of Newmarket is heralded by the great grassy bank, some thirty feet in
height, which looms before the wayfarer as he climbs a rise. The road,
and a road coming from Cambridge, pass through a cleft in this great
barrier, and under the lee of the opening nestles an old toll-house. To
the left, across a breezy open space stretching away for miles, goes
this grassy earthwork, rising and falling with the inequalities of the
ground, and with a yawning ditch accompanying it into the dim
perspective. A grey church tower is seen in the middle distance, and on
the far horizon, gleaming white in occasional sunbursts, or looming
blackly under cloud effects, is an architectural Something that
dominates the whole scene. We are, in short, come to the Devil’s Ditch
and Newmarket Heath. That is Burwell church, showing greyly amid
surrounding clumps of trees, three miles away, and that architectural
city of dream on the horizon, reflecting through the opalescent haze of
the Fens, across the intervening marshes of Wicken and Soham, is St.
Etheldreda’s own refuge of Ely, whose giant cathedral, islanded thirteen
miles away amid the bogs and meres, shines from afar, like a good deed
in a naughty world.
[Illustration: THE DEVIL’S DITCH AND NEWMARKET HEATH, LOOKING TOWARDS
ELY.]
XIX
THE first mention of the Devil’s Ditch is found in the Saxon Chronicle,
in the year 905, when this land of the East Angles was described as laid
waste by the northmen between the “Dyke” and the Ouse. It was under the
Saxons that it was first imputed to the Father of Lies, whose name it
still bears, and to whose strenuous labour, in the open-mouthed
astonishment of those simple people, amazed at the many such gigantic
earthworks they found in the land, they ascribed almost every other such
remarkable object. The Normans, in a later age, not so credulous, knew
it as St. Edmund’s Dyke; the jurisdiction of the Abbots of St.
Edmundsbury extending thus far westward.
But this famous line of defence—for such it is—had really a less
distinguished authorship. The Iceni, who at the time of the Roman
conquest were a very much more civilised people than the Saxons of five
hundred years later, constructed it as the rearward and strongest of the
several such ramparts and ditches they had thrown across this only easy
line of advance of a possible enemy into their country. A popular idea
of the Iceni is that they were like the Picts of North Britain, who
painted themselves a sky-blue, and considered that full dress. But they
were far more advanced than anything so nearly allied to the ideals of
the Garden of Eden, and would no more have owned kin even with such
earlier inhabitants of their own East Anglia as the neolithic men, than
we would stoop to call cousins with the gorillas. They had advanced
beyond the condition of patriarchal communities and roving tribes, and
had passed the intermediate stage of barter, to enter the more civilised
one of a nation with a money currency and coin of its own. Icenian
coins, in gold and silver, are well known to numismatists, and although
the design on them, said by experts to be intended to represent a horse,
is difficult to be recognised, still they _are_ coins.
This figure of a horse occurring so constantly on these coins has
sometimes led antiquaries to the ingenious conclusion that the
neighbourhood of Newmarket, even thus early, was famous for horses, but
that is a long shot, and very much in the dark.
A people of their calibre must have been quite capable of such military
works as these dykes. This was their best effort and still speaks well
for their energy. The ditch, on the western side, clearly showing that
the work was a defence from dangers expected from that quarter, is
twenty feet deep, and the bank, reared up in an acute angle, thirty feet
above the level of the ground, thus presents a formidable climb, in all,
of fifty feet. Add to these difficulties offered to an invader, the
strong probability that the crest of the rampart was defended by a
timber palisade, and we can clearly perceive that when these defences
were manned by a determined people, the invasion of the Icenian country
must have been a hazardous enterprise.
For seven miles the Ditch runs, from the waters of the Cam at Reach to
the woods on the chalk hills of Wood Ditton. It is possible to walk
along the summit of the bank most of the way, for, although rough and
uneven pedestrian exercise, it is in general eighteen feet in breadth,
and remarkably like an abandoned railway embankment. It is one of the
many sites identified as the scene of Boadicea’s defeat by Suetonius
Paulinus, but we are sceptical of this particular one, although the
ancient tumulus on the outer face of the Ditch, still called the Two
Captains, points to some forgotten conflict in which two leaders were
slain and buried on the contested field.
Little is now left of this once prominent mound, once important enough
to be marked on Ordnance maps, but now ploughed nearly flat. It stands
in the third field from the road, on the right hand, a field now under
corn, but until forty years ago a wood
XX
NEWMARKET HEATH is a large place. It is easily possible to ramble on it
quite away from any sight or sound of the races and the race crowds, and
to find a solitude in its midst while eight thousand people are shouting
themselves hoarse in cheering a popular winner. While the October
meetings are in progress on one side of the Heath, the July Course, on
the other, under the shadow of the “Devil’s Ditch,” is a voiceless
solitude. You would almost think that the Iceni, who dug the Ditch, had
planned the Course, and built the Stand on it as well, so deserted of
the world they look.
Nothing can be more dreary than the sight of this simple race-stand.
Built to hold a thousand people, here it squats, an emptiness; the only
sounds those in the long sombre belt of firs, whose branches sway with a
sound of the sea in the airs that sweep the breezy Heath.
Newmarket is first mentioned in 1227, when it seems to have been
established in consequence of an epidemic raging at the mother-parish of
Exning, about two miles away. This “old market” of Exning, now a
village, owes its name, say some, to the Iceni, but it is much more
likely to have derived from the Celtic word “Exe,” for water, for the
springs there are a feature of the place. That phenomenally pious lady,
St. Etheldreda, one of the daughters of King Anna, and foundress of Ely
Cathedral, was born at Exning, and there, we are asked to believe, was
anciently a great horse-fair, to which Newmarket can trace its origin as
Metropolis of the Turf.
But Newmarket did not come into prominence until the reign of James I.,
who loved its wild surroundings for the sake of the coursing they gave.
It was for hunting the hare and the bustard, and for the sport of
hawking, rather than for horse-racing, that Newmarket first became
favoured. It was not long, however, before the sportsmen who surrounded
James discovered that on the elastic turf of the Heath they had an ideal
running-ground for horses, far better than that of the several places
where matches were already being made, and racing very soon occupied the
foremost place. King James was a frequent visitor, and was the first to
establish a palace here, and here, in after-years, Charles I. was
brought as a prisoner.
Newmarket was under a cloud of neglect during the Commonwealth, for
under Puritan rule horse-racing was forbidden, but with the Restoration
its fortunes grew bright. There was never a more ardent turfite than
Charles II., who was continually visiting Newmarket, and maintained here
a dissolute Court that shocked even some contemporaries.
Evelyn, the diarist, in 1671 “found the jolly blades racing, dancing,
feasting, and revelling, more resembling a luxurious and abandoned rout
than a Christian Court. The Duke of Buckingham was now in mighty favour,
and had with him that impudent woman, the Countess of Shrewsbury, with
his band of fiddlers.”
That was a very poor indictment. Much more might have been said of a
Court which included Louise de la Quérouaille, afterwards created
Duchess of Portsmouth, Nell Gwynne, and numerous others of their stamp.
The wholesale and unblushing—nay, boastful—immorality of that Court is
amazing; and still more amazing is the historical condonation of
viciousness that has made Nell Gwynne a heroine. The origin of Nell,
whose name popular usage has spelt as above, but which seems to have
been originally written “Gwyn,” is almost as vague as that of Homer.
Seven cities have claimed that old Greek as a native. Nell, whose name
speaks her Welsh origin, was born in three places: Hereford, Oxford, and
the Coalyard, Drury Lane. Reared in the foulest slums, and the common
property of quite a number of persons, she yet became the favourite of a
King, the mother of a Duke, and the grandmother of a Bishop. One feels
sorry for that dignitary of the Church.
Charles, Lord Buckhurst, was the man who made her over to Charles II. It
was quite a businesslike transaction, and his price was the step in the
Peerage that made him Earl of Dorset. But that was not the first change
of proprietors, for an earlier love had been Charles Hart, an actor. Her
new protector, the King, she therefore spoke of as _her_ Charles the
third. That is a well-known story, how she procured a title for her boy.
“Come here, you little bastard!” she called the child in presence of his
father, the King. Charles was shocked at the coarseness of the
expression, but she was prepared with a retort. “That is the only name I
have to give the poor boy,” she said. As a result of this, the boy was
christened Charles Beauclerk, created Earl of Burford in 1676, and Duke
of St. Albans 1684.
Newmarket, with a licentious and idle Court seeking only to be amused,
was in the time of Charles II. as distinguished for eccentric wagers and
sporting feats as Brighton in after-centuries under the protection of
the Prince Regent. Lord Digby in 1670 staked £50 that he would walk five
miles in an hour, stark naked and bare-foot, and had the mortification
of losing by the narrow margin of half a minute. Charles and a great
crowd of courtiers were present. They all had “something on,” as well as
clothes, but whether they backed my Lord Digby or not we are not told.
Then there was Captain John Gibbs, a gambler and racing-man of the same
period, who laid a wager of £500 that he would drive his light chaise
and four horses up and down the steepest part of the Devil’s Ditch, and
won it, “to the surprise of all the spectators.” He performed the feat
by making a very light chaise with a jointed perch and without any pole.
The hero of that occasion lies buried in Attleborough Church, with a
long set of eulogistic verses over him, which do not, however, refer to
any of his sporting exploits. He died, it seems, October 22nd, 1695,
forty-eight years of age.
[Illustration: BARCLAY OF URY ON HIS WALKING MATCH.]
A sporting event of much later date and not quite so extravagant a
nature was Captain Robert Barclay of Ury’s sixty-four-miles’ walk from
Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, to Newmarket, on a hot July day in 1803. He
accomplished that feat in ten hours. This famous pedestrian, son of
another Robert Barclay, who once walked the 510 miles from London to Ury
in ten days, was the hero of many such sporting performances, and in
1809 walked 1,000 miles on the Heath in 1,000 consecutive hours. He was
thirty years of age at the time. On Wednesday, May 31st, he began what
was then regarded as “the most remarkable feat ever recorded in the
annals of pedestrianism,” concluding it on Wednesday, July 12th, at 3.37
p.m., in the presence of 10,000 spectators, with twenty-three minutes to
spare. The wager (for no one in those days did anything without
wagering) was for 1,000 guineas a side. It was supposed that not less
than 100,000 guineas changed hands among those 10,000 onlookers. His
mile average the first week was 14 min. 54 sec. During the last week it
fell to 21 min. 4 sec., and his weight was reduced from 13 stone 4 lb.
to 11 stone. This performance was undertaken without any training, and
so does not compare on even terms with those of Edward Payson Weston,
the American pedestrian, who, at the beginning of 1878, walked 1,000
miles in 398 hrs. 19 min., at the Cricket Ground, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and
out of those 398 hours rested altogether 150 hrs. 38½ min. Weston, who
improved even on this by walking 1,977½ miles in 1,000 hours along the
roads, at the beginning of 1879, trained continually.
Another famous sporting item of this period was Abraham Wood’s forty
miles running match on Newmarket Heath, on April 16th, 1807. The stake
was 500 guineas, and the performance was to be concluded in five hours.
Wood, who was a native of Mildrew, in Lancashire, and considered, as an
athlete, second only to Captain Barclay, completed the forty miles in
four minutes under the five hours. He ran the first eight miles in 48
minutes, and the first twenty in 2 hours 7 minutes.
The Palace built by James I., and rebuilt by Charles II., long continued
in use. James II. was too busy striving to dragoon the nation into Roman
Catholicism, to take much interest in the races, but William III. was
often here.
That grim and silent monarch does not bulk largely as a sportsman in the
minds of most people, yet he was a supporter of Newmarket, and we
actually find him in October, 1689, the year after his accession,
performing the extraordinarily quick journey of Hampton Court to
Newmarket in one day, a feat then rightly considered surprising. He
figures on one occasion as a reckless, unlucky, and infuriated plunger
at cards. It was in 1689 that he lost 4,000 guineas overnight at basset,
at one sitting. The next morning, still chafing at the loss, he gave a
gentleman a stroke with his horsewhip for riding before him on the
race-ground. It was rather an unfortunate outburst of temper, for from
it arose the sarcasm that it was the only blow he had struck for
supremacy in his kingdoms.
Anne and the first two Georges were familiar with the place, but towards
the close of George III.’s reign the Palace was sold. The Prince Regent,
however, took a keen interest in racing, and ran a rather crooked course
on the Turf, for he was practically warned off the Heath by the Jockey
Club, that autocratic body of racing law-givers whose rules no one, from
a jockey to a king, dare transgress. In such a world as that of racing,
which it would be mere affectation to contend is followed in the main
for purely sporting reasons, unmixed with the hope of gain, stringent
and inflexible laws and exemplary punishments are necessary for the
protection of all concerned.
Like many another institution with small beginnings and unexpected
growth, the Jockey Club emerges only in dim fashion from the past, and
historians can only say that it was established somewhere in the reign
of George II., between 1727 and 1760. Nowadays that body is
all-powerful, not alone at Newmarket, but in the whole world of racing,
whose events are conducted under its rules. The Heath itself is the
Club’s unchallenged domain, for it is rented of the freeholder, the Duke
of Portland, and its gallops are opened or closed just as the officials
will it. The revenue of the Club, too, is enormous, for every jockey
pays for a licence, and the fees exacted from owners at every turn, and
the money taken for admission to the betting-rings and enclosures, total
an income more than princely. The headquarters of the Club and
Tattersall’s Rooms combined face the High Street in no very imposing
manner, and the pavement in front of them becomes on race-days the
Rialto of owners and trainers
XXI
THE history of the Jockey Club and that of “Tattersalls” are
inseparable. Richard, the first Tattersall, born in 1724, and originally
stud-groom to the Duke of Kingston, founded the well-known business of
horse-auctioneering in London in 1766, and prospered from the beginning
of that enterprise; but his fortune was made rather in horse-breeding,
and “Old Tatt” had his first great success in 1779, when he bought
Highflyer, Lord Bolingbroke’s famous racehorse, for £2,500, and put him
to the stud. It is a proof of his tried and proved integrity that he
purchased Highflyer on credit.
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.