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This race featured a great deal in my youth.
It was staged at Haydock Park, usually the first Saturday in March, over 3m.
It was a Handicap Chase and victors included Cheltenham Gold Cup winners Royal Frolic in 1976 and Alverton in 1979.
It also IIRC had winners placed in Cheltenham Gold Cups – Sunset Cristo, Righthand Man, Earls Brig and Yahoo.
Scot Lane also profited from shocking jumping from Bregawn to win it in 1982 before following up in the race now known as the Ultima at the Cheltenham Festival.
But my fondest memory was in 1978 – I think it might have been Red Rum’s final racecourse appearance and, though he didn’t feature after a bad mistake at the first, it was a thriller with Rambling Jack clear when falling at the last, leaving Lucius in the lead, but the subsequent Grand National winner was overhauled by Rambling Artist on the run in.
I mention all this because, back then, the Grand National weights were out by the time this race was run.
I guess Saturday’s 3m4f Grand National Trial has sort of replaced it, though it has an earlier slot in the Calendar.
I wonder what memories this year’s winner of that will evoke in years to come?
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Just looked some of them up on Youtube; so many legends and old favourites. We really have lost something.
Was there that day too – Ron Barry just let the horse pop and he folded on landing. My father was livid, “ that Barry is past it now, he’s a binman !”
Checking Wikipedia, I was there for the last ever running of the race in 1990. Rinus won, trained by Gordon W Richards and ridden by Richard Dunwoody in the Edinburgh Woollen Mill colours.
Greenall Whitley was the local brewery which owned a large tied estate in the St Helens and Warrington area. The brewery closed in 1990, hence the end of the sponsorship.
I think the brewery was a victim of the “Beer Orders” Act, which placed a limit on how many pubs each brewery could own. Greenalls decided to stop brewing and became a pub owning company instead (the Act only stopped breweries owning large estates, hence how most of our pub stock is now owned by property companies).
In its heyday, Greenall Whitley used to advertise on television (presumably only in the Granada region, when ITV was just a loose affiliation of regional franchises). This one was perhaps the most famous but one scene would not get past the Thought Police today:
“We really have lost something.”
I recall my grand parents saying things aren’t as good as they used to be and struggling in my youth to see it as the world they described sounded dire.
I guess it’s a common condition as we age, but I’d have to agree with Befair that we – and IMO racing – have definitely lost something since those days.
The sad thing is I took it all for granted back then, and wrongly assumed the way racing was structured then was how it would always be.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"It always clashed with the Racing Post Chase card at Kempton, so I ony ever saw the Greenalls Gold Cup once – Whitley had gone missing by then. That was in 1994, when Haydock was waterlogged and the race was added to the Kempton card.
It proved to be the icing on a glorious cake that had races won by Balasani, Mysilv, Monsieur Le Cure and Antonin, all of whom went on to win at the Festival that year.
For the Greenalls, Kempton revived their old 3M 4F distance and in a race run on soft ground, Master Oats won his first big prize. He went on to win a transferred Welsh National the following season before his Gold Cup success. Thus becoming the answer to three racing quiz questions:
1. Who won a Greenalls Gold Cup south of the M4.
2. Who won a Welsh National in England.
3. Who won a Gold Cup jumping eight fences on the New Course and one on the Old Course on each circuit.
I’m sure the contributors to this thread won’t need reminding but others might not know that a scion of the family, Peter Greenall, 4th Baron Daresbury was chairman of Aintree for many years and an owner of racehorses
Greenall Whitley bought circa 1990 – and promptly closed – Shipstones Brewery in Nottingham, much to the annoyance of my father who was weaned on ‘Shippos’ during the 40s and 50s
The Shipstones Brewery has (sort of) been revived. Someone bought the name and started brewing about 5 years ago.
I had a pint of Shipstones Bitter in the Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem, the pub set in the walls of Nottingham Castle. I never had the pleasure of tasting their beer before Greenalls closed the original brewery, so I cannot say how it compared.
It was a decent if bog-standard bitter, and there was a dark mild too if memory serves
The old man grew up in the then mining town of Hucknall, north of Nottingham, and my grandparents continued living there until the mid ’70s so I partook of Shippos when visiting them, in the equally bog-standard if ‘characterful’ boozers in the town, crammed with coughing miners chain-smoking Players Plain, which was no doubt a welcome change from the coal dust they inhaled at work: no smoking d’arnt pit
Home Ales and Kimberley Ales were two other local brewers, now gone. Rather than being ‘pulled’ by handpump the draught beers were served by ‘switching’ an electric pump via a rather attractive bar-top glass cylinder through which a diaphragm moved back-and-forwards dispensing exactly half a pint each way
Another time, another planet
The Trip to Jerusalem is a grand pub, as are The Bell and The Salutation in central Nottingham. Haven’t visited them for years, must do so again sometime
“And there was a dark mild too if memory serves”.
I wish more breweries would make a dark mild but there is no money in mild, alas.
Having said that, I am currently enjoying a pint of Timothy Taylor Golden Best – a very rare example of a light mild.
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