FRANCIS BUCKLE AND SOME OTHER FAMOUS RIDERS. 



401 



there had he not been "useful." He was thoroughly adept at the "cross and 

 jostle " of the North Country, and once nearly drove poor Mangles into the 

 Borough Bridge Road at Catterick, and on another occasion made every horse 

 except his own fairly run away at Richmond. But he was as honest as the 

 John Day whose monopoly of that epithet he strongly resented, and died from 

 an overdose of colchicum, borne with all the courage that his father had shown 

 at Culloden with the Duke of Cumberland. 



It was on Ben Smith, the last of our Northern four, that Pierse played one of 

 his best tricks, much assisted by Bill Scott. Ben succeeded Mangles with the 

 Duke of Hamilton, and on the only two mounts he had for Mr. Gascoyne he 

 wort, the Leger both 

 times, out of his total 

 score of six from 1803 

 to 1824. He was a 

 close - pocketed and 

 clean - mouthed man, 

 always neatly dressed. 

 He was so loyal that 

 he refused to get off the 

 Duke's Ironsides after he 

 had been badly kicked, 

 and won the race with 

 a broken leg ; and he 

 very rarely lost his 

 temper, being of a simple 



nature that rarely took offence, and never gave it in the most awkward 

 inadvertences of his speech. But he once tried to knee Jackson, and they 

 started cutting each other's jackets to ribbons before they returned peacefully 

 to weigh-in. He was up on Correggio one day in a two-mile race at Preston, against 

 Pierse and Scott. Their only chance was to make him lose his temper, which 

 Scott succeeded in doing with some very peppery language before a crowd of people, 

 and then made the pace at the start with Gaudy. When the leader was done 

 with Paulowitz was rammed in front at once, and Ben, who never got a ghost 

 of a chance of taking a pull, was beaten by half a neck ; but he never bore malice 

 about it, beyond thinking Scott was " a sadly forrard young man." This Bill 



Mr. Orde Powlett's "Jack Spigot" (1818) by " Ardrossan." 



