Newbury should respect rich history and retain Hennessy

What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet. So says Juliet in one of the most quoted passages in Shakespeare. Names are arbitrary: Romeo, Juliet's beloved, may be a hated Montague but it makes no difference to her. She fancies the pants off him because of who he is, not what he's called.

Shakespeare, alas, wrote his masterpieces before horseracing really took off, so we must forgive him his ignorance of the importance of names (Wilde figured it out). Had he been born a mere 400 years later, and a regular at British racecourses, he would have understood that, when it came to the thorny issue of respecting tradition, names are very important indeed.

Like an Elizabethan explorer mapping the capes, bays and inlets of some unknown shore, racing must dream up hundreds of names every day. There are not just thousands of new racehorses a year, christened everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, but every single race needs a title too, dozens of them each day, crucial identifiers of the building blocks of our sport.