The first racehorse owned by the Prince of Wales was a horse named Stonehenge, which I bought for him. We were partners in the horse. Stonehenge had won one or two races, when I went away on leave for a few days. On my return I found that my groom, against orders, had been galloping him, and that one of his legs had filled. Having heard that my uncle, Lord Waterford, once trained a horse which filled his leg, by swimming him in the sea after a boat tried the experiment with Stonehenge. The admiral's coxswain, two hands, and myself swam Stonehenge every day about Plymouth Harbour. The horse got fit to run for his life, and I rode him in a hurdle race at Plymouth. He was winning easily, but, alas! he broke down at the last hurdle, and was just beaten.
In 1883-4, the Duke of Portland and myself, as partners, bought Rosy Morn, as a yearling. He won several races as a two-year-old, and we fancied him for the Derby. He was a better colt as a two-year-old than Lord Hastings' Melton, which won the Derby. Both horses were trained in the same stable, at Matt Dawson's, Heath House, Newmarket.
Matt Dawson declared that we had got a Derby horse. I was getting the boats through the Bab-el-Kebir in the Egyptian war, when I heard that Rosy Morn had gone a roarer; and I thought it a bad omen for the expedition.
Lord Marcus and I organised a donkey race to enliven a South Coast race-meeting. We hired two donkeys apiece, and each bestrode two steeds, standing on their backs, and rode them over the wooden groynes that descend the beach at regular intervals.
The curse of race-meetings is the crowd of dubious characters which infests them. Lord Marcus, travelling by rail to Newmarket, defeated three of such persons single-handed.
A trio of three-card-trick men tried to bully him into venturing on the game; whereupon he set about them. Two he knocked out, and the third piped down. They left that carriage of carnage at the next station, protesting amid blood and tears that it was occupied by the most furious devil allowed on earth. He was maligned: there never was a kinder-hearted man.
Lord Marcus, who is singularly ready with his tongue, upon being asked whether he thought False Tooth a good name for a horse, said:
"The best, because you can't stop him."
The same relative committed a worse crime at the Club, where a very deaf member appealed to him to be told what another member was saying to him.