Army Career and Sporting Life
Although he came from a naval family, Cotton was happier on horseback or driving horses and decided to join a cavalry regiment, the 10th Hussars or Light Dragoons. He served in Portugal as a lieutenant but was retired on half-pay in 1830 after three years. On his return to England he took up a life of sport and gambling, and became a well-known figure at sporting events and Crockford's. He hunted in Leicestershire, played cricket for the Marylebone Cricket Club, and attended race meetings and boxing matches where he was known as Vinny Cotton, Sir Vincent Twist, or the Baronet. On occasion he was involved in brawls, and was once quoted as advising brawlers to "pitch into the big rosy men, but if you see a little lemon-faced nine-stone man, have nothing to do with him". In 1836, having lost much of his fortune at the gaming tables, he bought the Age stagecoach which ran between London and Brighton. Cotton drove the coach for two years, before his mother's ill health caused him to return to Madingley.
Read more about this topic: St Vincent Cotton
Famous quotes containing the words army, career, sporting and/or life:
“This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstacy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... the ... thing I am proudest of in my whole business life is that I do not take, that I never took in all my life, and never, never! will take, one single penny more than 6% on any loan or any contract.”
—Hetty Green (1834–1916)