Buckfastleigh and South Brent Races: National Hunt Racing at Two Devon Courses
(2012) by Peter Wakeham is a fine read as well.
The author has sadly passed away in the meantime, but I think it’s still possible to secure a copy of the book at selected point-to-point fixtures in the Devon & Cornwall administrative Area as well as via the usual online booksellers. If I remember, I’ll try to dig out the contact details for Orchard Publications later tonight.
Below is a review I did of the book for the May 2012 edition of
Racing Ahead
– hope this might inspire some further interest in Mr Wakeham’s work.
gc
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It’s hard to imagine a person better placed than Peter Wakeham to commit to a single volume the long – and ongoing – history of racing at Dean Court Farm, Buckfastleigh since 1883, plus the shorter-lived action at two sites in nearby South Brent, from 1889 to 1912.
The current Chairman of the Totnes and Bridgetown Races Company (you’ll have seen its name feature in the title of a novice hunters’ chase at Newton Abbot for many years), and a former racehorse owner, Newton Abbot steward and Jockey Club Point-to-Point course inspector, Wakeham was also a stalwart of the commentary box in Devon & Cornwall Area Points for over three decades, making his debut on the occasion of Buckfastleigh’s first Pointing fixture in March 1963.
An authority on racing in this corner of Devon to the extent that his research informed most of the South Brent chapter in Chris Pitt’s outstanding
A Long Time Gone
(and is acknowledged as such), Wakeham’s
Buckfastleigh & South Brent Races
develops over 160 pages what Pitt necessarily had to limit to a couple of small chapters, and is a satisfying and meticulous expansion of both courses’ tales (albeit the limited quantity of surviving records pertaining to South Brent permits little over two chapters’ worth of material on it all told).
A Good Start
A mile west of the town of the same name and situated alongside the A38 to Bodmin, Buckfastleigh could number Newton Abbot (14 miles away according to a popular brand of internet routeplanner), Haldon (18 miles), Totnes (nine miles, and the subject of a previous survey by Wakeham, tidal crossings and all), Torquay (19 miles), Plymouth (22 miles), Dawlish (22 miles), Paignton (15 miles) and South Brent (five miles) among its contemporaries at various stages of its early existence; and an early chapter of the work places the course within the historical context of several of these – and other courses besides – at and around the time of its inception.
The course quickly bedded down as a popular Whitsun diversion for the local population, attendances for the greater part remaining buoyant despite the occasional curveballs of unbearable heat (1903) and tiny field sizes on hard ground (several concurrent years in the 1910s). Most helpfully in adding momentum and depth to the story of Buckfastleigh’s ongoing development from then on, Wakeham’s research secured him the loan of a genuine minute book charting the racecourse Executive’s actions from its final surviving former member; a volume in which the sanctioning from the late 1920s onwards of – among other things – the addition of a weighing room, a vet, better drainage, a Tote, the new grandstand and a two-day August fixture (adding Buckfastleigh to the canon of early-season jumps venues, alongside Newton Abbot and Haldon, from 1937 onwards) are all presumably writ large.
By (Impromptu) Royal Appointment
With the exception of 1924 Grand National winner Master Airlie, Buckfastleigh was seldom if ever a course to attract many top-class animals during its National Hunt incarnation; although, in a nice touch, Wakeham devotes an entire chapter to individual profiles of four of its best-loved course winners. Another chapter devoted to owners, trainers and riders of Buckfastleigh winners, meanwhile, runs the gamut from 1946-7 champion rider Jack Dowdeswell to Dorothy Paget, a selling chase victory in 1939 reason enough to include a précis on the last-named.
The course did bear witness to several notable training firsts during its existence. Fulke Walwyn’s selling hurdle winner in 1939 was his initial score of a long and fruitful career, for example; ditto that of the then still 21-year-old David Gandolfo in the same grade 21 years later. The last-named was found paddockside by the author a couple of years back, taking another look at where it had all begun for him.
Anthony Bingham Mildmay, the second Baron Mildmay of Flete (and after whom the present-day Byrne Group Plate at Cheltenham was previously named), is accorded copious mentions throughout the work; and with good reason, having provided sterling service as a course steward and accumulated a stack of winning rides before his death by drowning in 1950. The previous Whitsun, Mildmay had proven also the catalyst for the occasion of the course’s most famous human attendee, arranging a visit by Princess Margaret at relatively short notice after she had expressed an interest in taking in the afternoon’s sport. An attendance which reached around 22,000 at its height is nothing the course had ever seen before or would again subsequently.
Pointing A Way Back to Buckfastleigh
The end of National Hunt racing at Buckfastleigh in 1960 was not attributable to drastically falling patronage. Far from it – whilst obviously paling next to that of the Royal visit, the Whitsun attendances of 12,000 and 8,000 that year were still the sorts of totals that many courses running on the same dates in 2012 would give their eye-teeth for.
Rather, landowner Lord Churston put the estate on which Buckfastleigh racecourse was and is situated up for sale as part of a broader retrenchment of interests in the south Devon area; and whilst the sales price of £150,000 was large enough, as Wakeham points out, to imply that the Torbay-based investment company who stumped up the sum regarded the racecourse as a going concern, the National Hunt Committee’s confirmation soon after that such a private enterprise would not be granted fixtures effectively killed off all notions of Rules action enduring at the Devon venue.
Reading between the lines, one wonders whether this was less an anti-privateers and more a pro-reduction move. In a climate where the Committee (and racing at large) was looking to maintain a smaller portfolio of racecourses, and coming as it did barely two and a half years before the Levy Board’s swingeing withholding of funding sounded the death knell for an array of courses large and small, the sale of Buckfastleigh might conceivably have done the job of finishing off racing there for them.
Nothing actively precluded the redeployment of the site as a Point-to-Point venue, however; and Wakeham was there, newly installed in his commentator’s capacity, when Dart Vale & Haldon and South Pool Harriers’ fixture relaunched action at Buckfastleigh, albeit under this different code of racing, after a hiatus of barely two and a half years.
If there is perhaps one slight disappointment with
Buckfastleigh & South Brent Races
(other than the absence of an index), it concerns treatment of this action between the flags. The relative economy with which the highlights from Buckfastleigh’s two eras of Pointing – from 1963 to 1977 and then from 1998 onwards, in between which the land was used for grain production – are darted through in one four-page chapter sits a little at odds with the excellent, year-by-year coverage of the course’s National Hunt history that precedes it. In mitigation, however, contemporaneous editions of
Hunter Chasers and Point-to-Pointers
do of course offer an alternative source for that Pointing material.
One regard in which the book scores especially highly, conversely, is in the reproduction of primary sources – early course maps, racecards, jockey caricatures and especially photos all feature in quantity. The Coulton family, effectively tenants on the estate for three centuries up until the point of sale in 1960, evidently photographed the races exhaustively, and the fruits of their personal archive – graciously made available to Wakeham by surviving members – are deeply evocative in conveying by turns the bustle and the charm of a small but undeniably well-attended country raceday (bare hurdles, vast (by today’s standards) water jump, rudimentarily fenced paddocks and all).
Still Around – And Relevant
Your reviewer had cause to make a maiden visit to Buckfastleigh in March of this year, reporting on the Dart Vale & Haldon Harriers Point-to-Point fixture, and the photographs accompanying this review hail from that visit.
It is probably a touch on the trite side to suggest that one can smell the history of the place, as little of the fixtures and fittings from the course’s original incarnation survives beyond the careworn grandstand whose status in the
Hunter Chasers and Point-to-Pointers Annual
has regressed steadily from “is to be restored” in the 1999 edition to “looking most unlikely that it will ever be restored” in the most recent.
What is clear, however, is that although relatively far down the food chain as a National Hunt venue, Buckfastleigh’s status as one of the southwest Pointing courses longest on quality horses (of the present and the future) has conversely been pretty quickly (re-)established over the 14 years since racing resumed.
One 2003 meeting featured Lord Atterbury and Celestial Gold escaping intermediate and restricted class respectively; Double Mead, Whizzaar and Sericina all broke their maidens here in the last five years; the course is nowadays entrusted with the Devon & Cornwall Area’s £1,000 Classic race, the Westcountry Champion Chase (one of only five races that richly endowed in the entire Pointing calendar at present); and no race run anywhere this current Pointing season will generate as many subsequent winners as the outstanding intermediate contest held at the South Pool Harriers fixture this February (10 scorers and counting as at mid-April, including one more at the March 2012 meeting attended).
Definitely something to cheer in those facts for all who hold this spot hard up against the A38 especially dear and / or has delighted in its rebirth since 1998, then; and Peter Wakeham’s fine tome on all that went before offers plenty more Buckfastleigh history of a mostly older vintage to enjoy. Recommended.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.