The coach which I have selected by way of exemplifying my remarks was the “Warwick Crown Prince,” and, at the time I adopted it, was driven by Jack Everett, who was reckoned in his day to be as good a nurse, and to have fingers as fine, as anybody in the profession.
He took the coach from The Swan with Two Necks, in Ladd Lane, to Dunstable, and there split the work with young Johnson, who, though sixty years of age, had three older brothers on the bench. “Spicy Jack” was the beau ideal of a sporting whip. He was always dressed to the letter, though his personal appearance had been very much marred by two coach accidents, in each of which he fractured a leg. The first one having been hurriedly set a little on the bow, he wished to have the other arranged as much like it as possible; the result being that they grew very much in the form of a horse-collar. These “crook’d legs,” as he called them, reduced his stature to about five feet three inches. He had a clean-shaved face, short black hair, sharp intelligent blue eyes, a very florid complexion, rather portly frame, clad in the taste of the period: A blue coat, buttons very widely apart over the region of the kidneys, looking as if they had taken their places to fight a duel, rather than belonging to the same coat. A large kersey vest of a horsecloth pattern; a startling blue fogle and breast-pin; drab overalls, tightly fitted to the ankle and instep of a Wellington boot, strapped under the foot with a very narrow tan-coloured strap. The whole surmounted by a drab, napless hat, with rather a brim, producing a “slap-up” effect.
When at the local race-meetings, “Spicy Jack” dashed on to the course in a sporting yellow mail-phaeton, his whip perpendicular, his left hand holding the reins just opposite the third button of his waistcoat from the top. Driving a pair of “tits” which, though they had both chipped their knees against their front teeth, and one of them (a white one) worked in suspicious boots, produced such an impression upon the yokels that no one but “Spicy Jack” could come on to a racecourse in such form.[4]
All this appeared like “cheek,” but it was quite the reverse; for in spite of the familiarity which was universally extended to this “sporting whip,” he never forgot his place with a gentleman, and a more respectful man in his avocation did not exist.
“Well, Jack, what are we backing?” was the salutation of a noble lord who had given him a fiver to invest to the best of his judgment.
“Nothing, my lord; we are not in the robbery.”
“How’s that? we shall lose a race.”
“Well, you see, my lord, it was all squared and the plunder divided before I could get on.”