My Great-Grandfather – A Lifetime Dedicated To Race Horses

On May 28th, 1851 Rudolph Then-Bergh, my great-grandfather, founder of the WERNE STABLES FOR THOROUGHBREDS was born as one of eight children of Eduard Then-Bergh, a sales merchant, in Wesel, a small village near the river Rhine.

During the early seventies in the last century, after having finished school and university studies he took up practice in Werne as a veterinary surgeon specialising in the diseases of horses. Very soon he became an authority in this area. In 1875 his training of racehorses, which he got involved in already very early in his life, lead to the foundation of his own stable in Werne, nowadays a lively town situated in Northrhine Westfalia.

In the beginning it all started with a small number of privately owned horses and developed in 1880 into also taking over the training of horses belonging to owners situated all over Germany and very soon specialised in training horses of the passionate Suermondt family in Aachen. This was the beginning of an extremely successful period of the stable, which lasted over decades and which not only popularized the stable but also the very small village of Werne, which nobody knew of until then.

The success included not only the excellent horses and the absolute faithfulness and dependability of the stable staff, but also top class riders, some of whom Rudolph Then-Bergh spotted and trained himself, amongst others Lieutenant Otto Duermondt (24th Dragoons – 506 victories in 1463 races), Mr Broley of Great Britain, Lieutenant von Mossner (23th Dragoons – 298 victories in 1215 races), Mr. Leo Printen and Mr. Josef Birghan, who later became a well known trainer himself in Köln.

For a period of two years a jockey – Mr. Holtmann – who would nowadays  be called “Star-Jockey”, had his home in the stable. At that time his official title was “Germany`s Jockey Nr. 1”. It certainly did not come as a surprise that the overall performance of the stable boosted the yearly net profit.

Over quite a number of years the stable accommodated and trained about 50 horses. Amongst them horses of the Suermondt-family (Aachen), the Bischoff-family (Gelsenkirchen) and the Mecklenburg-family (Hamburg). As a result winners made their names known such as:

Frondeur – Florham – Fronhoff – Diamant – Rautendelein – Green Dragon – Stormy Ocean – Meistersinger – Perlhuhn – Markolf.

Horses of the stable were only allowed to start in steeplechases. The one horse being on top of all the others was Frondeur. Otto Suermondt actually bought this horse for his brother, but  the first attempt to mount the 4-year-old horse ended up in such a chaos that Suermondt thought it to be a dead loss and sold it to the Werne-Stable.

With excellent treatment the trained stable-staff helped the horse to relax, so that in the end the jockey Otto Rohne won a lot of 1st and 2nd places with Frondeur. During one event Frondeur actually completed two races on the same day and finished 1st and 2nd.

In 1911 general disaster hit the stable. Quite a number of horses died because of an epidemic plague (horse encephalomyelitis), followed after that by a further setback when World War I started in 1914, for which the stable had to provide a number of horses to various cavalry regiments. Because of these events and the increasing age of my great-grandfather, the Werne-Stable was closed in 1919.

“Papa Then-Bergh”, as he was always known to the people of Werne, died on October 23rd, 1926.

For a number of years the “Rudolph Then-Bergh-Memorial Race”, a steeplechase over 1500 m, which always took place on the Race Course in Dortmund-Wambel, paid tribute to this outstanding horse expert. The following generations retained his enthusiasm for horses.

(Sources: Family Records/Sankt-Georg)