The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpikeHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpike
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
MODERN Newmarket is typified by that showy giant barrack-hotel, the
“Victoria,” not long since completed, and in its glitter and electric
light an ostentatious sign of these thriving times of new-made wealth
and new-born social ambitions. The older Newmarket, of days when wealth
alone could not purchase rank and the _entrée_ to society, is
represented by the “Rutland Arms,” appropriately staid and severe in its
architectural style, and perhaps, like the older order it embodies, a
little under the cloud of neglect. The great “Rutland Arms” has, any
time these one hundred and forty years past, been the resort of the more
aristocratic patrons of Newmarket, and, looking back upon the town from
the Bury road, it is still the chief feature of the place. Built around
a courtyard, on solid early Georgian lines, of dull red brick and with
high-pitched roof, it makes no pretensions to beauty, and yet does
succeed in giving an impression of majesty and repose. Its noble rooms
are large enough to permit of walking exercise, and instead of the
exiguous cubicles, miscalled bedrooms, of modern hotels, you have
sleeping apartments whose dimensions might almost be expressed in the
measurements of a surveyor rather than in the less generous formula of
the foot-rule. The “Rutland Arms’” sign owes its existence here to the
fact that the manor of Newmarket came into the Manners family in the
reign of George II., by the marriage of the daughter of the sixth Duke
of Somerset with John Marquis of Granby in 1750. This was that famous
“Markis o’ Granby” who earned such military distinction in Germany and
such popularity at home that his name became for many years one of the
most popular of inn signs. The Manners family until recent years owned
the property, together with the neighbouring park of Cheveley, and their
coat-of-arms on a gigantic scale, blazoned in blue and gold, still
decorates the pediment of the hotel in aggressive manner. There are some
who freely, very freely, translate the proud motto _Pour y Parvenir_ as
“For the Parvenus”; but the “Victoria” is the hotel for them, and that
legend really means “To attain,” or, as an American might say, “To get
there.” What the choice of that determined sentiment originally meant,
who shall say? but as the Manners family long since obtained a dukedom,
they may be said to have duly arrived, and it is difficult to see what
else they can want.
[Illustration: NEWMARKET: THE “RUTLAND ARMS.”]
Much might be written of the old-time visitors to the town, but very
little anecdotal matter exists. For unconscious humour there is nothing
so good as the diary of our greatest entomologist, who was here in 1797.
On his tour he had found, with delight, a golden bug basking in the sun
on his window-sill, but with less delight a something of the same genus,
“new to me,” on his stocking, in a little country inn.
On the evening of July 3rd he and a friend drove up to the “Ram” at
Newmarket, as he duly records:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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