VAHREN, by the 2000 Guineas winner BONA VISTA (BEND OR) was lightly raced, winning only three minor races before retirement. In 1690, records show that the “Byerly charger” won a flat race, the Silver Bell, on Down Royal in Northern Ireland. This determination may well have stemmed from the fact that Herod was a direct descendant of the Byerly Turk, who, with his owner, Captain Robert Byerly of the Sixth Dragoon Guards, had spent time in Ireland in the late seventeenth century. Kennedy was a rich cattle owner who developed a taste for thoroughbreds and was determined to revive the Herod male line in Great Britain. He was an unruly individual and it took three other equally tough, Irish characters - the renowned trainer Henry “Atty” Persse, stable lad Dick McCormick and the legendary jockey, Steve Donaghue - to get him right.īut before Atty, Dick or Steve laid eyes on him, The Tetrarch began life as the offspring of a stallion described as a “plodder,” who had been purchased by one Edward Kennedy of Straffon Stud in County Kildare, Ireland. Of course, The Tetrarch did not rise to legendary status on his own. In the early decades of the last century, these markings were so strange that they sometimes inspired fear among the superstitious. THE TETRARCH displays his famous chubari, or Tetrarch, spots.