British Racing and Racecourses - The Start

The Start

The idea for the book came in 1966, when Marion Halpenny was at a race meeting and heard one woman asking another why a certain horse was wearing a nose band, it occurred to her at the time that the majority of people going to meetings knew very little about the details of racing and she thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put all the information together in a book. So began the task of collecting the necessary information, sifting through it, selecting items and preparing them for the book. She did all this without knowing it would ever be published and was pleasantly surprised when the first publisher she sent the manuscript to accepted it straight away.

Though met favourably by the media, who liked the lone woman against the establishment angle, male chauvinists in the racing world were luke warm and a series of copy cat books, written by men, were quickly published afterwards. The diagrams of the tracks of the racecourses, which were an innovation of Marion Halpenny, were also quickly copied by newspapers and other publications and are still often used and seen in publications today. All came from the book British Racing and Racecourses.