The Leger meeting of 1973 saw the first running of the Flying Childers Stakes at Doncaster, for two-year-olds over five furlongs. In the six preceding years the race was called the Norfolk Stakes, but Ascot snaffled the name and Doncaster changed theirs to honour one of the best-known horses of the 18th century. It was particularly appropriate, seeing as he was bred a stone’s throw from the course.
Hugh Childers was the Mayor of Doncaster when in 1610 he purchased Cantley Hall, on the outskirts of the town. His descendant Leonard mated his own mare Betty Leedes, a decent racehorse, with the Darley Arabian, a controversial import of foreign blood. The product of this was the Fying Childers, born in 1714. The namesake horse was unbeaten – over distances far in excess of five furlongs, despite looking like a sprinter in James Seymour’s portrait of him. He only raced six times, and three of them were walkovers by virtue of scaring off the opposition. In a trial he beat Fox, probably the best other horse around at that time, by a quarter of a mile conceding a stone in weight.
At least three pubs are named after him. He wasn’t as influential a stallion as his full brother (known variously as Young Childers, Bartlett’s Childers and Bleeding Childers, due to his propensity to breat blood vessels), who was the great-grandsire of Eclipse.
One of the race’s most memorable winners was Hittite Glory in 1975, returned at 100/1. Incidentally, if one studies the list of winners on Wikipedia it is very apparent that since 2008 the race has taken less than a minute on all bar one occasion, whereas before 1997 every timed race bar one took at least one minute. Cantley Hall is now owned by the founder of the DFS sofa chain.