Battleship: A Daring Heiress, a Teenage Jockey, and America's Horse

The youngest jockey, the smallest horse, and an American heiress. Together, near Liverpool, England, they made a leap of faith on a spring day in 1938: overriding the teenage jockey’s father, trusting the boy and the horse that the British nicknamed “The American Pony” to handle a race course that newspapers called “Suicide Lane.” As a result, Battleship became the first American horse to win England’s monumental, century-old Grand National steeplechase—the smallest National winner ever. At age seventeen, British jockey Bruce Hobbs became the race's youngest winner.

Hobbs started life with an advantage: his father, Reginald, was a superb professional horseman. But Reg Hobbs also made extreme demands, putting Bruce in situations that horrified the boy’s mother and sometimes terrified the child.  Bruce had to decide just how brave he could stand to be.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the enigmatic Marion duPont grew up at the estate now known as James Madison’s Montpelier—the refuge of America’s “Father of the Constitution.”  Rejecting her chance to be a debutante, denied a corporate role because of her gender, Marion chose a pursuit where horses spoke for her.  She would be pulled beyond her own control by Battleship and leave her film star husband, Randolph Scott, to see this quest to its end. With its reach from Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight to Cary Grant’s Hollywood, Battleship’s story is an epic true adventure.