THE HAMBLETONIANS
Hambleton Races with the Dialstone and jockeys’ scales in the background depicted by a painting by George Stubbs dated 1720 (Reproduced by kind permission of the owner)
the new owner Sir Matthew SmithDodsworth. He had joined a non-conformist sect and considered racing sinful. A belt of trees was deliberately planted across the gallops in 1901 (and subsequently felled in 1938) and a stone wall built. Trainers continued to come and go in the early part of the 20th century culminating in the arrival of Noel Murless in 1935. He moved into Hambleton Lodge with five horses stabled in the old yard at Hambleton House. The lodge was nicknamed ‘The Ritz’ by the bachelor establishment who stayed and lived there in honour of its rather spartan amenities. Even in those relatively recent days, Sutton Bank was a challenge. On one occasion, Murless had to dig his way through the snow down Sutton Bank in the middle of the night, his head man leading March Brown, his Cheltenham Foxhunters candidate (and subsequent winner), in order to get to the horsebox. Murless put a lot of money and effort into the Hambleton gallops and restored the facilities that had been denied to trainers there for some decades. In 1937 he was joined by another trainer who was to attain legendary status – Ryan Price, who trained from the hotel yard until the war intervened. The war also meant a move to Middleham
for Murless as Hambleton was turned into a dummy airfield and one hundred and twenty acres were ploughed up for crops, but in 1945 he moved back again with his new family, this time to live at Hambleton House. From here his career continued on an upward curve until his move to Beckhampton in 1947.
SOURCES Northern Turf History – Vol. 1 Hambleton and Richmond, by J. Fairfax-Blakeborough The Cox Library The Guv’nor – Tim Fitzgeorge Parker An Historical List of all the Plates and Prizes run for at York and at Black Hambleton – first publ. J. Jackson 1748. Early Horse Racing in Yorkshire and the Origins of the Thoroughbred – David Wilkinson ACknOwlEdgEmEntS Bryan and Victoria Smart Kevin and Jillian Ryan Yvonne Mee (née Carr, daughter of Joe Carr) Joan Calvert Brown (also née Carr, first marriage to Jack Calvert) Paul Cooper (Proprietor, Hambleton Inn)
Incumbents after Murless included Jack Calvert in Hambleton House (1955-83); and Joe Carr, who lived in Hambleton Lodge and built the existing front yard there in 1958, using the stable doors from the old Manchester racecourse. Eventually, Les Eyre bought Hambleton House. It was he who first put in an allweather gallop, but when he sold the property in 2002, the training ground was divided at the Cold Kirby road. Thus there are now two gallops – those on the eastern side being Bryan Smart’s from Hambleton House, and those on the western side, climbing up to a copse at the top of the hill and overlooking the countryside below, are Kevin Ryan’s from Hambleton Lodge. The lower section of the old oval course, where horses were racing four hundred years ago, was somewhere very close to the bottom end of Kevin Ryan’s gallop. Both Bryan Smart and Kevin Ryan have had great success at Hambleton and have sent out multiple group winners. Kevin Ryan started his training career there in 1998 with a dozen horses and now has ten times that number. “It’s a real old-fashioned, relaxed place with the right facilities to train racehorses, “ says Smart. “It’s been a very successful establishment over the years, and why should it not continue to be?” n
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