A Smock Race at Tottenham Court Fair.

A Smock Race at Tottenham Court Fair "Come on Moll, - Run Nan, - Bett's tumbled over the Sow, - It's Sall's Smock for a Gallon, - Huzza Huzza." A smock race, a footrace run by women in chemises, with a smock and sometimes a leg of mutton as prizes, was one of the few sports poor women participated in at English country fairs at the end of the eighteenth century. In Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (ch 10) we read: " I protest I don't like to see my daughters trudging up to their pew all blowzed and red with walking, and looking for all the world as if they had been winners at a smock race." Here the prize smock hangs from a window in the King's Head, City Road, at its junction with Tottenham Court Road. The Fair was held at the junction of Euston (City) and Hampstead (Tottenham Court) Roads until 1808 when it was abolished. In 1730 it was one of the attractions visited by "Seven Kings or Chiefs of the Chirakee Indians, bordering upon Carolina" who "are come over in the Fox Man of War, Capt. Arnold, in order to pay their duty to his Majesty" (London Journal, 12 June 1730). Here a large rowdy crowd watch the race, a dog has an old pan tied to its tail, a rider falls from a donkey, in the background a woman is tossed from a horse and the sow's piglets scatter to avoid being crushed by the tumbling Bett. Not in BM catalogue.