"Vie 6pettator," map 24t1), 1851
EPSOM RACES
IN point of numbers, the attendance on Epsom Downs on Wednesday, the seventy-second anniversary of "The Derby," was the greatest iner seen. The "Exhibition year" at Epsom will in this respect be memorable in turf chronicles. The weather was beautiful ; just enough rain fell early in the morning to lay the dust, and to enable Cockney beaux to dispense with those veils which are a notable feature of the concourse going and coming, which all Londoners not themselves at the races go to see in the streets of Southwark. The railways, warned by late disasters, organised their plans so fully and effectively that droves of passengers were conveyed with comparative com- fort as well as high velocity; it is said that the‘Brighton Railway alone carried nearly twenty thousand person i on that double journey, without any sort of accident. Of course there was a great addition of foreigners, bent on seeing how we manage this national sport on our own soil ; but the numbers of English were so prodigious that the foreign faces and garments seemed scattered but sparsely: and perhaps the immense concourse of ordinary vehicles was the reason for the opinion, expressed in one account, that there appeared a less proportion of the brilliant equipages which of yore were so splendid a feature of the great race meetings at Epsom and Ascot. The Police managed every- thing well ; so that, although nothing like so great a multitude was ever before seen on the Downs, there was no disorder, and no unwanted spoiling of innocent or unwary by the raptorial classes of our mixed society.
[There were thirty-three starters for the Derby—the largest field on record. The race was won by the favourite, Sir John Hawley's Teddington. , The Oaks was won by Lord Stanley's Iris.]
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