7 o 'THE DANEBURY CONFEDERACY: 



be attributed, if not the initiation, at least the 

 perfecting of this pernicious system. As to the state 

 of the turf at the time, and the manners of these its 

 parasites, let us hear what ' Sylvanus Urban ' has to 

 say, writing of the scene presented at Doncaster in 

 1832 : 



' We remember the scene in the betting-rooms at 

 Doncaster in Margrave's year, when old Frank 

 Eichardson, the blacksmith, a noted turfite, a man 

 who once confessed to a friend that nothing but 

 sobriety had kept him from being hanged, was tabled 

 in the room with the Bonds. The Bonds had a horse 

 in the St. Leger called Ludlow, and caused such a 

 scene in the room at Doncaster as will not be readily 

 forgotten by those who took part in it. These men 

 were tabled, with old Beardsworth of Birmingham — 

 formerly driver of a hackney-coach, but then keeper 

 of livery stables — Frank Eichardson, just named, and 

 a man called Wagstaff, an audacious fellow, whose 

 teeth literally fitted into each other, like two cross-cut 

 saws set together as a shark's ; and surely such a lot, 

 though magnates of the ring and turf, taking all in 

 all, were never brought before the public even at a 

 race-meeting. This was on the eve of the St. Leger, 

 when the din made by the Margrave clique, the Lud- 

 low tribe, and the Scott division, all yelling and blas- 

 pheming in concert, or rather discord, might, nay were, 

 heard in the theatre, though the building is situated 

 many streets distant from the boiling pandemonium. 



