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Page 12 · column 5 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
the Queens visit — maybe myself and Bunnie Mellon,” Miller recalled. Bunnie Mellon was wife of the late Paul Mellon, host and owner of the training center back then.
Eager for a first-hand impression of the Queen’s visit and any tittle-tale Miller could recall, I asked his personal impressions of this memorable visit.
Our talk, however, naturally gravitated to steeplechasing, specifically centering on his father’s great ‘chaser Elkridge, then top money-winning steeplechaser in history.
Miller recounted with pride that the durable Elkridge, owned and trained during his 11-year career by his father, who was also named Kent Miller, shared center stage with the Queen during her visit to the area.
The invitation that Miller showed me — an embossed card that was issued to a select few for the special day,, and later reproduced in the Middleburg-published Chronicle of the Horse magazine — confirms Elkridge’s esteemed position in the ceremony.
Chronicle readers, rather touchingly, were invited to cut out their exact replica of the invitation as a special memento.
The front page of the invitation proclaims “Yearling presentation for Inspection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Royal Highness The Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh. October 20, 1957, The Middleburg Training Track, Middleburg, Virginia.” The front also includes the famous Rokeby Stable wheat sheath logo.
The entire back cover of the invitation fists Elkridge’s breeding — “By Mate, a Prince Pal stallion, and out of Best to Test, a Black Toney mare — and recounted the small (15.3 and lightly built) bay gelding’s amazing record.
Elkridge was the first race horse owned or trained by the senior Miller. The gelding, the invitation states, “raced from age 3 to 13, 11 seasons in all, accounted for 31 lsts, 18 seconds, and 15 3rds. It is estimated that during his racing career he jumped over 1,500 fences, falling only once when a piece of brush hooked under his girth brought him down. Now nineteen years old, he maintains the perfect disposition he showed all through his racing career and enjoys fife hacking about the countryside.”
The breeding of the yearlings presented that day are printed inside the invitation with the name of their owners and trainers. It reads like a fisting of Virginia bluebloods.
I haven’t been in Virginia
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