After his return to Hungary, he set up a new training establishment at Göd, just north of Dunakeszi, and was immediately successful.¹⁴ There he trained the most famous horse in Hungarian history, Kincsem, who holds the extraordinary record of having raced fifty-four times and won on every occasion, although one of these was a dead heat. Nor were these unimportant races. In 1877, when she was a three-year-old, she won all five of the classic races in Austria-Hungary;¹⁵ this is a very rare feat in any country, and is something that has never been achieved in England. Kincsem also won a succession of major races in Germany, and the following year she also ran in France and England, where she won the Goodwood Cup, despite a number of adventures along the way.¹⁶
Kincsem was later retired to stud, but she died relatively young in 1887. Hesp was so saddened that he lost the will to live, and died himself only just over a month later.
Hesp, known as “Csárdás Bob” in Hungary, founded a whole racing dynasty. His son Edward, who died in 1922, was also a leading trainer, first at Göd and then at Alag; his grandson Frank was a champion jockey over hurdles and later also trained in Alag; his great-grandson József Hesp fought on the Austrian side in the First World War, during which he was captured on the Eastern Front and only managed to return to Hungary in 1920; he too became a very successful public trainer winning many of the classics; and finally there is his great-great-grandson, also a József Hesp, who is still active in helping to run the races at Kincsem Park today.¹⁷

John Reeves

A second example is John Reeves, who was the leading English trainer in Hungary for around forty years. He was born at Filkins near Burford in Oxfordshire in 1846. His father was a groom at the Hall and his mother was the daughter of the local butcher. One source says that Reeves attended “the world-famous school of Oxford”. However, he appears nowhere in the records of Oxford University, and another version of the story, which says his family wanted him to go to Oxford but he preferred to run away and become a jockey, seems more probable. In fact, many of the Reeves family were involved with horses, so it is perhaps no surprise that he too moved into this world. He became an apprentice jockey when he was only around thirteen or fourteen years old, and had his first victory at Epsom in 1858, but he was never very successful, and he seems to have drifted into horse dealing, as well as trying his hand at training in a small way, again not very successfully. It was horse dealing that first brought him to Europe. In the mid-1860s he bought a horse called Verbina, which he then sold in Italy. Then in 1867 he went to Austria-Hungary, initially as private trainer to Prince Liechtenstein at Eisgrub in Moravia. He immediately began to achieve good results, and this was the beginning of a long career during which he trained for some of the biggest aristocratic owners in the country before setting up as a public trainer in Alag. His was not a betting stable, and throughout his career he had a reputation for honesty and dedication.¹⁸
Reeves himself would probably have regarded his six Austrian and two German Derby wins as the pinnacle of his career, but he was also a successful trainer of steeplechasers. Amongst these was a horse called Brigand, which was unquestionably the leading continental steeplechaser of his generation. He won the Velká Pardubická three times, in 1875, 1877 and 1878; he also won the Grand Vienna Steeplechase and then went to Germany where he won the Old Baden Hunt Chase, the main steeplechase at Baden-Baden, in 1878. From there he went on to France where he won the Grand Steeple de Paris, and then he came to England where he was aimed at the 1879 Grand National. However, he could only finish ninth or tenth, and as a result, he is not remembered at all in England, in contrast to Hungary, where there is a fine bronze of him in the museum at Keszthely, the home of his owner, Count (later Prince) Tasziló Festetics. Festetics, one of the grandest of the Hungarian magnates, was married to an Englishwoman, his wife being the daughter of the Duke of Hamilton. He imported many horses from England and established an important stud farm at Fenék, now sadly derelict, on the Keszthely estate.¹⁹
Reeves continued training until 1922 when he retired and went to live with one of his daughters in Vienna. He died in 1930 and is buried in Alag. Like Hesp he founded a racing dynasty, his son Herbert being also a leading trainer in Hungary up until his death in 1936.
John Beeson was born in Lincolnshire in 1834. He was apprenticed to the Duke of Rutland’s stable but went to Austria as a boy. After working for Counts Fürstenberg and Aladár Andrássy, he moved to work for Count Miklós Esterházy in Tata. When Esterházy’s previous trainer, Mitchell, died in 1861, Beeson took over and trained successfully at Tata until his death in 1888, when the stable was taken over by his son, Alfred.²⁰

These are just a few examples, but there are many others, whose life stories follow a generally similar pattern. It seems clear that in almost every case, at least in the early period, these were people who were not going to reach the top in English racing. They were thus open to offers from elsewhere. At the same time, the general Anglophilia of Hungarian aristocrats for much of the nineteenth century led them to want to import not just English horses and dogs, but also English people who could look after the horses and the dogs, and also act as some kind of trophy themselves. Many Hungarian aristocrats regularly visited England for the hunting season, and there is little doubt that they recruited Englishmen to work for them in Hungary on these trips.
There was also a further group of English horsemen in Hungary, and these were the amateur gentleman riders, generally members of the aristocracy or gentry on the lookout for sporting adventures overseas. Men such as these would go over for a season or two, or perhaps stay a few years in Hungary before returning home. One such was Captain Butler Brooke, who settled in Alag in 1896 and stayed there until 1906, gaining the reputation of knowing “every blade of grass and molehill on the Alag track”. During that time he rode in 459 races, mostly restricted to amateur riders, winning a more than respectable total of 112 and coming second in another 93. Admiral Horthy’s brother, Jenő, who was also an amateur steeplechase rider of note, called him “a charming little Irishman”.²¹

The Festetics stud at Fenékpuszta as it is today

Trainers and jockeys were not the only English people to form part of the racing community. Racing has always been closely associated with hunting and many of the huntsmen on the great princely estates were English.²²
There were also stud farm managers, vets, bookmakers and racing administrators and officials who were English. To take one fairly prominent example, Francis Cavaliero, who was the Secretary of the Austrian Jockey Club for forty-eight years up until 1881 came originally from Devon. He was also the leading importer of English thoroughbreds to the Dual Monarchy, had a hand in running the stud at Kisbér, was the starter of the races at Pest, and, for good measure, taught the Emperor and Crown Prince Rudolph to speak English.²³
Throughout the Dual Monarchy the English tended to form little communities, or “commandos” as they themselves described them, with the greatest concentrations at Pardubice in Bohemia, Eisgrub (Lednice) in Moravia, and Tata and Alag in Hungary. During the race meetings, there was also a “little colony” of English trainers and jockeys in Pest.²⁴

Tata was founded as a racing community in the 1860s by Count Miklós Esterházy. The location was chosen partly because of its accessibility, being on the main railway line between Vienna and Budapest, and secondly because the turf was reckoned to be amongst the best in the country. By 1878 it was regarded as “quite a sporting locality”, with racehorses, foxhounds, stag-hounds and beagles. Esterházy laid out a racecourse, and began to attract leading owners and trainers to establish their training stables in and around the town.²⁵ Many of the latter were English, of whom the most notable initially were Alfred and John Beeson, Thomas Osborne, and John Metcalfe.²⁶ In 1887 they were joined by Harry Milne who rapidly became the leading trainer at Tata and remained there until he died in 1938. Like Reeves, Milne had spent some time in Italy before moving to Germany and then to Hungary, but unlike Reeves, his was a big betting stable, and he was noted for winning at many small handicaps and selling races as well as all the Classics.²⁷ Many of the jockeys retained by these stables were also English, although it is worth noting that towards the end of the century American jockeys began to arrive on the scene. Milne, for example, formed a highly effective partnership with the American Fred Taral.
It is difficult to know the exact size of the English community in Tata. A local historian has estimated that there were around ten to twelve families, perhaps rising to as many as twenty at one time;²⁸ but, however big it was, it was certainly large enough to attract the attention of one of the Anglican missionary societies. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had a chaplain based in Budapest, and in 1898 he reported that he had visited Tata and met some of the trainers and jockeys and their families. It may be as a result of this visit that an Anglican chapel was established inside the grounds of the castle at Tata. This building still exists, but for how long it was in use is not clear. Certainly by 1903 the chaplain was reporting that “Things in Tata are not rosy”; it seems that when he went out to visit the little colony he found that most of the trainers and jockeys had gone off to the races rather than go to church. Moreover, many of them had married local women, and so had “fallen away”. Although he tried to put a brave face on it, saying that the jockeys appeared to be “a very respectable set of young men”, and that he hoped for better things, it is clear that this did not happen and the mission lost its impetus.²⁹
In any case, by this time things were beginning to change in Tata. Miklós Esterházy died in 1897. His successor, Ferenc Esterházy, carried on the races, but he died in 1909 and his widow was uninterested in the sport. She allowed the racecourse to close in 1913, and most of the trainers subsequently moved to Alag. Training at Tata ceased altogether in 1922, although a few of the English, including Harry Milne, stayed on in retirement.

The Huxtable villa, Alag, ca. 1910

At the same time as racing at Tata was going into decline, a new training centre and racecourse were being established at Alag, just north of Budapest. The moving spirit behind this was Count Elemér Batthyány, the President of the Hungarian Jockey Club, and the intention was to establish what was often called the “Hungarian Newmarket”. In this they certainly succeeded. Even today, when it is clearly a shadow of its former self and the racecourse has closed down, Alag is an evocative place to visit, with a large training ground and many stables set in pine woods, and with many beautiful late-nineteenth-century villas which were homes for the trainers and jockeys.³⁰ One of the grandest is the Huxtable villa, which was a gift to them by one of their aristocratic patrons as a reward for winning the Derby. The Huxtables were another notable racing family who were in Hungary over two generations, the father, born in Manchester in 1849, starting out as a jockey before becoming a leading trainer, and his two sons, Harry and Robert, being jockeys. Harry’s most notable win came in the 1906 Velká Pardubická on Tigra, whereas Robert, after a highly successful career on the flat, was accused of race fixing and banned from riding in Austria-Hungary. He subsequently rode in South Africa and Russia, before moving to India where he died in 1920.³¹
In the early years of the twentieth century the links between English and Hungarian racing appeared strong, well-established and durable. When and why did it all come to an end so completely that the story has been all but forgotten, certainly in England and perhaps to a lesser extent in Hungary?
The easy answer is the impact of the First World War, after which, in racing as in much else, things were never quite the same again, and the ties, having been effectively broken during the four years of the war, were never reestablished. However, if we look at the question more deeply, it is clear that the war was not so much a cause as a catalyst, speeding up trends which were already apparent.
It is, for example, evident that in the decade before the war the dominance of the English jockeys was already being eroded. One example of this is that for fourteen years, from 1888 to 1901, the Velká Pardubická was won exclusively by English riders, whereas from 1902 to 1913, it was won by English jockeys only twice.

The Grandstand of the new Budapest racecourse, opened in 1880 in the City Park. Photograph, Budapest Collection, Municipal Szabó Ervin Library

What was happening was that the trainers were beginning to find it easier, and, significantly, cheaper, to employ local riders, rather than import jockeys from England.³² Interestingly, many of those who showed promise as apprentices, were sent to Newmarket to be trained as professional jockeys, and then returned to Hungary where they gradually monopolised all the leading rides and broke the former hegemony of the English. The two names that stand out here are Ferenc Bonta and Géza Janek, both of whom were apprenticed in England before returning to become leading riders in Hungary in the decade leading up to the First World War. Bonta was the first Hungarian to become champion jockey, which he achieved in 1902 with 96 winners during the season; and Janek became the first Hungarian jockey to win the Derby in 1910.
As for the trainers, the fathers were being succeeded by sons, and a gradual process of Magyarisation was occurring with each successive generation. It is interesting to track this process through the dominant language of each generation. Hesp’s great-great-grandson, for example, speaks no English at all, although his father had a slight knowledge of it.
It is also worth recounting what happened to the English trainers and jockeys during the war. In Germany they were rounded up and interned in 1914, and although some of them were later released, many remained interned for the duration in the camp at Ruhleben, itself a former racecourse.³³

The English trainers in Hungary dressed as jockeys for a charity race, 1918

In Austria-Hungary, it was quite different. The trainers were told that they could carry on as normal, and only needed to report to the police occasionally. At one point during the war, a commission of the Red Cross appeared in Hungary and asked to see the English trainers to check that they were being treated correctly. However, their first attempts to set up a meeting failed because the trainers were too busy going to the races. Eventually, a meeting was held in Alag, and the English were asked if they had any complaints. John Reeves acted as their spokesman, and he said that he did indeed have a serious complaint to make—that since the war he had been unable to get hold of any decent Scotch whisky!³⁴
In fact, the war was a good time for the English trainers in Hungary. Unlike in Germany or in England where racing was severely curtailed, in Austria-Hungary it seems to have flourished. Even as the Empire was collapsing in the autumn of 1918, racing was carrying on regardless. On November 17, 1918 the Vienna Sports Zeitung reported that “the racing season of 1918 has been one of the most successful ever experienced”, going on to report that the betting turnover in Hungary was well over three million crowns a day. Bookmakers, it was said, had made huge fortunes.³⁵
The English shared in the good times the war brought to racing. John Reeves could well have afforded the whisky he missed, as he trained the winner of one of the wartime Derbies; in fact every single winner of the Austrian Derby during the war years was trained by an Englishman. Reeves himself celebrated his jubilee of fifty years as a trainer in Hungary during the war, and to mark the occasion the Hungarian Jockey Club held a gala dinner to which every English trainer and jockey, along with their families, were invited. To add to the fun the leading English trainers all dressed up as jockeys and took part in a charity race.³⁶ Had this been known in England there would have been a scandal, for at the same time as the Hungarian Jockey Club was holding gala dinners for the English racing community in Hungary, the English Jockey Club in Newmarket was busy stripping its Austrian and Hungarian members of their membership of the Club— and these were men such as Count Batthyány and Prince Festetics, who were well-known Anglophiles. Somehow the actions of the Austrians and Hungarians appear the more civilised.

After the war, of course, everything was different. Hungarian racing suffered under the Commune, when the old Budapest racecourse was dug up and used for growing potatoes. The new boundaries and the new passport regulations made travelling between England and Central Europe more difficult and it is noteworthy that although most of the English trainers already living in Hungary stayed on until they died, there were no new recruits. As for the jockeys, the war merely accentuated the trend already apparent beforehand. Unable to bring new jockeys out from England, the trainers were forced to employ locals and by the end of the war the links between English and Hungarian racing gradually withered away. There were still seven of the leading trainers who were English in the 1920s, but as they died or retired no one came to replace them. The last of the active trainers to have come from England was George Hitch, who settled first in Austria in 1892 before moving to Hungary and training first in Tata and then in Alag. After being champion trainer several times between the wars, he retired in 1938 and died in 1954. Then, of course, the Second World War, followed by forty years of communism, severed the ties completely.
Memories of the English racing community have not faded completely in Hungary. Indeed, some in today’s racing community look back on that era as a kind of golden age, and perhaps, given the problems facing Hungarian racing at the present time, that assessment is not so wide of the mark.

¹ This article is a revised version of a talk given to the Oxford University Hungarian Society, on 29 May 2008. I owe a particular debt of thanks for their help to József Hesp, Géza Körmendi and György Száraz in Hungary and to Tim Cox and my wife, Judith Pinfold (Czigány), in England.

² Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 17 July 1842, 27 June 1858, 21 June 1863.

³ Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 20 August 1898; The Star, 5 November 1904; Nottingham Evening Post, 19 August 1937; Aurél Föld & Tamás Sipos, Fuss vagy fizess [Run or Pay Up]. Dunakeszi: Föld Ottó–Sipos Tamás, 1996, pp.14–15.

⁴ Évi jelentés a Pesti Lovaregylet munkálódásáról és a Magyar-Osztrák Birodalomban 1877-ben lefolyt lóversenyekről [Annual Report of Work of the Pest Jockey Club and of Horse Races Run in Austria-Hungary in 1877]. Budapest: Athenaeum, 1877, pp.195–242. 5 ¦FO371/7, Clarke to Grey no. 1, 7 September 1906, quoted by F. R. Bridge,

⁵ FO371/7, Clarke to Grey no. 1, 7 September 1906, quoted by F. R. Bridge, “British Official Opinion and the Domestic Situation in the Hapsburg Monarchy” in Shadow and Substance in British Foreign Policy 1895–1939: Memorial Essays Honouring C. J. Lowe. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984, p. 89.

⁶ An excellent overview is provided by Miklós Zeidler, “English Influences on Modern Sport in Hungary”, Hungarian Quarterly, Spring 2006 (vol. 47, no. 181), pp. 36–54; see also Rob Gray, A Very English Pursuit: Horse Racing in Nineteenth-century Hungary. Unpublished MA dissertation, University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2005.

⁷ Arthur J. Patterson, The Magyars: Their Country and Institutions. London: Smith, Elder, 1869, vol. 2, p. 31.

⁸ Stephen Gál, “Wesselényi in England”, Hungarian Quarterly, Winter 1939/40 (vol. 5, no. 4): pp. 667–674.

⁹ A succinct overview of the establishment of horse racing in Hungary is provided in Zoltán Barcsay- Amant & Gyula Erdélyi, A magyar lovassport története [The History of Hungarian Equestrian Sport]. Budapest: A szerzők, 1932, pp. 32–38.

¹⁰ Pesti gyepen volt ló-futtatások: Juniusban 1827: első esztendei tudósítás [Horse Races Run on the Pest Turf, June 1827: First Year’s Report]. Pest: M. Trattner, 1827, pp. 3–11. Boggis’ ride in the Epsom Derby is reported in the Morning Chronicle, 26 May 1826.

¹¹ Liverpool Mercury, 11 January 1892.

¹² Hesp may have had a connection with Sir Tatton Sykes, who was a leading breeder of thoroughbred racehorses on his estate at nearby Sledmere. In 1863 Hesp returned to Slingsby, specifically to present Sykes with a copy of Count Manó Andrássy’s Les chasses et le sport en Hongrie [Hunting and Sport in Hungary] on behalf of Baron Andor Orczy, as reported in the Daily News, 14 April 1863.

¹³ Dezső Fehér & Imre Török, A magyar lóversenyzés története, 1827–1977 [The History of Hungarian Horse Racing, 1827–1977]. Budapest: Natura, 1997, p. 53; Tivadar Farkasházy, Zsokékrul: a lóverseny regénye [On Jockeys: the Tale of Horse Racing]. Budapest: Gloria, 2006, pp. 155–159; Interview with József Hesp, August 2007.

¹⁴ In 1878 Hesp had twenty-five horses in training at Göd, as reported in the Sporting Gazette, 9 February 1878. The stable still exists but is currently (2008) ruinous, a sad state of affairs for the home of the famous Kincsem.

¹⁵ At that time the Classics in Austria-Hungary comprised the 2,000 Guineas, run in Pozsony, the 1,000 Guineas, Oaks and St Leger, run in Budapest, and the Derby, run in Vienna.

¹⁶ For Kincsem’s trip to England see Móric Hoeller, Kincsem Goodwoodban, 1878. augusztus 1 [Kincsem at Goodwood, 1 August 1878]. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat Nyomdája, 1928.

¹⁷ Alexander Duschnitz, Joseph Löffler & Anton Prinz, Das goldene Buch des Renn-, Reit-, und Traber-Sport [The Golden Book of Racing, Equestrian Sports and Trotting]. Vienna: Selbstverlage, 1904, p. 77; Béla Bevilaqua-Borsody, Magyar lósport és lótenyésztés [Hungarian Horse Racing and Breeding]. Budapest, 1943, p. 492; Interview with József Hesp, August 2007.

¹⁸ Duschnitz, Löffler & Prinz, Das goldene Buch, p. 58; Móric Hoeller, “John Reeves”, unidentified magazine article in the author’s possession.

¹⁹ Zsolt Harsányi, “A Hungarian Magnate”, Hungarian Quarterly, Spring 1939 (vol.5, no.1), pp. 90–98.

²⁰ In 1882 Beeson had fourteen horses in training for Esterházy. See Bell’s Life, 21 January 1882.

²¹ Charles A. Voigt, Famous Gentleman Riders at Home and Abroad. London: Hutchinson, 1925, pp. 111–116; Eugene Horthy, The Sport of a Lifetime. London: Arnold, 1939, p. 44.

²² The first huntsman imported from England appears to have been a man named Baldogh (possibly a misspelling of Baldock), who was brought to Hungary by Széchenyi and who was subsequently huntsman to the Károlyi family at Fót, the so-called “Melton of Hungary”. By 1857 there were eight packs of hounds in the country comprising around 300 dogs, almost all of English origin. See Manó Andrássy (et al), Les chasses et le sport en Hongrie [Hunting and Sport in Hungary]. Pest: Armund Geibel, 1857, pp. [3–7].

²³ The County Gentleman: Sporting Gazette and Agricultural Times, 12 November 1881 and 1 July 1882. Cavaliero was also secretary and starter at Pozsony, Sopron and Nyitra in Hungary, as well as at Prague, Pardubice and Brno. He supplied most of the reports of Austro-Hungarian racing in the English sporting press.

²⁴ Daily News, 19 May 1873.

²⁵ Géza Körmendi, Tata: a vizek és a malmok városa [Tata: Town of Waters and Mills]. Tata: Augmentum, 2007, pp. 112–115; Sporting Gazette, 9 February 1878.

²⁶ By 1882 the Beeson stable contained fourteen horses, the Metcalfe stable had eighteen and that of Osborne thirty-one. See Bell’s Life, 21 January 1882.

²⁷ “Harry Milne”, unidentified magazine article in the author’s possession; Information from József Hesp.

²⁸ Interview with Géza Körmendi, August 2007.

²⁹ Society for the Propagation of the Gospel: Report, 1898, pp. 198–199, and 1903, pp. 219–220.

³⁰ For a succinct history of Alag see György Száraz, Százéves az alagi lóversenypálya, 1896–1996 [One Hundred Years of Alag Racecourse, 1896–1996]. Dunakeszi: Magyar Lovaregylet & Magyar Lóverseny, 1996.

³¹ Föld & Sipos, Fuss vagy fizess, pp. 85–89; Duschnitz, Löffler & Prinz, Das goldene Buch, p. 40; Information from József Hesp.

³² In 1892 it was reported that the English jockeys were demanding exorbitant wages. See Liverpool Mercury, 11 January 1892.

³³ The Times, 9 November 1914; Matthew Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany: the Ruhleben Camp, 1914–1918. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, p. 124.

³⁴ Rudolf Erdődy, Das Vollblutpferd im Wandel der Zeit [The Thoroughbred Through the Ages]. Vienna: Rohrer, 1957, p. 162.

³⁵ This report was reprinted in The Times, 19 November 1918, under the headline “While Rome Burns”.

³⁶ New York Times, 18 May 1919.

John Pinfold
was Librarian of the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies
in the University of Oxford, 1993–2008.
He is now an independent historian and researcher.
His history of the Grand National, Gallant Sport, was published in 1999, and he is
currently working on a study of the links between English and Central European racing
in the nineteenth century.