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CHAPTER IV 
Several other sporting notabilities have been given the credit 
for sending Fred Archer to Mr. Dawson, Mr. John Dawson says : 
" No doubt my uncle would have taken Archer on his father's 
recommendation alone. William Archer was himself a well- 
known steeplechase jockey. He had won the Grand National, 
which is quite enough to say as to his knowledge of horseman- 
ship. Trainers get scores of letters about boys, it is true, and 
if a friend of Mathew Dawson's wrote to him, saying : ' There 
is a little boy down here in Cheltenham, a huntsman's son, or 
a jockey's ' or what not, he would as likely as not have written 
and said : ' Send him along, and I'll see what he can do.' All 
the same, boys are as thick as blackberries, and trainers are 
far from likely to write for them ; as a rule, they can get all they 
want without any trouble. William Archer's position in the 
world of sport was such that he could, as he would naturally, 
do the best he could for his son without any help from any- 
body, and he took him to my uncle, who was about at the top 
of his profession. There are always a lot of stories about 
racing matters, just as there were forty men in Newmarket and 
about five hundred in England who just escaped buying The 
Tetrarch as a yearling, only that another man did." 
When William Archer took Fred to Heath House he stayed 
with Mr. Dawson for a week, and saw his son have a leg up 
with the other boys at headquarters, the morning after his 
arrival. 
This was in February, 1866. At the end of the week Mathew 
47 
