The Life of Fred Archer 4t 
though Mr. Sam Brooks speaks of a Mr. Lewis who kept Hygeia 
House School also in Archer's time, and says that he had a 
wooden leg with which he used to inflict corporal punishment on 
his pupils. Mr. Alfred Holman, the well-known trainer, was 
at Hygeia House, but not with Fred. He was a day boy, and 
used to stray over to the King's Arms to hear some of the 
wonderful yarns in which William Archer excelled. Mr. 
WilUam Villar, the late Mr. Fred Taylor, and the late Mr. 
Herbert Mills were all at Hygeia House with Fred and Charlie 
Archer. Charlie is said by at least one competent judge to 
have ridden better than Fred as a boy. Fred apparently 
could neither read nor write much when he left for New- 
market. There he attended a night school. 
Mrs. Pratt said : 
" Mother was vexed because Fred would be away from school 
all but about two days a week. And father encouraged Fred 
in his riding. In spite of anything mother could say about 
wasted opportunities, father would retort : ' Let the lad alone ; 
he'll make more out of his riding than he ever will out of his 
book-learning.' But as a result of this Fred grew up very 
badly educated. He could sign cheques and write a good hand 
when he liked, but he generally employed somebody else to 
write all his letters, and I don't think we have kept any of 
those that he wrote himself. I remember that I tore one up not 
long ago that he sent me just after he won the Derby on 
Melton, when he sent me a present. 
It is not surprising that young Fred Archer's thoughts 
were chiefly about horses. At three he was always riding on 
the back of his long-suffering uncle Hayward, while whenever 
he got a chance he would steal into the stables and climb 
on to the horses' backs. He used to look up at the groom in a 
wistful sort of way and say : "I shall ride when I am bigger, 
shan't I ? " 
The accounts of eye-witnesses who saw and heard Fred 
Archer's education by his father show that the cross-country 
