FRANCIS BUCKLE AND SOME OTHER FAMOUS RIDERS. 389 



size, and enjoyed the inestimable advantage of being able to keep himself down 

 without wasting, the dangerous process that has killed off so many jockeys, however 

 skilfully the result of artificially decreasing the natural weight has been attained. 

 It must be remembered, however, that a jockey's life in the old clays was very 

 different to what it is when railways and motor cars and private carriages of every 

 sort whirl our luxurious horsemen up and down the country. William Day was 

 able to compare the two, and asks what modern jockeys would think of " riding over 

 Newmarket Heath with a light saddle round their waist, in their boots and breeches, 

 carrying their own saddles to the scales, and saddling their own horses ... or 

 riding from Exeter to Stockbridge on a small pony with their light saddle tied round 

 their waist after the races, and arriving at the latter place in time to ride there ; and 

 then starting in the same fashion for the Southampton Races." Frank Buckle 

 did more than his share of this sort of journeying, for after he had taken up his 

 residence at Peterborough he frequently started at an early hour to ride into 

 Newmarket, for a trial, rode home again and completed the ninety-two miles 

 (besides his work on the course) by six o'clock in the evening. For this he found it 

 necessary to keep some of the best hacks in the kingdom, and the constant exercise 

 involved no doubt helped as much as anything to keep him hard and light. 



Buckle's first wife, by whom he had no issue, lies buried at Newmarket ; but in 

 1807 ne married Miss Jane Thornton, of Lichfield, and after first residing at Orton 

 Longueville, in Huntingdonshire, where his three sons were born, he moved to 

 Peterborough, where he occupied one of Lord Fitzwilliam's farms, and very much 

 enjoyed stocking it with prime cattle in his few intervals of leisure. It was here 

 that he returned to die, after having gone to Bury St. Edmunds for a time, in 

 order to give his sons the benefit of education at the grammar-school there. All 

 three of them he left comfortably off, and though the youngest, who lived to be 

 ninety, was but nineteen at his death, the boy had been put in the way of becoming a 

 solicitor, while the two elder brothers took up the professions of a brewer and 

 a druggist, respectively. His second wife, who survived him several years, was 

 buried in Nunhead Cemetery, Camberwell ; and though a kinsman of his, known 

 as "young Buckle," showed fair proficiency as a jockey, the rest of his family were 

 carefully guarded from the possible evils of the profession he had chosen himself to 

 adorn, not only by being kept during their youth at some distance from its 

 metropolis, but by being actually forbidden to mention the subject of racing in their 

 conversation. The father need not have feared any rumour about himself coming 

 VOL. ii. 3 F 



