The following article was submitted by writer Pamela Robson from her home in Australia.
He was born in Cantley, near Doncaster, started his career in Middleham, Yorkshire and then went on to Mellerstein near Kelso to ride for George Baillie.
Known as Jem Jaques, he was listed as one of “the jockeys most worthy of remembrance during William IV’s reign” by mid-19th century historian, Robert Black. He moved to Penrith in 1817 and rode & trained there until 1841.
He excelled when riding at the Carlisle, Penrith & Kendal race meetings and trained for the local gentry including the Lowther family. He also owned and traded horses. Each season he took his client’s and his own horses on the northern circuit including Newcastle, Durham, Morpeth, Manchester, Ripon, Preston, Liverpool, Richmond, Lancaster, Northallerton, Chester, Preston, Stockton, Perth, Fife, Dumfries, Ayr, Edinburgh, Doncaster and York.
He was well known for successful weight loss – wasting. Racing writer The Druid (Henry Hall Dixon) wrote: “He excelled as much in wasting as he did in corner cutting, and if fifteen or sixteen started on a Doncaster morning [walking] to Rossington Bridge and back, he and Sim and Jack Holmes would invariably be seen leading up the old elm avenue at the finish. Two ounces of Epsom salts, a little tea with gin in it to make him break out freely, a dry biscuit, and a poached egg with vinegar, were all that passed his lips. Vinegar and poached eggs were his only support at times, and a lad who rode the rear horse, and drove the leader in the canal-boat, The Arrow, from Carlisle to Port Carlisle, tried the same fare himself rather than lose his place for overweight, and killed himself by it.”
Jaques did well for himself as a publican owning a series of pubs and inns and was about to retire in 1841 when he lost his money as a result of the collapse of the Bank OF Penrith. The Druid wrote: “The jockeys seemed much taller then: as for Jem Jaques, he was promptly transmuted from a well-fed innkeeper at Penrith into a seven-stone skeleton when poverty overtook him, and he rode successfully for Colonel Cradock again.
Back on the track in his 50s, Jaques first moved to Middleham and then took his family on to Dublin and the Curragh where he trained for Lord Howth and others. He returned to Cantley in 1851 and worked as a gardener subsisting on a pension from the Lord George Bentinck Fund for needy jockeys.
He was a key member of the Penrith and Inglewood Hunt and the Westmorland and Cumberland Yeomanry Cavalry and on Friday 4 June 1858 was remembered in the Carlisle Journal: “The assemblage on the race course was very large. The carriages of the aristocracy were drawn up in a line south of the ground. The Grand Stand was crowded with ladies.
“Old men who could remember the palmy days of the Inglewood Hunt and Penrith Races, when the star of Jaques was in the ascendancy, were by the presence of so large a concourse of people, forcibly reminded of the gatherings, which took place on those occasions, forty years ago.”
In January 1863, his wife Jane was found hanged in the pantry of their cottage. She left a note saying she missed her children. They had 13 children but only two survived them – most died as babies but four died from tuberculosis (consumption) as young adults. James, the eldest child, had started out as jockey but he lost an arm when accidentally shot by his father when hunting rabbits in Penrith. He died in 1853 from TB.
In 1868 Jaques committed suicide (February 17) at Laith Gate, Doncaster, by taking an overdose of laudanum.
Biggest win: James Jacques won the 1828 Ayr Gold Cup on Mary.