Squire, The: Life of George Alexander Baird, Gentleman Rider, 1861-93 Book

George Alexander Baird was a young man who devoted a huge fortune of some £3,000,000 to enjoying himself amidst the opulence of the late Victorian era. A superb amateur jockey who was a match for all but they very best of the professionals such as Fred Archer, he made a disastrous start to his career by getting himself warned off the Turf but was reinstated two years later, and three years after that owned a Derby winner. Though fundamentally kind-hearted, he never cared how, when or to whom he gave offence. He financed a large stable of prize-fighters headed by the British champion, Charlie Mitchell, and an even larger collection of mistresses, headed by Lillie Langtry. Never taking life too seriously, and rarely completely sober, he roistered and revelled over the length and breadth of England and Scotland surrounded by his perfectly deplorable cronies. Eventually, worn out by the pace of his profligacy, he died in 1893 at the age of thirty-one while on a visit to New Orleans. Along with all Baird's amorous and madcap adventures, and his crude assaults on every fortress of convention and established society, went his superb horsemanship, which he could exercise to the full since his immense wealth enabled him to own the biggest string of racehorses in Britain, and probably the world, at that time. The author includes a great deal about racing, breeding and training in this book, all presented in a fashion as palatable to the reader who has a mild flutter on the Derby as to those more closely involved with the Sport of Kings. George Alexander Baird emerges as an original - the archetype of a whole host of later anti-heroes, most of them fictional; a man whose wild, mad career to self-destruction developed a kind of frightful consistency, a pattern made the more fascinating by interwoven threads of considerable generosity and some humour.Read More