UPON TRAINERS. 203 



' Dicky Watt ' was pronounced by Lord George Bentinck to be 

 the finest judge of a yearling in the world, and many a lesson 

 in Turf management and in the mysteries of pedigrees was 

 imparted to the future owner of Crucifix by the owner of Black- 

 lock in the Bishop Burton paddocks. 



Concerning William Chifney, the last of the five trainers 

 whom we have included in the first chapter of our trilogy, a 

 volume might easily be written. It was the custom to speak of 

 him and of his still more famous jockey brother, Samuel, 

 habitually as ' the Chifneys ; ' but all the credit of training 

 Priam, Zinganee and Shillelagh rested with William, the elder 

 of the two. It is but four-and-twenty years since William 

 Chifney died at the age of seventy-eight, but no Turf writer of 

 a younger generation had energy or curiosity enough to gather 

 up from his lips the fragments that remained, so that nothing 

 might be lost. 



For years before his death (says Mr. Rice, in his * History of 

 the British Turf), William Chifney had been in very poor circum- 

 stances, living in the model lodging-houses at Pentonville, and 

 getting down to his dear Heath when the state of his exchequer 

 admitted of a third-class return ticket to Newmarket. Even then 

 he was sometimes too feeble to get farther than the top of the 

 town, where, with his back to the cemetery wall, he would watch 

 the horses returning to the stables after the races. When it was 

 one of his good days, he braved the blasts of the Heath in an 

 ancient blue coat, and a hat made secure by a parti-coloured ban- 

 dana. In appearance he was like a tall, thin, elderly clergyman, 

 and rather lame ; but he retained all that high-bred manner which 

 marked him as a relic of the Prince Regent's prime. He was gar- 

 rulous, and laudator temporis acti. In his London lodging, or at 

 a Newmarket tavern, he would occasionally gather round him a 

 knot of such as were willing to listen to the traditions of the giants 

 of old. Of his father, of Buckle and Robinson, of Conolly and his 

 own nephew, Frank Butler, he would talk by the hour, but his 

 brother, Sam, he rather affected to pooh-pooh. Then, with pipe 

 in his mouth and a mug of ale before him, William Chifney be- 

 came ' Sir Oracle,' though it was of men rather than horses that 

 he discoursed, Zinganee being the only animal he ever mentioned 

 with pride. 



