Pontefract’s Bentley Handicap, sometimes the Bentley Memorial Handicap, began in 1953 and lasted until April 2002. It was run in honour of the racecourse company’s secretary William Bentley, who took on the role in 1937. Racecourse administration was often placed in the hands of well-established local solicitors, who kept the job for decades. Pontefract has had a long association with Carter, Bentley & Gundill (qv) based in the town’s Ropergate. Three solicitors joined forces to create a new partnership in 1916.
As well as being a solicitor, Clerk to the Borough Justices, chairman of the governors of two Pontefract schools, King’s and the Secondary Modern Boys’, and director of various companies he had in his time been a town councillor, alderman and Justice of the Peace. He worked his way up from teaching shorthand at night school while still a student himself to becoming the senior payment in his firm of solicitors.
He asserted that the coroner court verdicts of “Suicide while of unsound mind” and “felo de se” (self-murder) should be abolished. He thought juries disliked the latter and brought in verdicts of the former, so as to spare the feelings of the deceased’s relatives. He called for a new verdict, “died by his own hand.” Felo de se was abolished in 1961. Nowadays the term is simply “suicide”.
When acting as a magistrate he liked things to be done properly; one day on the bench he noticed the man in the witness box was chewing gum. He asked him to remove the gum and made him take the oath again. Yet he was quite avant-garde in other ways; in his will he forbade his family from wearing mourning at his cremation.
Sources include:
An obituary in the Yorkshire Evening Post of 16 November 1951.
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