Epsom Derby Winners
and
What day was the Derby run each year?

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Diomed and Galileo which won the Derby in, respectively, 1780 (the first) and 2001
are featured on the “Evocation of Speed” sculpture in Epsom’s Marketplace.

What day was the Derby run each year?

For local historians, this can be useful to know. When posters advertise the race, or letters are sent just after it, or newspaper clippings mention it, they often specify the day without mentioning the year. We’ve prepared a spreadsheet which makes it possible to work this out quickly. As a rule, it is only once in a decade that the race is run on a particular date, so if you consult the list, you’ll find that a poster or letter referring to the Derby of Saturday 5^th June from some time in the last twenty years must be 2004, 2010 or 2021. Most sources give enough background information to suggest a decade, so that with the help of the table show below you can arrive at the year.

Today the Derby takes place on the first Saturday in June, but this has not always been the case. A timing of late May/ early June did not stabilise until the 1860s, with the last May race in 1968. Looking back (from 2023) we find that it has been run in June 128 times, but also 114 times in May. (That’s including the Derbies run at Newmarket in wartime, from 1915 to 1918 and from 1940 to 1945, to avoid the risk of large crowds gathering near London). Twice the race has been run in July – in 1917 on the 30^th, after the lifting of restrictions imposed during the wartime food crisis, and in 2020 on the 4^th, to accommodate Covid regulations.

The day of the race moved from Wednesday to Saturday in 1995, to make it more family-friendly, ending a long tradition of fictitious family funerals reported by employees who wanted to take the Wednesday off. Saturday had been trialled during and just after the Second World War, probably to minimise this kind of absenteeism. From 1847 to 1892 Parliament adjourned so that members could go to the Derby, although this was often contested and in some years the adjournment was turned down. Like the annual Parliamentary motion, the custom of Wednesday Derbies was not as old as it seemed: the first ten years of the race alternated between Wednesdays and Thursdays, and from then until 1837 Thursday was the norm. (There were also four Tuesday Derbies, 1915–18, but this was at Newmarket where attendance was being discouraged). The mid-week date was convenient in early years, when aristocratic patrons travelled down before the race and stayed locally for political networking.

Dates for the Derby have been taken from Roger Mortimer, The History of the Derby Stakes (1973 ed) with subsequent years supplied from the comprehensive information on greyhoundderby.com. Thanks to Maggie Wright and JJ Woodville who extracted the information.

Epsom Derby Winners

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