Bournemouth Racecourse

The Poole Selling Hurdle Race which started at 2 o'clock on the afternoon of Friday 17th April 1925 was the inaugural event of the Bournemouth Racecourse. The Racecourse, however. was not in Bournemouth but in the Parish of Kinson and the Rural District of Poole. Situated at Ensbury Park, it is now submerged under the bungalows and houses of the Leybourne Estate. The last horse race took place just three years later, on April 11th, 1928. Between those two dates the racecourse saw twenty-two days of National Hunt racing, three large aviation meetings, motorcycle grass track racing and some of the first greyhound racing in Bournemouth.

The racecourse was built on the site of an airfield used by the Royal Flying Corps. and then the Royal Air Force, to train pilots towards the end of the 1914-18 war.

Linking these activities, flying, racing and building, is one man, Mr. F.E. Etches; and this story is as much about him as about the negotiations and problems in establishing the racecourse and its final days.

THE LEYBOURNE  ESTATE The name derives from the name of the Estate. An extract from the  Memorandum of Association of the Fairmile Estate Company Ltd.  reads:- 'At an extraordinary general meeting of the Company duly  convened and held on the 18th day of September I930 ; at 50 Pall  Mall LONDON SW1, the following resolution was duly passed as a  Special Resolution:- "Resolved that owing to local associations,  reported to the Company, it is desirable to change the name of the  Company and that the name of the Company be changed from 'The  Fairmile Estate Company Ltd.‘ to ‘The Leybourne Estate Company Ltd.' The name Leybourne seems to be composed of two parts: the ending 'Bourne' from Bournemouth and the beginning 'Ley' from the name  'Studley Growers Ltd.’ a company owning part of Ensbury Farm in  1915. The full form would be STUD(LEY BOURNE)MOUTH.  

The race-course was put up for auction on Thursday, 13th December, 1928 by Messrs. Fox & Sons,  at St. Peter's Hall, Bournemouth, and bought in by the auctioneers at £54,000. The land came under the Bournemouth Town Planning Scheme No.1, for Kinson, administered  until 1931 by the Poole Rural District Council. The plan was approved by Bournemouth Council,  before the 1931 Borough extension, on 24th July, 1928. It received Ministerial approval on 9th  May, 1929. 

Next to Ensbury House/Manor eastwards was Ensbury Vicarage built in 1785 and set back from the road amid tall trees. The mellow red-brick house had Venetian-style windows on the ground floor under a Regency canopy built across the front of the building. It was used as the vicarage for St. Andrew’s until 1895 when the Reverend Arnold Sharp took up residence at Pelhams. When Brookside became the permanent vicarage the Ensbury one was let privately until the church, in 1922, finally gave up the house and it was sold. At the end of the Second War, it was opened as a restaurant and a guest-house. When the grounds were altered to extend the car park a subsidence was noticed. This proved to be part of a tunnel leading from a chamber under the kitchen. The house still stands, still amid trees but now on the busy corner of New Road. It now bears the name of ‘The Old Vicarage’ and has been entirely re-faced.

The largest house was Ensbury Manor or Ensbury House, a house whose foundations and deeds were 700 years old. It would seem reasonable to suggest that, in the absence of an alternative, this was the manor house of Kinson. Its grounds adjoin the lands of Kinson or Manor Farm, the oldest farm in the area, and the vicarage for St. Andrew’s situated in Ensbury, further east of the Manor. Against this is the fact that the farm took on the name of Manor Farm only around one century ago. The house was pulled down in 1936 but had been set back from the main road behind a screen of trees. 

To the south of Ensbury Manor across the main road, then a gravel track, stood another smaller 18th-century house of similar design and materials as the corresponding parts of the Manor. It is now called The Dower House but started out as Ensbury Cottage. It was probably always the dower house to the Manor, but only received that name within the last 60 years. 

The Methodists first met in a thatched cottage part way up Poole Lane at its junction with the lane that became Moore Avenue. In 1895 the Poole Methodists built a chapel on the main road just east of the village. It was of typical ‘village chapel’ design in red brick and slate; the interior was paneled and beamed with much dark wood. The Sunday school sermons were of the ‘hellfire and brimstone’ variety and most entertaining. When gas lamps were erected on the pulpit the risk that the pulpit-thumping would bring down the lot was an added attraction which drew children from the rival Sunday schools. The 1895 chapel’s foundation stones were laid by Dr. Samuel Montgomery and Wilson Hogue. When the little chapel was pulled down the foundation stones were kept and incorporated in the new church hall built in 1967. The new church, replacing the chapel, was erected nearby in 1957.

Kinson Con  Club serves the community of Kinson and its surrounding area`s . We offer a wide range of activities to live bands , tribute  acts , Country and Western nights and other events .

We have also our Sports Bar which caters for live sky sports  channels for your favourite sports events.

Or hire our function room for private parties, weddings, christenings 

You have to be a member to book the room or book through a member who has to attend the party all night.

Email info@kinsonconservativeclub.co.uk  to make enquiries 

 We invite members to bring their children  on a Saturday and Sunday to visit in the sports bar only between 11am - 6pm

Kinson House (earlier Kinson Cottage). This was a large house with original parts at least old enough to have been linked with the tales of smugglers, but with more recent additions. It was for many years the home of Lt. Colonel and Mrs. Godfrey Russell, great uncle, and aunt of Dame Sybil Thorndike, who remembers with enthusiasm the Russell family and holidays spent with them at Kinson House. She and her brother, Russell, rode over the heaths. Did the local stories of smugglers inspire Russell Thorndike’s books about the clergyman smuggler, Doctor Syn? 

The house became the possession of the Exton family (Bournemouth hotel owners) and later the Willis (well-known local builders’ merchant) family. When they left the house, it was requisitioned by the Bournemouth Corporation and was, from 1940, used to house boys evacuated from Southampton.

It has been demolished and replaced by blocks of flats; only some large trees remain to mark its grounds. Its neighbour, Holt Lodge, was the home of Charles Bennett, champion long-distance runner and one-time licensee of ‘The Dolphin’.