The last Al Khamsa mare of the Ferida lineage, a 1999 Ma’naqiyah Sbayliyah, was put down last month. I had given CSA Baroness Lady to Sue Moss in 2023 as a pet companion to one of her horses. She leaves behind a 2015 bay gelding, Haykal Al Arab (registered name Lucero De Santana, why? long story), who now belongs to Sue Moss. I also have four frozen embryos from her, at least one of which I hope is a female so that the line can keep going. Below, Lady and little Haykal.
Jeanne is the mother of Al Khamsa. Her involvement with the organization she helped found, which she documented in a recent post on Facebook, reads like a history of Al Khamsa of sorts: I was graduating from college, and realized that I could now fulfill a dream and have a horse. Fell in love with Arabians by seeing one presented at a clinic. Read the Ott articles in Rider and Driver, and wrote to them. I got a gracious reply from Mrs. Ott, who told me to get educated by visiting Walter Schimanski, HB Stubbs, and Charles Craver. All three were wonderful to newcomers. I fell for Lothar at Walter’s, and will always remember the special quality of the *Al Hamdaniah daughter, Al-Ka-Han. Skin like oiled silk, which gleamed. Walter sold me a mare bred by “Chubb” Stubbs named Fatimah, by Julyan x Fadaa. And I bought another Julyan daughter out of Sirrulla, named Sirrulya. Leased Sirrulla, and she was a real treasure. And of course, Charles and I fell in love and got married. Before that, Jane Ott had stopped publishing annual updates to the Blue Catalog, and the “Blue” community was losing contact. So like the idiot kid I…
I wrote about H.R.P. Dickson’s 1949 book “The Arab of the Desert” in an earlier blog entry about the Ubayyan strain of Ibn Jalawi. This entry is about about the horses of the rulers of Bahrain, in the context of Dickson’s mention of specific Arab leader being famous for keeping a certain strain of Arabian horses, their rabat or marbat: Every Shaikh of standing is supposed to always keep his rabat, i.e. a mare or mares from which he breeds a certain particular strain. He gets name and prestige by doing this. […] The Shaikhs of Bahrain similarly keep the Roman-nosed Shawaf (Kuhailan) breed. Kate referred me to this quote a few weeks ago. Several things struck me about it. First, how Dickson, who collected information for his book between 1929 and 1936, primarily associated the Bahraini rulers with the Shawaf strain rather than the Jallabi strain for which they are usually better known. Second, how Judith Forbis, who visited the royal studs of Bahrain in March 1970, forty years after Dickson (or his informants) made their observation, essentially echoed him about both the look and the status of the Shawaf strain. In her 1971 seminal Arabian Horse World article…