James Knott was born in Nottingham in 1834, the son of a warehouseman. He initially rode on the Flat and achieved notable success on September 26, 1853 when winning the Pains Lane Stakes, “of 2 sov each with a Cup and 10 sov added” on a five-year bay horse named Le Juif, which, at odds-on, won in a canter from Phantom, Merlin and Star of England.
The race took place at the eponymous Pains Lane racecourse in Shropshire and was run in heats over a trip of “twice round and the distance”.
The village of Pains Lane was located one mile from Oakengates and three miles from Wellington, near what is now Telford. The first record of horseracing there was in Bell’s Life and the Sporting Chronicle, which reported the results of a meeting on September 28, 1840. By 1846 the meeting was well established, its feature race being the Pains Lane Stakes for the China Racing Cup.
Pains Lane was renamed St Georges in 1859 but the annual two-day Flat race meetings, usually held on a Monday and Tuesday in late September or early October to coincide with Colliery Wakes week, continued until 1874
As for James Knott, he subsequently switched codes and became a successful jump jockey. He never married and died of consumption in Radford, Nottinghamshire on March 7, 1870, aged 36. He left a little under £3,000 in his will, a sizeable sum for a jockey of that time.