Jersey Act - 1949 Amendment

1949 Amendment

Weatherbys, publishers of the Stud Book, approached the Jockey Club in 1948 to ask if it agreed that the Jersey Act was "too restrictive". The rule was subsequently modified in June 1949, after the racing careers of a number of horses such as Tourbillon and Djebel persuaded the Jockey Club to reconsider. A number of French-bred Thoroughbreds began to race in England after the Second World War, but because they carried American lines they were considered half-breds. In 1948 two of England's five classic races were won by half-bred horses, My Babu and Black Tarquin, prompting the Jockey Club to amend the rule in the preface to the General Stud Book, to state that:

Any animal claiming admission from now onwards must be able to prove satisfactorily some eight or nine crosses pure blood, to trace back for at least a century, and to show such performances of its immediate family on the Turf as to warrant the belief in the purity of its blood.

The amendment removed the stigma of not being considered purebred from American-bred horses. A major consideration was that by the late 1940s most of the horses with suspect pedigrees were so far back in most horses' ancestry that it no longer made much sense to exclude them. Neither did it make much sense to exclude some of the most successful racehorses in Europe from registration. Weatherby's further amended its regulations in 1969, introducing the word "thoroughbred" to describe the horses registered in previous volumes of the General Stud Book. In 2006, Blood-Horse Publications, publisher of The Blood-Horse magazine, chose the "repeal" of the Jersey Act as the 39th most important moment in American Thoroughbred horse racing history.