Going to the dogs

A history of greyhound racing in Britain, 1926-2017

Keith Laybourn

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526114518
• eBook ISBN: 9781526114532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Greyhound racing emerged rapidly in Britain in 1926 but in its early years was subject to rabid institutional middle-class opposition largely because of the legal gambling opportunities it offered to the working class. Though condemned as a dissipate and impoverishing activity, it was, in fact, a significant leisure opportunity for the working class, which cost little for the minority of bettors involved in what was clearly little more than a 'bit of the flutter', This book is the first national study of greyhound racing in Britain from its beginnings, to its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and up its long slow decline of the late twentieth century. Much of the study will be defined by the dominating issue of working-class gambling and the bitter opposition to both it and greyhound racing, although the attractions of this 'American Night Out' will also be examined.

1

The rise of greyhound racing in Britain, 1926–45: the politics of discrimination

Hare coursing was common throughout Britain in the nineteenth century and whippet racing popular in London and the North but it was not until 1876, when greyhounds chased a mechanical hare (a false trail or quarry) at Welsh Harp racecourse in Hendon, North London, that modern mechanised greyhound racing began.¹ This flicker of activity provoked little interest and the working classes remained loyal to whippet racing, where dogs were released to run across a field following lures attached to ropes and encouraged on by people waving flags. Nevertheless, there was clearly a British nineteenth-century pedigree to greyhound racing and an infrastructure of types that favoured its rapid development. Notwithstanding this early failure, the idea of modern mechanical greyhound racing was revived in 1912 by Owen Patrick Smith, of the United States, who opened the first professional oval dog track with a mechanical hare at Emeryville, California, in 1919. Here, he attached to it a ‘certificate system’ of betting that led to the emergence of the pari-mutuel betting system, whereby all bets are placed together in a pool from which any taxes and the ‘house take’ are removed and the payoff odds calculated by sharing the pool among all the winning bets. This was to become known as the totalisator, or the tote, in Britain where it competed at the track with the independent bookmakers for bets. From these small beginnings the idea of operating a mechanical hare on an oval track was introduced into Britain in 1926 by the American Charles Munn, and a number of British businessmen. Following the example of the newly-formed American International Greyhound Racing Association, they launched the Greyhound Racing Association, which held a six-race meeting at Belle Vue Stadium, a converted old dog-racing track in Manchester, on 24 July 1926.² From then onwards, the sport of greyhound racing mushroomed, reaching 13.7 million attendances in 1928, 18 million in 1931, and 20.8 million in 1932 on NGRS tracks alone. The urban centres of London, Glasgow and Manchester dominated these figures – London accounting for more than nine million attendances, Glasgow 2.34 million and Manchester about 1.74 million in 1932.³ By the late 1930s the number of tracks fluctuated between 200 and about 220, as they opened and closed, and attendances were in the region of thirty-two million, as indicated in Table 1.1.⁴ Despite the threatened legislative challenges in the late 1920s, the ‘Tote crisis’ of 1932–34, the Second World War and the Attlee years, greyhound racing did not begin its long decline until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when attendances may have reached more than forty million on the NGRC ‘licensed tracks’, the ‘unlicensed tracks’, known as ‘flapping tracks’, and the small, itinerant ‘tracks of eight days’.⁵ In contrast, by the early twenty-first century attendances were down to two million.

In the first three decades of its existence greyhound racing faced an embattled existence, which raises a number of important questions. Why did it grow so quickly to become one of the top three spectator sports in Britain within a decade? Who invested in it (see chapter 3)? Which social classes attended the tracks? Why was it prone to internal conflict? Why did it face immense external religious and Establishment opposition? And why (although this question is more the basis of chapter 2), in the 1950s, was it facing a long, slow and relentless decline having withstood for many years the hostility of the anti-gambling organisations and the nonconformist churches whose power was apparently waning? Above all, and throughout, why did greyhound racing seemed to be perpetually the pariah of British gambling sports? The answers to these questions are not always obvious but, on balance, the evidence suggests that greyhound racing was largely financed by small-scale middle-class investors, alongside a few prominent wealthy investors who wished to cash in on the gambling aspect of dog racing and investments in tote machines and mechanical hares, although there were big financiers at the large tracks who were often on the council of the NGRS and had shares in numerous greyhound companies (see chapter 3). In the main, greyhound racing attracted the urban working-class punters who were given ready and legal access to the ready-money gambling denied them off the course. Yet throughout greyhound racing was riven with fractious organisational conflict between the larger NGRS tracks, running under the rules of its self-appointed NGRC, and the smaller ‘unlicensed’ (by the NGRS) provincial tracks, often known as flapping tracks, and their various organisations such as the British Greyhound Tracks Control Society (BGTCS), amongst others, and, from 1947, the Provincial Greyhound Tracks Central Office (PGTCO). The NGRS/NGRC was also frequently in conflict with the bookmakers, often represented by the National Bookmakers and Associated Joint Protection Society and the National Association of Bookmakers, which opposed the very existence of the tote. As a result, greyhound racing was always vulnerable to the strong opposition of relatively small, though powerful, religious and political groups, who did not regard it as a rational recreation for the working classes. Such opposition may have diminished as the twentieth century progressed, as Mike Huggins has suggested, but greyhound racing was particularly discriminated against in the late 1940s and declined from then onwards.⁶

Table 1.1 Annual attendances at greyhound tracks in Britain, 1927–2017

Year	Attendances at tracks
	NGRS/NGRC	BGTCS/PGTCO	Total (minus independent tracks and tracks of ‘eight days’)
1927	5,656,686
1928	13,695,275
1929	15,855,275
1930	17,119,120
1931	17,906,917
1932	20,178,760
1935			32,000,000
1938			36,000,000
1942			47,000,000
1946			39,000,000
1947			36,000,000
1948	25,203,553	6,500,000	31,703,553
1949	25,200,000
1950	22,549,079	6,516,396	30,000,000
1951	21,200,000		26,000,000
1952	20,900,000
1953	19,900,000
1954	18,400,000
1955	17,900,000
1956	16,600,000
1957	16,500,000
1958	15,400,000
1960	15,300,000
1961	14,500,000
1962	12,800,000
1963	12,000,000
1964	11,500,000
1965	11,200,000
1966	10,500,000
1967	9,900,000
1968	9,100,000
1969	8,000,000
1970	7,400,000
1971	7,200,000
1972	6,400,000
The new National Greyhound Racing Club unites the NGRS and the PGTCO in 1972
1973		6,100,000 (c. 4.6 m. NGRS/C and 1.5m PGTCO)
1975		6,200,000
1977		6,500,000
2007		3,200,000
Greyhound Board of Great Britain (formed in 2009)
2009		3,000,000	3,000,000
2017		2,000,000	2,000,000

Sources: There are no totally accurate figures on attendance at greyhound tracks. Normally the NGRS and PGTCO figures are available but there were independent tracks, as there are in 2017, whose attendances do not find their way into the total listed figures, and the temporary, itinerant, ‘tracks of eight days’, allowed under the 1934 Betting and Lotteries Act. The figures in the table are drawn from evidence in the following. HO 45/15853/663794/4, figures from a NGRS letter dated 30 June 1953; HO 335/87, PGTCO evidence and memorandum submitted in 1950 to the Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming, para. 22 for attendances at Grade 1 to Grade 4 tracks in 1950; HO 335/102, Royal Commission on Betting, Gaming and Lotteries (1949–51), Final Report, para. 152; HO 335/77, NGRS evidence to the Royal Commission on Betting, Gaming and Lotteries (1949–51), and letter 15 January 1951; HO 45/24210; BS3/26, NGRC and British Greyhound Racing Federation evidence to the Royal Commission on Gambling (the Rothschild Commission), June 1976, Appendix B; Laybourn, Working-Class Gambling in Britain, pp. 189–90.

Beginnings

Major L. Lynne Dixon, Brigadier-General A. C. Critchley, a Canadian living in England ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The rise of greyhound racing in Britain, 1926–45: the politics of discrimination
• 2 Discrimination and decline: greyhound racing in Britain, 1945 to the 1960s
• 3 ‘Animated roulette boards’: financing, operating and managing the greyhound tracks for racing the dogs, c. 1926–61
• 4 Dog breeding, dog owning and dog training: dividing the classes
• 5 An Ascot for the common man
• 6 Policing the tracks, detecting malpractice and dealing with the racketeers and ‘shady’ individuals, 1926 to c. 1961
• 7 The decline of greyhound racing in Britain, 1961–2017
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index