WHEN Edward Plunket Taylor was named the first recipient of the Man of the Year Sovereign Award in 1976, Milt Dunnell, sports columnist of the Toronto Daily Star, headlined his column, "Taylor's Always Man of the Year," and added, "It's a good thing they didn't make the award retroactive. Taylor's trophies and trinkets would have to be delivered by truck. The last time he wasn't Man of the Year in Canadian Thoroughbred Racing was the year before he came in."
 

E.P. Taylor built up one of Canada's largest and most successful industrial empires after World War II.  He turned a hobby of owning, breeding, and racing thoroughbreds into an empire of champions.  In so doing, his Windfields Farms created an unsurpassed equine gene pool.  [Photo, courtesy Canadian Press]

Taylor "came in" as far as horseracing was concerned as early as 1936 when he hired his first trainer, Bert Alexandra, bought the one horse Alexandra owned, and commissioned him to buy more with the $6,000 he allotted for this. Alexandra went to Pimlico and came home in time for the week-long races at Woodbine that May with eight horses picked up through claiming races. By the end of the Woodbine week, three of the horses had won twice. This not only gave Taylor his money back but also ownership of all eight horses.

To promote one of the many brands of beer he had bought up in the early 1930s and later consolidated into Canadian Breweries Limited, Taylor had his horses run under the stable name Cosgrave. The name "Cosgrave" was retained for several more years, its horses eventually winning more than 350 races.

In World War 11, "E.P." served as a dollar-a-year man. That arrangement almost ended in December 1940 when the ship he was on, along with Canada's then Minister of Munitions and Supply, C.D. Howe, and other government officials, was torpedoed crossing the Atlantic. They were rescued by a captain who broke regulations to pick them up. Taylor was later assigned key jobs in the USA and Britain before returning to his own corporate and thoroughbred interests, the latter leading to a directorship of the Ontario Jockey Club (OJC) in 1947. "E.P." soon became OJC's largest single shareholder and successfully lobbied the provincial government to reduce the tax on betting. He also developed plans - as he had done in the brewing industry - to consolidate the numerous but poorly equipped tracks around the province into fewer but more profitable operations. By then he had won the King's Plate for the first time with Epic in 1949 and, following another King's Plate vitory with Major Factor  in 1951, helped promote the first "Horse of the Year" award at Toronto in 1952.

As the principal speaker at that event, Taylor went public about the need for "improvement in racing itself, better conditions for horsemen, and more facilities for the public." He also improved his own stable facilities by buying out Colonel R.S. McLaughlin's Parkwood Stud in Oshawa and hiring several experts to oversee Windfields Farm that would make him Canada's leading thoroughbred breeder and owner.

In 1954, Taylor made another innovative and sportsmanlike move when he announced that all his yearlings would be offered for sale each spring and that he would retain those not bought, a move that gave other owners an opportunity to buy quality thoroughbreds to compete with him. As a result, Taylorbred horses won a dozen Queen's Plate races over the next 15 years, with his own stable entries in the winner's circle nine times.

On becoming chairman of the Jockey Club's executive committee in 1953, Taylor began, with the club's backing, to put his 1952 call for improvements into action, buying and rebuilding the Fort Erie track, renovating Woodbine (renamed Greenwood) and buying and shutting down other money-losing tracks around the province. He also quietly bought up land for a new track near Toronto's international airport, turning it over to the Jockey Club at cost. The OJC also won the right to extend the racing season from 84 to 196 days.

Called New Woodbine, the track was opened with fanfare in 1956 with a Taylor horse winning the first event over 14 others. In 1957 Lyford Cay, a horse he had sold at the yearling sale two years earlier that had been returned to him because of a suspected knee problem, won the Queen's Plate.

Taylor was president of the Jockey Club for the 100th running of the Queen's Plate and invited Queen Elizabeth II to be present. She and Prince Philip came and, although Taylor's own horse was not the favourite, it won, making a Taylor-owned horse the winner for the fifth time in a decade.
 

A walk he took many times in a hobby/career lasting almost 50 years, E.P. Taylor leads Lord Durham, in 1973, with Sandy Hawley aboard as winning jockey, to the champion's circle of the Coronation Futurity, the premier Canadian racing event held annually for two-year-old thoroughbreds.  [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star/Ron Bull]

In 1960, Taylor's finest thoroughbred to date, Victoria Park, was third in the Kentucky Derby and second in the Preakness before winning the Queen's Plate. Victoria Park also set a track record at Delaware but a bowed tendon ended his racing career later that summer. The Queen Mother was present to hand the "SO guineas" to Taylor in 1962 and a year later Taylor was again in the Queen's Plate winner's circle. Several things occurred that year, however, to make that victory anything but popular. One of the favoured horses from Texas was prevented from running on a technicality and some blamed Taylor's power for the decision. Canada's high unemployment and other economic woes were also attributed, in part, to capitalists such as Taylor, so the crowd booed when Taylor held up the cup over his grey topper.

The next year, however, all was forgiven as Taylor's Canadian thoroughbred, Northern Dancer, winner of both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, romped to victory at the Queen's Plate in what proved to be his last race, also because of a bowed tendon.

By then, Taylor, with two farms in Ontario and still another Windfields Farm in Maryland, was one of the most honoured and successful thoroughbred breeders in the world. As early as 1953, he had been made an honorary member of the Jockey Club of New York. In 1965 he was the first Canadian to be elected president of the Thoroughbred Racing Association and in 1970, he became the world's leading breeder of thoroughbreds when his stock earned more than $1.7 million. Three years later he stepped down as chairman of the Ontario Jockey Club and was honoree at a dinner that raised $50,000 to establish the E.P. Taylor Equine Researeh Foundation to provide for the advancement and improvement of equine medicine, surgery and husbandry.

In 1974 he was named Man of the Year by the Thoroughbred Racing Association and was elected to Canada's Sports Hall of Fame. By then, since he was offering every horse he bred at major North American yearling auctions - and selling most of them - Taylor's winning entries under his own colours of turquoise and yellow polka dots were less frequent. In 1975, Taylor-bred horses won $2,366,571 breaking the world record; again in 1976, of his 252 starters, 151 were winners with total earnings of $3,022,181.

These achievements were cited at the Man of the Year Sovereign Award sponsored by the Jockey Club of Canada, the Daily Racing Form, the Canadian Thoroughbred Horse Society and the National Association of Canadian Race Tracks. A year later the Thoroughbred Racing Association also honoured him with its prestigious Eclipse Award as the leading breeder of thoroughbreds in North America, the first Canadian so honoured.

On May 1, 1996, exactly 60 years to the day after Annemessic became Taylor's first winner, plaintively, the Taylor family announced that it was selling off its breeding stock, ending a fabulous racing empire which won more than 10,000 races and enters the record books asthe world's leading breeder of stakes winners at 349 wins.

Mel James