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 Night Nurse Handicap Hurdle. It was rare then to have a race named after a horse that was still in action, but there can have been few better or more popular Yorkshire-trained horses than Peter Easterby’s star Night Nurse.
He was one of the best of the Golden Age of National Hunt racing between 1970 and 1983. He won three races on the flat and 32 over jumps, including the Champion Hurdles of 1976 and 1977. Soon after the latter he was one half of the memorable Templegate Hurdle at Aintree, dead-heating with fellow dual champion Monksfield after a ding-dong battle, giving him six pounds.
In his belated fencing career he proved he was very nearly as good, and only missed out on a Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1981 due to his stablemate Little Owl. He was ten then; his best chance of being the first to complete the elusive Champion Hurdle-Gold Cup double had gone.
A brilliant jumper, classy and also utterly game, his Timeform rating of 182 was the highest ever given to a hurdler. He’d cost Easterby only 1,100 guineas as a yearling, yet as he explained later that the first seven people he tried to pass him on to turned him down.
Abandonments meant the second running of Doncaster’s Night Nurse Hurdle wasn’t until 1983, by which time Sedgefield had grabbed the initiative to use his name. Night Nurse was paraded before racing at Sedgefield on 21 September 1982, when reunited with his regular pilot over hurdles Paddy Broderick, for the first time since his retirement five years earlier. The Night Nurse Trophy was run at the County Durham track from 1983 to 1995, and usually attracted the sort of good quality fields rarely seen at that venue.
Doncaster staged only one more Night Nurse race before giving way, and in the mid-1980s it was renamed after Teal, the 1952 Grand National winner. He was trained at Middleham by Neville Crump.
There was a one-off “Sea Pigeon & Night Nurse” Handicap Hurdle at Warwick on 31 December 1999, when the course commemorated 20th century greats in its race names; Istabraq, Flyingbolt, Persian War, Arkle, Golden Miller and Cottage Rake.
Sources include:
https://famousracehorses.co.uk/night-nurse/