The Betting Ring. 5 1 



throat regularly after every Newmarket Meeting, till 

 the doctors knew exactly when to expect a sewing-up 

 summons, can find no imitators. About two hundred 

 men may be said to have had books in 1856, and 

 Messrs. Ives, Harry Hill, Warrington, Morris, Aaron 

 Worsley, G. Desboro', Hargreaves, Ishmael Fisher, 

 G. Reed, Howard, Onslow, Brabazon, Barber, F. Swin- 

 dells, Sargent, Adkins, Kimpton, C. Snewing, Sher- 

 wood, Justice, Portman, Whitbourne, Saxon, W. 

 Robinson, Jackson (" the coming man"), Pedley, G. 

 Hill, Bennett, &c., were popularly supposed to make 

 them at all figures, from io,ooo/. to iooo/. Foal books 

 have gone out of fashion, but Mr. Harry Hill had a 

 JO,ooo/. yearling one, and laid his hundred, seventy- 

 five, or fifty to one odds, according as he fancied the 

 pedigree of the yearling he laid against. To speak, 

 however, with any degree of accuracy as to book- 

 making would baffle even " The Wise Woman," as the 

 strangest canards are always floating about as to 

 " books" and winnings, and it is morally impossible to 

 separate what a man does on commission from what 

 he achieves on his own account Some few confine 

 themselves to commission business, the recognised re- 

 muneration for which is five per cent., the commis- 

 sioner taking all the risk. Old Michael Brunton used 

 to boast that he visited Doncaster (whose High-street 

 is always so redolent of toffy and " mellow peers") for 

 sixty-one years in succession, and made a grand 

 wind-up with Voltigeur's Cup day. Perhaps Frank 

 Garner, a farmer in Surrey, was one of the eldest 

 Ring-men we had, and visited Newmarket in 1855 

 for his fifty-first consecutive season ; and Fred Swin- 

 dells one of the cleverest. When the " Swindells' 

 attack" once opens on a horse it rarely fails to be his 

 crack of doom. A meteor occasionally starts up for 

 a season or two. Nine or ten years ago, two rose 

 almost together, and it was said that if Nottingham 

 had won the Cesarewitch, or Sting the Cambridge - 



E 2 



