NEWMARKET REMINISCENCES 183 



material foundation, but, oh ! Mr Marryott, you 

 acting for the Stewards, Directors of the Jockey 

 Club, did give sentiment a very nasty body-blow 

 and landed in a most tender place. 



How could you go for to do so, Mr M., and 

 yourself as prime mover, or merely active acces- 

 sory, in the fact, take away the Red Post, or allow 

 anyone else to lay hands on that sacred bit of 

 timber ? Rather should I have pictured author- 

 ity's representative leading a choral service, 

 assuring the ancient race mark of a kind of filial 

 reverence, attachment, and defiance to all and 

 sundry threatening it with damage, not to mention 

 tearing it up by its ancient roots, and casting the 

 relic away to be stuck up in a stableyard. Has 

 not the Jockey Club ever read, said, or sung 

 anyone of it, ''Woodman, Spare that Tree!" 

 Surely a version adapted to the object and 

 occasion must have suggested itself to many old 

 parties when they heard, too late, of this terrible 

 act of vandalism. Some years ago, when moving 

 off this object of interest in the neighbourhood 

 was half, only half, hinted at, a shudder spread 

 from the centre of information through the racing 

 world's constitution as ripples decentralise in a 

 pond from the splash of a stone. Several then 

 put in pleas for the woodman of the Heath to 

 spare that bit of a tree, associated with so many 

 stirring events to be remembered in the history 

 of English sport, mostly in Criterions and 

 Cambridgeshires. If I remember right, myself, 

 I treated the rumour as a very savage canard 

 indeed, and rated the story's materialisation as 

 an absurdity only to be equalled by the idea of 

 the Stewards selling the Bushes to warm bakers' 

 ovens. 



