A LONG TIME GONE.

​If you were to ask me the book I consider to be the most essential book ever written about horse racing, a book, I would argue, everyone with a fascination with the sport should have on their bookshelves, I would suggest ‘A Long Time Gone’ by the excellent Chris Pitt. Archaeologists maintain that it is knowing and understanding the past that allows us to put into context our present and future. The adage could not be better exemplified that in the knowing and understanding of the sport’s history, and horse racing is perhaps the most documented of all sports. We are nothing without those who came before and if digging about in racing’s past is a greater pleasure for you than finding a winner at Yarmouth or Musselburgh I suggest it cannot be done either satisfyingly of successfully without the works of Chris Pitt in your duffle bag.
To prove my point, I am about to write a quick history of Harpendon races, though in this instance I could also have gleaned my facts from Eric Brandreth, as Chris Pitt admits to doing, a former head librarian in Harpendon and the first chronicler of the town and most importantly its racecourse. I, too, wonder if he is related to the wit and raconteur, Gyles Brandreth.
If someone these days had the wholly good idea that the local town would benefit from staging an annual race meeting the reality of that idea could not come to fruition, if at all, for years into the future, and even then it would prove a Herculean exercise involving planning permission, B.H.B. approval, raising capital and so on and so on. Yet in 1848 Henry Oldaker had such an idea and together with other local farmers he organised and staged a 4-race card on the 21st of June of that same year. 10,000 people attended and it was generally agreed that it should become an annual event. For the 1849 meeting the committee bought a roller to roll out all the bumps on the common-land that constituted the racecourse.
In 1863 there were 8 races over varying distances, including 4-furlongs, a type of race that was not disallowed until 1912. God-forbid if those in favour of such races being reintroduced today ever get their way, as with the attention span of some young people it might be thought a good idea to have 3-furlong and 2-furlong races. In this period of racing’s history, it was traditional for the winner to take the whole of the stake money, with the second horse entitled to the return of its entry fee. Can’t see anyone advocating the return of that practice, somehow!
It is easy to think that Harpendon races at this time was nothing but a country meeting on similar lines to a modern-day point-to-point. It was anything but, as race day was always the week before the Epsom Derby and trainers would often try their Derby hopes at Harpendon, proving that the past really was, at least for racing, a different country, as the likes of John Gosden and Aidan O’Brien would be thought to have turned mad if they ran their big hopes only days before Epsom.
In 1862, a locally trained horse, Caractacus, who was beaten in a maiden the year before at Harpendon, won the Derby at 40/1, ridden by a stable lad, John Parson, who at 16 remains the youngest jockey ever to win the great race. Afterwards he disappeared back into obscurity. The noted jockeys of their day also regularly rode at Harpendon: Fred Archer, Herbert Jones, George Duller, Fred Rickaby, Freddie Fox, Morny Wing and perhaps the greatest of them all Steven (he did not appreciate being called Steve) Donoghue. In fact, the last-named dead-heated for the High Firs Plate on a horse called Sanglamore, the name of a classic winning horse around about the time ‘A Long Time Gone’ was published.
As with most race-meetings held within easy reach of London in those far off days Harpendon attracted the least desirable members of society. As a journalist in the local newspaper sadly reported ‘…. For two days a year all London’s pickpockets, sharpers and blackguards who happen to be out of gaol are permitted to make Harpendon their own, and to make travelling in a first-class carriage of the Midland Railway a danger to men and an impossibility to women’. Rather like a football special today, I suspect.
As it was with Cheltenham – how our lives would be changed if the local vicar had got his way and had Cheltenham races stopped – a local killjoy by the name of Henry Tylston Hodgson got up a petition to have Harpendon races killed off. He issued 815 voting papers and lost the argument by 278 to 244, with 18 abstentions. The sum doesn’t add up as only 540 voting papers were returned, which leaves the impression that the races were not considered a controversial enough issue for the locals to bother putting pen to paper over as the ‘not-bothered’ finished second the three runner poll.
By 1902 Harpendon’s reputation had diminished to the point that the local paper wrote: ‘Harpendon now enjoys the reputation of being a small meeting with a well-behaved local crowd’. The writer also went on to reminisce about the good old days when Harpendon races was patronised by a rowdier crowd, when hundreds of police were drafted into the village to keep-the-peace and card-sharps and pick-pockets got two-weeks in prison with hard labour thrown-in to help pass the time.
The last meeting was scheduled for 7th May 1914 but a killjoy with a world-wide reputation made life too difficult for the meeting to go ahead and there was no visionary in the same vein as Henry Oldaker to get the races up and running again and Harpendon disappeared from the sporting pages.