Museum Treasure - Winter 2010/2011                                            

The leather bound record* of

The Second Trial and Capital Conviction of Daniel Dawson for poisoning horses at Newmarket, in 1809, before Mr. Justice Heath, at Cambridge, on Wednesday, the 22nd of July, 1812, taken in Court, by Geo. Kent.

                                    ~ will be on display in the Betting Gallery during the 2011 season.



Daniel Dawson was accused of poisoning racehorses on Newmarket Heath in 1811.  He was tried on 12th March 1812 at the Cambridge Assizes, but was acquitted on a legal technicality. A second trial was held on 22nd July 1812 on new, and refreshed, charges.

George Kent recognised the intense public interest in this heinous crime and produced a pamphlet for each of the trials. This pamphlet provides a first-hand report of the second trial.  Kent felt that the future of horse racing at Newmarket was threatened.  He said ‘it was impossible to depict the gloom which prevailed at Newmarket’ when Dawson had been acquitted in the first trial.  ‘Suspicion haunted every quarter.  Gentlemen were fearful of sending their horses into the town, and nothing but ruin hovered over it’.  The trainer at the centre of the storm, Richard Prince, was well respected but ‘if horses were not safe in his care, certainly they would not be anywhere else’.  And the alarm was not confined to Newmarket.  The trials recorded fifteen examples of horses being poisoned at Doncaster, Brighton and Newmarket between 1807 and 1811, of which six died.  An alarm had been created that ‘nearly annihilated the turf amusements’.

Given this background, it is not surprising that both trials aroused much local interest.  The first trial had to be moved to a larger courtroom, but there were so many people that often the court was thrown into confusion.  Not even the threat of imprisonment had the desired effect of restoring order.  For the second trial the court was opened at 7.00 in the morning and ‘every avenue was thronged, so as frequently to impede business’.

The last example of poisoning brought the whole episode to a head and was the subject of the first trial.  The primary target was Lord Foley’s Pirouette, who was the 3/1 favourite for the Claret Stakes to be run on Tuesday, 30th April 1811 at the Newmarket First Spring Meeting.  A few days before the Claret Stakes, the conspirators started to poison the water troughs used by Richard Prince. At that time trainers had their own drinking-troughs on the Heath near to the Well Gap in the Devil’s Dyke.  The troughs were kept covered and padlocked.  The lids were made to fit tightly but they did buckle when left out in the sun. 

Cecil Bishop, a retired pharmacist, who was working on behalf of Daniel Dawson, had put the white arsenic in the well using a syringe and soft quill.  Dawson, in turn, was working for a gambler called Trieste.  Prince’s stable had a reputation as a gambling stable and his horses had been heavily backed in the ante-post market for the Newmarket First Spring Meeting.  Trieste would do the trick (i.e. back against the favourite, Pirouette). But Prince had heard rumours about the wells being tampered with and had avoided using them for seventeen days before the fateful day.  The conspirators thought the arsenic was not working because the horses looked so well and therefore added more arsenic to the water. 

Pirouette did not win the Claret Stakes.  The day after the race Prince resumed watering his horses from his troughs.  Six healthy horses drank from the trough but all refused their corn when they returned to the stable. Subsequently four horses, with a combined value of £12,000 [£560,000 in 2010] died.  Sir Sitwell Sitwell owned the two horses that survived; Sir Frank Standish and Lord Foley owned those that died.

John Kent, Richard Prince’s head lad, acted promptly and administered a strong dose of castor oil to Sir Sitwell’s horses, Reveller and Coelebs. Both horses recovered and ran in many races with Coelebs winning seven races in the following year.  The other horses had to wait for the arrival of Dr. Bowles of Cambridge, ‘who was a certified physician for human beings, and also very clever in treating quadrupeds’.  The delay in treating the horses proved fatal.  Spaniard, The Dandy, Pirouette and Sir Frank Standish’s Colt by Eagle died in great agony.  John Kent reported that ‘he had never seen a poor animal endure anything like the sufferings sustained by Spaniard, before death brought him merciful relief’. 

Eventually Dawson and Bishop were caught.  Bishop who ‘made a voluntary and written confession of the whole of the nefarious conspiracy’ provided the main evidence against Dawson.  However, the judge decided that Dawson had been wrongly indicted as a ‘principal in the alleged act of poisoning, when in point of fact, he was an accessory before the fact’.  A second trial was ordered for 22nd July 1812.


                      The charges in the second trial concentrated on the poisoning of troughs used by John Stevens, another Newmarket trainer, on 10th July 1809.  Two horses died: a hackney, valued at £20 and owned by Mr. Adams of Royston and a brood mare owned by Mr. Northey, also valued at £20.  Other charges included the poisoning of the Eagle Colt and Pirouette in 1811.


It took the jury four minutes to decide that Dawson was guilty.  He was sentenced to be hanged. He was hanged on 8th August 1812 at the top of Castle Hill, Cambridge.  Bishop was discharged without conviction.


                                                          Dawson at Cambridge jail

Between 1800 and 1827 2,338 people were hanged in Great Britain.  Many were hanged for stealing horses but only one, Daniel Dawson, was hanged for ‘Killing Racehorses’.

Bishop reported that Dawson was working for a Mr. Trieste.  In the trial Bishop was asked directly who Trieste was.  He replied that ‘Dawson held him up to me as a gentleman’.  George Kent was able to see Bishop’s written confession, in which Bishop said that both he and Dawson were to receive £500 [23,500 in 2010] ‘for this iniquitous work’ from a certain person or persons ‘which it is much regretted cannot be stated here’.  Later The Druid (Henry Hall Dixon) reported in The Post and The Paddock (1856) that Dawson was working as a tout for two bookmakers, the brothers Joe and Jim Bland.  The Blands had heavy liabilities on Prince’s horses in the ante-post market and could not afford for them to win.  The intention had been to incapacitate the horses, not kill them.

                                                                                                    Researched and written by Tim Cox

* Printed by W. Glindon, Rupert Street, Haymarket:  London, 1812

To be had of the Author, 8 Dufour’s-Place, Golden-Square; R. Rogers, Newmarket, of whom the country trade can be supplied; Hughes, Ludgate-Hill; and Mason, North Audley-Street.