Another gruesome episode of the Turf was the suicide of Mr Roger Brograve early in June 1813, owing to losses by betting. He was the brother of Sir George Brograve, and had been a captain in the 2nd Dragoons, and for some years had betted heavily. Originally, he had a competent, if not a splendid fortune, but, at the previous Newmarket meeting, he had lost heavily, and he was known to have lost £10,000 on the Derby. This he could not meet, and he shot himself. Hundreds of similar cases might be given, but this one must serve as an example. That large sums were wagered and lost and won at this time we may learn from the fact that in 1816 no less a sum than £300,000 is said to have been paid and received at Tattersall’s in the betting settlement on that year’s Epsom races.
Of the origin of bookmaking, Mr Dixon (The Druid) has written so well in The Post and the Paddock, that I cannot do better than copy him verbatim:
“Betting between one and the field was the fashion which Turf speculation assumed in the days of powder and periwigs, and Ogden (the only betting man who was ever admitted to the Club at Newmarket), Davies, Holland, Deavden, Kettle, Bickham, and Watts, ruled on the Turf ‘Change. With Jem Bland, Jerry Cloves, Myers (an ex-butler), Richard (the Leicester Stockinger), Mat Milton, Tommy Swan of Bedale (who never took or laid but one bet on a Sunday), Highton, Holliday, Gully, Justice, Crockford, Briscoe, Crutch Robinson, Ridsdale, Frank Richardson, and Bob Steward, etc., the art of bookmaking arose, and, henceforward, what had been more of a pastime among owners, who would back their horses for a rattler when the humour took them, and not shrink from having £5000 to £6000 on a single match, degenerated into a science. All the above, with the exception of two, have passed away, like the Mastodons, never to return. Nature must have broken the mould in which she formed the crafty Robinson, as he leant on his crutch, with his back against the outer wall of the Newmarket Betting Rooms, and, with his knowing, quiet leer, and one hand in his pocket, offered to ‘lay agin Plenipo.’
“The two Blands, Joe and ‘Facetious Jemmy,’ were equally odd hands. Epsom had fired up the latter’s desire to come on to the turf, and he descended from his coachman’s box at Hedley for that purpose, and sported his ‘noble lord’ hat, white cords, deep bass voice, and vulgar dialect, on it, for the first time, about 1812. He did not trouble it much after he had ‘dropped his sugar’ on Shillelah, though that contretemps did not completely knock him out of time. His acute rough expressions, such as ‘never coomed anigh,’ and so on, as well as his long nose, and white, flabby cheeks, made him a man of mark, even before he got enough, by laying all round, to set up a mansion in Piccadilly. Joe, his brother, had, originally, been a post boy, and rose from thence to be a stable keeper in Great Wardour Street; but, the great hit of his life was his successful farming of turnpike gates, at which he was supposed to have made about £25,000. ‘Ludlow Bond’ was not so coarse in his style as this par nobile, but ambitious and vain to the last degree. It was the knowledge of this latter quality, on the part of Ludlow’s real owners, ‘the Yorkshire Blacksmith & Co.,’ which induced them to put him forward as the ostensible owner of the horse, as no one would back a horse which was known to be theirs. Bond liked the notoriety which this nominal ownership conferred on him, and was, no doubt, a mere puppet, without exactly knowing who pulled the strings. Discreditable as the affair was, he always gloried in it; in fact he was so determined not to let the memory of it die out, that he christened a yearling which he bought from the Duke of Grafton, ‘Ludlow Junior.’ At times he appeared on the heath on a grey hack, and went by the nickname of ‘Death on the Pale Horse’ and, shortly after the Doncaster outburst, he came on in a handsome travelling carriage, with two servants in livery in the rumble.
“Mr Gully, although he did great execution at the Corner in Andover’s year, may be styled a mere fancy bettor now, and, as a judge of racing and the points of a horse combined, he has scarcely a peer among his own, or the younger generation of turfites. His fame at the Corner was at its zenith a quarter of a century ago, when he was a betting partner with Ridsdale. Rumour averred that they won £35,000 on Margrave for the St Leger (1832), and £50,000 on St Giles for the Derby; and it was in consequence of a dispute as to the Margrave winnings, that the Siamese link between them was so abruptly dissolved. Their joint books also showed a balance of £80,000 if Red Rover could only have brought Priam to grief for the Derby. There was a joke too, soon after this time, that Mr Gully and his friend Justice descended on to Cheltenham, and so completely cleaned out the local ring there, that the two did not even think it worth while stopping for the second race day. One of the lesser lights was found wandering moodily about the ring on that day, and remarked to a sympathiser that he was ‘looking for the few half crowns that Gully and Justice had condescended to leave.’”
In the second quarter of this century the Turf was getting in a scandalous condition. A fair race was hardly known for the St Leger, and, in 1827, Mameluke was got rid of by a series of false starts. In 1832 was the Ludlow scandal, just alluded to. This horse was the property of a man named Beardsworth, who was such a rogue that no one would bet on or against his horse, so it was apparently purchased by Ephraim Bond, the keeper of a gambling house, called the Athenæum Club, in St James’s Street. In reality it was owned by four people, Beardsworth, Bond and his brother, and a mysterious fourth party, whose name was not divulged. Ludlow was beaten by Margrave, a horse owned by Gully, the ex-prize fighter, who boldly accused Squire Osbaldistone of being the unknown fourth owner of Ludlow. The consequence was a duel, in which both combatants had very narrow escapes; Gully especially, for his opponent’s bullet went through his hat and ploughed a furrow in his hair.
In 1834 Plenipotentiary, or as it was called for brevity, Plenipo, the favourite for the St Leger, was undoubtedly “nobbled,” either by his owner, Batson, or his trainer, George Paine, either of which were capable of any dishonourable conduct.
There were, afterwards, many minor Turf scandals, but they culminated in the Derby of 1844 which is known as Running Rein’s Derby, which ran as a three-year-old, being in reality four years. As this fraud was the subject of an action, its story may be well told in the following synopsis of the trial.