3-039-219 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Eve of the Derby: at the winning-post, 1871. 'The annual summer meeting of English horse-lovers [ie the Derby Stakes, for three-year-old colts and fillies], on the breezy downs of Epsom [in Surrey] is nigh at hand...[Our illustration shows one of] the scenes usually to be witnessed a few hours earlier than "the great event,"...The gathering of a motley multitude of people - men, women, and children - intending to earn, or to beg, or perhaps to steal, or to gain by cheating, or to win by any means whatever, a few shillings from the careless and unwary, whose pockets are better filled... The detachment of metropolitan police, stationed there to keep order, to prevent the robberies and murders which would else surely be perpetrated, in that strange wild assembly, during the night, may divert themselves with a cockshy, or a fling of the knobsticks'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.