Thoroughbred (pronounced thur-oh-bred, thur-uh-bred, thuhr-uh-bred)
(1) Of pure or unmixed breed, stock, or lineage,
as a horse or other animal; bred from the purest and best blood; a pedigree
animal; purebred.
(2) By analogy, a person having good breeding or
education.
One of a breed of horses, to which all racehorses
belong, originally developed in England by crossing three Arabian stallions
with European mares (always initial upper case)
(3) By analogy, a machine built to exacting
standards with mostly bespoke parts rather than something assembled from parts
or components from other manufacturers.
1701: The construct wass thorough + bred. Through is traced to circa 1300, from Middle English thoruȝ & þoruȝ, an adjectival use of the Old English þuruh (from end to end, from side to side, a stressed variant of the adverb þurh), a byform of Old English þurh, from which English gained through. The word developed a syllabic form in cases where the word was fully stressed: when it was used as an adverb, adjective, or noun, and less commonly when used as a preposition. Bred is the past tense of breed. Breed is from the Middle English breden, from the Old English brēdan (bring (young) to birth, procreate (also "cherish, keep warm), from the West Germanic brodjan (source also of the Old High German bruoten, & German brüten (to brood, hatch)) & the Proto-Germanic brōdijaną (to brood), from brod- (fetus, hatchling), from the primitive Indo-European bhreu (warm; to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn). It was cognate with the Scots brede & breid, the Saterland Frisian briede, the West Frisian briede, the Dutch broeden, the German Low German bröden & the German brüten. The etymological notion is incubation, warming to hatch. The intransitive sense "come into being" is from circa 1200; that of "beget or bear offspring" from the mid-thirteenth century. As applied to livestock, the meaning "procure by the mating of parents and rear for use" was standardised by the mid-fourteenth century. The sense of "grow up, be reared" (in a family; clan etc.) is from the late 1300s, extended to mean "form by education" a few decades later. Thoroughbreed (also as thorough-breed) is a now rarely used alternative form. Thoroughbred & thoroughbredness are nouns; the noun plural is thoroughbreds.
Among the thoroughbreds: Lindsay Lohan visiting Flemington Racecourse for the Spring Carnival, Melbourne, Australia, November 2019. Melbourne Cup Day (left) and Derby Day (right).
The noun breed "race,
lineage, stock from the same parentage" (originally of animals) dates from
the 1550s, derived from the verb but wasn’t applied to people until the 1590s;
the scientific use to define a “"kind or species" began to be used in
the 1580s. The noun half-breed (person
of mixed race) is attested from 1760 and was used first as an adjective in
1762; now though offensive it appears to have been replaced by “mixed-race” but even this is not recommend for use unless
being applied self-referentially. The
verb cross-breed appeared in 1670, used in relation to dogs, livestock and
plants and, surprisingly, appears not to have been a noun until 1774. Underbred (of inferior breeding, vulgar) from
the 1640s was an adjective which didn’t survive; it was applied to animals "not
pure bred" after 1890.
Thoroughbred the adjective dates
from 1701 in the sense of persons "thoroughly accomplished" and wasn’t
used for horses until the concept was created in 1796; the noun is first
recorded 1842 but it’s hard to believe if wasn’t earlier in use in the
horse-racing business; the noun is first recorded in 1842. Use to refer to racehorses soon became
definitive and all other applications are now analogous.
Needs a trained eye. Thoroughbred (Indy King by Mr Prospector out of Queena) on the left, Standardbred to the right.
Sometimes casually used to refer to any purebred horse, it’s correct to use the word only with the Thoroughbred breed. If used with a lower-case "t", it technically may be applied to just about any object when appropriate but never with other horse breeds. It can cause confusion or worse.
The Thoroughbred was bred in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England when several dozen native mares were crossbred with three imported Oriental stallions, Byerley Turk, Darley Arabian and Godolphin Arabian; all Thoroughbreds can trace their pedigrees to these three. Between the 1730s and the late nineteenth-century, the breed spread throughout the world, first arriving in Australia in 1802. Bred mainly for (gallop but not trotting or pacing) racing, they are also used for show jumping, combined training, dressage, polo, and fox hunting. Thoroughbreds born in the Northern Hemisphere are officially considered a year older on the 1 January each year; those from the Southern Hemisphere having their birthday on 1 August. These artificial dates enable the synchronization of northern and southern competitions for horses within their age groups. Thoroughbreds are bred for speed, and depending on their intended career, for endurance over distances less than a mile (1600m) or as long as four (6400m). They have a reputation for being highly-strung, sometimes deserved, sometimes not.
A horse cannot be registered as a Thoroughbred unless conceived by natural means; any form of artificial insemination is banned. The industry maintains there are all sorts of reasons for this but it’s really a restraint of trade designed to limit supply and maintain high prices. One charming second career for a Thoroughbred stallion which has proven too slow to race is that of a teaser. A teaser’s job is to be placed close to a mare, usually behind a fence, to see if she’s in the mood to mate. If she proves receptive, the teaser is led (unwillingly one supposes) away and replaced with a fast stallion. Nature is then allowed to take its course.
The Maserati 5000 GT (Typo 103, 1959-1966)
It’s never taken much to induce advertising agencies to describe a car as a “thoroughbred”. Some have been more convincing than others but few have been as deserving of the appellation as the Maserati 5000 GT (Typo 103). With coachwork fabricated by eight different Italian coach-building houses, all of the thirty-four built used a slightly tamed 4.9 litre (300 cubic inch) variant of the 4.5 litre (273 cubic inch) V8 last seen in the Maserati 450S with which the factory’s racing team contested the World Sports Car Championship. It really was end of the era stuff, a shift to unitary construction soon dooming most of the specialist coachbuilders while increasingly interventionist governments were in the throes of passing a myriad of laws which would outlaw barely disguised racing cars being used on the road.
In keeping with the pedigree of its illustrious engine, the 5000 GT enjoyed a blueblood connection in its very origin. Before the Ayatollahs ran Iran, it was ruled by the Shah (king) and he got a lot more fun out of life than his clerical successors, noted especially as a connoisseur and of fast, exotic and expensive cars, his collection including multiple models from Lamborghini, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, Ferrari and Maserati among others. In 1958 he’d driven Maserati’s then popular 3500 GT but thought it lacking in power and, because hundreds a year were sold to the (rich) public, a bit common. Accordingly, after receiving material advertising both the 3500 GT and the remaining 450S race cars the factory wished to dispose of after withdrawing from racing, the shah decided he wanted a combination of the two, the race engine in the road car. To have it created, essentially he sent Maserati a blank cheque and asked them to call when it was ready.
It wasn’t as simple as it sounded for the 450S V8 was not some adaption from a production car but a genuine racing engine designed for use nowhere but the circuits and only in the hands of skilled racing drivers. Robust and powerful it certainly was but it was also raucous, inclined to roughness at low speeds and not all that well behaved except when at racing speed when it was more raucous still, if a little smoother. Taming such a beast for the road was a challenge but, with the shah’s buckets of money and some Italian ingenuity, remarkably, a relatively quiet and tractable engine (compared with that of a race car) was concocted. The bore-stroke relationship was changed, the camshaft profiles softened and the porting was altered, which, combined with a lower compression ratio, improved torque and delivered the still ferocious power over a more usable range.
Italian house Carrozzeria Touring designed one of their signature superleggera (their clever technique of lightweight construction) frames, onto which they attached a hand-made skin of aluminum to create a strikingly modernist two-seater coupé, its lines and interior appointments influenced by Persian Baroque architecture. Delivered to the shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 1919-1980) in 1959, it was almost a secret but when a second, commissioned by a South African customer, was displayed at the 1959 Turin Motor show, it generated such interest that Maserati were soon fielding enquiries from rich commoners wanting what royalty had. Priced stratospherically however, there weren’t enough rich folk on the planet to make it a viable option for their production lines so it entered the catalogue as a bespoke item, Maserati modifying the 3500 chassis which, frankly had been a bit over-taxed by the big V8 and tweaking the engine still further, slightly increasing the capacity but in a way that rendered it more docile, yet still a howler when stirred. The chassis appeared in the list and buyers could choose their own coachbuilder and eventually eight produced their own interpretations, the most numerous being by Carrozzeria Allemano which, over the years, finished twenty-two, the Allemano cars thought also the most alluring.
It was capable in some of the configurations in which it was supplied of 170mph (275 km/h), the fastest road car of its day, almost matching the 183 mph (295 km/h) achieved years earlier by the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut” coupé, which was little more than a Formula One car with a bigger engine and number plates. The 5000 GT was quite something and even if the early versions weren't exactly suited to urban use, they were never anything less than exciting. All the 34 built still exist, most percolating between private collections, high-end auction houses and the odd appearance at an appropriately exclusive Concours d'Elegance.
The Gordon-Keeble GK-1 (1964-1967)
Although elegant and capable, the Gordon-Keeble was no thoroughbred. Using a square-tube space-frame purchased as part of the assets of a bankrupt company, it was clothed not in hand-formed aluminum but with the much cheaper fibreglass. Using various bits and pieces taken from the parts-bins of many manufacturers, it was powered by a 327 cubic inch (5.3 litre) Chevrolet V8, essentially the same motor found in everything from Corvettes to pick-up trucks and while it may have lacked a pedigree, the purchase and the running costs were appreciably less than Maserati 5000 GT, one able to buy one for a fraction of the cost and, if the worst came to the worst, replace the engine and gearbox for less than the cost of an Italian cylinder head.
All but one of the one-hundred Gordon-Keeble GK-1s were built in England between 1964- 1967 by engineers once associated with the Peerless company, one of quite a few briefly to flourish during the 1950s producing low-volume runs of swoopy-looking fibreglass bodies atop custom frames, using a variety of power-plants. It was a simpler time. The genesis of the GK-1 was a request in 1959 from a US Air Force (USAF) pilot then stationed in England to fit a Peerless with a 283 cubic inch (4.6 litre) Chevrolet Corvette V8. The concept, essentially the same as that Carol Shelby (1923-2012) famously and historically would pursue by mating the AC Ace with the Ford V8 to create the Cobra (1962-1967), so impressed the engineers they took a V8 Peerless to Carrozzeria Bertone in Turin, Italy where a steel body designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro was built, appearing on Bertone’s stand at the 1960 Geneva Motor Show where it was well received.
After long delays related to securing contractual relationships with external component suppliers, the show car was finished to a point close to the standard required for regular production and, after testing which convinced the engineers it was a commercially viable proposition, sent to Detroit as a proof-of-concept for General Motors to evaluate. Suitably impressed, Chevrolet agreed to supply the Corvette engines and gearboxes for the first production run. Visually, the GK-1 differed little from the prototype, but structurally and mechanically, there were changes. Most obvious was the switch of the body construction from steel to fibreglass, the engineers’ preference for aluminum prohibitively expensive and the Corvette engine was the newer 327 cubic inch (5.3 litre) unit introduced in 1962. Mechanically, the GK1 was ready and reliable and, with its space-frame, De Dion rear axle, four wheel disk brakes, twin fuel tanks and a host of internal fittings hinting at a connection with aviation, the specification was tempting. Released in 1964, the critical response was overwhelmingly positive (although nobody had a good word for the steering) and demand seemed initially strong.
However, the back-shed curse, which afflicting many small-scale British manufacturers in the era, struck. Under-capitalized, the company was unable to successfully to link its cash flow with the demands of external suppliers upon which production depended and, whatever the engineering prowess available, the accounting skills required successfully to operate as a trading organization were lacking; a retail price under Stg£3,000 was unrealistically low and inadequate to support the actual cost of production and development. By 1965, with ninety GK1s having been sold, the company was perilously close to insolvent and was sold but the new owners proved no more adept than the old. After struggling to complete another nine cars (one more was added to the total in 1971, assembled the previous year from the residual spare parts when the factory was liquidated), operations finally closed, hopes of a US-based revival proving abortive.
One quirky footnote in the Gordon-Keeble story was the creature on the marque’s badge: a tortoise. That may seem a curious choice for a vehicle designed for high-speed but the beast ended up on the badge because of a boardroom dispute. Bertone’s prototype at the 1960 Geneva Motor Show had featured a badge with a stag's head, the emblem of the Scottish Clan Gordon to which belonged one of the founders of Gordon-Keeble. Because the clan’s motto was Bydand (abiding or remaining) which, in modern parlance translates as something like “durable, immortal, steadfast & everlasting”, it was thought appropriate for the GK-1, which did live up to the motto better than most, some ninety-two of the one-hundred said either to be in running condition or undergoing restoration.
However, because of the long delays before production began, it was necessary to seek bridging finance and this brought the inevitable managerial disputes and as a result, Mr Gordon left, contractually obliged to allow the project to continue using his name but he withdrew the right to use the clan emblem. With everything else going on, that wasn’t given much thought until late 1963 when, with a debut finally close, a photo-shoot was arranged so brochures and other promotional material could be prepared. At just the moment the absence was noticed, a tortoise happened to be wandering in the garden chosen as the backdrop and the meandering Testudinidae, unaware of the minor role it was about to play in UK corporate history, was picked up and placed on the hood (bonnet), everyone amused at the juxtaposition of one of nature’s slowest creations adorning one of mankind’s fastest. The tortoise was returned to the flower-beds and adopted as the emblem, appearing on the escutcheon of every Gordon-Keeble.
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