Lot 1604 , Archive of the Courthouse Farm Stud, Offham near Lewes and the Clark family, 1900-2014, including an important series of letters from Lady Anne Blunt at the Sheyk Obeyd Stud, Ain Shems, Egypt, 1912-1917, and her daughter

° Archive of the Courthouse Farm Stud, Offham near Lewes and the Clark family, 1900-2014, including an important series of letters from Lady Anne Blunt at the Sheyk Obeyd Stud, Ain Shems, Egypt, 1912-1917, and her daughter Judith Anne Dorothea Blunt, Baroness Wentworth, at Crabbet in Sussex, 1921-1955 Henry Vyvyan Musgrave Clark (1885-1981), known as Bill, was the proprietor of the second-oldest Arabian stud in Britain; in 1918 he co-founded the Arab Horse Society. Clark’s family had been prominent horse-dealers in Northern Ireland. In his late teens, Bill Clark spent two years on cattle ranches in Texas and New Mexico; the harsh conditions provided him with a tough and practical apprenticeship to horses. On his return to England he studied estate management at Audley End in Essex, and in July 1910 made his first visit to the Crabbet Park Arabian Stud, founded in 1878 by Wilfred Scawen Blunt and his wife Lady Anne, who wrote in her journal ‘Mr Clark can ride, he tried Mansur with saddle and bare-backed’. Clark continued in frequent correspondence with Lady Anne until her death in 1917, a connection maintained with her daughter Judith, Lady Wentworth, until 1955. In 1920 Clark married Audrey Thorne (1895-1981), who during the first war had schooled army remounts. In 1921 they were settled at Oaklands in Iford, and in 1935 moved to Courthouse Farm in the parish of Lewes St John Without. The stud was continued by the Clarks’ son Derek and his wife Mavis, and remained an active concern until the end of the 1980s.

1 Letters from Lady Anne Blunt (1837-1917) at the Sheyk Obeyd Stud, Ain Shems, Egypt, and the Crabbet Arabian Stud, Three Bridges; 1912-1917
Includes: his purchase of Redif from Crabbet, ‘with every wish for the success of your stud project’, 20 Jan 1912; the right stallion for Jellabeah, ‘she and Mansur ought to suit one another. Each belongs to a strain which has distinguished itself, by which I mean that some mare has performed a remarkable feat in war, at least that is what usually makes a strain fashionable in the desert’, Mar – Apr 1912; the difficulty of moving horses on account of the war, Feb 1915; is staying in Egypt indefinitely on account of dangerous seas, and purchase of Daoud, Apr 1916; printed list of pure Arabian brood mares and fillies, 1917; army change of view on breeding from Arabs, Jan 1917; her proposed trust in order that Crabbet may have a permanent existence of value to my country’, Mar 1917; ‘You cannot think what pleasure it gives me to hear that you mean to extend your breeding operations – you have years to look forward to, while mine are very limited at the best … so I should like to contemplate an assured future for your Arabian stud, and to do all in my power to forward its success’, Jun 1917

2 Letters from her daughter Judith Anne Dorothea Blunt (1873-1957), Lady Wentworth, at Crabbet in Sussex, 1921-1955
Criticism of named horses and lines ‘it is a pity so much of the Dillon blood got spread about as Crabbet always considered it the hall mark of a tainted pedigree’, Aug 1921; further criticisms, ‘Rohan very common and underbred and his pedigree shows unmistakable signs of being a town scribe’s work … if he had fifty pedigrees I would not breed from such a horse. Musket is the worst kind of Syrian weed. Marzouk a better type but a town bred horse in appearance’, Feb 1922; ‘In America they are muddling up the high caste [Arabs] with the Dillon taint so they will soon lose all the type they have got’; her difference of opinion with Bill Clark over the maximum height of an Arab horse, 1950-1955

3 Other documents and copy documents relating to the Crabbet stud and the Blunts, including typescript account of the Arab race at Newmarket (two entered by Wilfred Scawen Blunt), July 1884; copy list of brood mares and fillies, 1896; typescripts of speeches of Wilfred Scawen Blunt at the Crabbet sales of July 1902 and June 1913; pedigree of the Arabian mare Safarjal, bred at Crabbet in 1913; Rosemary Archer and James Fleming, Lady Anne Blunt, journals and correspondence 1878-1917 (Alexander Heriot, Nortleach, 1986)

4 General correspondence, 1913-2014; includes letters from Spencer Borden, Fall River, Massachusetts, and Col Frank Tompkins, Vermont, on long-distance races, 1913, 1920; extensive correspondence with British consuls in Aleppo attempting to secure a certified pedigree of Feda’an, including the sealed certificate; it will hardly be possible to get the Emir Moudjhem to swear before me. It would be against all custom to ask a great Bedouin chieftain to take an oath on such a matter’; ‘Lieutenant Rio of the Bedouin Control thinks ‘the Ibn Sbeini family must have been wiped out in recent blood-feuds’, Feb 1928 – Jan 1930; Guilherme Echenique Filho, Haras Er Rasul, Brazil, on behalf of the Brazilian Remount Service, requesting horses, 1931-1980; Frederick Day, School of Agriculture, Cambridge, 1939-1940; certificate, letters and photographs concerning Ghali, 1953-1962; Fortunino Matania, artist, 1954; Lionel Edwards, artist, 1957-1960; Carl Raswan, Santa Barbara, 1963-1966; Edward Skorkowski, Krakow, 1967; Princess Alice of Albany, 1977; Michael Harris, Royal Stud Farm, Oman and Honiton, Devon. 1983-1986; James Fleming, publisher, with tables of horses bought or bred by Bill Clark, 1992; report on the archive by Richard Fattorini, Sotheby’s, 2014

5 Newspapers, cuttings (including obituaries), brochures, photographs, maps and other papers, c1930-1997

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Blunt [née King], Anne Isabella Noel, suo jure Baroness Wentworth (1837–1917), traveller and breeder of Arab horses, was born on 22 September 1837 in London, the second of the three children, and the only daughter, of William King, first earl of Lovelace (1805–1893) and his wife, Ada King [see Byron, (Augusta) Ada (1815-1852)], the only child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke. Educated privately, Lady Anne, an accomplished linguist, was taught the violin by Joachim and drawing by John Ruskin.
Lady Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage on the development of his difference engine, a prototype of the computer, spent little time with her children. Lady Anne was only fifteen when her mother died, and she was brought up mainly under the spartan rule of her grandmother Anne Noel, Lady Byron. Her austere father took her on continental travels, where she absorbed four languages. During further European travel she met, in Florence, her future husband, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), who was then in the diplomatic service. They married on 8 June 1869 and had four children, only one of whom survived, Judith Anne Dorothea (1873–1957), later Baroness Wentworth. Marriage to the erratic Blunt transformed Lady Anne's somewhat sombre life to a hectic tempo: despite his charm and talents, her husband was extremely difficult to live with. His imperious ways and constant infidelities gave her much anguish and eventually led, in 1906, to their separation.
In 1872 Blunt inherited family estates in Sussex. He and Lady Anne designed and rebuilt the house at Crabbet Park, which remains a monument to their talents. With Blunt she travelled extensively in the Middle East: her scientific interests are manifest in the mass of aneroid readings, barometric pressures, and compass bearings in her journal entries of their travels in the Arabian deserts. There she found happiness, and her numerous journals give a fascinating account of their experiences. Written simply as a private daily record, they provide frank insights into every aspect of her life, including her views on the political events in which her husband was involved. They also reveal a woman of remarkable courage and endurance. She converted to Roman Catholicism as a result of a vision experienced when Blunt lay seriously ill in a remote spot during a journey in 1879. She was one of very few women of her time to travel into the heart of the desert. The Blunts undertook three long journeys, on horseback, taking only a few Arab servants with camels. Her artistic talent is evident in her sketches: whether of desert scenes, Arabs and their animals, town dwellings, or ruined forts, they were executed meticulously. Her superb watercolours capture the spirit of the desert, and exhibitions of her paintings were held in Saudi Arabia and London in 1993; her journals, which are housed in the British Library, were displayed there in 1977.
Lady Anne was heir to a considerable fortune, inherited from the Milbanke family, and it was largely her money that funded the Blunts' travels and the stud they started in 1878. That year, through the British consul in Aleppo, they met Arab sheikhs of famed horse-breeding tribes, and decided to buy Arabian stallions and mares to found a stud in England. This brought an important new dimension into their lives. Their Crabbet Arabian stud, gradually enlarged over the next decade with more desert-bred horses and, later, with the remnants of the famous Abbas Pasha collection in Egypt, became one of the greatest private studs, destined to influence Arabian horse breeding worldwide. The stud survived for nearly a century under the ongoing expertise of Judith, Lady Wentworth, after her mother's death.
In 1882 the Blunts purchased a 37 acre walled garden outside Cairo named Shaykh 'Ubayd, after the saint whose tomb stood in the grounds. They made it their winter home, establishing a second stud there. Lady Anne became fluent in Arabic, and the insights she gained into the people and their customs ensured an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bedouin and their horses. She also translated original Arab texts, two of which were put into verse by Blunt and published in England. She spent many years compiling a book on Arabian horses, but died just before its completion; happily much of this work is incorporated in the classic work by her daughter, Judith, Lady Wentworth, The Authentic Arabian Horse (1945). Two travel books, The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (2 vols., 1879) and Pilgrimage to Nejd (2 vols., 1881), despite appearing under Lady Anne's name, were not written by her. Purporting to be extracts from her journals, whole sections describing their travels were rewritten by Blunt.
After Lady Anne's separation from her husband in 1906, she rented a house near Crabbet Park, where Judith and her husband, the Hon. Neville Lytton, then lived with their three children. She wintered at Shaykh 'Ubayd where, with a few faithful servants and friends, she felt truly at home, the East having become an integral part of her life. She became Baroness Wentworth on 18 June 1917, having inherited the barony from her niece. Lady Anne died in the Anglo-American Hospital, Cairo, on 15 December 1917, and was buried in the Nun's burial-ground at the Jebel Ahmar. She was held in honour by her many Arab friends, to whom she was 'the noble lady of the horses'.
£800-1,200