. Born the son of a tailor in 1814, he turned his back on that profession in favour of wandering the American south as a young man in search of his fortune.
He found some of it in the California Gold Rush of 1849, enough to open the south's first 'gambling house' three years later.
His luck as a gambler is said to have won him $105,000 in a single night. And he was eventually able to buy 500 acres near Lexington, which he named 'McGrathiana' and turned into one of the great stud farms of 19th century America.
What his ancestry was exactly, I can't say. But his horses ran in green and orange, and Aristides was the grandson of an Irish sire called Faugh a Ballagh (from the old war-cry, meaning 'clear the way').
Alexander's 1966 book, The Sound of Horses, also reproduces an artwork celebrating the 1875 win, which depicts McGrath, Lewis, and the horse each occupying a horseshoe arranged in what the author calls a 'clover leaf' shape, but which is surely a shamrock.
That was an era of great Irish sporting chauvinism. Price McGrath will have been familiar with the exploits his four-legged namesake, Master McGrath, who died in 1873 after winning England's premier coursing competition, the Waterloo Cup, three times.
As immortalised in a famous ballad, the dog was a fervent Irish nationalist whose talents included returning the insults of his English rivals, mid-race:
'Well, I know,' says McGrath, 'we have wild heather bogs. But you'll find in old Ireland there's good men and dogs. Lead on, bold Britannia, give none of your jaw, Stuff that up your nostrils,' says Master McGrath.
Interestingly, the same period produced an American racehorse equivalent of that ballad, involving the aforementioned Ten Broeck.
It commemorated not the Kentucky Derby but an 1878 'match' (a race involving only two horses) with an undefeated Californian mare named Mollie McCarty: the first horse from out west to travel east and compete in what is now Churchill Downs, the derby's home.
Mollie's grandmother was a Shamrock (literally – that was her name). Sadly for Hibernian romantics, she lost the match. Mollie and Ten Brooks, as the song was called, is still a bluegrass standard today.
Getting back to the 1875 Derby, it also made African-American history, and not just because of the jockey. The winning horse's trainer, Ansel Williamson, was black too.
He had been born a slave in Virginia, as which he first learned to handle horses. After the civil war, he pursued the vocation as a free man, training many champions. He was inducted into the US National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1998.
The former McGrathiana was renamed Coldstream Farm sometime after McGrath's death in 1881. Today, it is an agricultural research facility in the University of Kentucky.