Eolus died three years later, in 1897, but by then Ellerslie had become a major thoroughbred nursery in Virginia, selling its yearlings every year at auction, buying and raising its own bloodstock. And by then, too, Richard Hancock’s son, Arthur, had graduated from the University of Chicago, a reedy young man, six feet six inches and 165 pounds, who came home in 1895 to be about his father’s business. He became his father’s assistant, attending yearling sales and doing his novitiate on the farm. And then, within one three-year period, a series of events occurred in Arthur Hancock’s life that enlarged its scope and potential, multiplying the possibilities open to him as a breeder.
In 1907, seeking a man without local ties or friendships, Senator Camden Johnson of Kentucky invited Hancock to judge a class of thoroughbreds at the Blue Grass Fair in Kentucky. Hancock accepted. While he was there, he met Nancy Tucker Clay, one of the many Clays of Bourbon County. Like the Harrises of Virginia, the Clays of Kentucky were landed gentry, owning lots of land, acres of some of the choicest real estate in the Blue Grass country. Nancy Clay and Arthur Hancock were married the following year, in 1908, fusing a family owning one of the finest estates in Virginia with another owning miles of rolling greenery in Kentucky.
In 1909, Arthur Hancock took over the operation of Ellerslie from his aging father.
In 1910, within a span of four days, Nancy Clay Hancock’s father and mother died. Nancy Hancock inherited 1300 acres of property in Paris, Kentucky, rich farmland set off Winchester Road. So the events of the year made Hancock the steward of two manors, and they left him an heir to his fortune and name. Earlier in the year, Nancy Hancock had given birth to a son, Arthur Boyd Hancock, Jr., a man whose influence on American bloodstock would one day exceed that of his father. Arthur Hancock, Sr., did not take long to coordinate the operations at Ellerslie and Claiborne Farm, the name they chose for the land in Paris. The Hancock stud at Ellerslie survived the horse-racing blackout of 1911–1912, when the sport was outlawed in New York during an outburst of moral fervor, but Hancock had to cut back the broodmare band to all but about twelve mares. Over the next twenty-five years, Hancock’s long climb to preeminence as a breeder began. He moved his family permanently to the Kentucky farm in 1912, a move suggesting that he knew Kentucky would one day be the home of thoroughbred breeding in America.
A year later he bought the stallion Celt, a son of Commando, for $20,000 in a dispersal sale at Madison Square Garden. Under Celt, the Hancock stud regained the vigor it possessed in the days of Eolus. Hancock’s interest in foreign bloodstock heightened when the prices dropped in Europe at the start of World War I. In 1915 he bought the English stallion, Wrack, for $8000 from Archibald Philip Rosbery. It marked Hancock’s first major acquisition of a foreign stallion, and it launched a breeding operation at Claiborne Farm, where Wrack was sent to stud. Barns were built near Kennedy Creek. Part of the land was fenced with planking. A grazing paddock was built for Wrack to loll away his idle hours. And the farm itself expanded, growing in size from 1300 to 2100 acres.
The Hancock studs flourished in the 1920s, grew in influence and prestige. In 1921, Celt was America’s leading thoroughbred sire in the amount of money won by his offspring, his fifty-two performing sons and daughters winning 124 races and $206,167 in purses. Hancock reached out for more foreign blood. His acquisition of foreign bloodstock reached its zenith in 1926, when he formed a four-man group—composed of Hanover Bank president William Woodward, Marshall Field, Robert Fairbairn, and himself—and bought Sir Gallahad III, a French stallion and a son of Teddy, for $125,000. Sir Gallahad’s impact at the stud was felt almost at once.
Bred his first year in America to Marguerite, a daughter of Celt, he sired Belair Stud’s Gallant Fox. “The Fox of Belair,” as he came to be known, won the Triple Crown in 1930, the second horse to do it. Sir Gallahad III was the leading American sire that year, with just sixteen offspring winning forty-nine races and $422,200, a record in purses that stood until 1942. He led the sire list three more times, his horses winning more than the horses sired by any other stallion.
Through the importation of the potent Teddy blood, through Sir Gallahad III and later his full brother, Bull Dog, American and other imported blood was freshened and invigorated. Sir Gallahad III’s influence became unusually pervasive in his role as a “broodmare sire,” so pervasive that he led the annual broodmare sire list for twelve years, ten years in a row, from 1943 to 1952. The broodmare sire list is a special category that singles out stallions whose daughters are exceptional producers. For twelve years the daughters of Sir Gallahad III produced racehorses that won more money than the racehorses produced by the daughters of any other sire. No horse in American history, before or since, ever dominated that list so long. He sired La France, dam of the 1939 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, Johnstown; and he sired Gallette, dam of champion handicap mare Gallorette; Fighting Lady, dam of the speedy Armageddon; and Black Wave, dam of the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner, Jet Pilot.
In 1936, Hancock was instrumental in bringing Blenheim II, the 1930 Epsom Derby winner, to America. Blenheim II cost an American syndicate $250,000. Among Blenheim II’s first sons to reach the races in America was Whirlaway, winner of the 1941 Triple Crown, the fifth horse to win it.
Hancock’s fortunes as a breeder soared. In 1935, horses bred by Hancock won more races—392—and more money—$359,218—than the horses bred by any other breeder. He led the breeder lists for the next two years. Hancock was not racing his homebreds. Following a policy adopted originally by his father in 1886, he sold his yearlings at auction every year. Through the years, he developed a reputation as a breeder knowledgeable about bloodlines, both foreign and domestic, who could recall in minute detail the distant reaches of a pedigree.
By then his son Arthur was a student of breeding, too. “I grew up at Claiborne and when I was twelve, my father was paying me fifty cents a day to sweep out after the yearlings,” he once said. That was in the summer of 1922, the year before he left the public school system in Paris and went to Saint Mark’s Academy in Southborough, Massachusetts, a bastion of righteous Episcopalianism, where he subscribed to the Daily Racing Form, the industry’s trade newspaper and the horseplayer’s bible. He transferred to Woodberry Forest, a Virginia school, and there picked up his nickname, Bull, by which he would one day be known throughout all the major world marketplaces for the blooded horse. His central ambition was to be a thoroughbred breeder.
In the summers of his youth, when his jobs went beyond sweeping out after the yearlings, he worked with the broodmares, the stud horses, the yearlings, the farm veterinarian, alternating jobs summer after summer. He went to Princeton, played baseball and football, and earned letters. He was a six-foot-two raconteur with a reverberating baritone voice.
At Princeton he studied eugenics, French, and genetics. And when he graduated in 1933 he returned to Claiborne, as his father had returned to Ellerslie almost forty years before, to become his father’s assistant. He learned, as his father learned, from the grass up—about the care and feeding of the yearlings and the broodmares and the stud horses, starting from the beginning. He learned about the land, too, walking it so often that one day he would know every tree and plank on it.
“I never wanted to be anything but a horseman,” Bull once said. “I just never thought of anything else.”
Claiborne Farm was no empire of prepotent young stallions and mares of promise when Bull Hancock returned to it in 1945, the year the air corps released him after his father suffered the first of several heart attacks.
Bull was thirty-five then and much had begun to wane since he became his father’s assistant. What he came back to was a farm with a twilight presence to