By Tobi Lopez Taylor
This post is part of the ongoing Crabbet Chronicles series, which also includes Lady Anne Blunt’s Stradivarius and Wilfrid Blunt’s meeting with Lawrence of Arabia.
In 2018, Prince Charles sent his “warmest congratulations” to the UK’s Arab Horse Society (AHS) on its hundredth anniversary, writing, “As the proud owner of four very beautiful Arabian horses, I have come to appreciate this particularly special breed....For one hundred years The Arab Horse Society has devoted itself to promoting interest in Arabian horses in the United Kingdom.” The AHS’s first president was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who, with his wife Lady Anne Blunt, established the world-renowned Crabbet Stud in Sussex.
The previous year, Prince Charles had celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the Soil Association, “the UK’s leading food and farming charity, and organic certification body,” whose motto is “healthy soil, healthy people, healthy planet.” While at the association’s annual luncheon, he lamented the fact that he had never met its founder, Lady Eve Balfour, OBE (1898–1990), nicknamed “the Compost Queen” for her efforts to inculcate organic farming in the UK. In addition to obtaining a degree in agriculture (at a time when few women were college graduates) and writing the literally groundbreaking book The Living Soil, Eve was an early member of the AHS and owned a mare named Bendira—a daughter of the Blunts’ famous stallion Mesaoud, whom they had imported from Egypt to their Crabbet Stud in 1891.
Eve Balfour, “the Compost Queen,” and her draft horses (from Brander 2003).
The previous year, Prince Charles had celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the Soil Association, “the UK’s leading food and farming charity, and organic certification body,” whose motto is “healthy soil, healthy people, healthy planet.” While at the association’s annual luncheon, he lamented the fact that he had never met its founder, Lady Eve Balfour, OBE (1898–1990), nicknamed “the Compost Queen” for her efforts to inculcate organic farming in the UK. In addition to obtaining a degree in agriculture (at a time when few women were college graduates) and writing the literally groundbreaking book The Living Soil, Eve was an early member of the AHS and owned a mare named Bendira—a daughter of the Blunts’ famous stallion Mesaoud, whom they had imported from Egypt to their Crabbet Stud in 1891.
Eve Balfour in the 1940s (photo credit: Wikipedia).
Born in 1898, Eve was the niece of Arthur James Balfour, who later became British prime minister; she called him “Nunkie.” Her mother was the daughter of a viceroy of India, a granddaughter of prolific author Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame), and a sister of Neville Lytton, third Earl of Lytton, who was an artist, an Olympic medalist, and son-in-law of the Blunts. His wife, Judith Blunt-Lytton, is known to Arabian horse fanciers as the breeder and author Lady Wentworth.
Drawing of Eve by her uncle, Neville Lytton (from Brander 2003).
From a young age, Eve knew she wanted to be a farmer. She was fortunate to be born into an eccentric, passionate family. A number of her Balfour relations were early members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) (her uncle by marriage, Henry Sidgwick, was the SPR’s first president), and her aunt, Constance Lytton, was a suffragette who was jailed four times. As Eve’s biographer noted in 2003, “It must have required a strong personality and an equally strong voice to hold one’s own in the often animated family discussion….Nor were such discussions restricted to the male side of the family.”
Fishers Hill, Eve’s childhood home (photo credit: The Lutyens Trust).
The house in which Eve grew up—Fishers Hill, in Surrey—had been designed by the well-known architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose wife, Lady Emily (Lytton)Lutyens, was Eve’s aunt. (Lady Emily became a Theosophist and went on to become a follower of Krishnamurti.) The architect’s biographer (and descendant), Jane Ridley, wrote that Eve’s mother, Betty, “was unworldly and helpless in practical matters. She shocked [Lutyens] by travelling in dirty third-class carriages with her children, none of whom ‘looked as if any care, thought or trouble was taken with their appearance, either clothes or body.’ For a family of intelligent, tomboyish, and rather neglected girls, Fishers Hill was a paradise; it [was] ideally suited to games and outdoor theatricals. Betty’s grandchild Anne Balfour remembered it as a magical house, with the feel of Kipling and Puck of Pook’s Hill.”
The teenage Eve working with a pony (from Brander 2003).
As a youngster, Eve was often on horseback, and had numerous cats, dogs, and other animals. She became a vegetarian at a young age and also took a great interest in plant growth, encouraged by her mother and her aunt, both excellent gardeners. Whereas in a typical family of her socioeconomic class, she would have been expected to “marry well” and raise children, her biographer wrote that it was “an example of the advanced approach to parenthood of both her mother and her father that when she announced her wish to become a farmer…she was promptly entered for the Agriculture Department of Reading University College.”
Eve’s biographer also recounted that while Eve was in college, she “was closely in touch with her Lytton relations at Crabbet Park. Judith Wentworth, her [aunt by marriage], was to become the noted Arab horse breeder. Eve, of course was greatly interested in her work and enjoyed vising her. She even contemplated leasing one of the Crabbet Park farms in Sussex and went as far as discussing the possibility with Judith. At this stage her inclinations were strongly towards eventually taking a farm in Sussex.”
However, after Eve’s graduation, she and her sister Mary instead found a 157-acre, dilapidated farm in Suffolk named New Bells. There, the two of them and an assortment of friends, relatives, and, eventually, employees, worked twelve-hours days in an attempt to make New Bells a profitable concern. Her biographer noted, “Despite the fact that there was no running water or electricity, and sanitation was primitive in the extreme, everyone seems to have enjoyed themselves in this youthful household and contributed their assistance to the farm, whether feeding pigs, herding sheep, milking, or harvesting.” Eve’s cousin Betty Lutyens remembered her first visit to New Bells, “when she was greeted at the door by Eve...in breeches and a red spotted handkerchief.”
In 1939, after working at New Bells for two decades, Eve and her associates began the well-known Haughley Experiment at New Bells and a nearby farm. This study compared organic and chemically fertilized farming methods. As Kevin Desmond wrote, “Balfour published the initial results of her experiment in a book called The Living Soil where she presented the case for an alternative, more sustainable approach to agriculture. Its influence was such that, in 1946, Balfour co-founded and became first president of the Soil Association. While continuing the Haughley [E]xperiment for the next 25 years, the Association has developed into an international organization pioneered by Balfour. [She] continued to farm, write and lecture for the rest of her life.”
Eve’s “Lytton relations” at Crabbet Stud had sold her the well-bred Arabian mare, Bendira, around 1909. Bendira’s sire, the aforementioned Mesaoud, was one of the world’s most influential stallions, appearing (often multiple times) in the pedigrees of upwards of 90 percent of today’s Arabians.
Bendira’s dam, *Bushra, was bred by the Blunts. She stood only 14 hands. Arabian historian Carol Mulder noted that though she was a bit “long and low” through the body, in some photos “she could look very beautiful.” *Bushra was purchased by Charles Husted and imported to the US in 1900. Of her nine foals, only *Ibn Mahruss and Sira have living descendants.
Bendira made a cameo appearance in the journals of Lady Anne Blunt, who recorded on June 3, 1903 that Prince Scherbatoff had come to tour Crabbet Stud and that her husband “took the Prince in the road cart with Bendira to see the mares and fillies….” Some years earlier, Scherbatoff and his brother-in-law Count Stroganov had established the Stroganov Stud near Tersk, in the northern Caucasus, where they bred Arabians. In 1899, the two men had visited Crabbet and had seen Bendira’s sire Mesaoud. In their book on Arabians, published in Russia the following year, Scherbatoff and Stroganov wrote that Mesaoud was “Crabbet Park’s number-one sire. He is a splendid specimen of a first-class Arabian and has won many prizes in England.” In 1903, Scherbatoff came back to Crabbet to look for more horses. Within weeks of Scherbatoff’s ride with Wilfrid Blunt driving Bendira, Mesaoud was purchased by a Polish breeder, Wladislaw Klineiwski, and appears to have changed hands again rather quickly, as he soon took up residence at the Stroganov Stud.
Bendira was closely related to the Crabbet-bred stallion *Berk, whose descendants often had excellent movement. *Berk was by Seyal, a son of Mesaoud, and out of Bukra, a three-quarter sister to Bendira’s dam *Bushra. (I wrote about *Berk’s daughter Tahdik and granddaughter Santa Fe, maternal ancestors of *Marwan Al Shaqab, for Arabian Horse Life Magazine in 2019.)
Bendira was registered initially in the UK’s General Studbook (GSB). In 1906, it was noted that she had been bred to Narkise but came up barren. The 1909 GSB recorded the birth of Bendira’s “only produce to live,” a filly named Beneyeh (by Feysul)—suggesting that if Bendira had previous offspring, it or they had died before registration. Beneyah herself was never assigned a registration number, which presumably means that she did not survive for very long. Bendira was not re-bred in 1908, and after that was sold to Eve.
In 1920, a periodical called The Near East featured the following notice: “A council meeting of the Arab Horse Society was recently held at the Grosvenor Hotel, S.W., where entries for the Stud Book Vol. II and for the Arab-bred Register were accepted.” “Miss Eve B. Balfour, of New Bells Farm,” was listed as one of the new members, and Bendira, now twenty years old, was given AHS registration number 172. She was described as a chestnut mare with a blaze and three white socks, her color and markings similar to those of her sire.
Eve did do some horse breeding at New Bells, but her biographer, Michael Brander (Eve’s nephew by marriage), did not discuss about this aspect of her farming in any detail, other than to reproduce a letter from Eve’s mother in which she wrote that “the horse dealer who brought the stallion to Eve’s mares nearly had a fit when he found the New Bells farmer was a young girl. He’ll get accustomed to that....” Whether Bendira may have produced some part-Arabian foals for Eve is unknown, though possible, since one of the reasons for establishing the AHS was “to encourage the re-introduction of Arab blood into English Light Horse breeding.”
The same letter from Eve’s mother also mentioned seeing Eve’s fellow farmer, her sister Mary, driving a pony named Betty who “just gets in between the shafts and goes a jolly pace.” Is it possible that the “pony” Betty was actually Bendira, an experienced driving mare who could have inherited her dam’s small size? We likely will never know, but it’s charming to imagine Bendira, a flashy chestnut daughter of the great Mesaoud, trotting along at “a jolly pace” at New Bells Farm.
In 1939, after working at New Bells for two decades, Eve and her associates began the well-known Haughley Experiment at New Bells and a nearby farm. This study compared organic and chemically fertilized farming methods. As Kevin Desmond wrote, “Balfour published the initial results of her experiment in a book called The Living Soil where she presented the case for an alternative, more sustainable approach to agriculture. Its influence was such that, in 1946, Balfour co-founded and became first president of the Soil Association. While continuing the Haughley [E]xperiment for the next 25 years, the Association has developed into an international organization pioneered by Balfour. [She] continued to farm, write and lecture for the rest of her life.”
Eve’s “Lytton relations” at Crabbet Stud had sold her the well-bred Arabian mare, Bendira, around 1909. Bendira’s sire, the aforementioned Mesaoud, was one of the world’s most influential stallions, appearing (often multiple times) in the pedigrees of upwards of 90 percent of today’s Arabians.
Mesaoud (Aziz x Yamamah III).
Bendira’s dam, *Bushra, was bred by the Blunts. She stood only 14 hands. Arabian historian Carol Mulder noted that though she was a bit “long and low” through the body, in some photos “she could look very beautiful.” *Bushra was purchased by Charles Husted and imported to the US in 1900. Of her nine foals, only *Ibn Mahruss and Sira have living descendants.
*Bushra (Azrek x Bozra) (from Mulder 1991).
*Berk (from Covey 1982).
Bendira was closely related to the Crabbet-bred stallion *Berk, whose descendants often had excellent movement. *Berk was by Seyal, a son of Mesaoud, and out of Bukra, a three-quarter sister to Bendira’s dam *Bushra. (I wrote about *Berk’s daughter Tahdik and granddaughter Santa Fe, maternal ancestors of *Marwan Al Shaqab, for Arabian Horse Life Magazine in 2019.)
Bendira was registered initially in the UK’s General Studbook (GSB). In 1906, it was noted that she had been bred to Narkise but came up barren. The 1909 GSB recorded the birth of Bendira’s “only produce to live,” a filly named Beneyeh (by Feysul)—suggesting that if Bendira had previous offspring, it or they had died before registration. Beneyah herself was never assigned a registration number, which presumably means that she did not survive for very long. Bendira was not re-bred in 1908, and after that was sold to Eve.
In 1920, a periodical called The Near East featured the following notice: “A council meeting of the Arab Horse Society was recently held at the Grosvenor Hotel, S.W., where entries for the Stud Book Vol. II and for the Arab-bred Register were accepted.” “Miss Eve B. Balfour, of New Bells Farm,” was listed as one of the new members, and Bendira, now twenty years old, was given AHS registration number 172. She was described as a chestnut mare with a blaze and three white socks, her color and markings similar to those of her sire.
Eve did do some horse breeding at New Bells, but her biographer, Michael Brander (Eve’s nephew by marriage), did not discuss about this aspect of her farming in any detail, other than to reproduce a letter from Eve’s mother in which she wrote that “the horse dealer who brought the stallion to Eve’s mares nearly had a fit when he found the New Bells farmer was a young girl. He’ll get accustomed to that....” Whether Bendira may have produced some part-Arabian foals for Eve is unknown, though possible, since one of the reasons for establishing the AHS was “to encourage the re-introduction of Arab blood into English Light Horse breeding.”
The same letter from Eve’s mother also mentioned seeing Eve’s fellow farmer, her sister Mary, driving a pony named Betty who “just gets in between the shafts and goes a jolly pace.” Is it possible that the “pony” Betty was actually Bendira, an experienced driving mare who could have inherited her dam’s small size? We likely will never know, but it’s charming to imagine Bendira, a flashy chestnut daughter of the great Mesaoud, trotting along at “a jolly pace” at New Bells Farm.