Brigadier Alan Harvey Jones MBE was appointed as company secretary at Haydock in 1965. The following year he made headlines by offering half price admission to pensioners if they showed their pension books at the turnstiles. 750 turned up at their two-day midweek meeting in February.
In March 1975 he put forward Haydock as the logical venue for the Grand National should Aintree’s owner fail to stage the race in future. He died in August of that year, credited with making so many improvements at Haydock “that it would be impossible to itemise them all”. The Harvey Jones Stakes was inaugurated a year later with £5,000 added money, with the help of extra Levy Board funding for Haydock’s principal races. It was run on the flat in August until 1999. The following year it was a steeplechase run in early November, and it continued thus until its final appearance on 19 October 2006.
The Brigadier was not related to the John Harvey-Jones that was a well-known “captain of industry” in the last quarter of the 20th century.