"The Captain" - Cecil Boyd-Rochfort

Article by Jennifer Kelly

Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort

In the hours leading up to her coronation, Elizabeth sat deep in thought, quiet with contemplation. A lady-in-waiting saw the new Queen’s preoccupied countenance and asked her if all was well. 

"Oh, yes,” Her Majesty replied, “the captain has just rung up to say that Aureole went really well." 

On the precipice of great responsibility, the new monarch’s mind was not only on the serious matters of state, but on the Derby candidate she hoped would carry her colors to victory in a matter of days.

The man entrusted with Aureole’s preparation, the Irishman whose skills had inspired the confidence of a sovereign and the daughter that succeeded him, was Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort. The youngest son of a family known for its service to the Empire and a fondness for sport, Boyd-Rochfort spent his life with horses, a calling that took him from the countryside of County Westmeath, Ireland to the gallops of Newmarket and inspired the confidence of royalty from both sides of the Atlantic. 

Aureole, and jockey Harry Carr before the 1953 Epsom Derby, where he eventually finished second, four lengths behind winner Pinza.

A life in sport 

When Cecil Charles Boyd-Rochfort greeted the world on April 16, 1887, he was the last of Hamilton and Florence Boyd-Rochfort’s sons, joining brothers Arthur and Harold. His father had been a major in the 15th Hussars and had served as high sheriff of County Westmeath, Ireland, where the family made their home at Middleton. 

There, the Boyd-Rochfort family hunted. They rode. They farmed. After his father’s early death, his mother bred horses and raised cattle, sheep, and pigs and even had a racing stable. Cecil carried this love of horses into his education at Eton, where he was an indifferent student, focused more on pedigrees and racing than his studies.

He attended the races along with his coterie of friends who were also keen for the sport. When Cecil left Eton in 1903, his next step was uncertain. His brother Harold encouraged his younger brother to follow him into military service, but Boyd-Rochfort was unwilling to commit, still awaiting his chance to work in racing. That came in 1906, when one of his heroes came knocking with an offer too irresistible to refuse.

Lessons from the best

Like Boyd-Rochfort, Henry Seymour ‘Atty’ Persse heard the siren’s call of the racetrack and followed it to a career as both a rider and a trainer. He finished third in the 1906 Grand National and soon after switched to training at his Park Gate stables near the village of Grately. In need of an assistant, Persse offered the job to the aspiring horseman. 

The Irishman had long been a hero of Boyd-Rochfort’s, since the young man had seen Persse win the Conyngham Cup in 1897. Boyd-Rochfort’s tenure with Persse, though, was short, as the latter became the private trainer for Colonel William Hall Walker, the future Lord Wavertree, in 1908. He soon found a position with Colonel Robert Dewhurst’s Bedford Lodge in Newmarket. The young man so impressed his new boss with his knowledge of racing and breeding that Dewhurst allowed him to help with the business of running the stable and sent him with the horses running out of the Newmarket area. 

When Sir Ernest Cassel sought a new racing manager, Boyd-Rochfort was suggested for the task. Alongside trainer William Halsey, he bought yearlings, learned more about keeping horses sound, and watched preparations for tries at the English classics. In 1912, Boyd-Rochfort bought a yearling by leading sire Desmond for 3200 guineas. The colt, later named Hapsburg, proved to be worth the price: he finished second in the 1914 Derby and then won the Eclipse and Champion Stakes. He later became a good sire, a testament to the young man’s eye for bloodstock. Boyd-Rochfort would not have long to enjoy his success as World War I prompted him to join the Scots Guard. Cassel promised that his job as racing manager would be there when he returned.

A good start

After the war, where his experience at the Somme had earned him the Croix de Guerre and a promotion, he returned to England as Captain Boyd-Rochfort, a title he would go by for the rest of his life. Back in Newmarket, he found Cassel’s racing stable in a sad state. Sir Ernest himself was in poor health and the stable reflected the same; they had only one win in 1917 and then none in 1918. After William Halsey retired, the captain found a new trainer for the ailing stable, but their fortunes did not improve. 

However, the captain’s did. He connected with the American horseman and businessman Marshall Field III, heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune. Field was looking for a trainer for his English stable and Boyd-Rochfort volunteered for the job provided Cassel was open to it. Sir Ernest was cutting back his racing interests and gave the captain permission to work for Field as well. 

One of the first horses the captain bought for Field was a filly named Golden Corn. At two, she won the Champagne and the Middle Park Stakes, a rare double achieved by greats like Pretty Polly, the Filly Triple Crown winner of 1904. Field and the captain had struck gold with one of the first horses he picked out for his new owner. Though Golden Corn showed her best at age two, her success promised much for the captain and his association with the American owner. 

As Golden Corn was winning, the captain‘s grand year turned sad with the passing of Sir Ernest Cassel. He left the captain a year’s wages in his will, but it was not enough for a new yard for the fledgling trainer. Both his mother and Field lent the needed funds for the purchase of Freemason Lodge in Newmarket. With fifty stalls to fill, the captain took out his trainer’s license in 1923 and got to work.

On his own

That first year, Boyd-Rochfort trained for several owners, including his brother Arthur and Field. He won nineteen races, one of those a victory with Golden Corn in the July Cup at Newmarket. In 1924, he scored his first win in the Irish Oaks, the Irish equivalent of the Oaks at Epsom, with Amethystine. 

Through his connection with Marshall Field III, Boyd-Rochfort soon had horses from more American owners, including William Woodward, a banker and chairman of the American Jockey Club, with whom the captain would win races like the Ascot Gold Cup and the St. Leger. In addition to Woodward and Field, his list of American owners counted some of the sport’s biggest names, like Joseph Widener, John Hay Whitney, cosmetics magnate Elizabeth Arden, and diplomat and businessman Harry Guggenheim. 

1955 Fillies Triple Crown winner Meld.

Boyd-Rochfort soon picked up another important owner, Lady Zia Wernher. The daughter of the Countess Torby, a granddaughter of Alexander Pushkin, and Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, Lady Zia invested heavily in racing after her marriage to Sir Harold Wernher. For Lady Zia, the captain won the Ascot Gold Cup with Precipitation; the Coronation Cup with Persian Gulf; and the One-Thousand Guineas, the Oaks, and the St. Leger, the Filly Triple Crown, with Meld. 

Boyd-Rochfort’s old friend Sir Humphrey de Trafford was another of his earliest owners and one that would stay with him the whole of his career. The captain trained Alcide, who won the 1958 St. Leger, and Parthia, who gave both men their only Derby victory in 1959. In addition to training for his old friend, Boyd-Rochfort made Sir Humphrey best man at his 1944 wedding to Rohays Cecil, the widow of Lieutenant Henry Cecil and mother of four sons, including Henry, who would follow in his stepfather’s footsteps. 

To attract owners like Wernher and de Trafford and that cadre of Americans spoke to the skills and expertise that the captain offered, developed through tangibles like hard work and discipline and intangibles born of a life spent with horses. 

The man behind it all  

His prodigious success had its roots in a confluence of factors. He was brought up in a family with a lifelong interest in horses and racing. He was mentored by two former riders turned trainers who shared the benefits of their time in the saddle and their knowledge acquired while developing horses. The captain was keen to learn from others, from his earliest years at school studying racing and pedigree between lessons to those years with Persse, Dewhurst, and Cassel, where he took in the lessons of healing ailments, feeding the bodies and minds of the horses in his care, and any other topic related to racing and breeding Thoroughbreds. He was a patient trainer, focused on the horse as an individual and less on the expectations that might put his charge in the wrong race at the wrong time.  

He was keen to hire the best and set them to the tasks needed to run the yard, but he also had his hands on the horses in his care. He trusted his employees to keep the rigorous schedule he set each day. He felt the legs of his charges, mandated soft water and weighed and measured specific feeding plans for each horse, and believed in long walks for his horses to warm them up for their exercise. He broke in horses at the Lodge in the early days and then later leased Heath Lodge Stud for that purpose. Trainer Sir Mark Prescott, who was a young assistant to Jack Waugh in the late 1960s, remembered that the captain’s horses “used to run in a sheepskin noseband, the lot of them and they always looked marvelous, something maybe a bit above themselves.”

At a given time, as his son Arthur remembers, he would have upwards of 65-70 horses and a stable of around twenty-five staff, from a farrier to a collection of exercise riders and jockeys, that were, as Sir Mark put it, well-mannered “like little gentlemen.” At 6’5”, the captain towered over most of his staff, and was, as his secretary Anne Scriven recalled, “a very stately Irish gentleman. Very upright, very Edwardian.” 

“He would say, ‘You boy do that,’ even to [assistant trainer] Bruce Hobbs,” she shared. After winning the Grand National on Battleship, the youngest jockey to do so, Hobbs spent a decade and a half as Boyd-Rochfort’s assistant. 

Arthur remembered his father as “being a Victorian and very upright. They were brought up in a different era then they were very strict in the yard, and everything was immaculate.”

“The captain was old school, aristocratic, he was completely confident in his superiority to most people,” Sir Mark remembered. “But he was always nice, very polite.” 

As a trainer, he was an observation horseman and a stickler for detail and demanded the same of his employees. He eschewed gossiping on the Heath as some trainers were wont to do, preferring to watch his charges intently. The captain no doubt stood at attention watching one horse in particular for owner William Woodward, a long and lanky chestnut with a wide white blaze, a champion in America who was trusted to this singular conditioner for a tall task: winning the Ascot Gold Cup. 

A challenge for the captain

Americans know Omaha as the third name on the short list of horses to have won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes, the American Triple Crown. Owner William Woodward’s aspirations were not limited to winning classic races in his own country, but also in England, the place where he cultivated his grand ambitions as a young man working for the American Ambassador Joseph Choate in the earliest years of the 20th century. One of the classics he aspired to was the 2½-mile Ascot Gold Cup. 

Omaha with jockey pat beasley and groom bart sweeney

Omaha’s three-year-old season had been cut short by injury, and, with his sire Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox already representing Woodward’s Belair at stud, the American did not need to retire his second Triple Crown winner. Instead, he took the risk of sending Omaha via the Aquitania to England, his ultimate destination Freemason Lodge. The Triple Crown winner was not the first Woodward had sent to the captain, but the task ahead of the trusted horseman could be considered somewhat of a titanic one: take a horse primarily trained on dirt, who had only raced counterclockwise and never more than 1½ miles and prepare him to run a mile longer clockwise on grass. 

The captain would send the American horse on longer gallops, from a mile and a quarter to two miles at least once a week, building the colt’s stamina and giving him the chance to stretch out the long stride that had made him such a success at distances over a mile. Couple those regular gallops under Pat Beasley, the stable’s lead jockey, with the captain’s regimen of walking, water, and feed, and Omaha was quickly fit enough to easily win his first start in England, the 1½-mile Victor Wild Stakes at Kempton Park. Three weeks later, back at Kempton Park,  he took the two-mile Queen’s Plate with ease. Clearly, the captain’s plan to acclimate and prepare the American horse for the Ascot Gold Cup was working.

In the Gold Cup itself, nearly three weeks later, the 2½ miles came down to the last two furlongs, as Omaha and the filly Quashed, herself an accomplished stayer, battled down the stretch. Anytime one pulled ahead, the other fought back, neither giving way until the very end. In what would be a photo finish today, the ultimate decision came down to judge Malcolm Hancock. The difference between the winning Quashed and the captain’s charge Omaha was a simple nose. That Omaha was able to come so far in such a short amount of time was testament to not only the well-bred champion but also Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, a horseman whose true brilliance came through in how he was able to sense and cultivate a horse’s potential. 

It was this instinct about the individual horse, the care he put into their development, and the discipline he imbued into his staff and himself that brought him an opportunity afforded to few: a chance to train for the Royal Stable. First for King George VI and then for Queen Elizabeth II, he brought his beloved monarchs great victories, ones befitting a man who had made horses his life's work.

A royal opportunity  

When Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort took over the Royal Stable, he had already been leading trainer in 1937 and won his share of both English and Irish stakes. As he went to work for the Royal Family, whom he greatly admired according to son Arthur, he was able to continue working with Lady Zia and Sir Humphrey as well as his American owners. With the Royal Stable, though, came some of his signature wins.

For the King, he won the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot with Avila, the One Thousand Guineas and the Dewhurst with Hypericum, and the Cesarewitch with Above Board. Days after Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the captain started Aureole in the Derby, seeking a Classic victory for the lifelong horsewoman. Aureole mounted a bid in the stretch but could not catch Pinza. Aureole would go on to win the King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Royal Ascot the following year, giving the Queen her first victory on the Ascot Heath. 

Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort and Queen Elizabeth II in the paddock at Kempton Park as she watched her colt Agreement being unsaddled after his victory in the Coventry Three Year Old Stakes.

Though the Derby would elude them, the captain would bring the Queen a Classic win in the Two-Thousand Guineas with Pall Mall. In all, he conditioned fifty-seven winners for the King, one hundred and thirty-six for Queen Elizabeth II, and three for the Queen Mother. As he approached his eighty-first year and the end of his time as a conditioner, the Queen made him a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order for his service to the Royal Stable.

As he prepared his exit, the captain named his stepson Henry Cecil as his successor at Freemason Lodge. Cecil had been his assistant for four years, his education and experience preparing him to take the helm from his stepfather. Though his temperament differed from that of his stepfather and their relationship could be fragile at times, Henry picked up where the captain left off and crafted a Hall of Fame career of his own. 

A legacy of excellence  

Forty years after his death and a century after he took out his trainer’s license, Sir Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort lives on in racing’s record books, as the conditioner of champions and the mentor of a man named Cecil, the one who gave us Frankel in all of his glory. The friends of his time are all gone yet his regal bearing and enduring reputation for discipline and detail live on in the stories of the horses he conditioned.

His patience for developing horses yielded a trio of victories in the Ascot Gold Cup and a Triple Crown with a girl named Meld. It was his brilliance that capitalized on the untapped potential of Omaha, already an elite name in America, and brought him to the precipice of victory at Ascot. 

The captain took his boyhood love of horses and turned it into his calling as a conditioner of champions for royalty on both sides of the Atlantic. Though his name may ring unfamiliar to 21st century ears, Cecil Boyd-Rochfort made his mark on the century that preceded it, etching his name into the record books many times over for King, Queen, country, and beyond. 

The captain (left) and trainers Ben and Jimmy Jones with American Triple Crown winner Citation at Hialeah, c1949.