Once
Lady Wentworth had discovered the successful "nick" with RAKTHA,
she repeated it frequently, but not every year. In the same way the SKOWRONEK-NASRA
cross was very successful, but in between NASRA's
first foal by SKOWRONEK (NASEEM)
and her last (NASIEDA) she also produced to RAFEEF
and NADIR. Had Lady Wentworth bred NASRA
to SKOWRONEK year after year, she could have had as
many as eight offspring from the cross. But in creating them she would
have limited severely the future possibilities for the use of NASRA
blood. She would not have made the best use of one of her most important
mares. Instead, she used in her breeding program NASRA
foals by five different sires. This gave her a much broader range of options
to continue breeding with the NASRA influence.
Lady
Wentworth did not foresee INDIAN MAGIC's
pedigree twenty-four years in advance and then create it. It took many
years of trial and error, combining everything she had with everything
else she had, taking note of which mare lines were producing her favorite
horses, or her best breedig animals, and taking each step as it presented
itself for taking. Before breeding INDIAN GREY,
Lady Wentworth had experimented with many combinations of the horses which
produced him and his famous full brother. She had tried SKOWRONEK
on NISREEN, producing NASIRIEH
and *INCORONATA, both of which produced to RASEEM.
*INCORONATA produced INDIAN GLORY
to this cross, a favorite colt struck by lightning and killed as a yearling.
With NASIRIEH Lady Wentworth tried doubling the *NUREDDIN
influence by breeding her to *RAHAL and SHAREER.
Lady Wentworth also tried combining SKOWRONEK and
*NUREDDIN while doubling NASRA
by breeding NASEEM to NISREEN,
producing INSILLA and INDIAN
LIGHT. This combination lacked the perhaps crucial
elements of RASIM and QUEEN OF SHEBA.
INDIAN
MAGIC's pedigree contains more crosses to HADBAN
than to MESAOUD, although people generally think of
the latter as the more pervasive Crabbet foundation sire. All seven of
INDIAN MAGIC's Crabbet bred great
grandparents were from HADBAN influenced mare lines.
*NUREDDIN II was doubled to him. Lady Wentworth began
to focus on the tail-female descendants of the HADBAN
daughters, NEFISA and *ROSE OF
SHARON, very early in her breeding. Lady Anne Blunt
credited the HADBAN influence with producing animals
of greater height, meaning well over 15 hands. Lady Wentworth mae no excuses
about her own preference for the taller sort of Arabian, although she also
used and appreciated the smaller ones like RASIM,
SKOWRONEK, and DARGEE.
INDIAN
MAGIC's pedigree is not sire dominated, except perhaps
by MESAOUD and HADBAN. Instead,
Lady Wentworth has done rather consistent line breeding to two successful
mare families. NASRA and RIDAA
have special prominence. Using Raswan's system of strain analysis, INDIAN
MAGIC is bred three generations in the Kuhaylan strain.
INDIAN
MAGIC's pedigree is not the result of outcross upon
outcross, but is instead rather tightly linebred. The five different Crabbet
bred great-grandparents were all closely related through MESAOUD
and HADBAN, while RODANIA and
DAJANIA were also key ancestors. From this point on
the pedigree only gets tighter. From 1904 until the tenure of Lady Wentworth
the Crabbet horses were bred as a closed herd. INDIAN
MAGIC's ancestry represents a very small sampling
of that herd, augmented with one line to SKOWRONEK,
Lady Wentworth's outcross of the 1920's. RAKTHA and
INDIAN CROWN were roughly three-quarter
siblings in blood.
The
Blunts saw in *ASTRALED, RIJM,
*NUREDDIN II, DAOUD, and RASIM,
as Lady Wentworth saw in NASEEM and RASEEM,
colts they wanted to retain as future sires rather than sell. The Blunts
decided to keep for breeding the fillies *ROSE OF
SHARON, NEFISA, RIDAA,
NASRA, NARGHILEH, RISALA,
RIM, and RIYALA, as Lady Wentworth
kept NISREEN and INDIAN CROWN.
A farm which sells every foal it breeds, and then starts over with new
foundation stock, is returning time and again to "square one."
Other
than the Crabbet foundation animals, all of INDIAN
MAGIC's ancestors tabulated in the pedigree above
were bred by Crabbet except his sire, RAKTHA. RAKTHA
illustrates another principle which successful livestock breeders have
employed: the use of "satellite" farms. Place with another breeder
some of your best stock, and it might be combined in ways which never would
have occurred to you, eventually producing something which you might want
ot use. By buying ASTRELLA and RAZINA
and bringing RAZINAA back to Crabbet for breeding
to NASEEM and NAUFAL (sire of
RIFFAL), Lady Yule provided Lady Wentworth with two
of Crabbet's greatest post 1940 sires: RAKTHA and
ORAN (Riffal x Astrella). (Like INDIAN
MAGIC, ORAN was by a RAZINA
son and out of a RASEEM daughter.) Lady Wentworth
purchased both of these stallions as younger animals with an eye to using
them at stud.
Lady
Wentworth started using INDIAN MAGIC
at stud when he was three, breeding him to NEZMA (Rafeef
x Nasra). Thereafter she used him every year, but he does not seem to have
covered more than six Crabbet mares in a single season. INDIAN
MAGIC completed for mares with stallions like ORAN,
DARGEE, RAKTHA, INDIAN
GOLD, GRAND ROYAL,
*ROYAL DIAMOND, and later *SILVER
VANITY, ROYAL CRYSTAL,
and *SILVER DRIFT. Lady Wentworth
always maintained a large stallion battery. With a few years as exceptions,
no one stallion dominated a foal crop. Again, this allowed her greater
flexibility as a breeder than the alternative method of maintaining only
one or two stallions and breeding all the mares to one or the other year
after year.
Lady
Wentworth bred INDIAN MAGIC very
frequently to mares of the SHARIMA family, and also
to INDIAN FLOWER (Irex x Nisreen)
and her daughter *INDIAN DIAMOND
(by Oran). SILVER FIRE (Naseem
x Somra by Daoud) produced her last two foals by INDIAN
MAGIC. The "R" family had already seen its
greatest days at its parent stud by the time INDIAN
MAGIC came into use, but he sired foals from ROSALINA
(Indian Gold x Rissella) and her daughter ROSINELLA
(by Oran).
INDIAN
MAGIC's foals for Lady Wentworth were all born during
the last nine years of her life, making it difficult to discern which she
might have used for breeding and how. The only one she appears to have
used was the SILVER FIRE daughter
SILVER MAGIC, dam of SILVADORIS
(by Oran) before her exportation to Australia.
What
INDIAN MAGIC's long term impact
on Lady Wentworth's herd might have been we shall never know. However,
he proved himself an outstanding sire and major influence on other breeding
programs around the world. ***
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