I feel I must be the only person in the country not to have had the Tudors bludgeoned into me at school, read Hilary Mantel’s books or watched the neverending stream of TV adaptations of their tediously complicated affairs.
In case there are any others, in a nutshell, Henry VIII’s (qv) loyal sidekick Cardinal Wolsey (qv) failed to arrange an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn (qv). Wolsey fell from grace and in 1529 was charged with high treason, only to die of natural causes before he could be tried and face the inevitable aftermath with the executioner.
What is this to do with Sandown? Well, Wolsey had used Esher Palace (one of his official residences) to monitor the building of a new, bigger and better palace for Henry nearby, Hampton Court. In 1537 Henry acquired Esher Palace (next to where Sandown racecourse was laid out in 1875), by which time he had executed Anne Boleyn for failing to give him a male heir.
Eventually parts of Esher Palace were dismantled for use in other royal palaces. The rest was knocked down or fell down, with the exception of the gatehouse (Wayneflete’s Tower) survives today.
The current building, Esher Place, dates from the 1890s and is used as a college by its owners, the Unite trade union. Between 1963 and 1986 Sandown staged either an Esher Palace or an Esher Place Handicap. The sequence began and ended with Place, but there were Palaces in between. Whether the coming and going of the letter a was deliberate or careless is hard to say.