The launching of contests for three-year-olds at St. Leger, the Oaks, and Derby in the late 1700s is considered the beginning of the modern sport of horse racing. Patronized by royalty and the aristocracy, the construction of a national railway grid during Victoria’s reign democratized the sport. It was run on a Thursday in May or June until 1838, when the event was moved to a Wednesday so more spectators could come via train. By midcentury, working class Londoners could buy cheap excursion tickets to Epsom Downs in Surrey and the carnival atmosphere around the racecourse was captured in this detail below from John Powell Frith’s famous painting.
The hilarity is shown on a much smaller scale in the board game The Derby Day. There is a large vignette to the lower left of a jockey and his mount and one in the upper right of a saddle. Examine the center panel carefully and you’ll find a peep-show operator, a man watching the race through a spyglass, a woman slicing a ham for two women holding out empty plates, a man pouring out small glasses of cordial, a man with mutton chop whiskers placing a bet. The tracks running down the board’s long edges feature little vignettes of a small menagerie, trick riders, Mr. Punch, and several accidents involving horses and carriages. The grandstand built in 1838 is visible in the far left—the roof alone had enough seats to accommodate 2000 spectators.
Victorians on holiday also flocked to seaside towns with expanses of sand at low tide which offered a perfect site for racing horses and donkeys. Men, women, boys, and girls chased each other down the beach so fast that casual strollers needed to be careful where they were walking. Like The Derby Day, the central panel shows people enjoying a variety of pleasurable activities: building sandcastles, riding donkeys lead by a sturdy boy, watching a minstrel show, taking advantage of the bathing machines, and stepping into boats for rides.
Games like these are wrongly described as examples of the omnipresent game of the goose, even though the tracks are not laid out in the telltale snail pattern. Figures on The Happy Sands board are numbered from one to fifty in a backwards “S,” snaking from the upper left hand corner of the top panel across the center panel, and moving left across the bottom panel to the lower right hand corner. The board’s layout suggests it is an informational rather than competitive pastime. The missing “rule” book probably contained descriptions for each numbered figure. The Derby Day has tracks numbered from 1 to 70 running up the long edges and without the rule book, there is no way to tell how exactly the game was played. It was probably issued attached in a folder, also missing.
The artwork for the two playing boards has been attributed to James Widdowfield Barfoot, son of John Richard (1794-1863). Both exhibited at the Royal Academy and undoubtedly would have preferred to be remembered as painters instead of prolific designers of illustrations used for board games and jigsaw puzzles. Most of their work was unsigned, although the telltale presence of roses worked into the design was a calling card for the Barfoots. Presumably they took the cash without advertising their involvement!
