The position as I see it, and the Government see it, has been materially changed since the development of greyhound racing in 1926. There are only seven horse racecourses within 15 miles of Charing Cross, with 187 days of racing, whereas in the same area there are 23 greyhound tracks with over 4,000 days’ racing within a year. Greyhound racing has brought on-the course betting facilities, often as an almost nightly event, into most of the large urban centres of the country.
(Sir John Gilmour, Home Secretary, Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Commons, 27 June 1934, col.1137)
Many millions of attendances were recorded at greyhound tracks at their height in the 1930s and 1940s. The customers and bettors were variously drawn to an ‘the American night out’, the sheer spectacle of dog racing in the bright lights of the track, and the obvious lure of a relatively safe and honest gambling location. They were attracted for different reasons and experienced treatment which varied enormously according to the type of track that they attended. But who were these bettors? What did they come for and what did they expect? What amenities were provided, and, indeed, how did greyhound tracks fit within with the needs of the local urban communities in which they initially prospered? The evidence suggests that the different tracks were highly geared to the needs of their essentially working-class customers, that those who attended were relatively small in number but regular attenders, and that the tracks were often seen as part of the community which they operated within, giving, as indicated in chapter 3, substantial local employment and adding to the cultural life of the working-class bettor. Indeed, within working-class communities greyhound tracks were not necessarily the social pariahs that they have often been presented as being by many middle-class MPs, religious groups and anti-gambling associations. Indeed, greyhound tracks offered a variety of experiences and were not the glum and guilt-ridden denizens that many middle-class critics presented them as being. They assumed an important and dominating position within the lives of a relatively small proportion of the working class. With some degree of accuracy, greyhound racing was varyingly described, in terms that became almost commonplace, as the ‘Ascot of the common man’, the ‘working man’s turf’ and ‘poor man’s racing’.1
The representation and image of greyhound racing and gambling
Towards the end of 1926 or at the beginning of 1927, John Heath, the Secretary of the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches (Federation), surveyed one of the new greyhound tracks, indicating its social features whilst condemning its iniquities.2 At a track attended by about 10,000 to 15,000 people, probably Belle Vue, he reported that:
People come in all sorts of ways, motors 200–300, trams and taxis. I saw people in invalid chairs, and also a perambulator! Saw that they came by families. I should have thought that 30 per cent were women and girls. The great majority were young men. Betting seems to be the great and real business. There are six races and they only take about 20 minutes in all. The bulk of the time is spent making bets. In every enclosure the bookies are busy, a ring of them on all sides, shouting the odds, booking bets and giving betting cards. There must have been hundreds of them and there is not the least vestige of an apology for their presence. I believe if they were not there the crowd would be absent.
I took particular notice as to the kind of folk who did the betting. I saw wives sending their husbands, mothers sending their daughters and a group of girls sending one of their number to have a ‘flutter’. Young men were the chief supporters of the bookies. The amount paid out on the 1 shilling side were smaller on the average than the 5 shilling. But even there they ranged between 2/6 to £3. I saw one who looked like a working man pass in three 10 shilling notes.
As to the legality of this, I am in doubt. The police were there but they were engaged in regulating the motor traffic or looking on. The Federation last Friday passed a Resolution deprecating the increase in betting through the races as furthering one of the most moral and spiritual perils affecting our generation.
The races were started by the blowing of a bugle by a man in Khaki. I took him to be a soldier. Is the Army lending men for this?
This is something we ought to fight and that the greater question is how to eradicate the passion for gambling which possesses the people.
This deeply hostile report was echoed by a memorandum from the Manchester Watch Committee to the Home Secretary in October 1927, which stated that:
Apart from the demoralisation involved, it is certain that the economic effects of the new pastime have been disastrous, especially in the immediate neighbourhoods of the trade. Betting on horses never had a complete effect, because horses have never been to race three times a week in a working-class district.3
Later reflections, such as those of Charles Dimont in 1946, were to compound the picture and provide vivid propaganda for the NAGL.4 Dimont described the tic-tac man signalling the odds, six men in bowler hats leading greyhounds to their stalls, the 100 bookmakers shouting the odds but probably not making money, and the atmosphere of the crowd watching the eight races on the night. This description occurred at the height of the post-war boom (1946) in greyhound racing when the initial post-war prosperity and release from wartime controls was fuelling a sport which, within two years, would be blighted by taxation. He described how in a ‘tomb-like vault under the stands, many of the spectators queue morosely before the totalisators … grab their tickets, hastily hide them in their pockets or handbags and slink away’.5 The atmosphere was described as glum, despite the races. A couple that Dimont interviewed were represented as being typical of the restless and uncommitted youth who attended on a regular basis for entertainment:
She went on a weakness, he sells gent’s hosiery. Thursdays and Saturdays they go to the dogs: Mondays and Fridays to the cinema; Wednesdays is at football; Sunday they dance. Every night there must be something to do. Greyhounds are their favourite evening because it gives them a thrill and a chance to make money. Sid, the boy has a system but he is reticent whether he has made money so far. They both live at home with their parents, and between them earn over £8 a week, but one of the attractions is that any wins are tax free. They plan to get married and have a car.
The impression of a wayward youth, careless of thought and thrift, wasting their money gambling on greyhounds, was linked further to the exploitation of the bettors by the tracks by the opponents of greyhound racing. Evidently in 1946, one, unidentified, London track was operating every day except Sundays (a statement which at that time could not have been true for that would have been in breach of the 1934 Act of 104 meetings per year rule and would have been quickly stamped on by the authorities) and six tracks were functioning on Thursdays and eight on a Saturday. The entrance fee was usually two shillings (10p) and the tracks were making huge profits, largely from the totalisators operated by the track and frequented by the bettors. Indeed, Dimont added that:
A company running three London stadiums made a profit of £435,000 last year [1945]. It is estimated that £318,000 will be taken in taxation, presumably through Entertainment Tax and corporation tax. Profit before all taxation, for the year ending April 30th 1946, was £72,827. The company says, ‘It is a matter of common knowledge that the sport is growing rapidly’.6
Clearly, the greyhound track owners were seen to be raking the money in at a time of economic austerity in Britain and the implication was that this was earned out of the pockets of the feckless working-class bettor.
These various condemnatory observations by middle-class and religious groups, and the police, are important in identifying the frequenters of the greyhound tracks and in labelling the tracks. The impression that emerges was one of irresponsible working-class youth squandering their money in dim-lit corners of greyhound stadiums, that the new sport attracted families, that it was a working-class sport for working-class areas, and added significantly to the burgeoning profits of the track owners in their furtive pursuit of income. There was also an implicit and explicit suggestion that it threatened the economic stability of local urban communities. However, it was often acknowledged that it did also attract some of the middle class who could afford to drive cars and pay for taxis. This is already evident from early accounts and police reports mentioned and endorsed further, as for the White City Stadium, London, that it was ‘patronized by all classes of society’, much as Mike Huggins has claimed.7 These were the indicators and characteristics laid down by the critics of the sport, dumbfounded by its success and horrified by its dubious legality.
Whilst some, if not all, of these characteristics may have been true, the defenders of greyhound racing were far more upbeat. To them greyhound racing was essentially an important working-class pastime which did not engender the type of corruption, immorality, degradation and insouciant behaviour which its critics imagined. They often recognised that greyhound racing was, indeed, a niche sport only attended by a significant minority of working-class gamblers. Along with the football pools, it was one of the two most important additions to inter-war gambling that allowed the working class to gamble legally. Indeed, as already established, there is evidence that greyhound racing allowed many of the working class to escape the reality of the day-to-day hardships of life, created new jobs and brought new investment that helped in the economic recovery of the late 1930s.8 In the wider scheme of things, greyhound racing was a significant and relatively cheap leisure pursuit which strengthens the view that gambling for the working class was essentially ‘a bit of a flutter’. Nevertheless, as already established, its rise as a predominantly working-class activity was subject to class prejudice and discrimination which led it to being controlled in a way in which, for instance, the more middle-class dominated horse racing was not.9
The inter-war years
The inter-war success of greyhound racing was essentially a product of time, place and moment, and saw the birth of a working-class sporting and gambling tradition. The rising prosperity of the working class allowed them to take advantage of the new urban sport. Attendances, as noted in chapter 2, rose rapidly. Belle Vue attracted 333,375 customers in the last five months of 1926.10 The White City (London) averaged 39,700 per meeting in 1928, although average attendances fell back to 15,300. Harringay also experienced a decline from an average crowd of 18,300 in 1927 to 13,200 in 1928, largely due to the opening of new tracks in London.11 In Hull, with a population of 300,000, there were two tracks that attracted 300 to 500 customers each per week night. Many tracks were in working-class districts; Stephen G. Jones noting there were three dog tracks in the Manchester and ‘they are all in working-class residential areas’.12 Jeff Hill, and many other historians, have argued much the same, although Mike Huggins has established some middle-class attendance for the 1930s.13
From the start greyhound racing was subject to intense scrutiny by those who felt that it was damaging working-class life. Within three months of the opening of Belle Vue the Home Office was concerned for those attending the tracks.14 Local authorities were equally concerned and the Manchester Watch Committee called upon the Home Secretary to introduce legislation to abolish greyhound racing, complaining of the ‘carelessness’ and contempt for ‘morality’ amongst the young of Manchester.15 The Manchester Evening News of 29 October 1927 complained of women attending the tracks and ‘trembled at what might happen to these women in the future’. Peter Green, Dean of Manchester, argued the need to give local authorities powers to prevent the proliferation of tracks, complaining that they were full of corrupt practices designed to beat the bettor.16 Indeed, as indicated in chapter 1, there were attempts to give extra powers to local authorities to close greyhound tracks and these demands were supported by prominent national politicians, such as Winston Churchill and John Buchan.17 In 1928 the Home Secretary informed the Cabinet that: ‘The principal objection against dog racing is that it is a mushroom growth which threatens to add enormously to facilities for betting amongst the working class and, in particular, for betting by many whose means would not permit of their attending horse races.’18
Despite such comments there is little evidence that the working classes, as opposed to organised religious and local authority groups, wanted the closure of greyhound tracks. Yet, as early as September 1927 the Home Secretary, who felt that the ‘greyhound bubble could not last’, decided that the police should monitor the conduct at tracks.19 Most of the police evidence suggested that there was no problem (see chapter 6); Superintendent Edwards of the Manchester City Police indicating that the meetings at Belle Vue were conducted in a ‘perfectly orderly manner’.20 The desire to control greyhound racing revived when the case of Shuttleworth v. Leeds Greyhound Racing (1932) made the totalisator at greyhound tracks illegal and briefly paralysed it by forcing tracks close or develop schemes to raise money through entry fees, or, as Belle Vue (Manchester) developed, a ‘Non-Profit Tote’.21 The ‘Tote crisis’ was resolved, with tighter controls, imposed under new legislation in 1934, but provoked further fury from the anti-gambling lobby. Mr Chamberlain, of the YMCA, stated that: ‘My feeling is that I have no right whatsoever to try to stop two people making a bet but I think we have the right to limit the social inducement to gambling.’22
The Marquis of Londonderry, speaking in the House of Lords whilst presenting a bill on gambling, stated that:
Greyhound racing has brought on-the-course betting facilities, often on an almost nightly event, into the large urban districts in the country … it was having an undesirable social effect. The Royal Commission called particular attention to the evidence which they received as to the deterioration of character among young persons in poor neighbourhoods, resulting from nightly betting on a succession of greyhound races which drains from their minds every other interest.23
Lord Sanderson felt that there was a dangerous feeling of ennui amongst the working class that drove them to greyhound racing and that it had to be controlled, although he admitted that it was impossible for the government to impose strong restrictions on greyhound racing ‘without placing the strongest restrictions on horse racing and without incurring the charge of class legislation’.24 The Lord Bishop of London noted that the Charity Organisation Society found an increase in applications for help in areas near to greyhound tracks and that a probation officer at the Marylebone Police Court disliked the participation of women of all ages at the racetrack and the presence of children and young persons.25 In contrast, in 1934 Lord Askwith, President of the NGRS, noted that 7,000 employees would be thrown out of work if dog racing were to be stopped and that dog racing ‘had the advantage of giving people an opportunity of meeting their friends’.26 Lord Gainford, the Earl of Kinnoull, added that: ‘The Bill is clear class legislation, you cannot get away from that.’ He added: ‘After all, why should the poor man be forbidden his little bit of sport in the evening while the rich men go racing every day of their lives.’27 At least one civil servant overcame his or her prejudice against the sport sufficient to state, of the working class, that ‘Those whose daily life is dull and monotonous have a need for excitement in their leisure hours to reduce the balance’.28
Sir Sidney Freemantle, who was involved in the running of four tracks in 1933, added that:
I think in the Provinces the fascination of greyhound racing is that 95 per cent of the patrons are working class. Greyhound racing gives an alternative to a drab industrial background. It costs no more to go to a greyhound track than to buy a pint of beer, and these people attend on those grounds … It is my experience that the poor working man and those who are not great gamblers by nature prefer the totalisator. That is one class and the other class is women. The women prefer the totalisator because in order to put their small amount of money on they don’t have to join the scramble round the bookmakers, they don’t have to submit to ridicule if they do not propose to put on enough money.29
The parameters of greyhound racing were thus being set out in its early years. To one group of observers, it was essentially a legitimate working-class sport that attracted women and family groups and offered the bright lights of the ‘American night out’ to contrast with the drab existence of working-class lives. Indeed, many recognised the excitement it brought to the working class, the Western Mail of 5 April 1928 stating that: ‘it is almost impossible to imagine a more exciting or intoxicating spectacle than five or six of these beautiful creatures straining every nerve in their efforts to overtake the elusive hare’.30 To another group of observers, the anti-gambling fraternity, it was a waste of money and a cause of poverty. The reality was much more nuanced than these extremes, though it is clear that greyhound racing did offer excitement and spectacle.
During the 1930s there was substantial evidence of the view that greyhound racing acted as some type of safety valve and release from tension. Defending greyhound racing against a potential totalisator ban in 1933, the Rt. Hon. Ormsby-Gore wrote to the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, to stress the vital need to legalise the greyhound totalisator as the common justice for the two million people who attended regularly and ‘did not consider it morally wrong’, because of the employment it created. Indeed, he argued that this ‘Ascot for the common man’ was the sport of the working man and an ‘antidote to social unrest’.31
The socially calming and anti-revolutionary appeal of greyhound racing was regarded, by some, as being rather fanciful, and often criticised, but gave way to more social analysis in the late 1930s. Mass Observation (MO), set up in 1937 by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, began its sociological and biological studies of British society in 1937. As part of its work Humphrey Spender photographed the lined features of male working-class gamblers at greyhound tracks for the study of Worktown (1937), ostensibly reflecting on life in Bolton although the photographs were actually of the Pitmen’s parties of the coal town of Ashington. The assumption, apparently confirmed by the pictures and research, was that greyhound racing had become quickly ingrained into working-class life and that it was often a family occasion or night out.
The Second World War saw the temporary closure of greyhound racing until it was allowed for one day per track per week. Nevertheless, its continuance was frowned upon by the wartime government, and Sir Stafford Cripps’ House of Commons outburst against greyhound racing and boxing, reported in the Daily Express in March 1942, associated these activities with black marketeering, spivs and idleness in working-class communities. This was immediately investigated by MO, whose file report suggested that Cripps had placed ‘exaggerated emphasis’ on the ‘immorality and decadence in Britain’. The problem, it argued, was that the war was going badly for Britain and that politicians were looking for a scapegoat.32 MO also pointed out that in its recent survey 46 per cent of people wanted horse racing banned, with figures of 34 per cent for greyhound racing, 24 per cent for boxing and 4 per cent for football, and that to single out the working-class pursuit of greyhound racing and boxing was discriminatory.33 Yet police investigations of greyhound tracks invariably found them almost free of any obvious crime and disorder, although the arrest of Ottavio Sabini, leader of the Sabini gang, famed for racketeering at horse racing and greyhound tracks, on charges of being an enemy alien, enforced an impression of seediness (see chapter 6).34 Notwithstanding this, chief constables were sometimes critical of the economic impact of greyhound racing and, indeed, the Lord Bishop of Manchester felt that the chief constables of Manchester and Salford, John Maxwell and Major Godfrey, were worried about its spread.35
MO did much to capture the attractiveness and the excitement that greyhound racing provided for the working classes. In its file report on ‘Saturday Night’, produced in 1947, its researcher captured the procedure and atmosphere which working-class bettors would have regularly encountered:
Passed through the five shilling [25p] turnstiles and walked towards the Directors’ Club which is situated in the stand on the right hand side of the track. From here the whole track is visible. The white circular rails, the wire netting keeping the crowds back – the green grass in the middle – the black floodlit tote machine showing the units as they clock over – the two big stands on either side of the track housing masses of people – the tops of the bookmakers’ boards and off the track to the right-hand side, the kennels. …
Suddenly the lights down and everybody moves into position so that they can see the race. The stadium becomes strangely quiet and the sound of the electric hare as it whirrax around the track is clearly audible. The traps click.36
MO’s research on greyhound racing did much to dispel the myth that it was corrupting the working class. Mass Gambling, a survey conducted by MO for the National League of Education against Gambling and published in January 1948 from existing research, observed and interviewed members of the crowd at greyhound meetings, reporting upon their sex, age and social class on a scale of A to E.37 The majority were classified as C or D, the skilled or semi-skilled working class, though some were classified as B, denoting that they were middle class or small business men. This was largely judged by the ‘trained eye’ of the investigator, whose additional comments were often subjective.
What this brief report revealed, based upon eight anonymised towns – named for instance, as ‘Steeltown’, ‘Railtown’ and ‘Moorland Town’ (a group of Exmoor villages) – was the way in which the working class, in a range of communities, operated to gamble at greyhound tracks.38 As a result of the rise in wartime incomes and the post-war expansion of betting, the mean stake was about five shillings (25p) per race, although it varied between 4s 6d (22.5p) in ‘Twinetown’, and 10s 6d (52.5p) or 11s 6d (57.5p) at Harringay.39 The report pertinently revealed that in all crowds serious gamblers operated alongside those largely there for the spectacle. An eighteen-year-old male, M18C (Male, eighteen years old, ‘C’ class), placed £1 bets and ‘never mentions anything about the race’, and another, M35C, was ‘only concerned with the money’.40 At the other extreme there were many who went for the dogs; M35C felt that ‘they’re lovely creatures’, whilst M50C thought that ‘they are pretty to watch’.41 Most bettors seemed to bet on the tote rather than with bookmakers, various surveys indicating meeting ratios of 3.7 to 1 and 5.0 to 1 at Harringay, 4.0 to 1 at Middlesbrough and between 2.5 to 3.3 to 1 at other surveyed tracks.42 It appears, also, that most bettors would also bet on six out of seven races, or seven out of eight races.43 In addition, it is clear that whilst the professional gambler might have a system, many of the occasional bettors selected their dogs by names associated with themselves. One woman, F60D, lived at Blenheim Place, Chelsea and ‘backed Blenheim one year and I won about 10s I think’, whilst another, M55D, seaman, stated that ‘I go by the names – anything attached to the sea like Sea Trout, or Sea Salmon’.44 About 42 per cent claimed to study form, whilst 21 per cent bet on a whim, 27 per cent employed guesswork, 5 per cent had a system and 4 per cent relied upon tips, the other 1 per cent using a variety of techniques.45 The largest proportion claimed that they studied form and that, whatever their successes, it clearly gave the thrill of making a balanced judgement for, as a PGTCO memorandum suggested, ‘There is truly an element of skill in judging the form of a greyhound’, for each greyhound was different, with those who were quick starters, those that were slow starters, those who preferred the inside of the bend and those who preferred the outside.46 ‘A skilled greyhound racegoer often considers that he can forecast the entire race beforehand … Greyhound racing provides those who like it, an element of excitement and skill.’47 They were, of course, able to consult the various guides to form supplied by the large betting companies that emerged in the 1930s and particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. Hills Guide to Greyhound Racing, published 1952/53, contained advice to bettors ‘Backing Dogs on Looks’ by Len C. Wilson, and ‘Dogs to Watch in 1953’ by Charles Hawkins.48
What emerges from this composite picture is that the majority of the crowd were working class, that both men and women attended the tracks, that bettors preferred to gamble on the tote, where 94 per cent of the money on each race was returned to the bettor, rather than with the on-course bookies, and that there was a mixture of interest in both gambling and the occasion. The MO report surmised that:
The typical bettor is then a solitary better, though of course they link up with friends once they are on the track. Children, though occasionally present at the tracks, are statistically very small except in Steeltown, where on a Saturday every one group in thirty-five included a child. The family party is quite a common sight here and children more noticeable than stated (B14C, F45C, F19C).49
This MO survey was followed in May 1948 by a short follow-up report entitled ‘Dog Fever’. This placed greyhound racing into sharp focus by noting that ‘about five times as many people go in weekly for the football pools as bet on dogs, and about four times as many put money on the horses’.50 The difference, it argued, arose from the fact that:
betting dogs almost inevitably means attendance at a dog track. The pool coupon comes through the front door, horses can be played by telephone or through the street bookie in the corner pub, but comparatively few dogs bets are placed away from the track. Among other things widespread rumours and suspicion of underhand dealings at dog meetings have made people chary of outside betting, and as a result in areas where there are no tracks there is virtually no betting either.51
Most betting took place on track and there was immense variation between rural and urban areas and from region to region, although the 10 per cent Pool Betting Duty encouraged a move towards off-course credit and ready-money betting from 1948 onwards (see chapter 7).52
Further evidence emerged about the greyhound track in Ferdynand Zweig’s book Labour, Life and Poverty in 1949.53 This seminal study contained a chapter on dog racing based upon 200 ‘cases’, which suggested that one in five adult male workers examined went to dog-racing meetings on a regular basis, though betting on dogs through off-course bookies’ runners was more common amongst women.54 Zweig argued also that the London working class were more likely to bet on dog racing than on horse racing, and were more likely to attend dog meetings; London having seventeen tracks and thirty-three meetings per week in the late 1940s and attracting up to 600,000 attendees per week. Nevertheless, the main contribution was his controversial identification of five types of race-goers. To him, there was the professional gambler, or ‘fiddler’, to whom gambling was a full-time, if precarious, occupation. There was the semi-professional gambler, often men in small businesses such as small shopkeepers and roundsmen, to whom gambling on the races is an additional occupation. His third type was the sporting type who attended about twice per week for the leisure who say: ‘I have nowhere else to go, and this is my recreation; better than the pub, because I am in the fresh air, and I have at least something for my outlay, and make some money from time to time.’55 His fourth type was the ‘unhappy type’, who often attended in ragged clothes and ‘who hold wistful illusions’ and are often of ‘inferior physique and emotionally unbalanced’, and they include ‘the crippled, deformed and otherwise physically handicapped’.56 These included fitters, crane drivers and telephonists. The fifth section of the crowd, considered to be a small section, which attended once per fortnight or per month, were the casual racegoers. Of these, Zweig considered that ‘the unhappy type’ were the financial losers and that five out of six would leave the stadium with losses on the meeting.57 Three years later Zweig’s major work, The British Worker, used the same structure for gambling generally, though he more specifically reflected that whilst many sports cut across class boundaries that ‘sports like dog racing … are reserved mostly for the working class and lower middle classes’.58 This analysis was very subjective and condemnatory in its style but, without doing full justice to the working-class bettor, recognised the diversity of the bettors.
B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, of the NAGL, referred to in chapter 2, were even more judgemental of gambling on dogs in their book English Life and Leisure (1951).59 They followed Zweig’s categorisation – the professional, and the semi-professional, gambler, the sporting type who gambled a few times per week, the poor unhappy working class, and the occasional family groups out for a flutter or a night out. Rowntree and Lavers were additionally intent upon revealing the dispiriting nature of greyhound racing through Charles Dimont’s mournful picture of a night out at the bright lights of dog racing that has already been described.
Nevertheless, this dour description of a night at the dogs, and the representation of the almost feckless sporting couple, did not do justice to the attractive drawing power of the greyhound track. In contrast, the MO file Mass Gambling (1948) gave a relatively neutral generic description of an official track on a Saturday night, emphasising the experience and atmosphere as well as the gambling, and drawing from its ‘Saturday Night’ report (already referred to) of the ritual of passing through the five shilling turnstiles, walking towards the Directors Club, viewing the black tote machine lit up by bright lights, and experiencing the quiet of the stadium, the sound of the electric hare, and the silence of the stadium before the ‘traps click open and shouts go up’.60 The fact is that ‘going to the dogs’ was exciting and enthralling, an evening’s entertainment in its own right. According to Daryl Leeworthy, it offered ‘speed, excitement, release and above all, freedom from the rhythms of work or unemployment but still essentially fixed by the repetitive nature of manual labour: true commitment to greyhound racing, after all, entailed attendance at the track two or three times every week’.61
At this time the Willink Commission (1949–51) added to this more favourable impression, using ‘Betting in Britain’, the first UK-wide Social Survey on gambling produced by W. F. F. Kemsley and David Ginsburg. It revealed that 60 per cent of the adult population (71 per cent of men and 51 per cent of women) gambled on one of three major forms of betting each year (pools, horses and dogs), that contemporary gambling was not a strain on national resources and manpower, did not cause serious crime, and that the great majority of gamblers ‘did not spend money recklessly’ and ‘without regard to the consequences on the standard of living of themselves and their families’. Nevertheless, it felt that gambling should play no larger role in the community than it presently did and that ‘the great majority of patrons at dog tracks are not drawn from the wealthier section of the community and expenditure on this scale is considerably higher than the average weekly expenditure of those in similar economic circumstances who take part in other forms of gambling’.62 The reason for this, it suggested, was the immediate accessibility, and cheapness, of betting on greyhound racing in urban areas although it is clear that the Commission also largely accepted the evidence of Mass Observation and Zweig.
The ‘Betting in Britain’ report firmly established for the Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming (1949–51) that greyhound racing was a minority, indeed niche, working-class sport with only 7 per cent of men and 1.5 per cent of women, about 4.1 per cent of the total population, betting on the dogs. Ten times that percentage were likely to be betting on the horses and the pools.63 Indeed, despite some fluctuation in estimates, it concluded that about 150,000 professional gamblers and 200,000 semi-professional gamblers accounted for more than 83 per cent of the official attendances at greyhound tracks, and 850,000 occasional bettors made up the rest. Effectively, if there were only thirty-two million attendances per year, about 600,000 per week, this meant that the ‘professional’ and ‘semi-professional’ groups dominated and that the average working-class bettor was in a minority, as indicated in Table 5.1. In addition, it was influenced by the evidence of the PGTCO to the Willink Commission and endorsed by the Home Office, that greyhound racing was ‘not a sport that attracts young persons’.64
Table 5.1 Frequency of attendance at greyhound tracks, 1950
| Attendance | Number | Attendances per year | Total attendances |
| 2 per week | 150,000 | 110 | 16,500,000 |
| 1 per week | 200,000 | 52 | 10,400,000 |
| More than 1 per month | 220,000 | 20 | 4,400,000 |
| More than 1 per year | 280,000 | 4 | 1,120,000 |
| 1 per year or fewer | 350,000 | 0.25 | 90,000 |
Source: Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming (1949–51), Final Report, para.152; HO 335/102.
The survey endorsed the view that greyhound racing was a modestly priced night out where betting was on a relatively small scale. In 1938, 1946 and 1950, respectively, the average individual stake on a race was four shillings (20p), 11s 1d (55.5p) and 5s 6d (27.5p) each and on the night it was estimated that in those years the average nightly stakes bet were £1 12s 0d (£1.60), £4 8s 6d (£4.42.5) and £2 4s 0d (£2.20).65 Normally about 75 to 80 per cent of this money went to the tote where 94 per cent of the money staked was paid back to the bettors. Even allowing for a smaller return to the bettor from the on-track bookmakers this suggests that about 90 per cent of the money bet was returned to the bettors per race.
Varied experience
The generic experience of attending the races, and of having an ‘American night out’, has already been outlined in chapter 3, where the focus was placed upon the built environment of the tracks as they emerged to provide a racing spectacle for the erstwhile bettor. As just seen, the generic experience has also emerged through the published MO file Mass Gambling (1948). Having entered the track and viewed the illuminated scene the greyhound bettor would gravitate towards the gambling rings. There would normally be two rings for gamblers, and also the dominating stands, and the larger tracks might have crèche facilities. There may be up to eight races a night (particularly after the Second World War), and there is the regular ritual of the dogs being brought out to the stalls, the sound of the artificial hare, the cheer of the crowd, and the exuberance of victory and the sadness of defeat. It was an exciting and enthralling experience. However, this is a generic description and, as already frequently established, around 30 per cent of tracks were not large enough to be able to afford a greyhound tote and relied on the bookmakers. The reality is that greyhound racing was a varied experience and the morphology of the track changed from venue to venue, from region to region, and from community to community. At the ‘flashy’ large NGRS tracks the men, women and children would see high standard and champion dogs in a spectacle of sport and gambling. At the much smaller, more basic flapping tracks there would be far fewer betting facilities for the more the ardent, often male, bettor, as lower graded and poorer quality greyhounds performed for a public of avid gamblers. The size of tracks, the facilities and the type of bettor varied, as suggested in chapter 3.
Crowd size is an important indicator of these differences. This emerges in the Labour government’s Dog Racecourse Betting (Temporary Provisions) Act of 1947. This Act limited betting at greyhound tracks to between 1 p.m. and midnight on a Saturday and the enforcement and exemptions to this Act were dealt with by Regional (Procedures) Industrial Committees. Separate legislation was passed for Scotland in 1947. Both Acts, which ceased in 1949, produced a schedule of the facilities and size of crowds, the Act dealing with greyhound tracks in England and Wales listing 150 tracks, and the one for Scotland indicated twenty tracks for Scotland, and seventeen unlicensed tracks, though the overall number of tracks in Britain was to increase in 1948. The schedule for England and Wales (which cut across the new NGRS and PGTCO track gradings of that time) indicated that there were fifty-one A tracks, fifty-one B tracks, thirty-one C tracks, all licensed, and seventeen unlicensed tracks (see Appendix B on greyhound tracks in England and Wales in 1947).66 The A tracks had crowds of more than 2,500, the B tracks crowds of between 800 and 2,500, the C tracks crowds of between 150 and 800. Of the ‘unlicensed’ and non-NGRS tracks two were A tracks, nine were B tracks and 6 were C tracks. This schedule combined the NGRS and PGTCO together, the A and B tracks offering betting on the tote and through bookmakers, though some gave up the tote in 1948 and 1949, whilst the C tracks were dependent upon bookmakers.
The variation between tracks and track experience has been established at various points throughout this book, and needs no further elaboration. What is less obvious is that some tracks, and communities, clearly experienced a transition on what was offered, even in the heyday of greyhound racing. In Blackpool, for instance, the Blackpool Greyhound Track was formed on 30 July 1927, with 5,000 spectators, at St. Anne’s Road, and was affiliated to the NGRS until 1929, when it became a high-quality flapping track with the tote. It entertained Rugby League matches in its early years but it closed on 30 October 1964, as its crowds fell to a few hundred per meeting. Between 1933 and 1937 the Blackpool Squires Gate Greyhound Stadium operated in competition, but its track was an unusually shaped one of 500 yards which meant that there was poor viewing from the grandstand. Later, between 1967 and 1988, a flapping track operated at Borough Road. All three were flapping tracks of a type but varied in the facilities they offered to their working-class clientele.
The greyhound tracks and the community
Finally, and tentatively, the operation of a greyhound track impacted upon the local working-class communities, which were drawn into greyhound racing by the jobs it created, and the rates and income it generated locally. There was intense opposition from local councils and from religious denominations to the very presence of greyhound racing and the gambling it encouraged, driven by the feeling that it was inimical to the needs of the community. The NGRS/NGRC constantly denied this charge and emphasised the employment and social benefits of greyhound racing and demonstrated this in the ‘Tote crisis’ of 1932–34, which brought about the loss of full-time and part-time jobs for the community. Indeed, on 21 November 1933, Chairman of the Brighton and Hove greyhound track wrote to the Rt. Hon. G. C. Tryan MP indicating the scale of the economic impact of the Brighton and Hove track were it to be closed. It employed fifty men, specialists in their trade. It had 250 dogs to feed in its kennels and therefore purchased 100 gallons of milk, three-quarters of a ton of meat, many hundredweights of green vegetables, large quantities of bread, eggs and other foods per week. He added that ‘We, of course, pay large sums in local rates, and in other taxes and contribute considerable sums to local charities’.67
Daryl Leeworthy has also noted the positive economic and social contribution of greyhound racing, particularly in South Wales.68 Supported by many Labour politicians, such as Aneurin Bevan, MP, who rejected the claims of social degradation made by the churches and chapels, ‘Labour councillors were regularly seen in the crowds at speedway and dog racing’.69 Bevan even attended the annual meeting of the NGRS in 1933.70 Local authorities rarely intervened in greyhound racing, the council finding a new source of power for the Hawthorn Greyhound Racecourse in Pontypridd rather than closing it down.71 They were mindful of the rates and rents that might be generated by them. In the early 1930s Cardiff City Council was unable to ignore the £1,000 rent per year paid by Arms Park (Cardiff) Greyhound Racing Company to the Cardiff Athletic Club, from whom it sub-let the stadium, because of the rates that an active stadium generated.72 Endorsing the evidence presented in Tables 3.2 and 3.3, it is clear that greyhound racing was a very large employer in Britain as a whole. It provided employment, substantially part-time opportunities, for the local community. Inevitably, money flowed in to those communities through the jobs greyhound tracks created, council rates and the food requirements of the dogs and the customers. The loss of employment in the relatively small flapping and NGRS tracks as a result of the ‘Tote crisis’ cost well over £100 per week to the local communities. The Arms Park Greyhound Track Cardiff spent £2,000 on wages in 1928 and £3,700 in 1930.73 Cardiff was clearly impacted upon by the annual dog food bill of £2,500, £100 of vets’ bills, £600 of track maintenance costs and £270 of policing costs which the greyhound company spent between 1928 and 1929, its first year of trading.74 Without a larger number of detailed examinations of some individual greyhound communities it is difficult to be precise but the recent study of the Albion track at Salford does tend to emphasise the positive attitude of the community to many of the greyhound tracks.75
Brian Belton’s study of dog racing in West Ham also describes how greyhound racing fitted into the broader culture and leisure of the local community to the point of track loyalty. When the Customs House at West Ham closed it was felt that its closure would boost the crowds at the nearby Walthamstow greyhound track and the Hackney speedway meetings. This did not occur and Belton, laconically, suggests that:
The expected positive impact in Walthamstow and Hackney [nearby stadiums expected to benefit from the closure of the Customs House] never really happened. It seems that the GRA [Greyhound Racing Association Property Trust Ltd] did not understand the loyalty that existed for the stadium, its dogs, its trainers and speedway team. This kind of support does not transfer easily. The thinking that it should or might is akin to thinking if West Ham Football Club disappeared that its support would just simply shift to Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur. To anyone who has been a supporter or fan of any sporting club attached to a locality or area this is, of course utter nonsense. This tradition was destroyed by ambition and greed, the type of forces that have no room for the sentiment and care involved in the practice of everyday support.76
The evidence on the relationship between greyhound racing and the urban working-class communities remains equivocal. Nevertheless, whilst there was much organised hostility towards it, as evidenced throughout this book, there is equally strong evidence that many tracks were regarded more sympathetically. Many tracks did, indeed, attract a loyal local clientele, they employed people and paid rates. Their activities were recorded in newspapers and there was some local pride in their existence.
Conclusion
The evidence suggests that whilst greyhound racing saw enormous growth between the 1920s and the 1950s, this was largely restricted to a significant, but relatively small, proportion of the working classes who regularly placed medium-sized bets. There may have been up to about 1,200,000 regular bettors, though only around 350,000 and semi-professional bettors accounted for five-sixths of attendance. Greyhound racing directly provided employment for up to about 28,000 full-time and part-time staff at its peak, created jobs in servicing sectors and exerted significant impact on the local community. Yet greyhound racing’s popularity pales into insignificance when ranged against horse racing and the football pools, and it declined rapidly from the 1940s. Nevertheless, in the quarter of a century between 1926 and 1951 it was a successful and significant addition to working-class leisure, even if it lacked ubiquity. It allowed a small proportion of the working class to chase a green light, the chimera of self-employment which they believed would allow them to escape the drudgery and poverty of life. MO, which came closest to examining working-class opinion on dog racing from a sociological perspective, confirms the driving forces of pleasure and release that accompanied the professional business of gambling on the dogs. Yet it was a much maligned and strictly controlled leisure activity. There was an inordinate amount of opposition from the anti-gambling forces in Britain, the Establishment and the middle class, whose approach, despite frequent claims of impartiality, was driven by an implicit class bias against greyhound racing, cloaked by economic concern and moral imperative. The authorities, who never came to terms with the shock of the mushrooming growth of greyhound racing after 1926 and the opportunities it gave for legal working-class gambling, discriminated against it and restricted its growth even if they were unable to ban it.
Nevertheless, in its early years greyhound racing was a vibrant, if niche, activity, supported by the urban working class, accepted as part of community life, creative of a culture of owning and training, and a sport which, despite a some low level crime, was comparatively honest. Above all, it provided some of the working classes with an opportunity to escape the drab existence that many led and offered a bright and glitzy ‘American night out’. However, its existence was always contested. Greyhound racing always remained a precarious venture which was vilified for not being a rational recreational activity by social commentators as well as anti-gamblers, subject to a level of discrimination never experienced by other sports, and it is remarkable that it was able to grow and develop for a quarter of a century. During that time greyhound tracks became ‘Ascots for the common man’, even though they catered to the interests of only a small proportion of the working class.
Notes
1HO 45/15843/659060/201, letter of the Rt. Hon. Ormsby-Gore to Sir John Gilmour, 25 November 1933, referred to it as the ‘Ascot for the common man’. The other terms were in common use.
2HO 45/14222, Part 1/499163/1.
3HO 45/14222/Part 1/441963/18. The report appeared in the Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1927 and was repeated in the same paper on 9 December 1927.
4Charles Dimont, ‘Going to the Dogs’, New Statesman, 30 November 1946, and also quoted in B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: A Social History (London: Longman, 1951), Appendix I, pp. 465–9.
5Dimont, ‘Going to the Dogs’.
6Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 465–9.
7HO 45/14222/499163, Part 1, Huggins, ‘“Everybody’s Going to the Dogs”’.
8Leeworthy, ‘A Diversion from the New Leisure’, 53–73.
9Baker, ‘Going to the Dogs’.
10Stephen G. Jones, ‘Working-Class Sport in Manchester between the Wars’, in R. Holt (ed.), Sport and the Working-Class in Modern Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 72.
11HO 45/14222; S. G. Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Classes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 47.
12HO 45/14222; Jones, ‘Working-Class Sport in Manchester’, 71. The three tracks were Belle Vue, White City and Albion.
13Look at the historiography section of the introduction in this book.
14HO 45/14222, file with last date of 7 October 1926.
15Daily Mail, 28 October 1927.
16Manchester City News, 14 January 1928.
17HO 45/142222, Cabinet Papers, CP 143, April 1928.
18Ibid.
19Quoted in the Daily News, 22 September 1927.
20HO 45/14222.
21Manchester Guardian, 23 December 1932. The totalisator was a machine, though there were many different types, that calculated the payments from all bets placed in a pool. Before 1933 about 88 per cent of the pool was paid back to the bettors in winnings but after 1934 this was raised to 94 per cent.
22Manchester Guardian, 11 January 1933.
23Royal Commission on Lotteries, Betting and Gaming (1932–33); Fifth Series, Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 26 April 1934, vol. 99. cc. 768–70, Marquis of Londonderry, Secretary of State for Air.
24Ibid., cc. 789, 792.
25Ibid., cc. 799–800.
26Ibid., cc. 810–11.
27Ibid., cc. 956, 962.
28HLG 52/1422, a two-page report probably produced in 1947.
29HO 45/15853/663794/31, the report of the deputation of the NGRS to the Home Secretary.
30Quoted in Leeworthy, ‘A Diversion from New Leisure’, 64.
31HO 45/15843/659060/201, letter of the Rt. Hon. Ormsby-Gore to Sir John Gilmour, 25 November 1933.
32Mass Observation [hereafter MO] File Report 1149, ‘Some thoughts on greyhound racing and national unity’, March 1942.
33Ibid., 12; Matthew Taylor, ‘Mass-Observation, Sport and the Second World War’, recording of paper at the Leisure Studies Association Conference, University of Bolton, 7 April 2009.
34MO, ‘Some thoughts on greyhound racing and national unity’; HO 45/14222; HO 45/23691, Sabini was arrested under the Defence Regulation 18B.
35Fifth Series, Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 26 April 1934, cc. 810–22.
36MO, ‘Saturday Night’, File Report 2467, April 1947, pp. 16–17 (Mass Observation Archives, University of Sussex).
37MO, ‘Mass Gambling’, file report 2560, January 1948 although often indicated as having appeared in 1947. Greyhound racing appears on pp. 111–38.
38Ibid., p. 113.
39Ibid., pp. 117, 119.
40Ibid., p. 119.
41Ibid., pp. 131–4.
42Ibid., p. 121.
43Ibid., p. 123.
44Ibid., p. 131.
45Ibid., p. 135.
46HO 335/87, memorandum of the PGTCO, para. 6.
47Ibid.
48CUST 49/4251 contains a copy of Hills Guide to Greyhound Racing, published in London almost certainly in 1952 for 1953. Other sections included ‘How to read races’ by Neil Martin and articles on ‘Top number favourites, systematic betting’, etc.
49MO, ‘Mass gambling’, p. 127.
50MO, ‘Dog Fever’, May 1948, p. 1.
51Ibid., p. 1.
52HO 335/52, Greyhound Racing Association, 7 (ii).
53Ferdynand Zweig, Labour, Life and Poverty (London: Gollancz, 1948).
54Ibid., p. 31.
55Ibid., p. 35.
56Ibid., pp. 35–6.
57Ibid., p. 37.
58F. Zweig, The British Worker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952), p. 125.
59Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 114.
60MO, ‘Saturday Night’, pp. 16–17.
61Leeworthy, ‘A Diversion from the New Leisure’, 66.
62HO 335/1, Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming (1949–51), Final Report, Cmnd 8190, March 1951, p. 3, para. 30.
63Ibid., paras 169, 177, 180, 188; HO 335/102.
64HO 335/87, Provincial Greyhound Track Control Office evidence to the Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming, pp. 8–9.
65Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming (1949–51), Final Report, p. 154.
66RB 1/10, 804. TUC files, Modern Record Centre, University of Warwick.
67HO 45/15853/663704/29, letter from the Chairman of the NGRS to the Rt. Hon. G. E. Tryan MP, 21 November 1933.
68Leeworthy, ‘A Diversion from New Leisure’.
69Ibid., 63.
70Ibid., particularly 62 referring to an article in The Times, 14 February 1933.
71Ibid.
72Ibid., 61.
73Ibid., 63, referring to Arms Park (Cardiff) Greyhound Racing Company Limited, Ledger Book, 1927–39, p. 54.
74Leeworthy, ‘A Diversion from New Leisure’, 60–1.
75Chloe Trippier study of Albion Stadium Salford for an MA at the University of Salford in 2013.
76Belton, When West Ham went to the Dogs, p. 121.