Sydney Sandon (1878?-1967) was a Kentish Man whose father owned a building company, yet he wound up working for Haydock for 58 years, for many as chairman and managing director. He married into the Frail family that founded Windsor racecourse in 1866. By 1908 they ran other courses including Haydock, when he became Secretary there.
Then they had only eight fixtures a year (there are 32 now) and they had no telephone, gas or electricity. There was a little station adjacent to the course and as each stable lad arrived with his horse he was issued with a hurricane lantern. He woke up in one morning in 1940 to find 7,000 Allied troops on the course, plonked there after being rescued from Dunkirk. A Belgian officer arrested Sandon on suspicion of being a fifth columnist. Almost until the end of his life Sandon lived on site, in a flat above the Secretary’s office near the paddock. “The course is my garden,” he said.
The first Sydney Sandon Stakes was run on Thursday 26 September 1968. Strangely for such an esteemed figure, the race ended in 1976, only for it to reappear ten years later – but not for long. Its very last running was on 24 May 1991, when it was replaced by the Knighton Group Stakes, whose contribution to Haydock was rather less substantial.