CHARLES BRUCE LOWE (1845-1894)

Australian thoroughbred breeding theorist C. Bruce Lowe, was born in 1845 at Clarence Town, New South Wales. Bruce Lowe attained fame and to some extent notoriety, from a scholarly treatise published posthumously in London in 1895. Lowe’s seminal work, Breeding Racehorses by the Figure System, allocated numbers derived from a compilation of the winners of the three great English classic races, the Derby, Oaks and Leger, to 34 taproot mares listed in the first volume of Weatherby’s General Stud Book. The female-line family with the highest aggregate number of winners or dams of winners became No 1, the next No 2 and so on up to 34. A further 9 non-winning families were also given numbers, making 43 in all.

After publication of Bruce Lowe’s book, many respected thoroughbred breeders, particularly in Europe, took up the Bruce Lowe Figure System with unbridled enthusiasm and a good deal of success. Nevertheless, in the early part of the 20th century several prominent American studmasters were extremely vocal as to the grievous harm Bruce Lowe Numbers had reputedly done, through causing USA horse breeders and international buyers to cast aside many un-numbered American native families.

Keith Binney has assiduously sought the reasons for what he considers to be unfounded criticism of Bruce Lowe’s work. He has traced and proved a pivotal economic link between the anti-betting laws of individual American States, which forced American breeders into large-scale exports as a commercial solution to a rapidly declining home market, and the Jersey Act subsequently adopted by The Jockey Club of England. In practice, this so-called Act barred most horses from American native families, coincidentally those without Bruce Lowe Numbers, from inclusion in Weatherby’s General Stud Book. Whether adopted cynically or otherwise, in effect the Act was a strong import-protectionand export guarantee measure favouring British breeders.