Mr. Payne 



we arrive at being based on the fact that when only ten years 

 of age, he not only took part in a four-mile point-to-point 

 steeplechase, but actually finished third. 



After leading for a considerable distance, Primrose, the 

 old hunter he was riding, came down, and her youthful pilot 

 being too short of stature to climb into the saddle again, 

 without assistance, had to bide his time until some one gave 

 him a friendly leg up. Needless to say his plucky effort met 

 with its due reward in the hearty cheering which greeted his 

 incoming, it being the consensus of opinion that but for the 

 mishap just described, the ancient Primrose and her youthful 

 jockey must inevitably have won. 



Born at Southminster in Essex on July 13th, 1883, the 

 subject of our memoir donned silk for the first time on Muscatel, 

 at Kimbolton, in 1898, his first winning mount being on Buttons 

 at Leicester in the same year. 



So well did he shape that his services were soon in general 

 request, and from that time until 1907, at the back end of 

 which year he had the misfortune to break his thigh — the 

 only injury of any consequence he had ever incurred during his 

 riding career — he rode with great success at all the principal 

 cross-country meetings in the country, his winning mounts 

 during that period numbering one hundred and sixty, the 

 most important of them being on Laplander and Lawrence, 

 the latter of whom he rode to victory thirteen times in 

 succession. 



For the last three years, Dick Payne, as he is familiarly 

 called, has trained and ridden the chasers belonging to Mr. 

 Romer Williams, at whose stables in Northamptonshire he 

 resides, and it was whilst riding one of them in a wind-up 

 gallop that he met with the accident just alluded to. 



The good sportsman in question, who is one of the staunchest 



463 



