PREFACE. xi 



The Navy has always been well represented on the Turf, and if Lord William 

 Bereslord's brother has carried on traditions which had been handed down by 

 Admiral Rous, by Lord Glasgow, or by Captain the Hon. Robert Spencer, these in 

 turn inherited the manly taste for sport from such old sailors as that Captain I'.yron 

 who took his son of thirteen to see Mr. Thornhill's Sai/or win the Derby, with Sam 

 Chifney up, in 1820, in appropriately nautical " weather," for the wind and rain were 

 so boisterous that the coach in which the Duke of York and the Duke of Clarence 

 (afterwards William IV.) had driven to Kpsom was overturned. The Captain could 

 remember Nelson talking at dinner about the danger of attacking land fortifications 

 from the sea. He could remember the triumph of the wooden walls of Old F.ngland 

 in the death-struggle with Napoleon the Great. He only just escaped capture when 

 commanding the frigate " Belvedere " in the war between Great Britain and the United 

 States ; and, after beating off the enemy's attack, he sailed into Halifax with three 

 other hostile ships in tow, which he had captured as a slight return for the trouble 

 that had been given him earlier in the voyage. But it was on that famous tight 

 which his good friend Broke had fought on board the handy frigate " Shannon " that 

 Captain Byron was most happy to dilate. The glorious battle with the "Chesapeake," 

 and the no less glorious defeat of the "Guerriere" by the American warship "Constitu- 

 tion," were the favourite stories of the old sailor round his own fireside. His son 

 never forgot them, and from his first Derby in 1X20 until the Duke of Westminster's 

 Ormonde defeated Minting and Bcndigo at Ascot, William Byron's tall, spare figure 

 was to be seen on every racecourse, the last of those gentleman bookmakers who 

 followed in the footsteps of Lord George Bentinck, of Captain Braba/on, of General 

 Anson, or Lord Strafford. He invested his money on the field on steadfastly com- 

 mercial principles, and he stuck to his fancy with as strong a courage as his lather 

 had ever shown upon the sea. He had seen Surplices double victory in 1848 ; he had 

 seen the mighty struggle for the great Doncaster Cup of 1850, and I- lying Dutch- 

 man's vengeance over Voltigenr in the year after. He died in his ninety-sixth year in 

 the first weeks of the twentieth century, and his name is almost an epitome of Turf 

 history beyond the memories of any of the friends he left behind him. 



There is one coincidence suggested to me by the records of 1900 which may help 

 as much as anything to transport my readers' imagination with a somewhat greater 

 gentleness than usual to that " far backward and abysm of time." when records of 

 interest to racing began. It is, that almost exactly a century before the heir to 

 Queen Victoria's throne was winning the Derby, a little race meeting was being held, in 



