Sunday, 23 November 2008
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June 2008 • VOLUME 34 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
CHAPTER VI
THE BREWER'S HORSE VERY different is the brewer's horse from the vestry animal, which is of very much the same class. He picks up as many nails as any horse in London, and at one brewery we saw a tin box full of small ironmongery brought home in horses' feet. 'Whenever a house is pulled down,' said the horse-keeper to us, 'there is danger to the feet of the horses that pass along the road. When property is being demolished in this neighbourhood, I send the teams a little way round, to avoid passing by it if they possibly can. People have no idea of the extraordinary things a home's foot will hold. Look there, and there!' and out of the box he took a 4-inch brass thumb-screw, and an awkwardly broken link of a thick iron chain. The brewer's horse is a splendid animal, the most powerful as a rule of London's heavy brigade. At the Cart-horse Parade, in which teams of all classes compete, the first, second, and third prizes were taken for the only two years in which they entered by Messrs. Courage, whose cast horses are generally sold for an average of 32l. each, one of them having fetched fifty-one guineas, the highest price ever obtained for a [-84-] horse cleared out of a stud as being past the work of the trade in which he made his first appearance in town. In fact, there is no stud in the kingdom of higher level excellence than that under Mr. Laird's care at Horselydown, which is saying much, considering that the 3,000 horses owned by the larger London brewers are worth at the very lowest estimate 90l. apiece. A barrel of beer weighs 4 cwt. ; a brewer's van carries 25 barrels, which means 5 tons; the van itself weighs not less than 35 cwt., some of them weigh over 2 tons; the harness weighs three quarters of a hundredweight; the men weigh - what? It is a delicate question. To answer it Mr. Laird weighed a drayman for us, a fine young man in his twenty-ninth year. He weighed 20 st. 10 lbs.! And the horse he drove, a five-year-old gelding standing 17.2 and still growing, was then put on the scale, and dipped the beam at just over the ton.
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An Equestrian Legacy