To explain the Walrus race at Haydock I can do no better than quote from the Liverpool Daily Post’s racing correspondent on 2 March 1950.
“When staid racing men open their newspapers at the sporting page tomorrow morning and find the Haydock Park events growing “curiouser and curiouser” they need not be unduly surprised. The Alice in Wonderland effect – there will be the White Rabbit, March Hare, Humpty-dumpty and Walrus and Oyster Handicaps – was premeditated by the executive, who wished to maintain local links for this additional two-days to the Haydock yearly programme.
“What better than that they should borrow Lewis Carroll’s famous story from which to make selection. For Lewis Carroll was born in Daresbury, not far away, and the village church in which he used to listen as a boy to his father’s sermons long since honoured him in stained glass representations of Tenniel’s illustrations.
“Haydock Park clerk of the course Mr Sydney Sandon told me yesterday, “You would scarcely realise how difficult it is to name with appropriate local links twelve races at each of twelve meetings. When we were asked to take this extra National Hunt meeting we did not know what to do about them until someone remembered Lewis Carroll’s association with Daresbury.”
The Walrus and the Carpenter was a poem from Through the Looking Glass, Carroll’s 1871 follow-up to Alice in Wonderland. The Walrus’s best-known lines are:
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”
By 1960 the Walrus was its chief race at Haydock at its early March meeting, but that year the entries were disappointing and it dropped out of sight until March 1976, when a Walrus Hurdle began.
Two years later the two big races, the Greenall Whitley and Victor Ludorum (qv), were complemented by the Oyster, March Hare, Alice, Dormouse and Duchess. After that these and other names from the Alice books such as the Mock Turtle, Tweedledum, Mad Hatters and Look Before You Leap came and went as titles of the unsponsored races at the late February/early March two-day meetings.
The Walrus re-emerged as a hunter chase on Friday 24 February 1995 and carried on as such on various days of the week, gaining sponsorship in 2007, and it miraculously survives to the present day, on a Saturday. It’s a relatively important race in the hunter chase calendar, coming two or three weeks before Cheltenham. I can remember it closing the Saturday afternoon racing programme on TV. That is unimaginable nowadays.