In the late 1970s Doncaster had no jumps meetings between the end of the flat and January. A new fixture was created on Friday and Saturday 18-19 December 1980. Races that weren’t sponsored were named after horses with a Yorkshire connection. One of them was the Doorknocker Opportunity Handicap Hurdle, ie a race for conditional jockeys. Graham Bradley won its first running.
Doorknocker won the Champion Hurdle in 1956, when an eight-year-old novice. He was the first northern-trained horse to win the race. He’d been bought as a yearling for leading owner-breeder Clifford Nicholson by the astute Irish trainer Paddy Sleator. He thought very highly of the horse, but proved almost impossible to keep sound. On his debut in March 1952 he fell in a hurdle for four-year-olds at Naas. He didn’t return to the track for another 44 months.
His reappearance was in a Leopardstown maiden on 26 November 1955, when the money was down. He trotted up at odds of 4/5. Twelve days later Doorknocker was sent over to Haydock and won a novice hurdle carrying 12-6, again odds on. A month after that he bore 12-10 on his back winning at Wetherby, odds on once more, but by now officially in the care of Yorkshire trainer Charlie Hall. The next stop was the Champion Hurdle. It was not a vintage year, which enabled Doorknocker to win narrowly at 100/9. The stable jockey, Paddy Farrell, who rode him at Wetherby, chose to partner another better-fancied horse from Hall’s yard that finished out of the money.
Nicholson said after the race, “It was a wonderful performance, because he has been partly broken down for the best part of three years. When his leg went we could do nothing with him for two years, and upon resuming training we had to do everything very quietly and steadily. He gets very upset and sweats badly, as he did today. I fully expected it because he left his supper last night and wouldn’t eat any breakfast again this morning.”
Doorknocker finished the season by running second at Aintree. He ran twice in the autumn of 1956, winning both, the latter a steeplechase by 20 lengths. There was ambitious talk of going for the King George VI Chase but injury prevented that bold plan. Two more outings in 1957/58 proved to be his last.
The final incarnation of the Doncaster race was in 1998. Two of the last four runnings were won by Graham Lee, who at the time of writing in 2022 was booting home winners on the flat.