A Race Card, and What Came With It
The Bureau’s sporting desk has held a file open since April on a race meeting that appears in no calendar of British racing. Our correspondent writes from Hythe, in Kent, signs himself Starter to the Seabrook Bay Meeting, and asks nothing of us but the courtesy of print.
He sends four things. A card for Wednesday, 15 July 1903: eight runners, six furlongs, “on the sand, three fathoms at the start and five at the winning post”. A ledger of air pumps hired from a Folkestone salvage contractor, with the men to work them entered by the hour. A set of glass negatives, of which he permits us to reproduce five. And a stewards’ report of a single page, finding that the race was run, that Neptune’s Fury was placed first, and that no time was taken.
He is candid about the rest of it. The runners, he writes, “did not conduct themselves”. Some declined to leave the mark. Others left the ground altogether and swam. Hoses fouled, and divers went down to cut riders free of their own air supply. The organiser, an inventor whom the card styles Sir Percival Waters, is described as undismayed, and as having turned his attention afterwards to other things. The meeting was never held again, which is the only statement in the file the Bureau accepts without qualification.
Plate one, which we print at the head of this piece, shows the line at the post. The Bureau will come back to it, and asks the reader meanwhile to note which of the parties in it is wearing a helmet.
We print the papers in summary below and set them against the record. It should be said at the outset that the copper is the least of it. The helmets are the third difficulty, and they are the soluble one. The second is the water. The first is the horse, which cannot breathe through its mouth, cannot be told to hold its breath, and at racing pace takes exactly one breath to every stride.
The Bay, and the Name on the Chart
There is no Seabrook Bay. There is a Seabrook, and it is at least on the right coast: a village of some two and a half thousand people in the civil parish of Hythe, on the Kent shore of the English Channel, set between Sandgate and Hythe on a narrow coastal plain with the chalk of the North Downs at its back and the water at its front. The Royal Military Canal begins there. A Martello tower stands on the sea front and the older guns of Shorncliffe Battery stand along from it. It is an excellent place to put a crowd. There is even a bay to look across, and the Bureau will not pretend otherwise — but it is Hythe’s, the long shallow bend of shore that runs down from Folkestone towards Dungeness, and no chart, gazetteer or tide table has ever lettered any part of it after Seabrook. What the correspondent has done is name a stretch of open Channel after his own meeting.
The distinction is not pedantry, or not only. A bay is supposed to be shelter, and the correspondent leans on the want of it very hard indeed. Everything that went wrong on the day he lays at the door of “an unexpected set of the current”, as though the water had behaved out of character. The Channel at that point has a tidal stream. It had one in 1903 and it has one this morning; it is on the chart; and a Folkestone salvage contractor with pumps to let would have named it before he named his terms.
Invited to mark the six furlongs on an Admiralty chart, the correspondent returned the race card, with the course drawn on it in ink and the words “as before” written underneath. Invited a second time, he observed that the Bureau appeared more interested in the map than in the race.
The Animal Breathes Through Its Nose
This is where the file stops being a question of engineering. The horse is one of the animals that cannot breathe through its mouth at all. It is an obligate nasal breather: the soft palate reaches back to the base of the epiglottis, which lies on top of it whenever the animal is not swallowing and makes an airtight seal, so that the mouth and the airway are two rooms with no door between them. The veterinary literature on the equine respiratory system says as much in as many words — the arrangement is why the horse is an obligatory nasal breather — and mouth breathing follows only from serious abnormality. Whatever the correspondent’s apparatus is sealed to, it cannot be sealed to the bit; and in the plate he has sent us it is not sealed to the nose either.
That is the smaller half of it. The larger half is that a horse cannot be asked to wait. At the canter and the gallop, breathing is not something the animal does but something its legs do to it: the chest is emptied and refilled by the stride itself, and the ratio is one breath to one stride, which Lafortuna, Reinach and Saibene found at the canter in ten trials out of ten and published in The Journal of Physiology in 1996. At racing speed the stride rate, and with it the breath rate, averages 110 to 130 a minute, with 148 on record. Tidal volume runs to 12 to 15 litres a breath. Minute ventilation, which is 80 litres a minute in a horse standing in its box, goes to something near 1,800.
A man in a helmet can hold his breath a moment while a valve is seen to. A horse at racing pace cannot hold one for the length of a single stride without also declining to take the stride.
The Arithmetic of the Air
The dress the Bureau grants him without argument. Augustus Siebe had a closed diving helmet by 1837, hermetically fastened to an india-rubber dress, with a segmental neck-ring that lifted off the collar in an eighth of a turn; and by 1903 the standard diving dress was sixty-six years of settled practice — a copper helmet of 55 pounds, weighted boots at 17.5 pounds each, something near 190 pounds of outfit all told, air pushed down a hose from a pump on the surface. It was equipment for a man walking on the bottom, and it was built that way because the suit makes swimming impractical. The diver it keeps alive is, by design, barely moving.
What the Bureau will not grant is the ledger. A galloping horse asks for something near 1,800 litres of air a minute, and that figure is taken at the surface. Air has to arrive at the pressure of its surroundings, and the surroundings add another bar every ten metres: three fathoms at the start is half as much again, five fathoms at the winning post is close to double. Eight runners at the far end of the course therefore want something on the order of thirty cubic metres of free air a minute, continuously, off a barge, by hand. The ledger enters four pumps and eleven men. The hose has to pass it as well — peak inspiratory flow in a swimming horse has since been measured at 47.8 litres a second, one animal, one inhalation — and two of the eight entries are marked on the card “hose only, no pump”, which is to say a snorkel three fathoms long. The European standard stops a snorkel at 38 centimetres — about one fourteenth of that — and stops it there because deeper than that the lungs sit in heavier water than the mouth does, the muscles that expand them are overtaxed, and pulmonary oedema waits at the end of the argument.
The chest in question is at its limit before anyone puts it under water. Bleeding into the airways from ruptured lung capillaries is found in something between 43 and 75 per cent of racehorses on a single endoscopy after a single race, and the capillaries begin to give at pulmonary pressures around 80 mmHg. That is what a gallop does to a horse’s lungs in open air, with nothing pressing on the outside of it.
The Meeting As Carded, Against the Record
What the Starter of the Seabrook Bay Meeting enters on his card, set beside what horses and water are measured to do.
| Entered at Seabrook | Recorded | |
|---|---|---|
| The course | Six furlongs on the sand, three fathoms to five | An open Channel shore in Hythe Bay — there is a Seabrook, and no bay is named after it |
| How the horse takes air | Through the apparatus, as the rider does | Through the nose only; soft palate and epiglottis seal the mouth off from the airway |
| Breath at racing pace | Not raised on the card | One breath to one stride — 110 to 130 a minute, 148 on record |
| Air wanted | Four pumps and eleven men, for eight runners | Near 1,800 litres a minute per horse at the surface, and more at depth |
| Through the hose | Not stated | 47.8 litres a second at peak inspiration, measured on horses swimming |
| What the dress was built for | Racing | A man walking on the bottom; the suit makes swimming impractical |
| Speed, on the drag term alone | A race | About one twenty-eighth of the speed in air — a shade under a mile an hour |
| Time returned | None taken | Six furlongs at that rate is three quarters of an hour |
Ballast, and the Price of Moving Water
The weighted saddle is the correspondent’s own contrivance and the part of the scheme he is proudest of. It is also the part that argues hardest against him, because what it has to hold down is a chest full of air. A horse in water floats, and floats high: in the Calgary spirometry the animals swam with only their lower lips and chins clear of the surface, and one of them contrived to keep its jaw out as well. What holds up half a tonne of horse is very largely the gas inside it, and at racing pace that gas is being thrown out and hauled back 110 to 130 times a minute. Ballast heavy enough to pin the animal to the sand at the bottom of a breath is ballast that has to be lifted again at the top of the next one, twice a second, from flag to post.
Suppose it solved. The water has still to be got out of the way. Drag goes as half the density of the fluid times the square of the speed, times a coefficient and a frontal area, and sea water runs to some eight hundred times the density of air. Hold the coefficient and the area where they are — a generous allowance, the rider having become a bale of wet canvas — and the same wall of resistance now arrives at one twenty-eighth of the speed. A flat gallop of 40 to 48 kilometres an hour becomes a shade under a mile in the hour. The six furlongs on the card take three quarters of it, at the exertion of a Derby finish, sustained the whole way.
The stewards took no time. On the Bureau’s arithmetic they would have needed to take a shift.
What the Sea Does Permit a Horse to Do
The Bureau’s quarrel is not with horses and water, which have a long and creditable history together. Nine years before the meeting, and sixty miles up the road, the Army dug a pond for precisely this purpose. The horses’ swimming pond at Aldershot was announced in February 1894 and cut that same year in Long Bottom, between Caesar’s Camp and Hungry Hill: an irregular sheet about 100 yards at its longest and 87 at its widest, thirteen feet deep in the middle. Horses were led in on long ropes until they discovered they could swim, then drawn across on the ropes alone while the men went over by boat. At its height some 800 soldiers made better than a thousand crossings a year in it. The object was a river, and the 9th Bengal Lancers had already claimed they could cross a hundred yards of one, form up on the far bank and fire a volley, in twenty minutes.
None of that involves going under; quite the reverse. The spirometry published on free-swimming horses in 2024 found them breathing 31.4 times a minute in the water — well under half what a horse does walking on a dry treadmill — and 12 times a minute for the first half-minute after entry; drawing 16.7 litres to an inspiration; and, most to the point, closing their nostrils. Left to itself, a horse answers water by shutting its nose and breathing less. The correspondent’s apparatus exists to hold the nose open and push air into it.
Even the one act that genuinely did put a horse into deep water for a paying crowd understood this much. The diving horse of Atlantic City — Doc Carver’s, conceived after his own horse went off a partly collapsed bridge over the Platte in 1881 — came off a tower as high as sixty feet, four times a day, seven days a week, from the middle 1880s to the middle of the twentieth century. Sonora Webster rode it from 1924, was blinded in both eyes by detached retinas after a fall from the platform in 1931, and went on riding it until 1942. It is the most reckless thing anybody has ever asked of a horse in water. It lasted about a second and a half, and the horse came straight back up.
What the Bureau Is Able to Certify
The Bureau is able to certify that the closed diving dress was real, and sixty-six years old by the summer of 1903; that Seabrook is real, and that the water off it is shallow and moves; that horses swim, and swim strongly, and that the British Army was teaching them to do it in a purpose-cut pond nine years before the meeting; and that a horse really was dropped sixty feet into a tank in front of a paying crowd, four times a day, for the better part of seventy years. It is not able to certify that any of these things happened at once, in a line, six furlongs along the bottom of the English Channel.
We wrote to Hythe a last time and asked for the winning time, on the ground that a race without one is a procession. The Starter replied that the timekeeper’s watch had been in the timekeeper’s pocket and the timekeeper had been under the water. He adds that the Seabrook Bay Meeting was judged on style in any case, and that Neptune’s Fury had a great deal of it. Asked how the judges had seen any of it, he answered that they had not, and that this is what a stewards’ report is for.
The file remains open.
