Today sees one of the finest events in the annual English sporting calendar taking place. And no it’s not the semi-finals at Wimbledon, the Henley Regatta or the practice run of the British Grand Prix at Silverston, but rather the highly competitive, highly sophisticated Oxted Pram Race. Having been a regular at the pram race in my teens, I’m extremely disappointed not to be able to document it for this project but our tight schedule demands that we are here in Coventry.

The annual Oxted Pram Race takes place on the Friday evening before the Oxted Carnival. Participating in the event is quite simple: pay an entry fee and ask family and friends to sponsor you to run the two thirds of a mile from Oxted train station to The Bell in Old Oxted High Street.  The only catch is that you have to push the pram wearing fancy dress and stop at each of the seven licensed premises on the way, where you have to down a drink as fast as you can.  There are prizes as well as penalties for how well you do.

Eric and Elsie Hallson started the pram race in 1977 after visiting friends in Clacton and attending a pram race there.  Eric quickly realized that the proximity of the pubs in Oxted this would be well suited to this type of event.

I’d be interested in any information on the origins of Pram Racing. A quick trawl of the internet provides very few clues, although it does bring up several other pram race listings around the country.

I did recently come across a picture of the Clutton village pram race from 1978 in the Looking Back pages of the Somerset Guardian.

 

This photograph was captioned ‘Rock-A-Bye-Baby: Contestants in the Clutton Pram Race get into the spirit’ and was dated May 5, 1978. Here is an extract from the accompanying article:

“On a grey, drizzly day, the colourful spectacle as almost 30 prams with runners and occupants lined up at the start, brought quite a few smiles to the faces of the holiday drivers held up in traffic queues on the A37. Landlady Molly Robinson, of the Warwick Arms, had hardly blown the whistle when the teams, complete with decorated prams, had their first massive pile-up just yards from the starting line. Best dressed on the day was the Clutton Methodist Sunday School with its flying doctor outfits.”

 

Mad Maldon Mud Race, Maldon, Essex, December 31st 2007

These mildly eccentric English pastimes seem to be enjoying a revival in recent years.  It could also be noted that pubs and the consumption of alcohol play a prominent role in them.  Is this in itself peculiarly English?  In fact, the Mad Maldon mud race, which I photographed in December, began as a result of a drunken conversation in the local pub, where one man challenged another to run across the mud flats and has since metamorphosised over the years into an annual race where a couple of hundred people get down and dirty squelching across the mud before celebrating in the pub afterwards.

 

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