Grand National Fatality Statistics

The following is a rather large table giving the fatality statistics for the Grand National at Aintree over time. There are a considerable number of missing years, but this is as good as I can do given the limited time to work on this. Some explanation can be found at the end :-

First of all, the source columns has the values BBC (for the BBC News website), W (short for WikiPedia) and T (for The Times newspaper). Some of the sources columns have multiple sources (far too few) with an indication of whether the sources agree with each other or not. The “[0]” in the sources column for the 1954 race refers to a quote that is worth duplicating here :-

“Worst day anyone can remember for fatalities.”

Some of the columns have values in that look like “#N/A” … as you might expect, this is the value for “not available”. This is counted as zero when performing calculations on the “fatalities” column. There are three reasons for assuming “n/a” can be assumed to be usually zero :-

1. It is clear when reading the race reports from The Times, that fatalities were unusual and there is every indication that the reporter made a point of mentioning them.
2. It would be unusual to say the least to make a point of indicating that a race had no fatalities – when was the last time that a rugby match report pointed out there were no fatalities ?
3. The report on the 1954 Grand National made it clear that this was the worst Grand National for fatalities “as long as anyone can remember”, which although does not indicate that the previous races had no fatalities, does indicate that 1954 was the worst year for a long time (actually from what I can find, probably the worst ever) and that very few involved in horse racing takes fatalities lightly.

That is not to say that there are not some additional fatalities that I have missed. I am only human and could easily have missed something, and it is certainly possible for reports of fatalities to be missing. However it is noticeable that even the earliest races where you could expect a certain more casual attitude towards the death of horses, that fatalities were very clearly pointed out.