So here we have a very famous horse indeed, Solario. He was foaled in 1922, so he was a four year old when this card was issued. And he lived until 1945. As it says on the card he was bred in Ireland by the fourth Earl of Dunraven, from impeccable stock, his mother coming from a stallion called Sundridge, the Leading Sire in Great Britain and Ireland for 1911, and his father being the 1918 Triple Crown winner. Solario himself broke records even as a yearling, he was sold for the record figure of forty seven thousand guineas. This was to the man on the card, Sir John Rutherford.
The other man on the card was Reg Day, usually just known as "R. Day", and he brought the yearling on, preparing him for riding and racing. He was well known, and got results, and you can see him on several cigarette cards :
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Ogden`s "Trainers & Owners Colours" first series (1925) 6/25, which tells us that he was "...the well known Terrace House trainer." and that "..prior to the war he trained in Germany for the Graditz Stud and for five years he headed the list of winning trainers."
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Ogden`s "Turf Personalities" (1929) 15/50, which is a caricature, and tells us that he was born on February 20th 1883. It also mentions our horse winning the St. Leger.
Both these cards say he was trainer to another man, Abe Bailey. And looking at Terrace House has brought up the facts that his father, Frederick William Day, was a vet, who emigrated to Australia and became involved with horse racing whilst there, eventually training a winner of the Sydney Cup. He then started travelling to England to buy stock, and was invited back to train horses for Sir Ernest Cassell. He used his son, Reg, as Head Lad and jockey, and Reg was good, so he became a trainer too, aged just seventeen, and he started at Terrace House in 1900. Then his father took over whilst he moved to Germany, to Graditz - which was actually The Royal Graditz Stud, and it was owned by The Kaiser himself.
Now I have read that it was the death of his father that brought Reg back to England but I think the truth is on the back of Ogden`s "Trainers & Owners Colours", cited above, where it states that he trained in Germany "...prior to the war..."
Solario won the 1925 St. Leger at Doncaster, and the Ascot Derby - in fact he was the last horse to win the Ascot Derby, because in 1926 it was renamed The King Edward VII Stakes, to be a permanent memorial to the King who so loved racing before his death. The following year he won the Ascot Gold Cup and the Coronation Cup at Epsom, which, coincidentally, was also named after King Edward VII, his Coronation in 1902.
After this Solario was sent to stud. He was still there when Sir John Rutherford died, and he then moved to another stud, maybe he was sold, I am not sure. But he never left this new home, where it seems that he was happy and respected. He died there in 1945, and he is still buried there in the grounds. As a more pleasant link he had followed his father in becoming the Leading Sire in Great Britain and Ireland
Now this is actually not that common a set, perhaps because it was an Irish issue. The pictures are amazing though, super colour, and gleaming horses, in authentic backgrounds, a mixture of stable and yard scenes, and of stirring action,
Our original John Player reference book (RB.17 - published in 1950) describes it as :
157. 25 RACEHORSES. Small cards. Fronts in colour. Backs in grey, with descriptive text. Irish issue, December 1926.
As usual this has been very much shortened in the World Tobacco Issues Indexes, where it simply says "RACEHORSES. Sm. Nd. (25) Irish issue".