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I have the misfortune to live in Harpenden, which is now not near any decent racecourse. However, you may not know that Harpenden was once a racing town.The last race was 100 years ago. If you drive through Harpenden you can see the common where the track used to be and there is a roadside pub called the Silver Cup which presumably got its name from the prizes.
From Harpenden history website:
"Horse racing was a popular and rapidly growing sport during the first half of the nineteenth century, and this part of Hertfordshire was well to the fore in its development.
Occasional races were held on Harpenden Common during the 1830’s and 40’s. Sir Thomas Sebright, Master of the Hertfordshire Hounds arranged one there in August 1834. Henry Oldaker was also organising occasional races in the area, and there is a record of one of these finishing on the Common. This was run on Tuesday 10th December 1839, from Friars Wash to Harpenden Common via Rothamsted Park and was won by Captain Becher.
First regular meeting – 1848
But regular racing on the Common did not become established until 1848. A committee consisting of local farmers organised a meeting on the common on Wednesday 21st June 1848. It consisted of four races, and was followed by a dinner at the Bull for the committee and others. About 10,000 people were present at this first meeting: it was such a success that a more permanent committee was formed to make it an annual event.The course was in the shape of a long narrow horse shoe starting on the Common near what is now the Golf Clubhouse; crossing Walkers Road, which was covered with straw for the occasion; then sweeping out into the country beyond Cross Lane; over the fields of the Childwickbury Estate behind what is now Horse and Jockey Farm, but was in those days a public house; and then turning near Ayres End Lane to come back along the Common.
Not all the races were run over the same distance. There were eight races in 1863: three were over a two mile course, three over a course of just over half a mile, one over a mile, and one over a mile and a half. Some races attracted more horses than others. The Wheathampstead Stakes, run at four o’clock over a course of four and a half furlongs, attracted six runners. Each owner staked five sovereigns to enter, and an extra thirty were added. The second horse kept its stake, the winner took the rest, but had to pay two sovereigns into the funds. It was a rule of this race that the winning horse was to be sold by auction immediately after the race.
Harpenden races were run under jockey club rules and stewards were appointed to see that the rules were observed.
Excursion trains for a gala day
These were the days before radio, television and the cinema; days when people made their own amusement, and any excuse for a gala day was gladly seized upon. The day of the races was such a day. Anyone who could take a holiday did so, not only to see the races but also to enjoy the various sideshows that were set up, rather like those that attend a fair nowadays.On the day itself the railway companies ran special trains with cheap excursion fares, and great crowds came from London and round about. Amongst them were many roughs, card sharps, pickpockets and other riff-raff of humanity. Fights and uproars were very common both on the course and in the evening in many parts of the village when the races were over.
The crowds arriving at the Midland station were met by rows of horse drawn waggonettes (rather like a rank of present day taxis) for those who didn’t want to walk up across the common.
Last race in 1914 – course dismantled in 1918
The last race meeting on the Common was held on May 7th 1914. The meeting for 1915 was advertised, but in the middle of May the Government cancelled all racing except that at Newmarket. The reason given for the ban was ‘the necessity of keeping the railway system free for the rapid and unimpeded transit of troops and munitions’It became apparent during the war that the Jockey Club did not approve of open courses such as Harpenden; partly because there was no way of making people pay to watch, as there is on enclosed courses, but also because they did not like courses with temporary structures such as Harpenden’s grandstand. There was a doubt as to whether or not a licence would be granted after the war. So, on the 8th August 1918 all the equipment was auctioned on the Common and the proceeds given to the Red Cross. When racing was resumed nationally in 1919, the Harpenden Races were no longer part of the Racing Calendar. All that can now be seen of the course is a square of trees surrounding a car park on the edge of Limbrick Road, these mark the site of the paddock.
HMS Harpenden
There is though, a postscript to the story of the Harpenden Races. During the first world war, the Admiralty ordered a fleet of thirty two paddle minesweepers, and named them all after racecourses. HMS Harpenden was commissioned in 1918, and served in Home Waters and the Baltic until December 1919, when she was paid off at Sheerness. She was then, in January 1920, berthed at Harwich for disposal, and eventually sold for scrap in 1928.The ships bell was acquired by the Right Honourable J C C Davidson MP for Hemel Hempstead Division, and presented to Harpenden Library in 1930, where it still remains as a reminder of the races which were an important day in the life of the village for sixty seven years."
Really interesting post Kasparov.
Does anyone else have any information on former racecourses /stables etc. ?Kasparov,
Here’s a fragment of Harpenden racing history, with info from the oldest book in my racing library, a 1913 McCalls Racing Annual. It provides the results from all meetings held between Dec 1912 and Nov 1913.
Harpenden had just one day of racing in 1913, on Thursday May 8th and the only other racing that afternoon was at Chester, featuring the Dee Stakes and the ormonde Stakes. Harpenden staged seven races, starting at 1:30:
Alexandra Plate of £112 for 2-y-olds 5 furlongs
Childwick Selling Plate of £100 1 mile
Rothampstead 2-y-old Selling Plate of £100 5 furlongs
N H Selling Flat Race of £48 2 miles
Hertfordshire Handicap of £100 1 mile 3 furlongs
Harpenden Town Handicap of £100 5 furlongs
High Firs Plate of £100 for 3-y-olds 1 mile 2 furlongs
Most of the big names were at Chester of course, but the 2-y-old seller was won by Steve Donoghue and the opening race by Herbert Jones, who had six rides on the card.
The NH flat race was nothing like a modern day bumper, but open to any horse that had been running over obstacles. The winner had in fact been beaten in selling hurdles at Lingfield and Worcester on his two previous starts. He was ridden by the amateur Mr George, who’d been on board the first race winner of the two day Cheltenham meeeting in March that included plenty of race names still familiar today.
Probably the best horse on show was Brand, the 7/2 on winner of the last race. He’d already won handicaps at Kempton on Easter Monday and at the Craven meeting, as well as finishing second at Newbury.
It also looks as if the starter had problems with this meeting, as the fifth race, scheduled for 3:45, was officially off at 4:01 and the last two races were also 11 minutes late.
Two of the selling winners changed hands for significant amounts by the standards of the time. The second race winner, Lall, a 3-y-old that beat older horses, fetched 420 gns and rewarded his new owner with two wins in handicaps later in the season. The Donoghue ridden Rey De Veult was sold to the trainer of Lall for 270 gns, but that proved to be an expensive mistake as he finished last in another seller at Lewes on his only subsequent start.
AP
Thanks AP. £100 then is worth over £8000 now on an RPI basis, but much more if you consider it relative to the UK economy at that time, so prize money was quite good. Especially so as it appears the spectators got in for nothing.
Can only recommend Chris Pitt’s book ‘A Long Time Gone’ for those interested in racecourses of yesteryear [I’ve got When Birmingham Went Racing’ as well.
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.
This is a little information on my hometown track. Sounded fun whilst it lasted. Believe you me, a July/August day up at Norton Tower would be like a January/February day at Ascot
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