RACING IN BRITAIN Closing Of Tracks Could Help Trotting

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30487, 8 July 1964, Page 4

RACING IN BRITAIN Closing Of Tracks Could Help Trotting

LONDON, July 6.

Now that world-famous Aintree racecourse, home of the Grand National, is to be sold for development as a housing and factory estate, and half-a-dozen other well-known racecourses are threatened or already closed, the question of a drift of popularity towards trotting is being discussed seriously by London racing writers.

The chief sponsors of trotting in Britain are the New Zealand brothers, Messrs Noel and William Simpson, who have spent £150,000 on establishing a stadium at. Prestatyn, Wales, where they are having a’ great success. Mr Noel Simpson told the “Daily . Mail” that he thought trotting might take three years to catch on nationally. His company had about 200 registered trotting ponies, representing 100 to 150 owners from all over Britain. Many others, particularly in Scotland, were unregistered. “It’s all a long way yet from New Zealand standards, where trotting hands out £500,000 a year in prize money,” says the * “Daily Mail.” “But in New York pioneer tracks have built up rapidly into major successes.

It could happen here, where you can still import a good trotter for £5OO or £6OO, and where you can stand to win £l5O at an ordinary meeting for an entry fee of £4, or £5O for 305.” More Tracks Soon The chairman of stewards at Prestatyn, Lord Langford, Constable of Rhuddlan Castle, who himself drives a sulky, said he was convinced there would soon be more tracks in all parts of Britain. “What we need is a national governing body for the sport, the equivalent of the Jockey Club, and totalisator betting. We started just too late to get a mention in the new Betting and Gaming Act. “Above all, we need the support of a new breed of ‘do-it-yourself’ owners who don’t have to be millionaires. This could be the horseracing sport for the new affluent middle' classes.” Mrs Elsie Mylon, managing director of a civil engineering firm, has set up a trotting stud-farm in .Wales and has formed the United Kingdom Trotting Association as a national “supporters’ club” for the sport. At Low. Ebb . The “Financial’Times” says that the condition, of racing in Britain is such that bids

for racecourses might sometimes come as a welcome deliverance to the concerns that run the courses. “Racing has found it increasingly difficult to draw enough people to keep its head above water. In the last few years attendance figures have moved steadily downwards from 5,600,000 in 1958 to 4,500,000 last year.” MS shPr : •