Halifax Racecourse: Short and not very sweet

The town of Halifax in West Yorkshire, England, is well enough known for its links to horseracing through Phil Bull’s Timeform company, but fewer people know about the haphazard six-year history of its main racecourse.

Small racecourses sprang up throughout Britain during the 1800’s and in many cases, less is known about the quality of horseracing at such tracks and more about the comedy of errors that usually surrounded them. Halifax was no exception.

Predating the racecourse itself, horseracing in Halifax is traceable to 1853’s West Hill Park meeting, with a May card that kicked off with the one mile Hopeful Stakes, won by Ithanic, a six-year-old owned by Mr Consitt. Racing here continued for the next quarter of a century.

By 1878 the modestly-titled Halifax and Calder Vale Agricultural Steeplechase and Racing Company Limited came into being. It saddled up with the intention of providing local people with their own racecourse and two meetings per year (across Flat and steeplechase disciplines). The company then leased a plot of land at Highroad Well, approximately a mile-and-a-half outside of Halifax town centre. Messrs Dawson and Johnson were promptly installed as course clerks with Mr J. E. Foster drafted in as secretary of the New Course on the doorstep at Norton Tower. This, to be the town’s main course, was situated at over a thousand feet above sea level at Roils Head and was approximately a mile long, covered ninety acres and cost £12,000 to construct. Its stone Gothic-style grandstand was built with £4,000, was over a hundred feet long, around forty-five feet high and could be seen on the skyline from as far away as Scammonden, near the neighbouring town of Huddersfield.

The grandstand held a capacity crowd of a thousand and on February 5^th of 1878, the course played host to a ‘viewing day’ of its facilities prior to the inaugural meeting. That finally happened in August when over a two-day period of Thursday 8^th and Friday 9^th an estimated twenty-thousand people attended. Jockey Club stewards for the meeting included Prince Soltykoff, the Viscounts Helmsley and Lascelles and the Duke of Montrose, withover sixty special constables and detectives prowling the grounds for thieves and rabble rousers.

The first race was the aptly-named Halifax Inaugural Plate, in which Fagan was triumphant aboard a horse called Nutboy - the prize being a gold mounted whip. The first Halifax Cup event then saw Pilchard and Knight Templar dead-heat for victory. Betting was not allowed at the time and the course’s entrance card made a valiant attempt at putting off would-be bookmakers by proclaiming:

“Anyone making use of any stool, clog, colour, hatband, umbrella, bag, satchel or any other thing of like nature for the purposes of betting shall be deemed to have forfeited the entrance money and be liable to expulsion from the ground.”

A second meeting was held in November that year and in its most thriving period the racecourse played host to such locally-titled events as the Calder-Vale Handicap, the Pellon All Age Selling Stakes, the Sowerby Selling Plate, the Savile Park Plate and the Beacon Welter Handicap.  

But Halifax Racecourse’s initial popularity was offset by brewing religious ire over perceived gambling and public immorality, a major point of contention in many places during this era, and which was no less of a headache for racing organisers at Halifax.

One thorn in racing’s side was the Reverend Enoch Mellor, Pastor of Square Congregational Church. His fire-and-brimstone sermon against the course in 1879 did enough to rile up God-fearing locals and those opposed to gambling. But regardless of this, by the spring meeting of that year, Halifax course officials were already in hot water.

A troupe of gamblers had been collared by the police but told them that the racecourse company had in fact charged them ‘ground rent’ to host their dice boards. The company was then accused of “aiding and abetting” on its premises “…persons to play by way of gaming, certain instruments, to wit, dice, cards, Billy-Fair-Play, and spinning” and was then hauled up to account, with its secretary being stung for forty shillings.

The Vicar of Luddenden also made gambling accusations which were supported by a petition of over seven hundred people and prompted a public meeting at the Halifax Mechanics’ Hall in July. A mixed crowd of religiously-minded and racing sorts ensured that a noisy fracas played out before Mayor Samuel Midgley even got to speak. Perhaps predictably, the outcome was bleak for racing supporters, with a motion being passed that the meeting “…views with regret and disapproval the recent establishment of races in this neighbourhood… [finding them] injurious to the moral and commercial interests of the community.” 

Racing limped on in Halifax for five more years, increasingly dogged by church opposition and plummeting attendance. The course also came under fire for being too far from the town and its central railway, a logistical flaw that proved most detrimental.

The final meeting was held over two days (Friday 4^th and Saturday 5^th of July 1884). A mixed meeting, there were four Flat races on Saturday’s card, alongside the Elland Hunters’ Selling Plate, which attracted only two runners. The last race, the mile-and-a-half Halifax Handicap Plate, was contested by three horses aged between four and five years old; Noisy Girl, who won, Sophist and Sacristan, with the race reported simply thus:

“6 to 4 on Noisy Girl, 2 to 1 agst Sacristan, and 6 to 1 agst Sophist. Won by half a length, a bad third.”

The racecourse was later auctioned off for a mere £735 (with the grandstand and effects previously being sold for £2,225) and had its jockeys’ scales sent to Thirsk racecourse. The Gothic grandstand was finally demolished in 1913 and the stone was used to create what is now the current West End Golf Club. Far more successful a sporting venture, its address nonetheless alludes to its origins at the ‘Racecourse at Paddock Lane’ and its promotional brochure further states: “…today a member looking over the wall by the fifth tee sees the old racing stables little changed by the passing of 100 years.”