Family C-16: The Steeltrap Mare

This family has its roots in the famous Lee family stud, Bylong, near Bathurst, NSW (see Family C - 1). Steeltrap (1815, by Scud) was imported in 1824 by Aspinall, Brown and Co., a London/Liverpool firm that established an agency in Sydney in 1822. He served as a stallion at Glanmire, Vaucluse, and finally the important Bungarribee stud of Charles Smith's where he got a number of good runners and horses of significance in early Australian bloodstock breeding, including Matilda (Family C - 15). Bungarribee was just west of Toongabbie, where the government horse-breeding station was located, and an imported mare at the station of unknown origin, bred to Steeltrap, produced a chestnut filly around 1833-34.

This filly, now known as the Steeltrap Mare, was recorded as "Colonel Wrenche's chestnut mare by Steeltrap, her dam a Government mare." Barrie believed "Colonel Wrenche" was actually a Colonel C. French, headquartered at Parramatta in 1836, and in 1842 transferred with his 28th Foot Regiment to India. The Steeltrap mare would have been in the Bylong Stud from about that time onward, but was certainly there by the late 1840s when she produced her successful daughters by the Lees' stallion native-bred Marquis (1837, by Dover), who also figures early in the pedigrees of Sappho (Family C - 1), Adeline (C -6) and The Young English Mare (C - 9). These daughters were Beeswing (c. 1848), Marchioness (c. 1850), and Ladybird (c. 1851), bred by George Lee's brothers, John and James.

Beeswing's branch bred on through the mid-twentieth century, with good performers such as Donald (1921, see below) appearing periodically. Her son Kettledrum (1870, by Kingston) got the sprinter William Tell (1880). Ladybird's branch, whose early representatives, including Melbourne Cup winner Zulu (see below) were bred at Bylong, also continued to the mid-twentieth century.

It was the branch of Marchioness that was most successful, both early on, with such winners as Bylong, winner of the first running of the AJC Metropolitan for John Lee, and later, particularly in Queensland, where Needle Gun (1900, by Amberite) was a broodmare. Needle Gun's son Pittsworth Gun (1907) won the QTC Stradbroke Handicap, as did her daughter, Line Gun (1910), who was purchased by Tom Jennings and became a significant matron in his Alma Vale stud at Greenmount. A great many good Queensland winners descended from Line Gun (see Spear Chief, below), and the family has a strong representative today in the gelded Ice Chariot (2002), winner of the Queensland Derby and other good races.

Notable Descendants