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.”