RACING AT THE DAWN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



341 



skill, I have no space to speak. "Old O." was great at discovering and winning 



them. He once backed his man to trundle a wheel faster than a certain speedy 



barber of Oxford Street could run the same distance unencumbered ; and as the 



terms of the bet specified that one of His Grace's own carriage- wheels must be 



employed, he had a long platform built, so that the axle might come to exactly the 



right height required by his performer, and won the bet. When he was Lord 



March, Messrs. Theobald Taafe and Andrew Sprowle were so unwise as to bet that 



he and Lord Eglinton would not carry one person on a carriage with four running 



wheels and four horses nineteen miles 



in one hour. Whereupon Lord 



March got Mr. Wright to build him 



a carriage weighing only 24 stone, 



including the postilion it carried, with 



a box seat of velvet hung with straps, 



and very thin leather harness covered 



with silk. The wheels had boxes 



built above them, which dropped oil 



gently on the axles, and the traces 



were so arranged that they would run 



back on springs instead of hanging 



slack. The two leaders, ridden at 



8st., were Mr. Greville's Tawney and 



Mr. Stamford's Roderick Random. 



The wheelers (/st.) were the Duke 



of Hamilton's Chance and Peeper. 



The course, on Newmarket Heath, 



lay between the Warren and the Rubbing Houses, through the Running Gap to the 



right, and three times round a circle of four miles, and back to the start. Lord March 



won easily, for the distance was done in 53 minutes 27 seconds. When the Prince of 



Wales was at Brighton, a number of less orthodox wagers were brought off, in which 



athletic ladies took a prominent part ; or Tom Onslow drove his phaeton and four 



at a gallop twenty times through the gates of Grove House ; or "a military gentleman, 



ridden by a jockey weighing 7st. slbs., booted and spurred, ran with a fat bullock 



unmounted across the Steyne for a hundred guineas," and won them easily against 



odds of four and five to one, about the same time as "Cripplegate" Barrymore rode a 



The Trimmed Cock. 



