Grand National Jockey Quotes

I farther assure this noble Duke, that I neither encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government loaded with all its encumbrances; clogged with its peers and its beef; its parsons and its pudding; its Commons and its beer; and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to provoke a Jockey of Norfolk [Thomas Paine], who was inspired with the resolute ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted merit.

After a few years the couple divorced and Derek married three times more. This flamboyant character, who was a major personality in the lives of the Mitfords, used his money to enjoy the lifestyle of a bygone age. He would stop trains by pulling the communication cord to complain about dirt in his carriage, would contemptuously toss a ten-pound note at Jockey Club stewards in payment of a fine for some riding misdemeanour, finished twice in the Grand National riding his own horses, and was a much-decorated war hero. His intellect was only just short of genius yet he would happily revise complicated travel plans to avoid ‘hurting the feelings’ of his beloved dachshunds. Pam’s marriage to him lasted fourteen years, and was the only one of his six marriages – apart from the last, which ended with his death – to endure for more than a couple. Pam and Derek always remained great friends and saw each other frequently after he went to live in France, where he became a researcher at the Bellevue Laboratory near Paris.