Breeder Drew Going Against The Herd

There is not much you can tell Dr Bridget Drew about herd mentality. It was for her work with cattle, after all, that she earned an OBE. As director of a veterinary research centre in Hampshire, she supervised 700 cows with the highest milk yield in the land. But it may yet turn out that she has never witnessed more bovine behaviour than on the October evening in 2016 when Lot 1795 entered the ring in Book 3 at Tattersalls. For the mob of professional prospectors—the agents, the trainers, the pinhookers—had long dispersed, seemingly unanimous in the assumption that the high points of the sale were behind them.

Martin Percival of Boyce Bloodstock had brought the filly to Drew's attention: a daughter of Nathaniel, whose first runners had made no more precocious an impression that season than might be sensibly expected. (Albeit a filly named Enable (GB) (Nathaniel {Ire}) would give some indication of their scope to progress with maturity when making her debut at Newcastle the following month.) This filly was scheduled to sell just three lots from the end of the second day, and might very well slip through the net. Drew loved her, and rang one of her principal trainers, Clive Cox.

“Are you still here?” she asked.

“No, I'm halfway out of Newmarket. Why?”

“There's a filly here I'd like you to look at.”

“Well I'll come back then.”

And Cox loved her too. Most importantly, the page matched the singular and exacting standards Drew has developed to sieve value from that tier of the market neglected by-well, by the herd. These focus on the racetrack record of the family, though one of her other criteria is that if the dam has been sold, she must have made six figures.

“On the basis that somebody knew what I couldn't, and that she must be quite a nice lady to pay that,” Drew says, sitting in the office of her stud a few miles south of Newbury. Catalogues line the shelves; framed pedigrees hang on the walls; through the windows, the woodland and pasture of Hampshire exhale mistily into a steady rain. “And I use the same criteria for the stallion. Because it's amazing how many of them are one-offs; how many whose dams' progeny have an average rating-including the stallion-that doesn't make 90 plus. That is just a simple rule of thumb, really. And I tend not to pay more than about £25,000.”

She stretched a point for this filly, and bought her with a single bid for 30,000gns. After winning both her starts, a maiden at Nottingham last August and the Lingfield Oaks Trial on her reappearance, Perfect Clarity (GB) (Nathaniel {Ire}) already looks remarkably well bought. And, on Friday, she will start as one of the leading fancies for the Investec Oaks itself.

“We just couldn't believe it,” Drew says, recalling the sale. “There was quite a bit of black type on the page-and nobody went to look at her. They must have thought there was something wrong with her. Nathaniel wasn't flavour of the month then, anyway. But nobody stays, they all go home.”

So far as Drew's checklist was concerned, Perfect Clarity qualified on all counts. The dam, Clarietta (GB) (Shamardal), was a dual winner at two who proceeded to be placed twice in listed company; and both the next two dams had run in the Oaks after winning the Lupe S. at Goodwood. Clarietta's mother Claxon finished fifth in 1999 and ended up winning the G2 Premio Lydia Tesio; going one better than her own mother Bulaxie, who had started favourite when only seventh to Balanchine at Epsom in 1994 and went down by just three-quarters of a length in the Italian race.

This, then, will resonate with many as a very good Hesmonds family. Claxon, moreover, had meanwhile deepened the Oaks seam by producing Cassydora (GB) (Darshaan {GB}), disappointing in the 2005 Oaks after a runaway win in the same Lingfield trial won by Perfect Clarity, but subsequently second in the G1 Nassau S. (She has since produced two group winners.)

And the family continues to thrive. Bulaxie's half-sister Dust Dancer (GB) (Suave Dancer), for instance, produced the dam not only of Zoffany (Ire) (Dansili {GB}) but also of Rostropovich (Ire) (Frankel {GB})-who goes for the Investec Derby on Saturday after his impressive win at Chester.

But it is not as though Perfect Clarity represents any kind of aberration, in terms of the efficacy of Drew's methods. The previous year, for instance, she had found Perfect Angel (Ire) (Dark Angel {Ire}) in Book 2, knocked down to her other main trainer, Andrew Balding, for 17,000gns; the MGSP filly, runner-up to Harry Angel (Ire) (Dark Angel {Ire}) in the G2 Mill Reef S., was bought in for 290,000gns when one of the shares needed valuation in the same ring last December. In all, 76% of the horses she has sent into training have won.

Yet as recently as 2002 she did not know the first thing about bloodstock. Her husband John, himself a veterinarian in Winchester, had been diagnosed with a progressive brain disease. It finally claimed him in 2017, but the happy inspiration of buying him a racehorse that Christmas animated his final years beyond all expectation.

“I gave up the day job, we sold the practice, and bought a Mark Johnston cast-off for four grand,” Drew recalls. “She won a couple of races for James Toller and my husband really did enjoy it, became quite passionate actually. And after a while friends started saying they wouldn't mind a share in a horse. So we bought another couple-and now we've a total of 50 to 60.”

If Drew had set out with no ambition to build a business on such a scale, few novices can have entered the game with such informed instincts. So how did cattle help her see things, as an outsider, that might elude those schooled in the conventions of bloodstock?

One lesson she had learned was that bulls must earn their stripes by results sampled on a reliable scale. Young bulls have to cover enough cows to get 200 progeny to a first lactation; in the meantime, they are laid off for three years. Only those with stock performing to a high enough standard will then be brought back to breeding. So Drew will never be misled by flash-in-the-pan dividends for a sire; and will always seek runs on the board, or solid breeding, from both sides of a family tree.

Unsurprisingly, since she started breeding Thoroughbreds in 2007, that has sometimes led her to unfashionable sires. And, if adequate numbers clearly can't be available for new or unproven sires, then quality control on their own families has enabled Drew to get aboard on the ground floor with the likes of Invincible Spirit and Dubawi. From an Invincible Spirit mare she had bought for 15,000gns, indeed, Dubawi promptly came up with Perfect Tribute (GB), who set two track records within a fortnight in 2011 when winning a listed race over six furlongs at Ascot and then the G3 Chartwell S. over seven furlongs at Lingfield. Perfect Tribute's half-sister by Poet's Voice (GB), himself picked out as a rookie, then realised 700,000gns in Book 1.

A second lesson learned with cattle is more specific-and absolutely seizes you by the lapels as something worth thinking about.

“I found from a large study I undertook with 2,000 dairy heifers that if they went through a period of very rapid growth, future milk production was jeopardised,” Drew explains. “My advice to my farming clients was to sell the biggest heifers, as they will make you the most money at the sales-everyone wants big heifers-and will yield less milk. I do not know if the same applies to horses but have been told that 'there are sales horses and racehorses, and the two are not always compatible'. I am convinced that some yearlings are overfed during [sales] prep, which could well be jeopardising future athletic performance. [So] I am never afraid to buy a small yearling, providing my criteria are met and she is athletic.”

Going against the herd, then, Drew has now had over 100 winners and realised nearly £1-million in prizemoney. And she has meanwhile developed a mechanism to make each new cycle sustainable-dividing her operation into Mildmay Farm and Stud, and Mildmay Bloodstock. The latter serves primarily as a vehicle to part-lease yearlings for their racing careers.

Perfect Clarity herself was a case in point. She is owned by Drew, her son Nick and her daughter Pippa. David Keast, who boards four horses at Mildmay, leased a half-share; and otherwise there was just one lucky investor who punted £3,750 per season to lease an eighth of the filly for two years. (For the initial period of which, incidentally, Perfect Clarity was readied for Cox by Patrick Chamings.) While the leaseholders have no equity in the filly, they stand to bank their share of a Classic purse, along with any other prizemoney the filly earns this year.

Drew is reconciled to the likelihood that retaining Perfect Clarity for the broodmare band will prove an unaffordable luxury. It has, after all, become a major enterprise: up to 15 in training every year, plus 10 or 12 broodmares, and sundry foals and yearlings. It wasn't planned that way, and Drew has needed moments of luck like everyone else. Perfect Tribute, for instance, was a foal-share until Drew bought out Darley for just £3,000 after she had been kicked in a Newmarket paddock. After setting her two track records, she was ultimately sold for 340,000gns. And Drew has no doubt that Perfect Clarity would never have fallen within reach had she been presented in Book 2, as her pedigree might have warranted.

But much of the impetus, equally, Drew has generated herself-with her curiosity, her educated instinct, her ability to give fresh answers to fresh questions.

“Well I do everything in a business-like way, or like to think I do,” she shrugs. “Even at my age, I tend to take the attitude you either go forwards or backwards; you don't stand still. We've just put in an aqua-treadmill, for instance, to help the horses fill their top line.”

“I only get pleasure from it all-enormous pleasure-because I've done it myself. I didn't want to rely on others. When I didn't know anything at all about it, I came up with those criteria. Horses related to other good ones, rather than one-offs. I don't know how I came to it, but it seemed to work quite well. So we've stuck with it.”

“Last year was a really, really bad year. I lost my husband, two dogs and four horses. But this year, so far, has been much better-and hopefully it will stay that way on Friday.”