Highways and Byways in Surrey

by Eric Parker

Water ended Epsom in 1715; wine began Epsom again in 1780. A party of gentlemen, drinking at Lord Derby's table at Lambert's Oaks, a house on the high ground above the town, lifted their glasses to the glories of horse-racing. They founded two races, one, in 1779, for three-year-old fillies; another, in 1780, for three-year-old colts and fillies. They named the races after their host and the house where they drank, and Epsom was made again. The Derby and the Oaks became national institutions. Before that roystering party, the downs had seen racing, but had not seen a racing crowd. Charles II had run his horses on Epsom and Banstead downs; perhaps his horse now and then bore away the silver bell, which was the first and simple prize when horses began racing. Queen Anne may have entered a colt or two at Epsom: her consort, Prince George of Denmark, loved horse-racing and drank Epsom waters. Greatest of all memories of the Turf, Eclipse lived for years by Epsom downs, and won poor little races for an obscure commoner. He would have won any race he could have been asked by a king, but it was the fate of the finest racehorse ever foaled to live before the Derby was founded, and before he could race another horse worthy to pass the starting post with him. Pownall, in his History of Epsom, has a pleasant passage extolling Eclipse's merits. He writes in 1825: he has studied, he tells us, Lawrence's History of the Horse and Bingley's British Quadrupeds, and this is the result:—

"Eclipse was withheld from the course till he was five years of age, and was first tried at Epsom. He had considerable length of waist, and stood over a large space of ground, in which particular he was an opposite form to the flying Childers, a short backed, compact horse, whose reach lay in his lower limbs; but, from the shape of his body, we are inclined to believe that Eclipse would have beaten Childers in a race over a mile course with equal weights. He once ran four miles in eight minutes, carrying twelve stone, and with this weight Eclipse won eleven King's plates.[A] He was never beaten, never had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur; nor was he ever for a moment distressed by the speed or rate of a competitor; out-footing, out-striding, and out-lasting (says Mr. Lawrence) every horse which started against him."

Eclipse, like Homer, had many birthplaces. Mr. Theodore Cook, who has written authoritatively of him where others have guessed or accepted tradition, has been informed of more than seven; and, in collecting details of relics of the great horse, he has been supplied with evidence that Eclipse possessed no fewer than six "undoubted" skeletons, nine "authentic" feet, sufficient "genuine" hair to have stuffed the largest armchair in Newmarket, and "certified" portions of skin which would easily have carpeted the yard at Tattersall's. There never was such an omnipresent animal.

After 1780, the horse-racing crowd grew. In Pownall's time, when the Derby and Oaks had not been established forty-five years, the Derby attracted some sixty subscribers, and the Oaks about forty, of fifty guineas apiece, and Epsom was full to overflowing. The watering-place has become a circus. The race week brings down all London. "At an early hour in the morning, persons of all ranks, and carriages innumerable, are seen pouring into the town at every inlet. All the accommodations and provisions that the surrounding villages can supply are put in requisition." The royal family would come to look on; sixty thousand spectators, Pownall thinks, met on the downs.

But Pownall has nothing to say of the road. The road must have been the thing to see; not as we see it to-day, when motor cars start for the course before lunch instead of before breakfast, and luxurious railway trains draw decadent race-goers to Tattenham Corner. In the real Derby days all racing men that were men drove to Epsom, early in the morning, by the road. Four-in-hand coaches travelled level in the pack and the dust by costermongers' donkeys; at every inn there were touts and tipsters, haunting creatures with secrets of betting; they knew what would win outright and what would certainly lose; the Duke's trainer had whispered to them, the swindling Captain had tipped them the wink; you merely had to pay for the knowledge. Wayside strips of green were turned into cocoanut shies, wherever a man might wish to shy at nuts; clowns on stilts stalked in chequered blue; bare-legged boys and girls turned amazing Catherine wheels. There was the hill to finish with by the course, and the plaudits of the crowd for him who took his team up in spanking style. They still drive four-in-hand coaches up the hill; but the motor-horn follows the coach-horn.

Frith has made the Victorian Derby day immortal; a less well-known hand has written of what Frith painted. The author who signed himself "Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing scenes in the forties, has set down in his Bye-lanes and Downs of England a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose reading the list of heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace'; my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon Sunflower, the Assassin, and the flash grazier; the Dollar, hellite, billiard-marker, and bacon-factor; the ringletted O'Bluster, double-jointed publican, Leather lungs, and Handsome Jack contrasted in the pig's skin; and, ye Centaurs! what seats were there!" It must have been a sight for proper men to see. Not the veriest tailor would walk on Derby day. He "would mount a mis-teached hippogriff, and risk the chance of a purl, rather than not show at the covert-side." Who, indeed, would not bestride a steed when he might meet the Assassin and the O'Bluster in the ring? But there were others:—

At the time we write of, "Old Crutch," too, with his scaffolding under his arm, and disabled limb dangling like a loose girth from his rosinante's side, a quadruped equalling the Dollar's mount in beauty,—might have been seen side by side with Lord Chesterfield, on his thoroughbred, and addressing him in all the Timbobbinish horrors of his frightful vernacular. My lord was then in the zenith of his good looks and humour, and was, moreover, so well upon Cotherstone, that he saw graces in Old Crutch's physog, with the charming "thousand to forty" he hoped to draw him of on the Tuesday prochain,—that he joked and rattled with the uncouth old cripple in undisguised merriment. With these might have been noticed the elegant form of Lord Wilton, on his roan, shaded again by a round-shouldered knave from Manchester, with ungloved hands and snub nose, who had "potted the crack" for his special line of action. His yeoman Grace of Limbs, fresh and hearty as a summer gale, mounted on his Blue-eyed Maid, loomed in stalwart manhood by the side of some pallid greek or city trader, having a word of greeting and jollity for all alike, for he was there for the sake of sport, and had no anxiety beyond his "pony."

The Heavies, as Thornhill of Riddlesworth, Sir Hercules Fitzoutlawe, and poor fatty Sutherland, together with my Lord Miltown, from his not being particularly adapted for an equestrian display, appeared in their several chariots on the outskirts of the ring, an occasional lull in the wordy tumult permitting the Irishman's lisping scream to penetrate the dense and agitated circle, in his praiseworthy efforts to do business. Old Crocky, too, was there, mounted on a subdued wretch of the horse-species, tenanted, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, by the evil spirit of some defunct croupier, and ready to "return on the nick" as usual. In this "mess tossed up of Hockley-Hole and White's," in addition to our foregoing inventory, were dukes and butchers....

But these are perhaps enough. Has the crowd on the hill changed much since the forties? The Ring roars no longer round a gibbet, of course; a Grand Stand of vast dimensions overlooks the course from starting-gate to paddock; dukes no longer ride side by side with butchers to make bets. But the crowd itself, and what the crowd does, and what it sees and feels—all that, surely, has changed hardly at all. The gipsies still swarm, and the touts still swindle; the bookmakers, bedizened with belts of silver coin, and outlandish hats, and flaring assertions of personal integrity, still clamour by their blackboards; they still chalk up the odds they offer against horses whose names they mis-spell; the sun still shines on the jockeys' silk jackets; still, down a course cleared empty, distracted dogs rush madly; still, before the start for the great race, there broods over that huge concourse an intense, almost a dreadful silence; still there is the shout as the jackets flash from the starting-gate, still the hum as they sweep down the bend, the roar as they rush for the straight, the yell as the leader drops back, shoots out, thunders past the judge. All that remains, and will remain. But two changes are insistent. One is the motor-cars, which are all over the hill and almost everywhere else; but that is a permanent thing. The other is the advertisements on the kites. In the old days the downs lay under blue sky and white clouds. Now they lie, on Derby day, under strings of kites. You may go to Epsom to see horse-racing, but you will not escape soap, mustard, or pills.

Of Epsom's residents and neighbours, Lord Derby won the race named after him in 1787, and doubtless others have won since. But the best record belongs to the owner of Durdans, who won the Derby in 1894 with Ladas, in 1895 with Sir Visto, and in 1905 with Cicero; and who, in addition to his career as politician, man of letters, and owner of racehorses, has added difficulties to the tasks of other writers by contributing to Mr. Gordon Home's Guide to Epsom a discouragingly brilliant preface.