Later the Haddington race meeting came to be held annually, the principal prize run for being “a silver bell of value.”
Rather an eccentric individual, named David Hume, was connected with the Turf in Scotland about the middle of the sixteenth century. He appears, indeed, to have been quite an interesting personality. A resident of Wedderburn, where he died in or about the year 1575—the early writers, while admitting that when he died he must have been fully fifty years of age, yet disagree as to the exact date of his death—he is especially worthy of mention because probably he was typical of a particular stamp of man that during the latter half of the sixteenth century was in a great measure responsible for the development of the race horse.
Presumably David Hume owned property, for he is spoken of as “a gentleman of good status in Berwickshire,” and in later years his son, known as David Hume of Godscroft, wrote a book which became famous in Scottish literature, the “History of the House of Douglas.”
The elder Hume is described as “a man remarkable for piety, probity, candour and integrity.” How ironical that description unconsciously was we shall see in a moment. The son, we are told, “seldom missed an opportunity of speaking in still more laudatory terms of his father,” but Mr J. P. Hore's opinion is to the effect that if some such institution as the modern Jockey Club had been in existence when Hume the elder was in his heyday, that gentleman would, in spite of his alleged probity, integrity, and so forth, have been warned off the Turf at short notice.
For we read that “so great a master in the art of riding was he that he would often be beat to-day and within eight days lay a double wager on the same horses and come off conqueror” (sic). No doubt this paragon of honour has many emulators on the Turf to-day, but the relatives and friends of the latter at least have not the effrontery to tell us that such men are “strictly just, utterly detesting all manner of fraud,” the statement made again and again about the elder Hume by his kinsfolk.
Elsewhere we learn that sometimes he ran two horses in one race and that upon occasions he was able to hoodwink the spectators assembled into believing that a horse had tried hard to win when in reality it had barely extended itself.
Hume himself would talk openly to his friends about the races he meant to win, and apparently he seldom attempted to conceal the fact that some of his horses were meant to lose.
Possibly this very “ingenuousness” may have led some of his friends, and a proportion of what we should to-day call the general public, to believe that he acted honourably and always in good faith.
In justice let it be said, however, that he bred good stock, also that he was a better judge of a horse than the bulk of his contemporaries—though that is not high praise. While himself engaged in roguery in connection with racing he was all the time striving to purify the Turf. He would, in all probability, have amassed a large fortune—or what was deemed in those days to be a large fortune—had he been less addicted to gambling for gambling's sake, for it is certain that from first to last he won much money by laying against his own horses as well as by backing some of them. The more amazing, therefore, is it that certain writers, even in comparatively recent times, should speak of him in all seriousness as a man of remarkable integrity.