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| Laura Thompson
On 16 August, the last greyhound race will be run at Walthamstow Stadium. A race just like any other - hare circles; traps open; dogs hurtle towards the bend - that will bring to an end almost eight decades of sporting history. It was in 1933 that Walthamstow first opened its gates, to a public that fell instantly in love with its earthy urban glamour. What a place it was! If I close my eyes now I can see the thin bright tubes of neon on the Art Deco frontage, the pink-red glow of the words WALTHAMSTOW STADIUM, the way they gleamed across a darkening sky. Whenever I drove across London to the track I longed for that first glimpse of light, its promise of fun, vigour, happiness. In my twenties, when I wrote my first book, The Dogs, which was about growing up in the world of greyhound racing, I went to Walthamstow all the time. There was nowhere that I would rather have been. It was a terribly unlucky place for me, gambling-wise, but that couldn't have mattered less. What I liked was simply being there, in the midst of things, feeling around me all the rough good-nature, hearing the shouts of the bookmakers and the whining of the dogs in the traps, watching as the lights of the track gradually encroached upon the night. On a busy Saturday night it felt like the most alive place in the world: 'a magical palais of urban dreams', as I described it in my book. Walthamstow was, in fact, a latecomer to the world of greyhound racing, which had kicked off in Britain at Belle Vue, Manchester, in July 1926. A crowd of 1,700 attended the first meeting, where the races were run by former hare-coursing dogs owned by members of the aristocracy; a supreme irony, given that this night saw the birth of one of the great working men's sports. Within a week the crowd had grown to 16,000. The late 1920s saw an explosion of popularity, with tracks being set up all over the country: in London alone there was racing every night at White City, Harringay, Wembley, West Ham, Clapton, Wimbledon or Hackney Wick. By the end of the decade, annual attendances totalled 17 million. By the end of the war they had risen to 50 million, with 77 licensed tracks. The beauty of dog racing was that it was cheap, accessible, and gave you eight quick thrills in a night. You could walk to the track. You could back your judgment to win money. This was your sport; unlike horseracing, it was not the property of the remote and rarefied elite. It belonged to the people who supported it, and who loved it to the point of madness. William Chandler, who created Walthamstow, was born in Hoxton, just north of the City of London. His sharp brain took him to the position of number-one bookmaker at White City, and he became a director of Hackney's track (whose site will form part of the venue for the 2012 Olympics). In the early 1930s he sold his shares and paid £24,000 for an unlicensed dog track - a 'flapper', as they are called - upon whose land Walthamstow was built. The Chandler family ran the stadium all its life. I loved to spend the evening with them in the Paddock Grill restaurant (where local boy David Beckham used to collect the glasses) and was half in love with Frances, daughter-in-law of William, whose beauty was undiminished by age and who would tell me stories of the stellar greyhounds that she had owned throughout the 1950s. I hadn't actually grown up with Walthamstow, although through my father - a big owner - I grew up with dog racing. His greyhounds were trained at White City and Harringay, and that was where I spent the nights of my childhood. White City was the totem: I still dream occasionally of its vast oval arena. When it was demolished in 1984 it was as though greyhound racing had lost its soul. Its Derby final nights were magnificent. People never believe me when I say that White City set an almost regal standard with its terrifying maître d', its smart clientele including Prince Philip, and its general air of demanding civilised behaviour from its customers, but it really was that kind of place. Walthamstow always had a different feel: gaudier, gutsier. Its catchment area was east London and Essex, and on a Saturday night things could get boisterous, but I never remember it turning nasty. Dog men always seem comfortable with themselves. The only people who ever made me uneasy at Walthamstow were the city boys who used to go there in the early 1990s, when greyhound racing was briefly voguish, to continue their day's trading by throwing money around on dogs. They would get idiotically drunk and become very patronising. Once I ran into a man whom I'd known at university. 'What on earth are you doing here, Laura?' he said; he simply could not believe that I was there in a spirit of non-irony. I remember that this brief meeting made me oddly sad. Dog racing may be tough but it has a sweet sincerity at its heart. And it suddenly seemed so vulnerable, adrift. While Walthamstow survived and thrived, the forces of modernity were kept at bay. I last went there about five years ago, for a fundraising evening for the retired greyhounds. I sat next to the wife of Walthamstow's biggest bookmaker and marvelled at her immaculate, stalwart femininity. I felt enveloped, once more, in the old world. I could never have dreamt that this place would soon be losing £500,000 a year (despite continuing to have the biggest UK greyhound attendances) and that the land on which it stood would be sold for 'residential development'. In truth, though, dog racing had been dying for a long time. Never more popular than in the years around the war, it has steadily declined ever since. Attendances now strive to reach the four million mark. When I went to White City and Harringay, in the 1970s and 1980s, the sport seemed to seethe with life, but the world was changing around it. The opening of betting shops; television; television in betting shops; the creeping homogenisation of culture... greyhound racing has put up a good fight against these things. It has sold itself to people who have no real interest in it, made itself an attractive place at which to spend an evening. It will carry on because the big bookmakers want it for gambling fodder, while tracks such as Wimbledon, Romford and Hove will ensure that it has some reality beyond the betting shop screen. But the party is over. For me, it ended a few years ago. I still go dog racing from time to time, but I have become deeply exercised with the problem of what happens to greyhounds when their racing lives are over, and for this reason a part of me would be happy to see the death of the sport. It is not quite that simple, though. Flapping tracks would continue even if every licensed stadium in the country were to close. And the industry does try to shoulder its responsibility towards the dogs; Walthamstow was particularly good in this respect, and gave its support to a wonderful woman, Johanna Beumer, who has made it her life's work to find homes for ex-racers. Dog men, real dog men, always had respect and love for greyhounds. 'They're brave, and in my opinion they're noble,' my father once said to me. But dog men, like their sport, are dying. My father - a great dog man - died in 1999: what fun it would be to have one more gaudy night with him at Walthamstow. |
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