PITCHCROFT.

​Many years ago, I went with a friend to an evening meeting at Worcester. As Chester is also known as the Roodeye, Worcester can be referred to as the Pitchcroft. It was a warm and pleasant evening, with, as always, superb visibility of the action. I enjoyed the evening so much that I wanted to record it in some manner of form and wrote a short-story based on the actual evening’s racing, abetted by fictional characters. The story was called ‘Pitchcroft Blues’ and can be found in my book of racing short-stories ‘Going To The Last’, which can be purchased as either hard copy or in digital form. You will find details close at hand.
Anyway, commercial over, the aforementioned evening was brought vividly back to me when reading the excellent Chris Pitt’s book ‘Pitchcroft. 300-Years of Racing in Worcester’.
Chris Pitt must be one of the country’s finest racing historians, as can easily be ascertained if you have a copy of ‘A Long Time Gone’, ‘Go Down To The Beaten’ or ‘When Birmingham Went Racing’ on your bookshelves. His latest book is both equally as interesting and worthy of anyone’s collection of horse racing books.
Chris Pitt’s research is thorough and he treats the subject matter with the same respect as if he was writing the history of Ascot, Newmarket or Cheltenham. Worcester may be humble compared to the aforementioned courses but it is a really top-notch course hiding in plain-sight and over the years the sport’s top trainers have sent their promising young hurdlers or chasers for their first spins over its hurdles and fences, with trainers and jockeys alike describing Worcester as ‘fair, ‘non-trappy’, ‘where the best horse normally wins’. From its early days to the present, good horses have won and lost around the course that lives in the shadow of the cathedral and along the banks of the Severn.
Of course, that old River Severn is not always Worcester racecourse’s best friend, with nature using the course as a flood-plane on a regular basis, causing many meetings to be abandoned not through heavy ground but flooding, flooding to the point where boats are the only appropriate transport. It was such an on-going dilemma that Worcester was the first course to apply for summer jumps meetings, a move that initiated the end of summer holidays for jump jockeys.
For most of its 300-year history Worcester raced both on the flat and over jumps, though the locals couldn’t seem to stir themselves for the flat, which made flat racing unprofitable and on August 20th 1966 the decision was taken to dedicate the racecourse to National Hunt only.
On September 3rd 1987, Worcester made the national newspapers, radio and television, when the Princess Anne won the 3-mile Droitwich Handicap Chase on her own horse Cnoc Na Cuille, trained by David Nicholson.
Great Horses have run at Worcester, including Tingle Creek who finished second to Tex giving him 40Ibs, Larbawn, Titus Oates, Galloway Braes, Gaye Chance, and the list goes on.
John Kempton was at Worcester, winning on Three Dons, when Foinavon, a horse he trained, won the Grand National on the day the voice of Michael O’Hehir became immortalised, ‘And Rutherfords has been hampered and so has Castle Falls, Rondetto has fallen, Norther has fallen ..’ You must know the rest by heart.
Sir Edward Elgar loved the course and spent many a happy day in competition with the local bookmakers. I suppose it is fanciful to speculate but he could have come up with a few bars of music that later could be heard at the Henry Woods Promenade Concerts.
Chris Pitt’s history of Worcester racecourse is jam-packed with historic and more recent photographs and is, in my humble opinion, one of the best books of its kind. It is worthy both as a racing book and as part of English history. Oh, and as I do not like to give away too much of a book’s contents, I have only filched a small amount of the facts contained in the book and a treasure trove of Worcester related stories and data await you.