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| Waione bred Valhalla (hood) losing the Dunstan |
Breeding stock we've sold have gone on to produce 5 winners of 19 races, 2 of them stakeswinners, and 1 stakes placed.
Mucking about with horses does get to be a bit of an affliction after time, hardly more so than here in the Whangaehu Valley with prodigious generations of racing families, both human and equine.
Grandfather was a keen trotting man, but fortunately had no great influence on things round here.
My old man, DJ, kicked off racing around 1950 with his original Blue Smoke, while down the road Bill and Stan Connors were making names for themselves, Bill with a stud standing stallion, Perilous, and Stan racing notable at the time Paddy Joe, while another neighbour, Humphrey OLeary, later produced a steady stream of useful horses carrying his Kerry prefix.
Bill's son Bernard carried on racing a number of good horses, best of probably Lone Hand, Stan's son Mark, and his son Raymond, owner-train with some claim to fame incl triple Gt Northern winner Hypnotise, while the next generation of O'Leary's made their mark with jumper Fonterra, who raced successfully in Japan, and more recently, the cup winning, Who Shot TheBarman.
Our line had its foundation with the purchase from Bob Bennett, of the old Grange Stud at Westmere, of the broodmare Golden Sonnet, a 22 family descendent. This is the family, arguably one of the country's best, established here by GM Currie with the importation of Eulogy in 1915.
With a Bruce Lowe number of 22, the family was pretty well down the order of things in GB, maybe it was the 5x3 inbreeding to St Simon's sire through 2 daughters that gave her the leverage into NZ's racing legend.
Eulogy was carrying a filly foal by Coriander, (from the Pretty Polly, no.14 family), injecting a shot of one of the studbook's greatest female stirps into a filly subsequently named Pennon, a winner of 3 races who went on to produce a 100% record 8 winning foals.
