Newmarket at other than race-times does by no means proclaim its occupation to the chance traveller along the road. He must rise betimes and fare forth early who would see the sheeted racers going to or returning from their morning gallops; but such an early riser will find much to impress him. Two thousand horses are in training at Newmarket, but only he who in the brisk and racing early hours of the day sees the long processions belonging to the various owners filing at a walk along the High Street can realise the fact. Many a poor body is less warmly and comfortably clad than a racehorse out for his morning constitutional. Horse-cloths made with as much attention to individual fit as given one’s own overcoat cover their bodies and necks, and even clothe heads and ears, and are all decorated with the owner’s monogram. The trainer watches these morning gallops from the back of his own serviceable nag, and notes their “form” with the eye of a general officer inspecting troops. But he does not, as an American writer artlessly tells us, “amble by on his old-fashioned Suffolk Punch.” This little quotation shows you the danger of using terms not properly understood; for a Suffolk Punch is a horse of the dray-horse kind, and of the breed often used in ploughing; furrow, if not thoroughbred, and a thought too substantial for a saddle-horse.
The trainer keenly watches these trials, and so also do certain knowing gentlemen to whom the offensive name of “touts” is given. It is the business of their kind to study that “form” for the benefit of those who read the sporting papers, and to telegraph the performances day by day, so that the British working man, who so largely supports the bookmakers and the half-penny evening papers that thrive on the prognostications of “Captain Coe” and “Old Joe,” may study the “form” aforesaid. With their heads filled with jargon of this kind, the working men and others, whose knowledge of a horse does not go far beyond the ability to distinguish his head from his tail end, are firmly of opinion that they can spot winners. That they are not often so fortunate does not discourage them, and when the tipsters fail, as in a very large proportion of cases they do, they keep a faith that in this otherwise sceptical world is as touching as it is uncommon.
The life of a tout is infinitely better than once it was, in the days when they were severely mauled by trainers unwilling that the doings of their horses should thus be made public. But it was long ago made clear that, even under the worst conditions, information would by some means be obtained, and so, furnished with field-glasses of the best, they, unmolested, garner up the lore of their craft day by day; and the trainer, conscious of the fact that his stables at least can be made to hold their secrets, if the gallops no longer can, is found often in amicable intercourse with these gleaners of useful knowledge.
It is a healthy life for all concerned, for the country is a bracing one and the hours are early. To each horse on these early morning trials is his attendant lad: apprentices of the training-stable, with everything possible to them in the way of professional prizes. They may develop as jockeys or as trainers on their own account, or may perhaps go to the Devil in many of the easy ways that racing affords. But there are few or no lads in any profession you like to name smarter in personal appearance or better disciplined than the apprentices and stable-boys of Newmarket. The modern trainer, with the consideration and income of an ambassador, the authority of the headmaster of a public school, and the domestic appointments of a prince of commerce, is the benevolent autocrat of his establishment. His lads have no excuse for outside pleasures, for he provides them with billiard-rooms, newspapers, and magazines, and every imaginable comfort of a well-appointed club, with the result that the well-known enthusiasm for and belief in horses trained at Newmarket in general becomes crystallised into an esprit de corps for particular stables. The whole profession has been revolutionised in every grade and in most methods. The jockey who used to reduce the “too, too solid flesh” that troubled even Hamlet—who had not the jockey’s excuse for ridding himself of it—by the heroic and uncomfortable course of wearing two pairs of trousers, five or six waistcoats, two or more coats, and then walking seven or eight miles in all that clothing, now adopts other methods—greatly to the sorrow of the local tailors. Those old-time jocks who thus mortified the flesh must surely command our retrospective sympathy, for they did not merely so dress and so walk, but, coming to some inn at the end of the prescribed miles, took a seat by a roaring fire, and, piling on more clothes, sweated away the avoirdupois at a truly alarming rate until it was time to tramp home-along. Turkish baths nowadays perform the same office with little trouble, and jockeys more than usually keen on reducing weight take medicines in addition. It was through the severity of this self-adopted course that Archer brought himself into the low and feverish state in which he committed suicide.
But who would not be a successful jockey in these days of high retaining fees, special rewards, and popular favour? From the worldly point of view, judging things from the purely monetary standpoint, such an one looks down from his pinnacle upon the whole bench of Bishops, upon the Army, the Navy, the Church, the Stage, Literature, Art, and all the things that really count. You may not like it, but—“there you are,” and it is useless to point out that the old verb “to jockey” means “to cheat, to trick,” and must have derived from this profession. To one who might so point out this derivation, an obvious retort could be made that things have changed, and that as actors have risen from being in the eyes of the law mere roguish vagrants and “players of interludes,” so jockeys may now be honourable men. We cannot hark back to the times when every jock was made keep his place, and was paid less than his worth, instead of absurdly more.
What were the rewards of the jockey in those days? He received five guineas if he won and three if he lost, and when a former Duke of Grafton sent his jockey two five-pound notes after winning both the One Thousand and the Two Thousand Stakes, with the injunction to “take care of them,” he was thought generous. In these days no jockey of repute, with the winning of classic races to his record, will get into the saddle for a smaller fee than £1,000, win or lose
