A jockey’s tragic legacy
Titan of the Turf... John Vincent looks at the life and sad end of the 19th century’s greatest horse rider.
Think of the all-time great jockeys of British horseracing... Gordon Richards, Lester Piggott, Pat Eddery, Tony McCoy, Ruby Walsh, Ryan Moore. Then add another name you may not remember: that of Fred Archer.
In a career tragically cut short by his death at 29, he was Champion Flat Jockey for 13 years in a row, chalked up 2,748 winners, including 21 Classics, and boasted a winning strike rate of 33 per cent, far in excess of any other rider, past or present.
But while nature endowed him with fabulous skills on one hand, it took away with the other. The 19th century racing genius who won his first race as a child of 13, weighing just 4 stone 11lbs, grew to almost 5ft 10in – unfeasibly tall for a Flat jockey.
So began Archer’s inexorable decline, his ill-health and depression exacerbated by starving himself to maintain a racing weight of 8 stone 10lb. A poor walker and unable to run, he couldn’t lose weight by exercise so he took frequent Turkish baths and consumed exceptionally strong purgatives concocted by a Newmarket doctor. His typical daily diet was a sardine, an orange, a nip of castor oil, a small glass of Champagne and a single biscuit.
His tragic downward spiral reached it sad conclusion on November 8 1886. Morose and taciturn by nature and weighed down by depression, high fever and the loss of his wife in childbirth, he put a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He died in his sister’s arms and a coroner determined that he took his life “whilst in a state of unsound mind”.
Now a memento of the titan of the
Turf has gone under orders at Salisbury, Wiltshire, auctioneers Woolley & Wallis in the form of a pair of silver-mounted ox bone candlesticks by George Wish, of Suffolk Road, Sheffield. The candlesticks, which fetched
£1,250, bore shields marking Archer’s 1883 wedding to his racing trainer’s niece, Helen Dawson. After their ox roast reception in Newmarket, the femurs of the fore and hind legs were mounted in silver to form the two pairs of candlesticks.
A little more on Archer, whose father, William, was also a jockey, winning the Grand National on Little Charley in 1858. Archer Jnr. accumulated a vast fortune but squandered about £250,000 through gambling and became heavily indebted to underworld characters in London. Nicknamed The Tin Man for his love of money and miserliness, it is said he asked bystanders for coins to put in his breeches to increase his riding weight but never returned it.
Archer, greatest jockey of the 19th century, leaves a ghostly legacy. Over the years, several people, including jockeys, have reported seeing a strange shapeless, white form wandering about Newmarket racecourse, frightening the horses. It is said to be the ghost of a tormented Fred Archer...