Fred Archer

Fred Archer won twenty-one classic races and was champion jockey thirteen years running, and shot himself at twenty-nine while delirious with fever. He was the son of a National Hunt jockey from Cheltenham, was apprenticed at eleven to Mathew Dawson at Newmarket, and rode his first winner at twelve. He was champion jockey every year from 1874 to 1886. He won the Derby five times, the Oaks four, the St Leger six, and rode 2,748 winners from 8,084 rides, a strike rate above one in three that nobody has approached over a comparable career. He was unusually tall for a rider at five foot ten, and the wasting required to make the weights ruined him: he lived on a diet described by his contemporaries as almost nothing and used a violent purgative supplied by his doctor, known in the sport as Archer's mixture. His riding style was hard and he was accused of excessive use of the whip, and he was the first jockey to be treated as a public celebrity in Britain, earning more than most of the owners' trainers. His wife died in childbirth in 1884 and he never recovered from it. In November 1886, weakened by wasting and ill with typhoid, he took a revolver from a drawer at his house in Newmarket and shot himself in front of his sister. The phrase archer's up, meaning that a result is a foregone conclusion, was still current in British racing generations later. His house at Newmarket, Falmouth House, he had built with his winnings.

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