Strix
Seven-League Bets
HE fatigue which, two generations ago, our fathers and grandfathers unflinchingly sustained, and the en- durance they showed, would be fatal to the effeminate constitutions and flaccid muscles of their unworthy descen- dants.' With this harsh, lugubrious comment a sporting paper of the time concluded its obituary of Squire Osbaldeston, who died in 1866. Following the unsuccessful attempt by three undergraduates to walk from Oxford to London at the end of last term, The Times has published a desultory series of letters recalling less abortive feats of pedestrianism; but I think most people would agree that the British put their powers of endurance to the test far less frequently, take far less pride in them and bet far less money on them than they did a hundred years ago.
In 1831, Osbaldeston, at the age of forty-seven, won a wager of £1,800 by riding 200 miles in under ten hours. He took, in point of fact, eight and three-quarter hours, used twenty-eight horses and trained for 'many weeks' by galloping sixty miles every morning. His was a spectacular achievement, . carried out over a course of four miles before a large audience at Newmarket; but the spirit of emulation was strong in those days, and soon afterwards, pounding dustily along the road from Madras to Bangalore, a Captain Home of the Madras Horse Artillery also covered—on, one imagines, worse horses and under more exacting conditions--200 miles in ten hours; while Mr. Bacon, of the Bombay Civil Service, went off at a tangent and put up a new kind of record by riding one camel 800 miles in eight days.
These particular feats, of course, would be difficult to replicate today, if only for economic reasons. But our fore- bears were always staging—mainly, it seems, for the hell of it—less elaborate trials of strength. Take, for instance, what happened on an August evening at Black Hall, near Banchory in Kincardineshire. The gentlemen had shot snipe all day, wading up to their waists in 'a large morass.' After dinner Sir Andrew Leith Hay bet Lord Kennedy £2,500 that he would get to Inverness on foot before him. They set off there and then, wearing evening dress, and each accompanied by an `umpire'; their servants caught ,them up after seven or eight miles with walking shoes to replace their pumps. Lord Kennedy struck across country, over the Grampians; his chal- lenger went by the coach-road, which was thirty-six miles farther.
They walked all that night, the next day and the next night; it rained all the time. Lord Kennedy reached Inverness at six o'clock on the morning of the second day, Sir Andrew Leith Hay four hours later. The umpire with Lord Kennedy, however, felt bound to report that the winner, 'then a good deal beaten, had leaned on the arm of his attendant in descend- ing and ascending the hills'; so it was decided to refer the matter to Captain Barclay, who had walked 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours and thus had some claim to be considered an authority in these contexts. But the bet was called off by mutual agreement before the arbiter had given his decision, which would (he afterwards revealed) have been in favour of Sir Andrew Leith Hay.
In those days, of course, if you wanted to have a bet, you had to arrange an event to bet on and find somebody to bet against. 'Matches' were not necessarily based on endurance tests or feats of strength, like the challenge, quite frequently issued, to carry any member of the company fifty yards before anyone else present could run a hundred. There was, for in- stance, the occasion when Captain Ross bet Mr. Fo'jambe £100 that he would shoot ten brace of swallows in a day with a pistol, using ball. Ross won this bet before breakfast, picking the birds off as they hovered, 'pretty stationary,' before entering their nests; the nests were at the top of a tower three storeys high. so Ross, whatever one thinks about his attitude to the swallows, must have been a proficient pistol-shot.
* * Today we can bet as much as we like, six days a week, on quadrupeds •which we have never seen and which belong to complete strangers, without any more exertion than is in- volved in making a telephone call; so one of the raisons d'etre for the sporting wager no longer exists. Another has been largely eliminated by the profusion of organised games and sports in which energetic people can sublimate their com- petitive instincts. If you feel like taking somebody else on at something, you arrange to meet him at the badminton club after office hours or on the golf course at the weekend; you don't suddenly bet him that you can walk a hundred miles across country faster than he can.
The incentive to perform these Homeric and eccentric exploits has disappeared; but, apart from this, I suspect that the ability to perform them is far rarer than it used to be. The population has largely ceased to use its legs in day-to-day life; and though a great many people 'take exercise' in their leisure hours, they take it in measured doses which are well within the limit of their physical capabilities. Children no longer walk to school unless the distance involved is negligible; ploughmen no longer homeward plod their weary way; soldiers only very rarely march. It will be several centuries before our legs reach the level of desuetude attained by the penguin's wings, but it rather looks as if that is the way they are going.
* * * I was talking the other day to an old man of eighty-five who used to be our head forester; we were discussing a wood which he had helped to plant over fifty years ago. 'Farquharson was head forester in those days,' he said. 'A very strong man and a good runner. We were allowed half an hour off for breakfast. Everybody else brought a bite of food with them, but Far- quharson always went home for his. He lived in the village. He was never late back.' The wood is just under two miles from the village, and Farquharson would not have become head forester before middle-age at the earliest. The particular sort of pride in their own powers which used to make men do that sort of thing is now, I think, very rare.
* * * But although these heroic figures were much admired, there must have been times when people got a bit fed up with their prowess; and in the pages of a splendid Victorian compilation called Sportascrapiana, which records some of their feats, there is no more human character than Thompson. He was not one of the giants; indeed, we do not know anything about him except that one day he was standing next to Osbaldeston at a pheasant shoot. The Squire was shooting particularly well; Thompson was not. At length the contrast between his neigh- bour's brilliance and his own ineptitude proved too much for his urbanity, and—'in an unguarded moment—Thompson turned to the great man and gave vent to his emotions.
your unerring tube!' cried Thompson.
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