Epsom Derby Quotes

Hailed in his lifetime as ‘the Peacemaker’, Edward VII was spared the destruction of the European order of courts and crowned cousins in which he had been the dominant figure. Both of his imperial nephews, Tsar Nicholas of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, were brought low. Along with his wife and all of their children, Nicholas was butchered by the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1918. The year before, George V, worried about his own position, had resisted the suggestion that they should be given refuge in Britain. Once the news of their murders had been confirmed, he despatched a battleship to the Crimea to rescue his aunt, the Dowager Empress Marie, as well as a large party of her relations and retainers. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, who had represented Nicholas at Edward’s funeral, was not among them. The first of the Romanovs to die, he had been taken into a forest in the Urals and shot a month before his elder brother. In the chaos that enveloped Russia during that terrible period, another, more improbable, victim met his end. Minoru, the royal racehorse which had swept to victory in the Epsom Derby of 1909, had subsequently been sold to a stud near Kharkiv for £20,000. He was last seen struggling to draw a cart on the 900-mile evacuation from Moscow to the Black Sea.

By then, the suffragettes’ militant campaign was at fever-pitch. The previous year, Emily Davison had been fatally injured at the Epsom Derby when she threw herself beneath the hoofs of the King’s horse in full view of thousands of stunned spectators. Now, the police took no chances. Even in the Royal Enclosure, female race-goers were subjected to body-searches, lest their swirling capes should conceal hammers or bombs. It was a far cry from the subdued decorum of Black Ascot. Edward VII would have wondered what the world was coming to.