Chapter V: Preface (4)

But Highflyer himself demands a few words here. He was a bay horse, foaled in 1774, the property of Sir Charles Bunbury, who sold him to Lord Bolingbroke. He won a long succession of classic races at Newmarket in 1777-79, and was in after-years the sire of many equally famous horses. In fact, as in the case of “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere,” of later times, Highflyer stood for all that was fleetest and finest, in his own day, and it was from him that the stage-coach proprietors of old delighted to name their conveyances. We find no “Highflyer” coach, however, on this road, but a well-known London and Edinburgh “Highflyer” coach ran from 1788 to 1840, and at least five other local coaches of the same name travelled the cross-roads of Yorkshire, that shire most famous of all for the love of horses.

Highflyer in thirteen years brought Tattersall such prosperity that he was able to set up a fine establishment at New Barns, or “Highflyer Hall,” Ely, and to entertain the greatest in the land with a baronial hospitality. The New Barns port was said to be the best in England, and was very potent. Richard Tattersall, grandson of “Old Tatt,” who himself lived to be known as “Old Dick,” used to tell how, in 1794, as a boy of nine, he saw a post-chaise from his grandfather’s place drive up to the “Palace” door at Newmarket, with William Windham, the statesman, riding a leader and Charles Fox awheel, while the Prince of Wales, too greatly overcome with New Barns port to take part in the frolic, or even to sit on the seat, lay utterly helpless on the floor of the chaise.

Tattersall was not only powerful at Newmarket, but popular as well; and in those days, when Highway-men infested all the roads leading into this place where money flowed so freely, was the only man who could with impunity go back and forth, unattended and unarmed, with his pockets full of gold. The Highway-men declared him “free of the road.” On the one occasion when he actually was stopped and relieved of his treasure, it was the work of one who did not recognise him, and restitution was made when his identity was discovered. Not every one, although perhaps rejoiced to share this highway franchise, would feel altogether complimented by this more than fraternal affection of those knights of the crape mask and horse-pistol, for it argued a community of interests.

By the time the Jockey Club and Tattersall’s came into existence, Newmarket had become too firmly established as the headquarters of racing for any greater or less measure of Royal favour to affect its fortunes. Wealth, quite irrespective of birth and rank, now counts. It is all one to the town and the trainers who provides the funds, whether it be a millionaire Austrian Jew banker, a German Israelitish financier, a rack-renting peer-landlord, a monarch of the licensed victualling trade, or a wholesale furnisher from Tottenham Court Road; and when the bacon-kings and the sovereigns of soup, and all the other geniuses of the factory and the Exchange, who pile up huge fortunes out of the labour of others, come here to spend a percentage of their hoards, they will be all sure of the same welcome—as why should they not?

There is little or no snobbery in Newmarket, and it is perhaps the only place in the world where the King can depend upon being let alone. He can walk the High Street or the racecourse like any other sportsman, or look into the shop-windows without being mobbed. Here, at any rate, Addresses are never presented, and Royalty walks, for a change, upon pavements and mother earth, without the usual intermediary of red carpet. No one—at least none who are conversant with the manners and customs of the place—even takes off a hat to the Sovereign, who is thereby relieved from his invariable courtesy of returning the salute. In short, no one takes the least notice of him.

XXII

THE cemetery at Newmarket is the traveller’s melancholy introduction to this town of gay memories. It acts the part of that oft-quoted ancient Egyptian custom of seating a skeleton at the feast; for those who go to and from the racecourse, and the budding jockeys who daily exercise the horses on the Bunbury or others of the Heath gallops, can scarce fail to see it and its serried ranks of grandiose white marble monuments. It must inevitably be dispiriting to some, for it emphasises the shortness of our course, enacts the _rôle_ of mentor, and seems to hint, “Why toil and moil and live laborious days, and why in that toiling stoop to petty meannesses, when at last—and at no distant date—you too must lie with the many racing celebrities of a bygone day, as forgotten as they?” In some sort the roadside cemeteries that now so dolefully are set in the gates of every town _may_ thus be a moral force—although that is to be doubted—but certainly their suggestions of the fleeting nature of life and the essential futility of it are alien from public policy, as likely to sap the energy of the race. The time must needs come, and that soon, when cremation is made compulsory and the wayside cities of the dead abolished.

The humble gravestone is scarcely to be found in this enclosure. Nothing less than a marble cross will serve the turn of the owners, the trainers, and the jocks who are bedded down here. Captain Machell, a Turf celebrity of later years, lies nearest the gate of any: they say at Newmarket he wished to lie close to the road, near the wall on whose other side the horses go on their morning gallops throughout the year. So unfailingly does sentiment rule, even here!

A racing-man could take you through these groves of ornate monuments and thoroughly perform the part of a horsey “Who’s Who,” but the majority of the names mean nothing to the outside public. One, however, you may read that means much to our generation; it is the name of Archer. Even that section of the public uninterested in horse-racing was familiar with the name and fame of Archer in his life, and in his death he still retains a hold upon the popular imagination. Fred Archer in the early ’80’s was to the racing world what the Prime Minister is in the world of English politics, the Archbishop of Canterbury in matters ecclesiastical, and the President of the Royal Academy in the domain of Art: was, indeed, more to his world than they to theirs, for he occupied his foremost place by sheer merit, and it is not commonly the ablest statesmen, the most pious divines, or the most gifted of painters who are thus elevated above their especial spheres of activity.

It was no shame, even to the most puritanical, to know who Archer was. “Archer up!” became a synonym for success at the time when he flourished. And how he did flourish! He was but twenty-nine years of age when he died, but had long been world-famous. Born at Cheltenham in 1857, the son of a jockey turned publican, he scored his first win on Atholl Daisy, at Chester, September 28th, 1870. In 1872 he won the Cesarewitch, and in 1874 the Two Thousand Guineas, on Lord Falmouth’s Atlantic. From that time forth he was the foremost jockey, and was so successful that he became a superstition with backers. To his skilful and daring riding fell such remarkable successes as the Derby and St. Leger in 1877, and in 1885 the Derby, Oaks, Grand Prix, St. Leger, and Two Thousand Guineas. In the whole of his career he rode to victory no fewer than 2,748 winners; a record no other jockey has approached. His riding weight was 8 stone 10 lbs. In earnings and presents he is said to have made over £60,000 in those fourteen years that comprised his career. Archer’s monument is a large white marble cross, carved at the crossing with a spray of roses in high relief, and on the plinth with a rose in full bloom, represented as though having fallen from the spray. It was originally erected by him to his wife, as may be gathered from the inscription:—

“In Sacred Memory of Helen Rose, the
beloved wife of Frederick James Archer,
who passed away November 7th, 1884,
aged 23 years.”

For ever with the Lord,
Amen, so let it be:
Life from the dead is in that word,
’Tis immortality.

Also their infant son, William, January 9th, 1884.

In Sacred Memory of Frederick James Archer,
who passed away November 8th, 1886, aged
29 years.

“In the midst of life we are in death.”

From the gates of this melancholy place one looks down along the whole length of Newmarket High Street. Looking backward, you see the Heath, with the long trail of the road, and the gradually diminishing line of telegraph-poles seen at so acute an angle that they give almost the impression of a close-set palisade: no place so excellent as this for the purpose of instructing the young idea into the meaning of perspective.

The Heath comes up to the very doors of the town, whose broad void street is stretched out there as though it were some Sleepy Hollow whose inhabitants were drowsing away an empty life. But no greater mistake could possibly be made: there are no more wide-awake people in the world than here. Even at Doncaster, where the St. Leger keeps the minds of the Yorkshire tykes whetted to the keenest edge, there are not sharper folks.

A race-day during the July or Houghton Meeting makes a very different picture. Special trains have by midday brought thousands of sportsmen from London and elsewhere, and the great mansions in the town, usually closed, are filled with gay parties. Every public-house does a roaring trade, and the street is thronged with an astonishing number of cabs and every variety of fly and victoria, whose drivers are all extravagantly eager to drive you to the course. Whence those vehicles come might form an interesting subject of speculation. Stalls for the sale of all manner of possible and impossible things form a continuous line along that broad thoroughfare. Even uncooked pork sausages are offered for sale, but what the class of people who flock into Newmarket for half a day are supposed to want with them it is difficult to conceive. The Newmarket sportsman is scarcely the kind of person who might be expected to carry a pound or so of pork sausages with him on to the course, or on his lap, going home.

In addition to all these stalls and booths, the sellers of “race cards” are much in evidence, and a long procession of men with that characteristic equipment of the racing-man, the field-glasses slung over the shoulders, winds slowly up the long way to the Stand. These are devotees of the great goddess Chance, who, like Justice, is blind. They do not hurry, because they have often trod the same path: they are neither joyful nor gloomy, but just stolid and businesslike, because they have come this way with such a succession of varied fortune that they take gain or loss with unchanged demeanour and equal fortitude, and when they return you shall seek in vain to guess the luck of the day from their unemotional countenances.

The racing is all done by 3.30 p.m., and in another hour the course is clear, the town empty of strangers. But the inns are filled with stable-folk and the many nondescript hangers-on of a great racing centre. As the evening wears away even the inns clear, and at ten o’clock all is quiet, except perhaps for a painful orchestra of three itinerant musicians playing injuriously outside the “Black Bear.” A drizzly rain falls and the musicians disperse, greatly to the relief of the ear that listens, not so much because it would as because it must. Newmarket’s race-day is done, and the cats make love, undisturbed, in the porticoes. Only within the mansions of the great is the excitement of the day continued, and there they play bridge until morning glints greyly through the shutters

XXIII

THE houses of this broad street are curiously irregular. Great palatial mansions alternate with humble taverns; the busy “White Hart” stands next door to the Duke of Devonshire’s house, and shops elbow other imposing residences of the great. On the right hand, as you enter the town, is the large red-brick pile of Queensberry House, built a few years ago by Lord Wolverton, and at first styled “Ugly House,” from a successful racehorse of that name; and everywhere in the town its turfy sympathies are declared in the villas christened with titles that mean much to those versed in turf history. The customary “Elms,” “Limes,” and “Montserrats” of villadom here give place to “Bend Or,” “St. Gatien,” and other horsey mottoes.

But the town has every reason to regret the past. In days before railways, a race-meeting meant these great establishments being occupied for days at a time; now it is easily possible to return comfortably to London in the evening, they are often in use only for a few hours, and many have long been to let. Where the Palace stood, a Congregational Chapel and a row of shops front the street.

The churches—St. Mary’s on the Suffolk and All Saints’ on the Cambridgeshire side—are, on the other hand, quite humble buildings, and tucked away out of sight in most apologetic fashion, as though in this Metropolis of the Turf religion were bidden take a back place. Cynic circumstance has decreed that the best—and, indeed, almost the only—view of St. Mary’s, the most important of the two buildings, is that gained from the yard of that eminently sporting and horsey inn, the “White Hart.” From that point it certainly does contribute to a fine picture, although its tapering spire, with the clock-bell placed in a little hutch on one side of the tower, is quaint, rather than pretty or intrinsically striking. It stands in a damp little churchyard, closely hemmed in by narrow streets and lanes, with several very old tombstones inserted in the buttresses; among them one of a seventeenth-century actor of the Theatre Royal, Newmarket, who in jaundiced tones and the most gruesome spelling, tells us that life is fleeting and we shall be as he, and so forth. The old hunks! Sorry himself to leave the stage of life, he made his exit with that cheering reflection that the curtain must presently be rung down on the whole company.

It is a dark church within, and with little to reward the pilgrim; but a curious relic exhibited in a frame on the north wall is interesting. It is a small purse, found in 1857, during the rebuilding of the south wall of the chancel. In the course of those operations two debased windows and an Early English piscina were found. On the top of the piscina was the purse, of faded white silk, with large tassels, and containing three Reichening pfennigs or Nuremburg jettons, specimens of the well-known counters or tokens made in the first part of the sixteenth century by Hans Schultz, of Nuremburg. They bear on one side the device of the Reichs apple within a trefoil, and on the reverse an heraldic rose, surrounded by crowns and fleurs-de-lis. They and the purse all date from about 1500. A purse of this character is generally represented in sacred heraldry as the receptacle of the thirty pieces of silver, the reward of Judas’s betrayal. Maundy money was distributed in purses of this pattern, so late as the reign of Charles II.

Near by is a tablet to the memory of a Rector, who died in his thirtieth year, in 1681. His epitaph tells us, “Here lie the mortal remains of R. Cooke, late Rector of this parish, whose tongue or life I know not which was the most eloquent.” He exerted himself so much while preaching that he broke a blood-vessel, and died in the pulpit. “Thus,” concludes the epitaph, somewhat extravagantly, “he poured out his life-blood for the Gospel.”

The Church of All Saints, at the other side of the High Street, and in Cambridgeshire, was wholly rebuilt, as a memorial to Colonel Lord George John Manners, of Cheveley Park, in 1876. It is interesting only because of the small black marble tablet, about the size of a pocket-handkerchief, to the memory of Tregonwell Frampton, which was on the chancel wall of the old church, but has been shouldered away in the new building to the darkness of so high a position on the wall of the tower that the inscription cannot be read without the aid of a ladder. Frampton, who came of a race of landed proprietors in Dorsetshire, was “Father of the Turf,” and, as the inscription on the tablet states, “Keeper of the Running Horses to their Sacred Majesties, William the Third, Anne, George the First and Second.” He died, considerably over eighty years of age, in 1727, and thus ended a remarkable career of bold and eventful gambling in his youth, variegated by a later course as trainer for those four monarchs. For that is what the phrase, “Keeper of the Running Horses,” means. Historians of racing are even yet uncertain as to the truth of the grave charge made against him of mutilating the famous horse Dragon, in order to qualify him technically for a particular race, the evidence against him not being sufficiently convincing. The year of this alleged offence was 1682. It seems scarce credible that he would afterwards have occupied that position of trust with William III. and the three succeeding sovereigns had there been any foundation for the charge

XXIV

MODERN Newmarket is typified by that showy giant barrack-hotel, the “Victoria,” not long since completed, and in its glitter and electric light an ostentatious sign of these thriving times of new-made wealth and new-born social ambitions. The older Newmarket, of days when wealth alone could not purchase rank and the _entrée_ to society, is represented by the “Rutland Arms,” appropriately staid and severe in its architectural style, and perhaps, like the older order it embodies, a little under the cloud of neglect. The great “Rutland Arms” has, any time these one hundred and forty years past, been the resort of the more aristocratic patrons of Newmarket, and, looking back upon the town from the Bury road, it is still the chief feature of the place. Built around a courtyard, on solid early Georgian lines, of dull red brick and with high-pitched roof, it makes no pretensions to beauty, and yet does succeed in giving an impression of majesty and repose. Its noble rooms are large enough to permit of walking exercise, and instead of the exiguous cubicles, miscalled bedrooms, of modern hotels, you have sleeping apartments whose dimensions might almost be expressed in the measurements of a surveyor rather than in the less generous formula of the foot-rule. The “Rutland Arms’” sign owes its existence here to the fact that the manor of Newmarket came into the Manners family in the reign of George II., by the marriage of the daughter of the sixth Duke of Somerset with John Marquis of Granby in 1750. This was that famous “Markis o’ Granby” who earned such military distinction in Germany and such popularity at home that his name became for many years one of the most popular of inn signs. The Manners family until recent years owned the property, together with the neighbouring park of Cheveley, and their coat-of-arms on a gigantic scale, blazoned in blue and gold, still decorates the pediment of the hotel in aggressive manner. There are some who freely, very freely, translate the proud motto _Pour y Parvenir_ as “For the Parvenus”; but the “Victoria” is the hotel for them, and that legend really means “To attain,” or, as an American might say, “To get there.” What the choice of that determined sentiment originally meant, who shall say? but as the Manners family long since obtained a dukedom, they may be said to have duly arrived, and it is difficult to see what else they can want.

Much might be written of the old-time visitors to the town, but very little anecdotal matter exists. For unconscious humour there is nothing so good as the diary of our greatest entomologist, who was here in 1797. On his tour he had found, with delight, a golden bug basking in the sun on his window-sill, but with less delight a something of the same genus, “new to me,” on his stocking, in a little country inn.

On the evening of July 3rd he and a friend drove up to the “Ram” at Newmarket, as he duly records:—

“Arrived at Newmarket 6 p.m., where the “Ram,” wide-opening its ravenous maw, stood to receive us. We regale ourselves, after an expeditious journey, upon a comfortable cup of tea, and then take a walk to the racecourse, as far as the stands. By the way, we observe _Centaurea calcitrapa_ plentifully. At some distance we see the Devil’s Dyke, and, terrified with the prospect, retreat with hasty steps to supper. _Soham cheese very fine._ _July 4th._—On going into the quadrangle of this magnificent inn I observed a post-chaise with episcopal insignia; it belonged to our worthy diocesan. On the panel of the chaise door I took a new _Empis_.”

XXV

THE flat-racing season at Newmarket—and incidentally the flat-catching season also—opens with the Craven Meeting on Easter Monday, and ends with the Houghton, or third October Meeting, towards the close of that month. Between these are the Second Spring, the two July, and the First and Second October Meetings, making in all eight annual events. But Newmarket does by no means hibernate with the end of October and merely come to life again in the spring. When the flat-racing ends, the hurdle-racing takes up the thread of sport, and allied with these winter activities are the runs of the Drag Hounds.

There are many courses on the Heath: the Old Cambridgeshire, nearest the town, where the historic Red Post, the Duke’s Stand, and some of the old saddling-stables still remain; the long four-miles’ Beacon Course, little used in its entirety, now that a two miles’ contest is thought a good race; the Rowley Mile, named after Charles II., who was known among his familiars as “Old Rowley,” either from his favourite riding-horse being so named, or else because his sacred Majesty, so grotesque of face, was thought to so greatly resemble a frog—and frogs are still, in country districts, known as “Anthony Rowleys”; the Swaffham Course, and the Bunbury Mile. There is no finer or more bracing race-ground in the kingdom than this of Newmarket Heath, nor one so open, or where every stage of every race can be so well followed. It has no parallel elsewhere, and is certainly the very antithesis of Ascot, Goodwood, and Sandown, which are ladies’ opportunities for display, as much as they are the sportsman’s occasions for betting. Here, when the Cesarewitch and the Two Thousand Guineas are being run off, it is a very serious and earnest business, and toilettes only sparingly relieve the Quaker grey of the sporting crowd.

“No Betting Allowed” is the notice that the enquiring stranger sees repeated several times on notice-boards over against the New Stand. To bet legally you must pay your sovereign, half-sovereign, or five shillings for entrance to the various enclosures in the Stand: to lay or take the odds in the open is an indictable offence. Yet there is nothing else but quiet and earnest, but unostentatious, betting going forward all the while among the crowd assembled outside the rails. The bookmakers in the various rings, sanctified and immune from molestation at the hands of the law, by reason of those entrance-fees, may be heard shouting the odds like maniacs, but here the case is indeed altered. Those notices might really, with more appearance of common sense, be spelled “No Betting Aloud,” for the very large amount of betting that actually does go on, under the very noses of the numerous foot and mounted police stationed here to prevent it, is conducted in undertones. Not whispers, by any means, but offers made by bookmakers in conversational tones, easily to be heard by the crowd at large, of so many to one on the field; with money changing hands, visibly and indubitably, for all the world to see, and the same familiar faces of the bookmakers at every race throughout the year.

Here, in fact, we see the failure of an attempt to make the people moral by Act of Parliament—a failure that in its failing creates a great deal more immorality, and of a less venial kind, than that it originally set out to suppress, for there is nothing more certain than that the police, who do not see these things with the official eye, do most surely observe them with the merely physical eyes of ordinary human beings, and not only refuse to take proper cognisance of them, but “have a bit on” of their own, and thus place themselves in the Gilbertian position of rendering themselves liable to be given into their own custody for betting for ready money in a public place.

It behoves an innocent to be careful how he has that “bit on,” for the Heath at race-time is no place for the guileless stranger with a few odd sovereigns to lose. There are those here whose sole mission in life is to plunder the unwary, and who have the keenest scent for what they elegantly term a “mug.” Their method is a simple one, as you who have the curiosity to test it may find. You hang listlessly over the rails and assume the virtuous air, even if you have it not, of being unspotted from the world. If that, on the other hand, be your usual wear—why, then so much the better. The experimentalist in this sort will not have long to wait before he gets a bite. Already, while he is taking up his position and gazing around with the air of one quite new to racing, he has been singled out from the surrounding crowds and marked down for attack by sharpers who are past-masters in the little frailties of human nature. Two men approach our innocent in being, or in seeming, and one of them, under his very nose, pays a little heap of glittering sovereigns—or counters—into the other’s palm, with the remark that if he, the payee, had only sprung a little more on that dead cert, the winnings would have been really _worth_ winning. Poor human nature swallows that bait as eagerly as trout rise to May flies, and when those two practical philosophers accidentally, as it were, take their victim into their confidence, his gold is already as good as gone. It seems the winner owes his luck to his very good friend here who is “in the know,” and, with an inexhaustible series of good tips from the Ring, is willing—nay, eager—to give, not only his friend, but the most casual pick-up acquaintance of even less than five minutes’ standing, the full benefit of that information which, if applied in the way he presently suggests, has the power of transmuting your silver into gold, and of increasing your solitary sovereign into tens and twenties.

No sport is more enjoyable than that of fooling sharks of this description; it is its own exceeding great reward. You can play them as the fisherman does the salmon, and lead them on with ingenuous innocences and artful idiotcies until they who think they have the greatest simpleton on earth to deal with, find themselves at length fairly gaffed and landed.

The amateur simpleton receives the introduction of “my friend from Tattersall’s” with an air of eager credulity, and casually remarking that he has never before seen a race nor ever made a bet on one, raises the confederates’ hopes to the highest pitch. The “friend from Tattersall’s” has another “moral” for the next race, and recommends a sovereign placed on the selection; whereupon you consider it from this light and from that, and discuss it in all its bearings until they are half-crazed with anxiety. “Surely,” says one, “surely you can afford to back a certainty?” “Of course, _if_ it is a certainty,” you say; and then, with the conscience-stricken qualms of the good young man, “Is it quite right to bet on a certainty?”

But the last touch of comedy comes when, having had those scruples satisfied, you insert an exploratory thumb and finger in your waistcoat pocket, and—find, regretfully, that you have come out without any money!

The effect of this is magical, and as you walk up the course to have a quiet laugh, the bitter curses of the disappointed sharps come after you, in heartfelt undertones. The horse selected for a winner comes in with the ruck, as, of course, these fellows had foreseen.

XXVI

NEWMARKET at other than race-times does by no means proclaim its occupation to the chance traveller along the road. He must rise betimes and fare forth early who would see the sheeted racers going to or returning from their morning gallops; but such an early riser will find much to impress him. Two thousand horses are in training at Newmarket, but only he who in the brisk and racing early hours of the day sees the long processions belonging to the various owners filing at a walk along the High Street can realise the fact. Many a poor body is less warmly and comfortably clad than a racehorse out for his morning constitutional. Horse-cloths made with as much attention to individual fit as given one’s own overcoat cover their bodies and necks, and even clothe heads and ears, and are all decorated with the owner’s monogram. The trainer watches these morning gallops from the back of his own serviceable nag, and notes their “form” with the eye of a general officer inspecting troops. But he does not, as an American writer artlessly tells us, “amble by on his old-fashioned Suffolk Punch.” This little quotation shows you the danger of using terms not properly understood; for a Suffolk Punch is a horse of the dray-horse kind, and of the breed often used in ploughing; furrow, if not thoroughbred, and a thought too substantial for a saddle-horse.

The trainer keenly watches these trials, and so also do certain knowing gentlemen to whom the offensive name of “touts” is given. It is the business of their kind to study that “form” for the benefit of those who read the sporting papers, and to telegraph the performances day by day, so that the British working man, who so largely supports the bookmakers and the half-penny evening papers that thrive on the prognostications of “Captain Coe” and “Old Joe,” may study the “form” aforesaid. With their heads filled with jargon of this kind, the working men and others, whose knowledge of a horse does not go far beyond the ability to distinguish his head from his tail end, are firmly of opinion that they can spot winners. That they are not often so fortunate does not discourage them, and when the tipsters fail, as in a very large proportion of cases they do, they keep a faith that in this otherwise sceptical world is as touching as it is uncommon.

The life of a tout is infinitely better than once it was, in the days when they were severely mauled by trainers unwilling that the doings of their horses should thus be made public. But it was long ago made clear that, even under the worst conditions, information would by some means be obtained, and so, furnished with field-glasses of the best, they, unmolested, garner up the lore of their craft day by day; and the trainer, conscious of the fact that his stables at least can be made to hold their secrets, if the gallops no longer can, is found often in amicable intercourse with these gleaners of useful knowledge.

It is a healthy life for all concerned, for the country is a bracing one and the hours are early. To each horse on these early morning trials is his attendant lad: apprentices of the training-stable, with everything possible to them in the way of professional prizes. They may develop as jockeys or as trainers on their own account, or may perhaps go to the Devil in many of the easy ways that racing affords. But there are few or no lads in any profession you like to name smarter in personal appearance or better disciplined than the apprentices and stable-boys of Newmarket. The modern trainer, with the consideration and income of an ambassador, the authority of the headmaster of a public school, and the domestic appointments of a prince of commerce, is the benevolent autocrat of his establishment. His lads have no excuse for outside pleasures, for he provides them with billiard-rooms, newspapers, and magazines, and every imaginable comfort of a well-appointed club, with the result that the well-known enthusiasm for and belief in horses trained at Newmarket in general becomes crystallised into an _esprit de corps_ for particular stables. The whole profession has been revolutionised in every grade and in most methods. The jockey who used to reduce the “too, too solid flesh” that troubled even Hamlet—who had not the jockey’s excuse for ridding himself of it—by the heroic and uncomfortable course of wearing two pairs of trousers, five or six waistcoats, two or more coats, and then walking seven or eight miles in all that clothing, now adopts other methods—greatly to the sorrow of the local tailors. Those old-time jocks who thus mortified the flesh must surely command our retrospective sympathy, for they did not merely so dress and so walk, but, coming to some inn at the end of the prescribed miles, took a seat by a roaring fire, and, piling on more clothes, sweated away the avoirdupois at a truly alarming rate until it was time to tramp home-along. Turkish baths nowadays perform the same office with little trouble, and jockeys more than usually keen on reducing weight take medicines in addition. It was through the severity of this self-adopted course that Archer brought himself into the low and feverish state in which he committed suicide.

But who would not be a successful jockey in these days of high retaining fees, special rewards, and popular favour? From the worldly point of view, judging things from the purely monetary standpoint, such an one looks down from his pinnacle upon the whole bench of Bishops, upon the Army, the Navy, the Church, the Stage, Literature, Art, and all the things that really count. You may not like it, but—“there you are,” and it is useless to point out that the old verb “to jockey” means “to cheat, to trick,” and must have derived from this profession. To one who might so point out this derivation, an obvious retort could be made that things have changed, and that as actors have risen from being in the eyes of the law mere roguish vagrants and “players of interludes,” so jockeys may now be honourable men. We cannot hark back to the times when every jock was made keep his place, and was paid less than his worth, instead of absurdly more.

What were the rewards of the jockey in those days? He received five guineas if he won and three if he lost, and when a former Duke of Grafton sent his jockey two five-pound notes after winning both the One Thousand and the Two Thousand Stakes, with the injunction to “take care of them,” he was thought generous. In these days no jockey of repute, with the winning of classic races to his record, will get into the saddle for a smaller fee than £1,000, win or lose

XXVII

THE road on leaving Newmarket, at the crest of the High Street, branches in many directions from where a modern clock tower stands, like a policeman, in the parting of the ways. The Clock Tower, which, as a prominent and venerated landmark, and one of the principal features of Newmarket, it behoves us, in all humility, to spell with capital letters, was erected by one “Charley” Blanton, owner of Robert the Devil, in honour of Victoria the Good. The Clock Tower is Blanton’s, but the antithesis is our very own. Beyond this point the roads are reduced to two: that on the left leading direct to Thetford and Norwich; the right-hand fork conducting to Thetford by the loop road through Bury St. Edmunds. We will examine this road in detail before taking the direct route.

This is the “Bury side” of the town mentioned in the Jockey Club notices of the gallops available for exercising the horses, and the triangular stretch of common in the fork of the roads is the place referred to on all such notices as “the Severals,” a name here in direct contradiction to its general meaning, which is an enclosed, as opposed to a common, field.

A busy day on the Severals is a pretty sight, for it is the place where the frisky yearlings are trained to obedience. Here you see them, cantering round and round, at the end of a rope, rejoicing in their youth, young and silly, before they have learnt their business in life, and, with their manes and long flowing tails not yet docked, and their limbs not grown to the lankiness of the full-grown racer, the most beautiful of animals. Their triumphs, and equally the anti-climax of their after-careers as cab-horses, and their final conversion into ha’porths of cats’ meat on skewers, are mercifully hidden from them.

The road to Thetford through Bury is a lonely and, on the whole, a dull route, but it begins in lordly style, with lengthy rows of portentous racing establishments in all the showy glory of long gravelled drives and imposing gates. The later history of domestic architecture is unrolled before you, as you go along the Bury road, in mid-Victorian grey brick and stucco, with gas-globes like unto the lamps of the Metropolitan Railway; in later Victorian white Suffolk brick with string-courses of red brick set angle-wise in a style alleged to be decorative; and in the “Queen Anne” _plus_ Victorian Renaissance composite style of these latter days. The Edwardian style is still to seek. We need not study to tell who lives where, because the merest nonentities invariably live in the most ornate houses, and, with the varying fortunes of the Turf and them that fleet their little day upon it, those who flaunt so bravely this year are the next season gone no man knoweth whither; and few, except their creditors, care.

At last the houses end, and we are upon the open road, with the roadside plantation of firs, called the Long Belt, on the right, and the heaths and downs on the left, stretching away until they are lost in distance and in the harrs of the Fens. This, for the cyclist, is an express route, but we must not, for that reason, forget to pull up at the cross-roads, where a sign-post points in one direction to Chippenham and in the other to Moulton. Halt awhile and notice the great grassy mound beside that sign-post, for it is a spot known to the villages round about, and in Newmarket, as the “Boy’s Grave.” The boy thus handed down to fame was, according to the traditions of the countryside, a shepherd boy who lost a sheep from his flock, and, afraid to go to his employer and acknowledge it, hanged himself here—from the sign-post, say some more credulous than their fellows. A big boy, and even a giant, you, looking at this mound, might think; but its size is due to the care of the road-menders, who not only keep it in order, but bank it up with turf cut from the selvedges of the wayside.

Legends are not rare in this neighbourhood. Indeed, along the by-road in the direction of Moulton one reaches Folly Hill, the crest of the downs can be seen from here, with a fragment of wall and a clump of beech-trees on its summit, and a story of its own in the making. Here, in fact, we are peculiarly fortunate, for on Folly Hill it is possible to note the genesis of a legend and to record it ere time has evolved a story, full-blown and mysterious, out of very matter-of-fact materials. A story of sorts is, indeed, already current in Newmarket, where the enquiring stranger after things in general can obtain some finely inaccurate information as to what he may expect to see on Folly Hill, or “God’s Evil,” as it is alternatively known. With this he is prepared to find a stone pillar in a wood, the sole relic of a house built, at some time unspecified, by “a man almost a millionaire,” unfortunately unnamed, but with the blackest of reputations.

There is not really (it may at once be said) any such pillar, but the gable-end of a ruined old red-brick house stands up against the sky on the hill-top, and is known to the farmer of Trinity Hall Farm, on which it stands, as “the Pilgrim.” The ploughmen know the beech clump on the hill as “Cobbler’s Bush,” because, according to their tale, “a ole cobbler what used to mend boots lived there. There’s a ole tree there what nobody mustn’t touch, because he planted it.”

“And what is that old building on the hill-top?”

“That’s a ole rewing they calls the Barks. Nobody mustn’t touch it.”

“Not touch it; why not?”

“Because the soldiers come to look at it.”

At that explanation a flood of light is thrown upon the name of “Barks.” It is the local pronunciation of “Barracks,” and that name comes, of course, from the “soldiers” who go to look at it. Who are those soldiers? Merely those who have at some time or other accompanied a surveying party of the Ordnance Survey, for map-making purposes. No doubt a fine gory embattled legend will be built on this some day, probably with Cromwell, that arch-villain of popular imagination, as the moving figure in it.

Passing over the Kennett at Kentford, where the ragged remnants of the old bridge even yet stand in the water, beside the new, and where the unusually good Flamboyant-traceried Gothic windows of the church, looking down from a roadside knoll, gladden the heart of the ecclesiologist, the character of the road becomes, like the life of a saint on earth—flat, featureless, dull, and uninteresting. Just as the follies and vices of the hardened sinner make the most readable biography, so do those scenic accidents that give steep hills and difficult roads make interest for the amateur of the picturesque. Higham station, with the spire of Barrow church peering over distant trees, is not of itself either remarkable or romantic, and in so far that it does not look its real age, the toll-house standing at the cross-roads is like those modern grandmothers whose jimp waists and springtide tresses are the wonder of their grandchildren.

Few signs of life vary the monotony of the flat fields, and when the roadside inn known as “Saxham White Horse,” and inappropriately endued with a coating of red wash, opens out ahead in one of the long perspectives, it is as though one had found an unexpected habitation in an empty land. Risby village shows some indications, off to the left hand, and, for so unpromising a district, is remarkably picturesque, with rugged dingles and ridges, and a round-towered old church in a tree-embowered lane looking as though it had been designed by Morland. It is an Early English church, without aisles, but with a lofty chancel arch on whose either side are elaborate stone tabernacles. A slip of brass on the chancel floor records that

“Here lyeth the body of Mr. Edward Kirke,
Esq., 1613.”

Returning to the road, a detour made on the other side of it, to Little Saxham church, reveals another, and finer, tower. A great deal of mystery has been made of the round-towered churches of East Anglia, and antiquaries of a bygone age expended much unnecessary ingenuity in seeking some out-of-the-way reason of ritual or defence for their existence; but the reason of their being is simple enough. They are found, almost exclusively in England, in these eastern counties, where building-stone does not exist. Norfolk has no fewer than 125 of these round towers, and Suffolk 40. Essex has 7, and Cambridgeshire only 2. The greatest number are found where flint is plentiful, for they are constructed chiefly of that material, and the circular walls have that shape because it is thus possible to dispense with the stone quoins necessary for binding the angles of square buildings. In a word, the round towers are round for the same reason that compels a man to wear a silver watch when he would like a gold chronometer—they were less expensive.

Here, at Little Saxham, we have a particularly fine example, of Norman date. It is probable that in this case a desire existed, for some reason now lost to us, to make a greater show than customary, for the tower here is taller than most. Its lower stages are in severely plain flint-work, but the upper storey is quite elaborate and wholly faced with stone.

An elaborate monument to Lord Crofts fills one side of a chapel in Little Saxham church. He was one of Charles II.’s merry companions, but here is made to look sufficiently unhappy. The effigies of himself and his wife are shown in painful semi-reclining attitudes, as though they would very much like to get up, but could not. My lord’s expression, underneath his Baron’s coronet, is particularly agonised.

The uneventful road on to Bury St. Edmunds is brought to a conclusion by the barracks, the first harbinger of the town, at the outer end of the long wide street called Risby Gate

XXVIII