The Appointment of a Steward

In the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre archives is a letter that sheds light on the rarely documented process of appointing officials to oversee races.

The letter is signed by J Benet Esq, sometimes written as Benett.

The letter is addressed to the subscribers to the races at Salisbury, referred to in the letter as Sarum, and is a reply to their invitation to be the Steward of their next race meeting.

The Steward's function was and still is to ensure that the rules of racing are observed. Stewards were first officially appointed in 1771. Before then, disputes had to be settled by a vote among the subscribers to the meeting

The Benetts of Norton Bavant, a long-established Wiltshire gentry family, were distantly related to the Bennetts (or Bennetts) of Pythouse, a few of whom had sat in Parliament in the seventeenth century. 

Benett’s grandfather, Thomas, of Norton Bavant, who married Etheldred, daughter of William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, purchased Pythouse in 1725 and died in 1754. His eldest surviving son, another Thomas, who controversially secured a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford in 1754 and was sheriff of Wiltshire, 1758-9, married in 1766 Frances (who died, childless, two years later), daughter of the Rev. Richard Reynolds, chancellor of the diocese of Lincoln, of Little Paxton, Huntingdonshire. With his second wife Catherine (d. 1780), whom he married in 1771, he had three sons and two daughters.

The tall and thin John Benett, whose elder brother Thomas died in 1789, evidently entered the Wiltshire yeomanry cavalry as a private soon after he came of age, as he later boasted of his long service record.
Following his father's death, 16 May 1797, he inherited, by his will of 23 July 1795, considerable wealth and properties in Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Somerset. He resided at Pythouse, which was extensively remodelled to his own architectural specifications, and greatly expanded and improved his agricultural estates, becoming a combative proponent of tithe commutation.

His house at Norton, which was occupied by his sisters Etheldred, a pioneering geologist, and Anna Maria, an amateur botanist, was in William Cobbett’s favourite part of the country despite derisorily dubbing Benett ‘the gallon loaf man’.

Cobbett admitted that if Benett would give him a farm there, ‘I would freely give up all the rest of the world to the possession of whoever may get hold of it. I have hinted this to him once or twice, but I am sorry to say that he turns a deaf ear to my hinting’. Although strongly Whig in his political outlook, he had no time for radicals, condemning, for instance, the activities of Henry Hunt, an old antagonist, when supporting a loyal address to the prince regent at the Wiltshire county meeting in March 1817. Hunt, who in turn held Benett in contempt, called his speech on that occasion ‘a violent, dastardly and unmanly attack upon me’ and commented that ‘he knew that his dirty hirelings would protect him against a reply from me, and he therefore gave a-loose to a most malignant spirit’. A swaggering squire, Benett, foreman of the Wiltshire grand jury (from 1820), had a reputation for oppressing his tenants.5 The Irish poet Tom Moore, who subsequently became a friend of the family, described him in 1818 as a very haranguing-minded gentleman - his wife odious - full of airs, with a hard, grinding Tartar voice, and presuming beyond anything.

Sir 

I am very sensible of the honor [sic] you & the Gentlemen intend me in offering me the stewardship of the next Sarum Race, & no consideration would induce me to decline such an offer but my being a complete stranger to horse race concerns.

Since however you are so good as to promise me assistance, of the Gentleman who are encouraged by the Racers that desire me to serve the Races I will however unequal impose on it and in proof of my reading a coming with yours & with their wishes.

J Benets Esq

Bath Races 1756

In 1756, a two-day Bath race meeting took place on Claverton Down on Wednesday 22nd and Thursday 23rd of September.

Any owner who wished to enter his, almost all owners were men, had to take their horse to The Lamb Inn in Bath, which was overseen by a Mrs Figg, on Saturday the 18th. 

The Lamb Inn was on Stall Street in Bath. The more recent establishment, the Lamb and Lion on Lower Borough Walls is a remodelling of the Lamb's stables. It is known that the Lamb was an Inn by 1718 but had probably been established at least a century before. By 1756, the Inn was the starting point for coaches to Devon and Cornwall [2]

At the inn, the owners would need to provide evidence that their horse met the qualifying conditions for the race they wished to enter. This was usually done via a Certificate completed in a standard format, as in the example below from the Sporting Kalendar of 1755.

If the certificate was not produced on the Saturday it had to be shown before the race.

Both races require at least three horses in each race to be 'reputed Running horses &c'. Owners had to pay a two guineas entrance if a subscriber to the meeting and, in addition, a five-shilling fee to the clerk of the Course; a non-subscriber had to pay three guineas and five shillings to the Clerk of the Course or pay double at the starting post. If only one horse was entered for a race, the owner would be given Ten Guineas and have his entrance money returned. Any disputes and objections were to be settled by 'Gentlemen at the Stand', i.e. those who had subscribed to be in the grandstand.

At the races, horses could only be fitted with their racing plates by one of the Smiths, who had half a guinea for the privilege. People who wanted to set up a stall to sell liquor on the Down had to pay a fee of one guinea. 

Horses placed either first or second on the first day were forbidden from entering races on the second day.

On both days, the organisers promoted backsword contests on the course to add to the entertainment. Backsword contests involved fencing with the wooden sticks used for training in the use of single-edged weapons.

The first day of the meeting consisted of a race for a £50 purse for any horse that had not won the value of fifty pounds in 1756 (matches between two horses were not included in this calculation).  The race was a handicap with five-year-olds carrying eight stone seven pounds and six-year-olds carrying nine stone seven pounds. Older horse (referred to as aged) twelve stone. As happens today, the bridle and saddle were included in these weights. The race consisted of three four-mile heats.[1]

This race was won by Mr Corker's Dishonesly, a 6-year-old bay horse. It is not certain who Mr Corker was, but he may have been a scion of the Cornish Corkers who were prominent in the African slave trade.

The next day, Thursday the 23rd, the race was for a purse of fifty pounds and was open to any horse, mare or gelding that had yet to win more than one fifty-pound plate in 1756. As with Wednesday, the race was a handicap with five-year-olds carrying ten stone four pounds; six-year-olds carrying seven stone four pounds. Older horse (referred to as aged) twelve stone. This race was also run over three four-mile heats. This race was won by Lord Craven's chestnut horse, Barforth Ball.

Lord Craven was Fulwar Craven, 4th Baron Craven (died 10 November 1764), educated at Rugby School and Magdalen College, Oxford. He became High Steward of Newbury and was about to stand for Parliament for Berkshire when his brother William's death in 1739 brought him the Barony of Craven.
He was famously fond of racing and hunting, hunting on his Berkshire estates at Hamstead Marshall and Ashdown Park, keeping his own stud of racehorses and founding a racecourse at Lambourn. He and his brother William founded the Craven Hunt, and he appears in James Seymour's 1743 A Kill at Ashdown Park. 

Via the Tate Gallery

Craven resided at Coombe Abbey, near Coventry in Warwickshire, when not hunting. He continued to hunt until his death at old Benham Park in 1764 after a long illness. He was buried at Hamstead Marshall and, being unmarried and childless, was succeeded by his nephew William. The early Craven Barons had been soldiers and courtiers and, as a result of the service, had gained large colonial estates, particularly in America.

The Barforth part of the winner's names suggest breeding for on one the horse of the Croft family stud at Barfoth in Country Durham whose stud and breeding lines were important in the creation of the thoroughbred race horse.

1. Boddely’s Bath Journal August 16th 1756
2. Bath Pubs Kirsten Elliot and Andrew Swift