say Cheese

In 1839 the first Grand National was run. The first race was won by a horse called Lottery. A Captain Beecher was leading this race when he fell off his into a stream (brook). The fence where he fell is known as Beecher's Brook.You've seen it in a hundred costume dramas.
A young 6 year-old stallion "The Colonel" won the first of two back-to-back triumphs at Aintree by winning the 1869 Grand National whilst being ridden by George Stevens both times. The same George Stevens who won the 1856 National some thirteen years earlier and another set of back-to-back victories on "Emblem" and "Emblematic" in 1863 and 1864 making him one of the true legends of the event. It was "The Colonel's" second ever steeplechase winning at 100-7. The horse changed owners over the next twelve months with John Weyman passing over the honour of bringing back the champion horse to Matthew Evans a year later.

"The Lamb" became the first ever grey winner of the National in 1868 and one of only two grey horses to win the race, the other being "Nicolaus Silver" almost one hundred years later in 1971. The tiny horse that had been thought to be far too small to win the National found an unusual path to entering the 1868 event after he had originally been sold to a vet, who bought the horse for his daughter. "The Lamb" however proved to be too much to handle for the young girl allowing him to find his route into the Grand National for the first time in 1868.
The horse did however start with fairly good odds at 9-1 and was owned by Lord Poulett who also owned the horse in 1971 when he returned to the race winning again. The jockey George Ede and trainer Ben Land did not return with "The Lamb" though, but still enter the record books associated closely with the small grey horse.Horseback Riding was only available to the wealthy. Because they were the only ones that had enough money to own or rent and maintain a horse. Others that weren't so wealthy had to make financial sacrifices to enjoy the fun that comes out of horseback riding. Female riders needed gloves, boots, and equestrinne tights to fill the costume recommendations.
A group of Victorians sitting around the piano. Men in dinner suits, women twitching fans, the daughter of the household bashing out a Mendelsohn standard, polite applause muffled by white kid gloves, and another round of constipated dialogue.

...it's hard to think of a public pleasure with which they did not engage with intense, breathless enthusiasm.

If only somebody had thought to check the entertainment listings on the front page of The Times. Instead of suffering this well-mannered torture, they could have telegraphed the Cremorne Gardens and booked a table near the bandstand, scored a few strikes at the American bowling alley, taken in one of the shows or concerts, guzzled down a curry, danced until four in the morning, smoked a few opium-laced cigarettes, then returned home on the tube to negotiate their inevitable hangovers.
The processes of industrialisation partially account for the scope of these activities. During the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain was transformed from a largely agrarian society to one in which the majority of the population lived in cities. Those who relocated to these growing urban environments could no longer, as their parents and grandparents had done, pursue activities based around the rhythms of village life. Moreover, industrial jobs offered a precise delineation of work and leisure time that had never existed in the past. The Victorians were the first people to have statutory holidays and proscribed days off. The burgeoning entertainment industry was only too eager to help them fill that leisure time with recreational pleasures, enticing them into theme parks, shopping malls, amusement arcades and theatres.
There's a huge disjunction between the received image of nineteenth-century recreation, and the dizzying extent of the pleasures that were available to ordinary Victorians. 'Outside amusements were few,' insists one standard history textbook, 'hence the frequency with which the piano figured in the home.' Nothing could be further from the truth. The lives of Victorians were anything but staid and dull. Indeed, it's hard to think of a public pleasure with which they did not engage with intense, breathless enthusiasm
They were great consumers of recreational drugs, purchased at Boots and knocked back in suburban living rooms all over the country. Most popular was laudanum - a cocktail of opium and alcohol, which is still manufactured for medical use today. This substance wasn't just the tipple of a clique of artsy dopeheads, as it had been in the time of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey (although Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Gladstone, Jane Carlyle and Florence Nightingale all glugged it back with enthusiasm). Opium was the People's Intoxicant, more freely available in the 19th century than packets of Lambert and Butler are today. The anti-drug laws by which our society is regulated appeared during the First World War, when the government became nervous that the packets of heroin gel that women were buying from Harrods to send to their sweethearts at the Western Front were having detrimental effects upon discipline.More healthily, perhaps, organised team sports achieved a new primacy. Large numbers of Britons learned to swim: a rare talent before the mid-nineteenth-century. The first international cricket match was played in 1868 between British players and an Australian side entirely composed of Aborigines. The Football League was founded in 1888, and had soon generated its own star system, which included figures such as Arthur Wharton, Britain's first black professional footballer, who kept goal for Preston North End and Rotherham, and also found time to break the 100 yards world record, and play professional cricket for Yorkshire and Lancashire.
For the first time, pornography was produced in a volume capable of satisfying a mass readership. Oddly, the industry was founded by a gang of political radicals who used sales of erotica to subsidise their campaigning and pamphleteering: when, in the 1840s, the widely-anticipated British revolution failed to materialise, these booksellers and printers found that their former sideline had become too profitable to relinquish. Lubricious stories such as Lady Pokingham, or, They All Do it (1881), and hardcore daguerreotypes, photographs and magic lantern slides, demonstrate the omnivorous nature of Victorian sexuality. Don't imagine that this material comprised tame pictures of gartered ladies standing in front of cheese plants; any permutation or peccadillo you can conceive is represented in the work that has survived from the period. And it was produced in huge quantities: in 1874, the Pimlico studio of Henry Hayler, one of the most prominent producers of such material was loaded up with 130,248 obscene photographs and five thousand magic lantern slides - which gives some idea of the extent of its appeal.
5 years after Harry Lamplugh won the Grand National as a jockey he was back again winning for a second time, but this time as the trainer of "Cortolvin" the 16-1 outsider. The horse who won while ridden by John Page and was owned by the Duke of Hamilton wasn't really expected to fair that well in 1867, but under the guidance of John Page and Harry Lamplugh, was prepared sufficiently to fly past the opposition and win at the big one Aintree.

The 1866 Grand National was won by "Salamander" a 40-1 outsider with larger odds than any winner for years. The horse had been born with a crooked leg and was thought to be near to worthless, with it being bought for a bargain price by Mr. Edward Studd of Rutland when in a terrible state. "Salamander" did however repay the faith Edward Studd showed in him by making a full recovery and returning £40,000 from the huge gamble placed upon him as Alec Goodman rode him to victory.

"Alchibiade" won the 1865 Grand National ridden by Captain Henry Coventry of the Grenadier Guards who only ever raced in one National. Starting at 100-7, the horse trained by Mr. Cornell ran a fantastic race battling hard to beat all others to victory. The jockey Henry Coventry was also cousin of Lord Coventry who owned the two winning horses in 1863 and 1864, while this year's horse owner was Benjamin John Angell, the same Benjamin John Angell who formed the governing body for horse racing in 1866 known as the National Hunt Committee.

tru kraft

authenticast

snipers in the acw

During the American Civil War, the common term used in the United States was "sharpshooter", which is a reference to and a tribute to the Sharps rifles that were commonly used by Civil War "snipers", but the term "sharpshooter" does not originate with users of the Sharp's Rifle. The rifle was designed by Christian Sharps and made from 1850 onwards by the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company. They were renowned for long range and accuracy, and they were issued only to the best shooters. However, the term "sharp shooter" had been in use in British newspapers as early as 1801. In the Edinburgh Advertiser, 23 June 1801, can be found the following quote in a piece about the North British Militia; "This Regiment has several Field Pieces, and two companies of Sharp Shooters, which are very necessary in the modern Stile of War". The term appears even earlier, around 1781, in Europe.
Another common term used in the United States during the American Civil War was "skirmisher". Throughout history armies have used skirmishers to break up enemy formations and to thwart the enemy from flanking the main body of their attack force. They were deployed individually on the extremes of the moving army primarily to scout for the possibility of an enemy ambush. Consequently, a "skirmish" denotes a clash of small scope between these forces.
In general, a skirmish was a limited combat, involving troops other than those of the main body. The term "sniper" was not in widespread use in the United States until after the American Civil War.
Pity Gen. John Sedgwick. He was killed at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864 by a sniper 800 yards away. While he was placing field guns behind his front line, Sedgwick waved toward the distant Rebel sharpshooters and laughingly enjoined his gunners to ignore their sporadic shots: “What are you dodging for? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance!” Seconds later, a bullet smashed into Sedgwick’s face, killing him instantly.

Sedgwick, the highest-ranking Union general killed in the Civil War, was just one of the more prominent victims of Civil War sniping, a form of combat that came into its own as rifle technology improved during the 19th century. Effective sniping required rifles—as opposed to muskets—and the infantry rifle was still in its infancy in the 1860s.
Although Prussian guard troops had fired a few rifle shots in the European revolutions of 1848, British light infantry had been the first to use rifles to devastating effect: against Russian musketeers in the Crimean War, which was fought from 1854 to 1856 on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Thereafter, all armies had re-equipped with rifles, which were essentially muskets with grooved barrels that would “take” the soft lead of a bullet and fling it in a tight, spiraling shot at a distant target. Whereas musket rounds rolled and hopped like knuckle balls, rifle rounds screamed in like fastballs—straight down the pipe.
Or nearly straight. Even the best rifles developed in the 1850s and 1860s did not entirely solve the problem of trajectory. The standard .52-, .54-, or .58-caliber mid-19th-century rifle round was a heavy lump of lead, a veritable cannonball of a bullet. To fire it accurately downrange, infantry had to elevate their rifles so that the heavy, sinking ball would fly out far enough before toppling into an onrushing, distant adversary. Misjudge your distance from the enemy by as little as 30 yards—easily done at 300 yards—and your bullet would whistle harmlessly over his head. No wonder that Union infantry had required on average 900 pounds of lead and 240 pounds of black powder to kill a single Con­federate in the Civil War, or that only one out of every 250 Prussian bullets fired in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 actually struck an Austrian.
Statistics like these suggest the difficulty of sniping in the Civil War. “Sharp­shooting” was a job for marksmen. Get­ting into the New Hampshire Sharpshooters, one of dozens of Union light infantry outfits, required feats of accuracy: at 600 feet, 10 consecutive shots at an average of five inches from the bull’s-eye. Col. Hiram Berdan, who was ordered by Gen. Winfield Scott to create two entire sharpshooter regiments from companies raised in the various states of the Union, was himself a famous crack shot—the best in the Union army.
Winning army target-shooting contests every year between the Mexican War and the Civil War, Berdan used his celebrity to recruit. During tryouts for the Sharpshooters in 1861-62—regularly attended by Pres­ident Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet—Berdan would fire at life-size drawings of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from 200 yards and score repeated head shots. One story had him asking a spectator, “Where shall I place the next one?” “In the right eye,” came the answer, and the next shot tore away the right eye.
Finely made or customized rifles generally were required to make such shots. A favorite Confederate sniper rifle—procured in small quantities from blockade runners—was the .45-caliber British Whitworth. When it was fitted with a telescopic sight, the Whitworth had what was grimly called “killing accuracy” of 1,500 yards. The Whitworth barrel was drilled in a hexagonal pattern and fired a bullet shaped like a threaded nut. Gen. William Haines Lytle, the Ohio-born Union soldier-poet, was shot off his horse and killed by a Whitworth-armed Confederate sharpshooter at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. (Lytle had 10 months earlier written his last poem—“Lines on My Thirty-Sixth Birthday”—which, true to its Byronic title, predicted his imminent death in battle.)
The Manchester-made Whitworth and its nut-shaped bullet also killed Gen. “Uncle John” Sedgwick at Spotsylvania Court House. The sniper was probably Ben Powell, a Rebel crack shot who, like today’s snipers, was conceded virtual independence by his officers. His only job was to rove along the Union lines looking for a clean shot. Berry Benson, another Confederate sharpshooter, recalled meeting Powell in the Wilderness (site of the May 1864 battle that resulted in nearly 30,000 total casualties) and examining his Whitworth, which was so powerful that it could serve as a sort of howitzer when no direct fire targets offered themselves.
“Having nothing to do, I went down across a field where Ben Powell, with his Whitworth rifle, was sharpshooting,” Benson recalled in his memoir, Confederate Scout Sniper. “There had been a number of Whitworth rifles (with telescope sight) brought from England, running the blockade. These guns with ammunition had been distributed to the army, our brigade receiving one. It was given to Powell, as he was known to be an excellent shot. In campaigns, he posted himself wherever he pleased, for the purpose of picking off the enemy’s men. I shot the gun a few times. It kicked powerfully. . . . Once at Petersburg Powell gave [Blackwood] the gun to shoot, and as there was nobody particular in sight to shoot at, he held it up at a high angle and fired it over into the besiegers’ camp. Not long after, in a Northern paper, he read an account of two men being shot at a well, struck by the same ball, which had come so far that the report of the gun was not heard. And the day given was the same day Blackwood fired the Whitworth.”

Weapons of choice
The sniper’s weapon of choice was the so-called American rifle. Individ­ually crafted and sold to hunters and target shooters before the war, “American,” “benchrest,” or “match” rifles were so heavy—14 to 40 pounds, two to four times the weight of a factory-made in­fantry rifle—that they had to be aimed and fired with the barrel resting on a bench, fence, or other support. The accuracy of these aptly named “heavies”—like the 35-pound, .46-caliber Morgan rifle made in small batches by John C. Wells of Milwaukee—derived from the massive barrel and superior engineering.
To get the most from their rifling, benchrest bores were much tighter than standard rifles, which necessitated special accouterments. Merely to load a bullet down the long barrel, the sniper had to fit the bench­rest rifle with a “false muzzle” and a “bullet starter.” The false muzzle was essentially a funnel placed in the barrel of the rifle to hold the wide bullet in place on the lip of the narrow gun barrel. The bullet starter was a stubby, piston-driven ramrod that fit inside the false muzzle and allowed the sniper to jam the bullet down the rifle barrel and seat it in the breech without gouging the finely wrought true muzzle.
Still, with just one really first-class sniper rifle per brigade—usually left in the supply wagons to be brought forward when opportunities arose—most sharpshooters made do with the best rifle they could procure officially or scrounge unofficially. As always, the rich, industrialized Union with its flourishing arms industry got the best stuff. After personally intervening in Washington with the army staff and the secretary of war, Berdan procured a special rifle for his two Sharpshooter regiments: the Model 1859 .52-caliber Sharps—nicknamed the “Berdan”—which, in skilled hands, became one of the deadliest weapons of the war. Though not as well engineered as a match rifle or the Whitworth, the Berdan Sharps was a breech-loader cap­able of firing four times more quickly than muzzle-loaders like the Whitworth, and it was accurate out to 700 yards in skilled hands.
But Berdan never relied on technology alone. “To be effective sharpshooters the men have to be as skilled in field craft as they are in marksmanship,” he wrote in 1861. “They must be self-assured yet highly disciplined and above all they must be dedicated.” This directive got to the heart of sniping. As terrifying as it was for the victims, it was hard on the practitioners as well—physically and psychologically. Berry Benson, a Rebel sharpshooter, surveyed his own results along the “Bloody Angle” at Spotsylvania and noted his disgust: “This horrid confusion, these wet, muddy graves—this reeking mass of corruption, of rotting corpses. . . .How a man can look upon such a scene and still take pleasure in war seems past belief.”

Freelance snipers
Neither army trained snipers in the professional, dedicated way that they are developed today. Rather, they used sharpshooter units to scout and harass the enemy. Some individuals, like the Confederacy’s Ben Powell or the famously shaggy Union sniper Truman “California Joe” Head, would stand out as particularly good shots and gradually slip the bonds of military discipline, working more and more as freelance snipers, less and less as uniformed sharpshooters. Califor­nia Joe—a favor­ite of Berdan and the Northern press—was celebrated for the number and difficulty of his “kills” with the Sharps rifle, one of them at 1,500 yards.
It would generally be more accurate to call Civil War snipers light infantry, what the Europeans called skirmishers: American equivalents of the Prussian fusilier, the Austrian jäger, or the French chasseur. Al­though Hiram Berdan organized the two green-jacketed Union sharpshooter regiments, they were trained by Caspar Trepp, a Swiss infantry officer who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy and with the British in the Crimea. Like European light infantry, American sharpshooters were trained to fight in open order—with wide intervals between the men—use cover, and advance and retreat on bugle and drum signals.
As in Europe, big Civil War battles drew whole sharpshooter units into action. Pitzer’s Wood and the Devil’s Den at Gettysburg—a low ridge crowned with broken stone masses—were fought over by companies of Confederate and Union sharpshooters in July 1863. One of the most famous Civil War photographs—Alexander Gardener’s Death of a Rebel Sniper—shows a dead Confederate sharpshooter in a carefully constructed sniper’s nest in the Devil’s Den.
Firing at long range—more than 500 yards across Plum Run to the Round Tops—Confederate marksmen piled up Union casualties at Gettysburg before they themselves were rooted out by Union sharpshooters and artillery fire. One of the dead Rebel snipers was discovered with a Leonard target rifle in his hands. A 36-pound match rifle made in New Hampshire, the Leonard had hairsplitting accuracy up to 1,000 yards. “From a distance of nearly half a mile, the Rebel sharpshooters drew a bead on us with a precision that deserved the highest commendation of their officers, but that made us curse the day they were born,” a Union veteran recalled bitterly. On Little Round Top, anxious Union officers scanned the Devil’s Den with field glasses to locate the muzzle flashes and smoke puffs from the Confederate rifles. When a sniper was detected, a percussion shell would be fired into his lair. Several Confederate sharpshooters were killed in this way. Gardener photographed one of them; the corpse—killed by concussion—was unscathed, and its trigger finger was crooked to fire.

Piling up casualties
This vulnerability in fixed positions—invisible, smokeless powder would not be introduced until the 1890s—ex­plained the Civil War sniper’s preference for trees, which concealed the muzzle flash better, waved away the charcoal smoke, and offered a less obvious target to frustrated gunners. One of Winslow Homer’s best-known Civil War illustrations was The Sharp­shooter, published in Harper’s Weekly in 1862. It depicts a Yankee sniper in a tree near Yorktown during the Penin­sula Campaign. The sniper, one of Berdan’s Sharpshooters, is sitting on a tree branch and squinting through the sights of a James target rifle. The .45-caliber, muzzle-loading James, with its four-power telescopic sight, was a relatively light sniper rifle—just 14 pounds—yet in Homer’s drawing the shooter is bracing the rifle on a branch to improve his aim. Two companies of Berdan’s Sharpshooters used the James target rifle to pick off Confederate defenders during the siege of Yorktown in the spring of 1862.
Winslow Homer was appalled by the impressions he gathered during his sittings with the sharpshooter. At one point, he peered through the telescopic sight at an unsuspecting enemy. In a letter to a friend, Homer crudely sketched what he had seen: a Confe­derate officer striding through tall grass, the sniper’s crosshairs on his chest. “The above impression,” he wrote, “struck me as being as near murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army.”
Modern warfare had not yet evolved the dreadfully efficient two-man sniper teams of World War II or their dedicated rifle and ammunition designs. But already in the 1860s, with opposing armies sinking into trenches and battery positions to fight multiday battles along long, fortified lines, the sniper was being born as a force multiplier. First developed as a scout and a picket, the sniper came in the course of the American Civil War to be valued as a low-cost, high-impact weapon, capable of demoralizing an entire battalion of field artillery or knocking a good general out of the saddle. (The loss of Gen. John Sedgwick to a sniper at Spot­sylvania, Ulysses S. Grant fam­ous­­ly said, “is greater than the loss of a whole division of troops.”)
Nevertheless, light infantry advocates like Hiram Berdan preferred to concentrate their sharpshooters as skirmishers. Sniping therefore continued as a haphazard arrangement until 1914, when, with million-man armies deployed within bullet range of each other, snipers would finally begin to be developed as dedicated “special operations forces.”