Harper Leads Whitsbury Into New Era

It seems a long time since a jet-lagged young Englishman was given a tour of the New Zealand stud where he hoped to learn something about the coalface of the bloodstock business. “Don't worry mate,” Ed Harper was told, as he blearily took his post for a debut night shift. “It'll be quiet tonight.” By daybreak he had presided over six foalings, by torchlight in a relentless downpour. “And one of the mares died of a prolapsed uterus, at the time the most horrific thing I'd ever seen,” Harper remembers now. “It was definitely a reality check, and one I needed. But I never doubted for one second that this was what I wanted to be doing.”

Yet if that seems a long time ago, Harper is still only 32. And it is still only six years since, freshly returned to Whitsbury Manor Stud in Hampshire, he pestered his father Chris that they should buy a 3-year-old sprinter who had beaten precisely one horse in his last two starts. They started Showcasing (GB) (Oasis Dream {GB}) at a fee of £5,000. Last month Harper was able to announce that the sire of dual Group 1 winner Quiet Reflection (GB) (Showcasing {GB}) would stand at £35,000 in 2017.

Moreover, two of the other three stallions he is now supervising at Whitsbury are operated in partnership with Coolmore and Shadwell, respectively. Showcasing, it seems, could hardly be better named for the way he is helping to illuminate the parallel emergence of Harper as a force in the bloodstock world.

Not that Harper himself sees it that way. Quite apart from stressing his father's continued and cherished assistance, he describes himself as far more of a hindrance than a help to Showcasing's initial success. “If ever a horse has made it through his own talent, it's this one,” Harper says. “He was the first stallion I'd had a hand in buying–I'd been badgering Dad, I was going to be the one managing the horse, and it was the first time I'd put my neck on the block and said, 'This is a horse we need to buy.' Luckily Dad still had his hands on the reins, and was able to make it happen with his diplomatic skills. But I was a rookie with no idea what I was doing. Showcasing has had to bust his way through on his own.”

True, his father had involved him in the business from a very young age. And while Harper subsequently disappeared to Reading University, and then to qualify as a surveyor with Savills, at least he was already seasoned in the ups and downs of the Turf. “I was very lucky in that Dad was including me in all the business decisions even at 15, from which gatepost goes where, to which stallion to stand,” Harper recalls. “Obviously your opinions at that stage wouldn't carry much weight, but that ensured I was relatively up to speed about the pitfalls of racing, the sales and the market. But on the practical side I had long forgotten anything I might have learned as a 10-year-old at Pony Club. So that needed drastic attention: I had this nightmare of being the horrid new boss who can't put a head-collar on a mare.”

He duly took the National Stud diploma course before chaperoning the stud's shuttle stallion at the time, Sakhee's Secret (GB) (Sakhee), to New Zealand. “Out there you'd never hear anyone say 'That's not your job' or 'You don't do that',” Harper says. “You do everything, hands-on, so you learn the practicalities pretty rapidly. I'd say from a single year out there you'd learn as much as you might in 10 on a small stud here. But what I lacked, when I came back to Whitsbury, was the business contacts. Nobody knew who I was, and I didn't know anybody.”

Many of those breeders he sought to introduce not only to the stud's new director but also to its new stallion more or less hung up the phone. “Luckily I did inherit some breeders who had supported Whitsbury from way back,” he says. “And I'm so thankful to that select band of local breeders, who were prepared to give the horse a chance and see how things panned out. I owe a huge amount to their trust and support. Without them, we wouldn't have managed to book enough outside mares to get the horse going. So his success is a massive testament to them.”

He continues, “But while I was never anything other than enormously grateful for their mares, the fact is that we're talking about a horse standing for five grand, and we're probably doing a few deals as well, managed by someone who didn't quite know how to present things. So inevitably they were mares at that level. And yet still Showcasing has managed to get these top-quality performers.”

Leading rookie sire in Britain and Ireland by aggregate wins, and joint-top by individual winners, Showcasing consolidated last year to finish as Britain's leading sire of 2-year-olds and also champion second-crop sire. His Southern Hemisphere foals were also excelling. Significantly, his reputation has been gaining even during what is traditionally the most vulnerable phase of a stallion's career, with his third-crop runners on the ground. His opening books of 117 and 119 mares shrank to just 68 in that third season, less than half of them winners. By the time he covered 127 mares this spring, however, 20% of his partners were black-type performers.

“So yes, it's very exciting to wonder what he might be able to do, now that he is getting a wider spread–both geographically, and in the quality of mares,” Harper says. “Those first books featured a lot of older mares, or mares coming from breeders who wouldn't, for instance, have a full-time vet: factors that will always slow down the rate at which you get to a finished product.”

Showcasing had been derailed by a hock injury, but not before demonstrating that he had trained on–running an exceptional race for a 3-year-old to be second in the G2 Duke of York S. on his reappearance. As a juvenile, he had been a blazingly fast G2 Gimcrack S. winner. As such, it was only when things went wrong that he became a feasible project for Whitsbury. And the same acuity has served Harper equally well in further boosting the roster since–not least in the shape of new recruit Adaay (Ire) (Kodiac {GB}).

“You're never going to find the perfect stallion out there, that you can afford, so you've always got to look for the angle,” Harper says. “I've always had to be very aware of value. Had Showcasing not had his injury, I doubt we could ever have bought him. Adaay, our new horse, was an extremely obvious 3-year-old. He'd been a very precocious 2-year-old, by the right sire, and he'd trained on to win prestigious Group 2 races at three. That represented a fairly unobtainable package. But this year my luck was not necessarily William Haggas's luck, and like so many other Newmarket trainers he suffered from what people call 'the virus' in the first half of the season. And that gave me my opportunity.”

“Fortunately the people at Shadwell were very willing to listen,” he adds. “I quickly got the impression that, quite rightly, they weren't going to sell. But I hoped we could persuade them that we could give him the best chance in a commercial market– and that they might provide support, at the other end, with yearlings ending up with good trainers. There's no doubt Adaay will start off with immeasurably more support than Showcasing did. He's what you'd call a typical Kodiac: not the biggest but very powerful, the spitting image of what a precocious 2-year-old will look like.”

A very similar situation had left the door ajar to another heavyweight partnership through Due Diligence (War Front), a young stallion who has again put Whitsbury ahead of the curve with an emerging sire of sires. Harper once again made his approach to Coolmore at a time when the horse had faded from attention.

“For me, everything's a punt–but some punts seem more obvious than others,” Harper says. “I thought it highly unlikely that we would ever be able to stand a top-quality son of War Front. And when I stood at the paddock before the Diamond Jubilee–the sort of race I'd probably watch rather more carefully than most–I looked round and thought to myself, 'God, I don't think I'll be able to get any of these, never mind the most beautiful horse in the ring.' There he was, between those two Ballydoyle handlers, his head low to the ground, just looking amazing. And I thought, 'Wow! That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve. What a pity I've no chance of buying him.'”

But the American import was sidelined after his superb second that day (when still only a 3-year-old) and Harper eventually dared to seize the moment. “Luckily I'm one of the few people crazy enough to pick up the phone and at least pose the question,” he says. “The worst that can happen is that you'll be told no. As it turned out, we were able to buy into the horse with Coolmore. And I'm working very hard to show all of our partners that we're a good place to stand stallions.”

He duly filled the rookie's book with 124 mares, whose owners have been given an incentive to keep the faith with a clip from £6,500 to £5,500 next year. Certainly Due Diligence does not have to seek far for an inspiring example at that end of the market, with Swiss Spirit (GB) (Invincible Spirit {Ire}) having more than punched his weight as a £4,000 cover with his first yearlings this autumn–notching three-figure hits at Tattersalls and at Goffs in both the UK and Ireland.

In this case, both heart and head had disposed Harper towards the son of Swiss Lake (Indian Ridge {GB}). “If you could invent a pedigree, he'd be just exactly what I'd come up with,” he enthuses. “At Whitsbury we've always had a soft spot for Indian Ridge, who was trained there by David Elsworth, and we were fortunate enough to stand his best son Compton Place (GB) (Indian Ridge {GB}), a saint of a horse who helped our business no end. And this is one of the fastest families in the Stud Book. So Swiss Spirit, for us, was an option too good to miss.”

He adds, “He's proving the most reliable stallion for producing a good type of foal, and bucking a trend in that he's more popular now than when he went to stud. That's great, at that end of the market, because a four-grand sire will tend to get a mare that might be old or frail or wonky. But it doesn't seem to bother him. That's why we've sent him a lot of our maiden mares, because he'll give them a good first foal.”

Whether measured by quality or quantity, Whitsbury has made considerable advances with its own band of broodmares. At 65, they have nearly doubled since the arrival of Showcasing, Harper reasoning that every talented yearling raised here performs a dual service–in its own right, for clients of the farm, but also in reflecting well on a resident stallion.

All this expansion necessarily ties Harper to phone and laptop more than he would like, making him more grateful than ever for his father's sagacious input. “He's very kind in that he has handed over the decision-making, but he's always there for a reminder or guidance,” he says. “I'm the first to admit I don't get out of the office enough, so it's great to have a stockman in the background who can come in at the end of the day and say: 'By the way, I think you should take a look at this.' Remember, he was a farmer before he was ever a stud man, and he's just brilliant at the management of stock.”

Though Harper does not wish to labour the point, he resents misapprehensions that the previous transfer between generations was remotely comparable. It is well known that the stud was previously owned by his father's uncle, the bookmaker William Hill. “Some people think it was all handed on a plate,” Harper says. “Well, it was the absolute opposite. Dad was barely 20 when William rang my grandmother and said: 'I hear my nephew's into farming. Does he want to come and manage Whitsbury?' It sounded ridiculous, a kid to be managing a 2,500-acre estate with 60 staff. But my grandmother said, 'He'll never ask you again.' So Dad was handed the reins of the farm, which was the bigger part of the business, and knuckled down. And he turned a perennial loss into a profit in his first year– which probably annoyed William intensely. Within two years he said, 'Well, you'd better manage the stud too.' And Dad did exactly the same there.”

Hill died of a heart attack during the 1971 Houghton Sale, and Whitsbury was in due course sold on by his daughters. The new owners kept on Harper Sr. as manager and he had achieved a tenancy by the time they sold the estate to him in the mid-1980s. “How he managed to borrow the money when he didn't have any, I don't know, but we've been paying it off ever since,” Harper says. “The standards required at Whitsbury–to maintain the houses, the racing stables, the gallops, the farm, the stud–don't leave us the option of being a bespoke small trader. We need a certain level of turnover to keep the place running, which is why we're trying to expand. And the costs increase by the year. So what we're doing is as much governed by necessity as passion.”

Sure enough, in strictly limiting stallion books, Harper is not making any pronouncement on the overproduction that concerns so many in the bloodstock business. He simply takes the view that a book limited to 125 works best for the farm, both in guaranteeing clients a relative rarity value and underwriting the kind of fee Showcasing can now command. Together, these factors make it worth disappointing some applicants.

“I'd love to say we're being philanthropists, doing it for the good of the breed,” Harper says. “But it's simply a case of what we think fits us best. Because for us our first priority is survival, and paying the bank manager. I fully believe stallion managers should be free to do as they wish. But we do feel it's important for breeders to know, reliably, the maximum size of a book before taking a nomination.”

It is evident that Whitsbury could not be in less complacent hands. Harper is candidly obsessed by his responsibility and ambition for a corresponding profile for the anonymous young surveyor who returned from New Zealand. “I'm horribly competitive,” he says. “As a child I was always the one who broke the tennis racquet over his knee. So that's definitely something that drives me. From the age of five, I'd seen my father work his guts out 365 days a year. We're always trying to keep doing better: to breed better horses, to win better races, to get better stallions. We might be a bit off the beaten track but we do have advantages, in climate and land. And I'd like to think Newmarket breeders who only used to think about Newmarket stallions will now be paying attention to whatever might be new at Whitsbury.”

“As I said, there were so many reasons for Showcasing to fail,” he continues. “But now he's getting help from every direction. I'd like to think that if we can uncover another one, then he will get a lot more help. I've made countless mistakes, and cringe at some of the conversations I had when starting out. But what I did know was what I was trying to achieve. And I know that every stallion has been bought with borrowed money, so we can't afford to get it wrong.”