The Celebrated Captain Barclay: Sport, Money and Fame in Regency Britain [Hardcover]

This is a remarkable book about a remarkable man. Captain Robert Barclay Allardice was one of the most famous figures in England in the period from 1800 to 1830. A self-absorbed gentleman of a minor Scottish family, with a comfortable income, Barclay broke with convention and became one of the leading figures of "The Fancy". The Fancy was the name given to wealthy and often dissolute members of the aristocracy who devoted themselves to the pleasures of sport, particularly horse racing and prizefighting. The Fancy also included large numbers of the lower classes, who, like the rich spent much of their money gambling on sporting events. In its worst sense, the Fancy combined criminals of both the higher and lower classes into one aggressive group which worked to subvert the laws of middle class England. In its best sense, the Fancy ( which Thorstein Veblen would later describe as "The Leisure Class" )was a democratic body focused upon sport which may have protected England from the class violence of revolution which racked all of Europe during the nineteenth century.

As a member of the upper class portion of the Fancy, Barclay might have simply spent his time in gambling and dissolution, but he did not. Instead he became a superb athlete and the most famous "pedestrian" of his time. "Pedestrianism" was a popular sport in the early nineteenth century when men and women were accustomed to taking long walks of many miles from place to place. The Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, were famous walkers. Their emphasis upon Nature grew out of their habit of regularly walking 20 or 30 miles a day while composing their poems.

Captain Barclay himself would often walk 50 to 70 miles a day for pleasure. Eventually he found that his ability to walk extraordinary distances could win large bets in gambling. The book opens with the most famous of Barlcay's bets that he could walk 1000 miles in 1000 hours for 1000 guineas. This feat attracted vast crowds to both watch and bet upon the outcome. It was said that over 100,000 pounds ( 40 million pounds in today's money) was bet on this race. With his victory, Barclay became one of the most famous men of England, and a leader of the Fancy.

Barclay also interested himself in prizefighting and horse racing. He himself was a powerful amateur pugilist and a superb coachman, both activities which ordinarily were fit only for the lower classes. He knew and associated with all of the major prize fighters of the era, from Gentleman John Jackson to John Gully to Tom Cribb. He earned his title of Captain by his military activities in the Napoleonic Wars. He was a gentleman farmer with 3800 acres in Scotland and even wrote a book on an Agricultural Tour of Canada and the United States. Finally, he became a trainer of athletes when the very concept of training for a sporting event was something new and unexpected. In all he was a man's man, who when in his 70s could lift a fully grown man standing on his open hand, from the floor and place him upright on top of a table.

Peter Radford, himself an Olympic athlete, has written an absorbing and well-documented history of this fabulous man and his times. The prose is flowing and the research excellent. The only fault I found was the fact that Radford did not realize that Bill Warr, a prize fighter and friend of Barclay's, was actually the older brother of Joe Ward and had himself been convicted of manslaughter as the result of an impromptu boxing match in 1789. Ward's conviction of manslaughter was typical of the type of men with whom Barclay associated in The Fancy.