Imagine Ryan Moore getting caught on the line by a rival’s late spurt at the end of a Newmarket race and being so upset that he goes to bed without supper, crying like a baby. Then imagine him offering to recompense the owner personally for his lost bets. That is how the popular George Fordham, champion jockey 14 times between 1855 and 1871, behaved after losing that way in 1962. Famed for his scrupulous honesty in the days when racing was riddled with corruption, Fordham has attracted less attention than his younger rival Fred Archer, known as ‘the Tin Man’ for his relentless pursuit of money. But when the two of them met in the two-horse matches that were common at the time, it was Fordham ‘the Demon’ who regularly came out on top. Archer may have won five Derbies to Fordham’s single victory in 22 attempts, but the latter’s record of seven 1,000 Guineas victories among his 16 Classics still stands.
Rivals say that the hardest thing when riding against Ryan Moore is trying to gauge from his demeanour any clue as to how well or badly his mount is going. Fordham was also known as ‘the Kidder’, often fooling his opponents into employing the wrong tactics. He preferred a gossamer touch on the reins to his rivals’ frantic whip-wielding and spur gouging and even today’s jockeys would benefit from studying his sympathetic views on how to ride two-year-olds. In The Demon (AuthorHouse), Michael Tanner reminds us how in the Victorian era, with horses an everyday sight, racing was the most widely supported sport both among the public and the massive-stakes gamblers of high society. The top jockeys were richly rewarded — a ‘present’ of £500 for a big race victory was common — but lives were shorter. Fordham was not the only jockey of his time to die of pulmonary tuberculosis.
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