| Lady Anne Blunt |
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LIFE AND WORK Lady Anne was a daughter of William King, 1st Earl Of Lovelace and Ada, Lady Lovelace . Her maternal grandparents were George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron and Annabella Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth . She was fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Arabic, a skilled violinist and a gifted artist who studied drawing with John Ruskin . Though the books ''Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates'' and ''A Pilgrimage to Nejd'' are attributed to her and were based on her journals, they were extensively rewritten by her husband. Her own voice comes through more clearly in ''Lady Anne Blunt: Journals and Correspondence 1878-1917'', edited by Rosemary Archer and James Fleming and published in 1986. Archer also wrote, with Colin Pearson and Cecil Covey, the definitive book ''The Crabbet Arabian Stud: Its History and Influence''. Lady Anne's 1869 marriage to Blunt was not a happy one. Her many pregnancies produced a single surviving child, Judith Anne Dorothea Blunt-Lytton, 16th Baroness Wentworth. Lady Anne never ceased to grieve her miscarriages and the babies who died soon after birth. Though a fond father to Judith, Blunt made no secret that he would have preferred a son. He had many mistresses, often simultaneously, and when in 1906 Dorothy Carleton (later adopted as Blunt's niece) became a regular in Wilfrid's home at Newbuildings Place, Lady Anne left him. The Crabbet Stud was split in two that summer. Lady Anne kept her half of the stud in England, but she spent several months each year at Sheykh Obeyd Garden near Cairo, a 32 acre (129,000 m²) apricot orchard the Blunts had purchased in 1882. Lady Anne left England for the last time in October of 1915 and spent the remaining years of her life at Sheykh Obeyd. LEGACY Following Lady Anne's death in 1917, Wilfrid and Judith disputed the ownership of the horses. The battle finally went to court; a verdict in Judith's favor was rendered in 1920. Wilfrid died in 1922, and the reunited studs continued under Judith's management. Her decision to use the Polish stallion Skowronek remains controversial, but the stud at Crabbet Park survived and prospered for almost fifty years until in 1971, when the property itself was bisected by a motorway. Judith sold Crabbet horses all over the world, including to the United States, Australia and Russia. Famous modern studs like Al-Marah in America and Fenwick in Australia owe their existence to large-scale importations of her horses. In the 1970s the Crabbet lines fell out of favour, and many Arabian breeders turned instead to Egyptian, Polish, Russian and Spanish lines. Today most "Crabbet" breeders consider themselves preservationists, maintaining a small pool of high-percentage Crabbet horses in order to maintain their reputed qualities of wonderful temperament, beauty and extraordinary performance and soundness. However, the modern Arabian horse contains significant Crabbet breeding, regardless of bloodline. Over 90% of all Arabians registered in the United States, for example, contain one or more lines to the Crabbett Park Stud. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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