Lady Anne Blunt
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Anne Isabella Noel Blunt, née King-Noel, 15th Baroness Wentworth (22 September 1837-15 December 1917), known for most of her life as Lady Anne Blunt, was co-founder with her husband the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt of the Crabbet Arabian Stud. The two married on 8 June 1869. From the late 1870s, Wilfrid and Lady Anne travelled extensively in Arabia and the Middle East, buying Arabian horses from Bedouin tribesmen and the Egyptian Ali Pasha Sherif. Among the great and influential horses they took to England were Azrek, Dajania, Queen of Sheba, Rodania and the famous Ali Pasha Sherif stallion Mesaoud. To this day, the vast majority of purebred Arabian horses trace their lineage to at least one Crabbet ancestor.
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[edit] Life and work
Lady Anne was a daughter of William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace and Ada, Lady Lovelace, arguably the world's first computer programmer. Her maternal grandparents were the scandalous poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron and Annabella Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth.
She was fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Arabic, a skilled violinist and a gifted artist who studied drawing with John Ruskin. Though the books Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates and A Pilgrimage to Nejd are attributed to her and were based on her journals, they were extensively rewritten by her husband. Her own voice comes through more clearly in Lady Anne Blunt: Journals and Correspondence 1878-1917, edited by Rosemary Archer and James Fleming and published in 1986. Archer also wrote, with Colin Pearson and Cecil Covey, the definitive book The Crabbet Arabian Stud: Its History and Influence.
Lady Anne's 1869 marriage to Blunt was not a happy one. Her many pregnancies produced a single surviving child, Judith Anne Dorothea Blunt-Lytton, 16th Baroness Wentworth. Lady Anne never ceased to grieve her miscarriages and the babies who died soon after birth. Though a fond father to Judith, Blunt made no secret that he would have preferred a son. He had many mistresses, often simultaneously, and when in 1906 Dorothy Carleton (later adopted as his niece) became a regular in his home at Newbuildings Place, Lady Anne left him. The Crabbet Stud was split in two that summer. Lady Anne kept her half of the stud in England, but she spent several months each year at Sheykh Obeyd Garden near Cairo, a 32 acre (129,000 m²) apricot orchard the Blunts had purchased in 1882. Lady Anne left England for the last time in October of 1915 and spent the remaining years of her life at Sheykh Obeyd.
[edit] Legacy
Following Lady Anne's death in 1917, her husband and daughter disputed the ownership of the horses. The battle finally went to court; a verdict in Judith's favor was rendered in 1920. Wilfrid died in 1922, and the reunited studs continued under Judith's management. Her management and breeding decisions departed from some of the principles established by her parents, and created controversy (See Crabbet Arabian Stud article for details), but the stud survived and prospered for almost fifty years until 1971, when the property itself was bisected by a motorway. Judith sold Crabbet horses all over the world, including to the United States, Australia, Spain and Russia. She also sold some horses bred from the Blunt lines back to Egypt, where they have a legacy today. Modern studs known for Crabbet breeding, including Al-Marah in America and Fenwick in Australia, owe their existence to large-scale importations of horses bred at Crabbet.
Today, due to the worldwide dispersal of Crabbet stock over its near-century of existence, most modern Arabian horses contain lines to Crabbet breeding, regardless of their nation of birth. Over 90% of all Arabians registered in the United States, for example, contain one or more lines to the Crabbett Park Stud.[1] Some "Crabbet" breeders consider themselves preservationists, maintaining a small pool of high-percentage Crabbet horses, while others use these lines as an outcross on other strains. In either situation, Crabbet-bred Arabian horses have a reputation for athleticism and classic type, good temperament, performance ability and soundness.
[edit] References
[edit] See also
- Crabbet Arabian Stud
- Arabian Horse
- Judith Blunt-Lytton, 16th Baroness Wentworth
- Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
- Ada Lovelace
- George Byron, 6th Baron Byron
[edit] Bibliography
- Blunt, Lady Anne, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates
- Blunt, Lady Anne, A Pilgrimage to Nejd
- Blunt, Lady Anne, Lady Anne Blunt: Journals and Correspondence, 1878-1917
- Winstone, H.V.F., Lady Anne Blunt: A Biography
[edit] External links
| Peerage of England | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Ada King-Milbanke |
Baroness Wentworth 1917 |
Succeeded by Judith Blunt-Lytton |
