Crystal Palace time capsule note inspires bet on Christmas Day horse
A 1964 note buried under Sir Joseph Paxton’s bust led Josh Smalls to back Christmas Day with £20. The bet tied a park renovation to one of racing’s strangest coincidences.
A 62-year-old note buried in Crystal Palace Park turned a routine renovation into a race-day wager, and Josh Smalls did not hesitate. Moments after a time capsule was unearthed on 15 April 2026, the site manager put £20 on Christmas Day, after reading a handwritten message that urged the finder to back a horse linked to Santa Claus.
The capsule had been found beneath the bust of Sir Joseph Paxton, the 19th-century garden designer behind the Crystal Palace, as workers carried out restoration work in south London. Inside were four old English coins and a note written in 1964. The note said the money had been won on a horse named Santa Claus in the Epsom Derby and should be used on another horse with a Christmas connection.
Smalls said he first checked recent Derby runners and found no other horse with a festive name. Then he found Christmas Day in the current field. The coincidence became more striking because the original Santa Claus horse had been trained by Vincent O’Brien, while Christmas Day was trained by Aidan O’Brien. The horse racing link was only part of the story’s pull, but it was the one that sent Smalls to the betting slip.
Bromley mayor Christine Harris also backed Christmas Day, staking £15, with any winnings set aside for Madlani Cancer Support and the Dyslexia Association of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham. The coins and the note were said to be worth about £10 in today’s money, a small sum that had been preserved for more than six decades before the park works brought it back into the light.
The find came as the bust of Paxton was being removed for relocation to the Italian Terraces, part of a £22 million upgrade to Crystal Palace Park. It also landed with an extra twist: the man who found the capsule, Craciun Marius Dorin, carries a first name that means Christmas in Romanian. In a story built on chance, memory and a little faith in old paper, that was the sort of detail that made the whole episode feel hard to dismiss.
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