Two weeks ago I’d got to the beginning of WW2 with Salisbury, and since then I’ve only moved on to 1942. Quite a bit was happening then, but that’s also true of things at home. I have collected an archive of non-racing paraphernalia, contained in about 12 boxes and baskets, and I’ve had to catalogue it to see what should be kept, destroyed, or given to someone else. The decisions are not solely mine, so that slows things up. That’s a contrast with racing archives research, where I am the only arbiter of what I look at or ignore.
The diary is fairly clear in the next ten days and I should be able to progress into Salisbury’s peacetime. Holiday weekends are good for book work. Traffic and bad weather are good reasons not to go far at Easter. Come to think of it, traffic and good weather would be even better reasons to stay in and get on with it.
Last time I advised watching out for David Pipe’s runners in the Midlands Grand National, but he had none. Perhaps he knew how awful the weather would be there. From the comfort of my armchair I’d describe it as “intermittent sleet blizzards”. The management did jolly well to get the meeting on and keep it going. I expect the crowd was a bit down, but as they had virtually sold out in advance I don’t suppose too much damage was done financially.
The 2018 turf flat season began yesterday with the Lincoln Handicap as usual. Nobody makes any play of the fact that the Brocklesby Stakes, traditionally the first two-year-old race, goes back just as far as the Lincoln. Both races began in 1849, although the Brocklesby was then a handicap over a mile and a half. Mind you, the Lincoln started off over two miles. It came down to its present distance of one mile in 1855. It wasn’t until the closure of Lincoln racecourse that these races moved to Doncaster to kick off the 1965 season.
racinghistorian 