DEATH OF A SPORTING CELEBRITY

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 520, 15 May 1880, Page 3

DEATH OF A SPORTING CELEBRITY

In obscurity, poverty and paralysed old age, there has lately passed away, within a mile of the little town of Wantage, Berkshire, England, one who some quarter of a century since was by no means tbo least conspicuous and successful of his time as an owner and trainer of race horses. Tom Parr was once a. most prominent, figure, upon every English racecourse, but it is long since bis most famous horse, Fisherman, started in one hundred and twenty races and won seventy, including twentysix Queen’s Plates. He had outlived the record of his many brilliant coups upon tbe turf, and also the memory of the few veterans who still live to take interest in the sport which he loved so well. There have hem few connoisseurs in the present century who had a keener eye for the points of a horse, whcthcryearling, orin maturity, than the rough country I vainer who once made Benhcins, in Berkshire, a name of terror to his racing and betting contemporaries. Between Tom Parr and the most successful and fashionable trainers of bis own and of (he present day there was irreconcilable difference. He bold—and his success for twenty years lent no s’ight weight to his opinion—that, in most, if not all, of our English training stables the racehorse is habitually treated too delicately and tendcriy ; that the boxes in which most of bis life is passed are kept at too high a temperature ; that the animal himself is too much swaddled in clothing ; and that the daily long or short gallops to which he is subjected when in preparation are less conclusive to condition, and above all, to staying qualities* than long walking exorcise ami many long hours passed in the open air. Tom Parr’s stables, oven in winter, were kept at so low a temperature that his visitors shivered, despite their thick grey coats, wheu they repaired to Beiihams in cold weather, and entered the box in which, with one light rug over his loins, a Rataplan or a Fisherman was in course of being got ready for an approaching race. “ The horse”—such was the exclamation constantly upon the old trainer’s lips—“is naturally a hardy animal,"and half .the accidents, and more especially his aptitude for breaking a blood vessel, are the direct results of penning'■him hp in a hot stable,! where ho breathes an unnatural atmosphere and is managed as though he were a sensitive woman.” Enforcing this dictum, Torn Parr was in the habit of himself riding Fisherman, at the time when that admirable stayer was winning most of the long races in the country, to the neighbouring post office to fetch home the letters ; and upon inanj' occasions he appeared at the covert-sicle mounted upon one of his best mature racehorses, to canter about with tbe Berkshire hounds. After enumerating the victories achieved by Parr’s horses, and the leading racingrnen who were visuors at his stable the writer concludes ; such successes were not without their pecuniary advantages ; but, not satisfied with being a judicious trainer and horse dealer, Thomas Parr must needs aspire to the rank of a country gentleman. He invested in land all that by hard work, by no ordinary astuteness, and by excellent judgment, he had amassed upon the Turf, and furthermore, he. became a borrower of monej- at five per cent, in order to embark it in an investment out of which even with the most skilful managment, it was impossible for. him to get back more than two per cent. “ What more? his tale is to’d. ” Poets, satirists and philosophers without end have moralised upon “ the vanity of human wishes,; ” but the declining years of the once prosperous Thomas Parr, passed in sickness, poverty, neglect, and gloom, proclaim the force of Dean Swift’s dictum “ It is an uncontrolled truth that no man ever played a bad part, who understood his own vocation, or a good part who understood it. ” Slight is the sympathy of mankind,, says Dr. Johnston, with the sorrows of vanity j and the'sad finale of a life which might have closed very differently: inculcates, at least, that moderation in success which is the surest evidence of a well-balanced mind.

• - : THE DIAMOND AGE. There is nothing in the artificial diamond scare after all* and the Glasgow chemist Ims thrown, up the sponge. A long and patient investigation has just taken place, and the conclusion arrived at is, that the apothecary’s diamonds were paste., A London newspaper observes :—“The time is probably still far distant when our mansions will be built of vast rocks of precious stones, produced artificially like concrete or common'bricks. We must wait for tins until the advent of that twenty-ninth century the annals of which were written and published a year or two ago. An epoch which among other wonders will, it is said, see the formation of caloric depots, to regulate the atmosphere all over the globe ; and dovelopmentof aquatic or submarine farming, thus* bringing many millions of additional acres under cultivation at the bottom of the sea ; tbe re-arrangement of mountains, and the colonisation of the moon.”