OF THE SADDLE AND SIRLOIN CLUB 205 
A MAN OF A THOUSAND TALENTS 
80. “A long green coat with velvet collar and big yellow but- 
tons, a colored handkerchief, long yellow cashmere vest, knee- 
breeches, very wide top boots, and plain black hat,” thus cata- 
logs WM. McCompie the “plain” dress of the gentleman of Ury, 
Capt. BarcLay. He was acknowledgedly the greatest all around 
sportsman of his day, active in fox hunt, prize ring, and local 
regiment, performer with courser and coach, claimant to the 
earldom of Airth and Monteith, apologist for Quaker and finan- 
cier for tenant farmer, the very cornerstone of the Shorthorn 
foundation in Aberdeenshire. Of manly scope himself, all of 
his operations breathed of bigness. “His cattle must be up to 
their knees in grass and his wheat-wagons with four or six horses 
and the drag on seemed like an earthquake to the Aberdonians 
when they rumbled down Marischal street to the harbor. Well 
might the surveyor tremble by reason of them for the safety 
of the Old Bridge.” McComsir asserts that “his horses were 
the strongest and his fields the largest in the country. He once 
said that he did not like a field in which the cattle could see 
one another every day.” Ury embraced some 4,000 acres, of 
which four hundred were in highest tilth, reclaimed from the 
stony littoral of the Grampians’ Pleistocene. 
His Shorthorn operations opened in 1822, but his success was 
grounded in the purchase of Lady Sarah in the dispersion of 
Mason of Chilton’s herd in 1829. Her son Monarch, dropped 
soon after her arrival at Ury, was rebred to her and from this 
union came the foundation bulls of Ury’s success, the notable 
Mahommed and Sovereign. Sold out of the herd, the former 
bull was repurchased on the basis of his breeding successes 
elsewhere, and remained in the herd until 1841. In 1838 the 
first herd, with the exception of Mahommed, was dispersed to 
tide the Captain over financial difficulties, some eighty head real- 
izing a total of 3,000 guineas. The Lady Sarah blood was par- 
