view raw text
GOSSIP OF THE TURF. I Edward "Weatherby, former secretary of the English Jockey Club, and publisher of the Racing Calendar, is dead. The death of Edward "Weatherby removes one more link binding the past turf history of England to the present. For nearly a hundred and fifty years, without a break, the Weatherby family has filled the office of secretary of the Jockey Club, the first Secretary Weatherby having created the office in 1760. The first Secretary Weatherby founded the English Racing Calendar in 1773, and the family has maintained this time honored publication ever since. If any one family in the world has helped more than another to build up the national sport of racing, it has been the Weatherbys. They have always enjoyed the respect and esteem of the entire turf world. The property on whih the Messrs. Keene have built the new stable for their horses quartered at Newmarket, England, was purchased from Lord Rosebery, and is beautifully situated as racing quarters on the High street of the racing town. Matthew Allen had expressed himself as dissatisfied with his present quarters, which are situated at Exiling, a village on the outskirts of racing headquarters. Messrs. Keene gave him carte blanche to go ahead and find quarters to suit himself, and this new stable is the outcome. Newmarket is a long, straggling, overgrown village, the main feature of which is the High street, which not only divides Newmarket itself, but is the dividing line of two I counties, Rutland and Cambridge At one end of the village, the Bury end or call it town if you will is the main exercising ground, the Severals, and so on. At the other end the Cambridge end is the race course side, where Newmarket races are held. The finish of ,the celebrated Cambridgeshire is the nearest, approach of the race courses to Newmarket. The top of the Cambridgeshire hill the finish is where the downs first commence on the Cambridge side of the town. Oddly enough on the opposite, side of the Cambridge road to the finish of this big race is the Newmarket cemetery, where so many ; turf celebrities are now resting. Of the great eastern two-year-olds of 1901, not one raced to his first season form in 1902, and in the west McChesney alone made good. Tankee, Blue Girl, Goldsmith, Nasturtium, Endurance by Right, Heno, Dixie-line, Whisky King, Chilton, Compute and Abe Frank, for purse and fame winning purposes, were failures. William C. Whitney, president of the Saratoga Association, who seemed to hold the three-year-old situation in the hollow of his hand on January 1, 1902, finished the season with one second-rate stake for colts and two or three small filly purses to his credit. Neither Nasturtium nor Endurance by Right got to the post. Catarrhal fever put them both out of business before the post trumpet for the first race of the Morris Park spring meeting sounded on May 30. The colt stake Mr. Whitney got the Carlton was won by King Hanover, a son of Hanover Lady Agnes, he never had confidence in. Nothing could more forcefully illustrate the unfathomable uncertainty of the sport of kings and bring into prominence the unalterable fact that the wealthy man has no better than an even break with his rival not so well off in this worlds goods than Mr. Whitneys experience.
