A new greyhound stadium was opened at Towcester on 6 December 2014 at a cost of £1.8 million, the first new track in Britain since 1995.1 In 2016 it was announced that Abbey Meads Stadium (Blunden), Swindon, was to be built and opened in 2017. It cost about £5 million and replaced the existing stadium which opened in 1949.2 Such good news for greyhound racing belies the fact that the sport has declined sharply and changed considerably in Britain since the late 1940s. As already indicted, since 1926 there have been 399 different companies operating greyhound racing tracks in Britain, 143 licensed tracks under the NGRS and its subsequent organisations (126 in England, twelve in Scotland and five in Wales), and 256 independent tracks. However, there have rarely been more than about 220 licensed companies and about 210 tracks operating at any one moment. This number had fallen to twenty-five Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB) tracks in 2010 (the GBGB having taken over from the National Greyhound Racing Club and the British Greyhound Racing Board in 2009). The number of GBGB tracks fell further to twenty in 2016, although the number of tracks has fluctuated as a few tracks have been opened or closed from year to year. When Wimbledon closed in March 2017 there were only twenty-four GBGB tracks remaining in Britain, some of them now run directly, or indirectly, by the large betting organisations, built into serving the growth of off-course gambling.3 There are also seven tracks run by independent owners and still known as ‘flapping’ tracks.4 The annual attendances of thirty-two to forty million of the 1930s and 1940s had fallen to 3.2 million in 2007 (5,570 meetings at twenty-six GBGB registered tracks with a turnover of £75,100,000), to about three million in 2013, and is now hovering around two million. The last figure will be slightly higher if the small attendances at the small ‘flapping tracks’ are added. What had happened? Why has greyhound racing declined so rapidly from its halcyon days of the inter-war years?5 It is clear that taxation, the development of off-course betting, the rising importance of the large bookmakers, the rising concerns about the cruelty of greyhound racing, and growing competition from other forms of gambling all played a part.
The closure of the tracks: global cruelty and off-course betting
From the late 1940s track closures have been numerous and constant, as indicted in Table 7.1, and the names of them include many that were well frequented, seemed robust and were almost iconic. Brian Belton has suggested that from the early 1950s there were fears for the future of the famous Custom House track in West Ham but it lingered on until ‘in December 1971 the owners of Custom House stadium, the GRA (who had taken the stadium over in 1967) made it known that the stadium had been sold to a property developer for £475,000’.6 The Stratford Express, in early May 1972, reported that ‘West Ham Stadium, the Mecca of greyhound and speedway racing in the East End for almost fifty years is to close this month’. It added that ‘the site, which has the largest racing circuit in Britain, is to be used in a redevelopment scheme for 395 houses’.7
Table 7.1 Greyhound meetings, attendances and tracks, 1948–75
| Year | Meetings | Average attendance per meeting | Greyhound tracks |
| 1948 | 6,930 | 3,651 | 209 |
| 1950 | 7,327 | 3,071 | 200 |
| 1955 | 7,292 | 2,455 | 192 |
| 1960 | 6,789 | 2,254 | 188 |
| 1965 | 6,003 | 1,866 | 164 |
| 1970 | 5,585 | 1,325 | 140 |
| 1975 | 5,874 | 1,055 | 107 |
Source: BS 2/36, Memorandum of the British Greyhound Racing Federation and the NGRC, Appendix B, evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Gambling (1976).
Many tracks closed or were closing in the 1970s, even as legislation in 1971 allowed them more meetings. The alarm for the supporters of greyhounds racing has increased markedly since then and particularly in the early twenty-first century when other tracks were closed. Walthamstow Stadium, ‘The Stow’, opened by William Chandler in 1933 and run by the Chandler family, finally closed on 16 August 2008.8 An iconic stadium, famed for its Art Deco frontage with the pink-red glow of the words WALTHAMSTOW STADIUM, and its earthy urban glamour, its demise was seen as a bitter blow to greyhound racing. Portsmouth Stadium, at Target Road, opened in 1930, held its last meeting on 23 March 2010, after having been sold to the Tipner Regeneration Company and South East of England Development Agency.9 Oxford Stadium, ‘Sandy Lane’, which opened on 31 March 1939, ceased trading for greyhound racing on 29 December 2012; speedway had already ended there in 2008. The Greyhound Racing Association had been refused the right to build 220 homes on the stadium and the Council intervened to list the stadium as a conservation area. The stadium is now a go-kart track. The Brandon Stadium, Coventry, the home of greyhound racing and the Coventry Bees motorcycle speedway team and Stock Car racing, closed on 16 January 2014.10 This led to fifty redundancies on the track, the rehousing of 200 greyhounds, and a loss of racing opportunities for thirty local greyhound trainers. Wimbledon, the only remaining track within London and for many years the home to the Greyhound Derby, the biggest race in the British greyhound calendar, closed on 25 March 2017.11 Finally, the Hall Green Stadium, in Birmingham, closed on Saturday 29 July 2017, after operating for ninety years.
The fate of greyhound racing in Britain is particularly mirrored in the closure of Wimbledon Stadium. Opened in 1928 by the ‘Cockney millionaire’ William Cearns it once attracted crowds of well over 10,000. It was a vibrant part of the community of Tooting. However, in 2017 it was owned by Risk Capital Partners, a private equity firm run by the former TV Channel 4 chairman Luke Johnson, which bought the then Greyhound Racing Association and its six dogs tracks in 2005. Now, with Wimbledon, once also the home speedway and stock-car racing, three of these tracks have now been closed. Risk Capital offered Merton Council, the planning authority, the pledge to build a 10,000-capacity football stadium alongside housing and a retail park and closed the track. Wimbledon track closed with about 2,000 people in attendance eating their three-course meals in the Grandstand restaurant or drinking pints under the terraces in a stadium three-quarters shuttered in darkness, watching a dozen races which included eight ‘open’ races attracting dogs of the highest quality. The sense of community which once attracted bettors was gone and ‘there was little more than a flicker of regret amongst its regulars, diners, families and stag party revellers who attended its dying rites’.12 Like other stadiums, owned increasingly by the large bookmakers who put up the prize money and stream the action live into their betting shops, where the real money is, Wimbledon has served the immediate needs of gambling but in the end lost out to the more lucrative activity of property development, a consequence of the declining returns from greyhound racing.
In seeking explanations for the decline of British greyhound racing it is impossible not to link it with the recent global decline in the sport resulting from the perceived cruelties of greyhound racing. Dog racing has dwindled in the United States and Australia. In the United States, as a result of the concern about cruelty to greyhounds, forty states have banned greyhound racing and five do not operate it though it is not illegal to do so. Only Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa and West Virginia operate tracks, although Texas is moving towards legalising greyhound tracks again. Until recently there were twenty-six tracks in the United States, twenty of them in Florida, but by 2016 this figure had fallen to eighteen tracks, twelve of them in Florida. In 2016 there were seventy-nine tracks in Australia but in New South Wales thirty-two were to be closed on 1 January 2017 as a result of an investigation into animal cruelty, live baiting and the fact that many, perhaps thousands of, retired and injured dogs have been put down. This decision was reversed on 11 October 2016 with the proviso that conditions be improved and the issue of cruelty tackled. The picture is not entirely bleak and, although similar problems have arisen in other countries, greyhound racing seems to be surviving reasonably well in Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa.13
As abroad, recent greyhound racing scandals in Britain have also damaged the sport. On 16 July 2006 D. Foggo wrote an article in The Times on the ‘Killing field of the dog racing industry’, which reported upon the legal killing of greyhounds, referring to a case in Seaham, in the North East. On 4 August 2006, following up this story, the Sunderland Echo reported on a Sunderland man, Dave Smith, who was killing thousands of dogs, ten at a time, according to a dog warden, which had been dumped after their racing careers had finished. He was apparently not doing anything illegal but it was claimed that the corpses of 10,000 dogs had been buried at his Northdene Avenue home, in Seaham, County Durham. In May 2008 the Sunday Times revealed that the largest greyhound breeder in Britain, Charles Pickering, was selling puppies which had not raced or proved to be too slow to Liverpool University for research and dissection.14 The university apparently used sixty-two dogs – six provided by their owners and forty-four destroyed by Belle Vue Track (essentially for their cadavers) – thirty-nine of the dogs having sustained minor racing injuries and being regarded as uneconomic. In 2015 about 500 dogs were abandoned across East Durham and council chiefs have put together a scheme to ensure good ownership. Apparently, a further four greyhounds – Happy Hawk, Liam Maldini, Blue Fern and Balreask Touch – had been ‘raced to death’ at Belle Vue Track, in Manchester, all within the space of two weeks. It is also estimated that 1,500 greyhounds get injured on British tracks, leading to them being destroyed. Betty Blackmore, of the RSPCA, stated: ‘This sorry state of affairs cannot continue. Dogs are being chewed up and spat out of an industry which ultimately treats greyhounds as disposable commodities, rather than sentimental animals for which it is responsible.’15 The Associate Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare, funded by the RSPCA and the British Racing Greyhound Fund, produced a report on The Welfare of Greyhounds in May 2007, suggesting that around 13,500 dogs from regulated tracks and about 1,500 from independent tracks were surplus to requirements each year and were being put down.16
Much of this damning evidence is distilled in a document produced by The League Against Cruel Sports entitled The State of Greyhound Racing in Great Britain: A Mandate for Change. Published in 2014, it indicated further the vast scale of the destruction of greyhounds and their widespread use in scientific experiments in universities.17 It called for the control of breeding of Irish and British greyhounds, accurate checks on the number of dogs being bred, registered and run, and proper health controls and kennelling. Above all, it argued that the self-regulation of greyhound racing was not working.
The GBGB has responded to this with the GBGB Greyhound Commitment, an operational charter for running the sport, which offers an eight-point statement for ensuring the welfare and safety of greyhounds, ensuring that greyhound injuries are reduced further from their low level and ensuring that greyhounds have a happy retirement. In other words it has accepted a ‘duty of care’, with the Chief Executive of the GBGB, Mark Bird, stating in 2018 that ‘animal welfare is at the heart of greyhound racing’ and that ‘the Greyhound Commitment sets out its intent that every greyhound that can be homed when it retires is successfully homed’.18 It also suggests the introduction of accredited professional training for the 7,000 people working in the sport. The full GBGB Greyhound Commitment runs as follows:
1.Greyhound welfare and safety is at the heart of everything we do.
2.Every racing greyhound is treated with care and respect throughout its career.
3.Our independently verified injury rates remain the lowest in the world and will improve further still.
4.Wherever possible every dog leaving racing enjoys a long and happy retirement.
5.Every race is run fairly, safely and that attending a race meeting is an enjoyable and fun experience for all involved.
6.Those working in the sport have access to training at the beginning of their careers, ongoing accredited professional development.
7.Funding received from the betting industry significantly contributes to greyhound racing.
8.Together, we continue to promote our sport and nurture the public’s love of greyhounds.
In 2017 the official injury rate for 400,000 runners in greyhound races was 1.15 per cent and although 86 per cent of retired greyhounds were successfully homed 348 could not be homed and were put down. There is clearly some way to go to tackle the issue of greyhound welfare.
Yet whilst cruelty towards greyhounds has been uppermost in recent debates about the future of greyhound racing in Britain the fact is that its decline began in the late 1940s, not the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and certainly not just because of the recent scandalous revelations. Indeed, in Britain, the politics of the decline of greyhound racing has proved no less controversial than the politics of its growth and there seem to have been three major factors leading to decline. One has been the discriminatory tax regime that operated against greyhound tracks from the 1940s until the 1970s which put them at a financial disadvantage compared with horse racing and other gambling pursuits. By the time this issue was resolved in the 1970s greyhound racing was already in steep decline. The second major factor has been the increasing development of off-track betting facilities which had made betting at greyhound tracks unnecessary for the majority of bettors and put the surviving tracks in the hands of the national bookmakers and the television companies. Third, and more generally, there has been the rising competition from other gambling sports and leisure activities that has occurred since the 1950s, including the National Lottery and scratchcards.
The first of these challenges, the continued policy of discriminating against the dubious, non-rational, sport of greyhound racing in the 1920s and 1930s was demonstrated most forcefully by the discriminatory taxations imposed upon it by a Labour government in the late 1940s. As outlined in chapter 2, and despite academic articles which have denied discrimination, there was a furious reaction from the greyhound racing fraternity to what was seen as the discriminatory attack upon working-class gambling resulting from the imposition of a 10 per cent Tote Pool Duty in 1948, alongside a tax on the bookmakers through a licensing system (see Appendix 7 and Appendix 8).19 To some it was seen as an attack upon working-class leisure activities. Despite the regular annual round of pressure from greyhound organisations being applied at Budget time for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to reduce the Tote Pool Duty, it was actually raised to 11 per cent in 1962–63 before being restored to 10 per cent. The Labour government of Harold Wilson reduced it to 5 per cent in 1964 and to 2.6 per cent between 1966 and 1968, before raising it back to 5 per cent (see Table 7.2). It was not until 1972, under the Edward Heath Conservative government, that it was reduced to 4 per cent at a time when the NGRS and the new NGRC was pressuring for the tax to be imposed on off-track bookies as well.
Table 7.2 Greyhound Pool Betting Duty on the Tote, 1948–76
| Years | Level of Taxation % |
| 1948–62 | 10 |
| 1962–63 | 11 |
| 1963–64 | 10 |
| 1964–66 | 5 |
| 1966–68 | 2.5 per cent General Betting Duty |
| 1968–72 | 5 per cent General Betting Duty |
| 1972–76 | 4 per cent General Betting Duty |
Source: BS 3/26 Royal Commission on Gambling (Rothschild Commission), appointed February 1976 and reporting in 1978, evidence by the National Greyhound Racing Club, p. 49 of a 100-page document submitted as evidence on 25 June 1976.
The industry declined rapidly, and the NGRS and NGRC looked to finding new ways of gaining income for greyhound racing to offset the income loss resulting from taxation. However, frustrated in these overtures, the NGRS sponsored a successful private members Tote Bill in 1969 to allow the track tote draw-back to rise from the 6 per cent, set in 1934, to 12.5 per cent, though it was observed that after it was introduced ‘many tracks only make a 10 per cent reduction’.20 In 1971, Edward Heath’s Conservative government decided to further amend the Betting and Lotteries Act of 1934 with the Dog Betting Act of 1971 (incorporating another act in 1963) and to allow tracks to hold 130 meetings per year, rather than the two per week previously permitted, and also allowed tracks to fix their own days for racing, with the exception of Good Friday and Sundays.21 This offered a lifeline to greyhound racing but was too little too late for many tracks. Following the government’s relaxation of the rules, a Home Office official wrote on 9 February 1972 that: ‘This has given the tracks a further source of income. They cannot complain that they have not received favourable conditions and it should be borne in mind that the overheads for dog racing are fractional compared with those of horse racing.’22 This was disingenuous given that horse racing was never saddled with the type of taxation that greyhound racing faced from the 1940s, nor subject to the same controls on the owners’ tote take. The greater number of days and the flexibility of the new arrangements clearly benefited all tracks but the new tote draw-back arrangements offered nothing to the rapidly declining number of smaller tracks operating without the tote and depended upon the course bookmakers who were taxed and for whom the tracks often paid the tax to ensure the presence of bookmakers to attract crowds. As a result, many of the smaller flapping tracks, and some of the smaller NGRS tracks, closed down, to be replaced by housing estates and other commercial developments, leaving a rump of large tote-driven tracks frequented by a small number of bookmakers operating in front of illuminated grandstands dominated by restaurant facilities.23 The communal character of the meetings, evident in the early days of the sport, changed substantially to the point where greyhound tracks were, and are now, often seen as even more of an urban impediment to the interests of the areas in which they operate, even more than they were once felt to be. It is also clear that the British Greyhound Racing Federation, which emerged briefly in 1976–77, did not feel that there were sufficient days available for its affiliated members and was requesting 156 days when it could organise gambling on its tracks.24
Taxation was one problem leading to the decline of greyhound racing but it has to be combined with the second, even greater, challenge – the move from on-course betting to off-course betting. Off-course betting became a major problem for the greyhound tracks by the 1950s, as suggested in chapter 2. Extensive evidence of the proliferation of off-course credit bookmaking was made to the Home Office and to the Royal Commission on Gambling, Lotteries and Gaming (1949–51). Yet off-course betting became an even more serious issue in the 1960s. Prior to 1961 greyhound racing tracks were still the major legalised cash-betting outlets in the urban centres for the working classes. That situation changed dramatically with the Betting and Gaming Act of 1960, which led to the opening of LBOs in April 1961. This Act amplified the existing move to off-course betting and produced a further slump in attendances at greyhound tracks. Indeed, two major tracks in London – Park Royal and Stamford Bridge, which had regular attendances of 3,200 and 3,700, respectively, up to 1961, found that their attendances had fallen to 800 and 900, respectively, within seven years of the Betting and Gaming Act being implemented. The matinee meetings, as opposed to evening ones, became so uneconomic that they ceased to be offered at the two tracks.25 This is further emphasised by the fact that on NGRS/NGRC tracks 80 per cent of the betting had been with the tote in 1951 whilst in 1975 the bookmakers were likely to exceed the take of the totalisators by 30 per cent.26 This move had also been determined by other legislation which encouraged off-course betting or restricted the tote, notably the Betting and Gaming Lotteries Acts of 1963 and 1971, the 1967 Dog Racecourse Totalisator Regulations, and similar regulations in 1975 which meant that ‘greyhound racing [was] a tightly controlled sport in Britain’.27
To compensate for their loss of income to LBOs, attempts were made by the greyhound authorities to widen the scope of the totalisator in the 1960s. The Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting (1932–33) had suggested that the owners of courses should not control betting facilities, though that was rejected by government. Nevertheless, the track owners often employed managers rather than operated the track and the tote themselves. The tote, of course, only operated on the track. However, in October 1961 the NGRS issued a memorandum that credit betting should be allowed on the tote, raising the prospect of off-course betting on the tote, and it revived the issue again in August 1962. It sought legal opinion in July 1963 which advised that credit betting on the tote was not illegal but the Home Office quashed the idea of off-course greyhound tote betting, suggesting that it would increase the scale of gambling and be subject to fraud.28 Failing to secure this initiative in 1972, the NGRS/NGRC suggested some changes to the totalisator, the charge of a levy on all off-course betting on greyhound racing and more days for racing. All these ideas were rejected and a Home Office memorandum of 1972 suggested that:
Since 1968, the greyhound interest have been engaged in other matters, connected with the deduction from the totalisator and the removal of restrictions on the days on which greyhound racing might take place. They have never put forward a comprehensive proposal explaining how they would introduce safeguards into any arrangements for betting on the totalisator by persons not resident in the trade.29
This Home Office memorandum felt that the imposition of a levy would affect greyhound racing in two ways. First, it would ‘add to the quantity of off-course betting, with which the track totalisator would have to compete’ and, second, greyhound racing ‘would benefit from a levy as assists horse racing’.30 However, it felt that, despite pressure from Mr Underhill, the representative of the NGRS who bombarded the Home Office with letters and statements, little progress had been made since the early 1960s and that there were practical difficulties in raising a levy. It suggested that Underhill and the NGRS should, if they pushed ahead with the levy idea, submit practical proposals, the Home Office feeling that ‘we have seen little progress since.’31 No plan ever emerged though the 2nd Lord Mancroft (Stormont Samuel Mancroft), as President of the British Greyhound Racing Federation (formed in the mid-1970s to bring all the greyhound interests together) stated, in his evidence to the Rothschild Commission on 7 July 1976, that:
Our reason for asking for a levy is on a different basis. It is because the sport as a whole is slipping away in popularity for obvious reasons the two most notable of which are television at night – of course we primarily are night sport and secondly, because of the street betting shop. This is taking money away from us at a rate which is making the sport barely viable. Our report is for a levy … We are not asking for public money; we are asking for punters money to come back into the sport. That is what we need in order to keep the sport viable when so many of our tracks are teetering on the edge of financial disaster not through their own inefficiency I like to think, but merely because the sport is not being supported financially or physically in the way it was in the old days when it first gained popularity.32
By the mid-1970s the impact of both taxation and off-course gambling on dog racing was palpable and, as Table 7.1 and Table 7.4 indicate, between 1948 and 1975 the number of greyhound tracks had halved, the number of NGRC tracks had declined by more than 40 per cent, and attendances had fallen by more than 75 per cent. The old non-NGRC tracks (now part of the new NGRC) are estimated to have held 6,200 meetings in 1975, two meetings per track per week, with an attendance of about one and a half million, which means that there were only approximately 250 attenders per meeting.33 In total, then, there were about 7.7 million attendances at all greyhound tracks in 1975. The national statistics for Britain in 1975–76 bear out this dramatic move from on-track betting to off-course betting as a whole, of which greyhound racing was a part, with the fact that £1,805 million of the £2,079 million spent on gambling was being spent off course.34 Indeed, there must have been alarm at the steady decline of greyhound racing speeding up in the early 1970s when the general betting duty was quite low in historical terms, as evident from Table 7.2. Indeed, the tote retention for the owners was only just over half of the income received by the tracks between 1973 and 1975 (Table 7.3). The declining returns of the tote led to the Greyhound Racing Association, and other organisations, to ‘sell uneconomic tracks for property development’.35
Table 7.3 Income of the NGRC greyhound tracks, 1973–75 (%)
| 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | |
| From retention (tote) | 51.2 | 52.0 | 51.5 |
| Catering and refreshments | 22.0 | 22.5 | 24.5 |
| Advertising and racecards | 18.1 | 17.4 | 17.2 |
| Kennel charges | 4.5 | 4.1 | 3.8 |
| Others | 4.2 | 4.0 | 3.0 |
Source: BS 3/36, evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Gambling, 1976–78 (Rothschild).
In the face of decline greyhound organisations were forced to operate more closely together. On 1 March 1972 the NGRS and NGRC merged to form the National Greyhound Racing Club (NGRC), which maintained a body of ten ‘Independent Stewards’ (the Hon. R. Stanley, the Earl of Westmoreland and the Viscount Ward of Whitley amongst them) to maintain the distance between a body of men upholding the rules of the tracks and one which represented the interests of the old NGRS tracks which were now NGRC tracks. The Provincial Greyhound Tracks Central Office became the Provincial Greyhound Tracks Federation in 1973, representing fifty-nine non-NGRC tracks, but operated in close relation to the NGRC through its Permit Racecourse Scheme, whereby non-NGRC tracks would come under the aegis of the NGRC, seek general advice from it, but operate outside the normal NGRC standard track requirements, for a nominal fee of £10.36 There was even a move towards linking all greyhound organisations throughout the world into the World Greyhound Racing Association formed in 1971, although it does not seem to have exerted much impact upon greyhound racing in Britain.37
When the new NGRC presented a memorandum and evidence to the Rothschild Commission in 1976 it represented all sections of the sport – the Stewards, commercial companies, the NGRC, the non-NGRC racecourses (the flapping tracks), the owners, trainers and the breeders.38 Indeed, it was ‘the single effective voice for the whole industry’.39 As a unified body the new NGRC argued that ‘Public interest in the sport is as strong as ever but it is now differently expressed’.40 But there was no getting away from the fact that the industry had declined as a result of the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act and the growth of off-course gambling. As a result, the NGRC requested its proposals to the Commission. It wanted the number of days in which tracks could operate the sport and gambling increased from 130 per year to 156, the number of Special Betting days to be increased from four to six, the number of races at a meeting increased from eight to ten and that a levy be raised on off-course gambling on greyhounds or alternatively that the racecourses be given property rights to negotiate the use of their races for gambling with the betting shops or other commercial gambling groups.41 It also campaigned to get the entry fee of bookmakers attending the tracks raised to five times the standard entry fee, in a move reminiscent of the bitter conflicts of the inter-war years between the tracks and the bookmakers.42
The Rothschild Commission (1976–78) gathered evidence from the NGRC and other dog-racing and bookmaking organisations, as it did from other areas of the gambling industry, and this indicated the plight of greyhound racing, as indicted in Tables 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6, which record declining number of tracks, declining attendances and declining returns on investment. Yet its 303 recommendations had little to say about greyhound racing. Its main thrust was to try to maintain and widen the right to gamble and seemed to adopt a view that excessive gambling was a psychological problem and, therefore, was something which should not impinge upon the broad social policies of government. All it did for greyhound racing was to encourage the widening the competition of gambling and thus usher forward its gradual decline, even though the number of days of racing was increased and tracks were able to assert their property rights in negotiating the streaming of races to LBOs.
Table 7.4 The decline of greyhound racing, 1948–75, on NGRC tracks
| Year | NGRC tracks | Meetings | Average number of meetings | Attendance (millions) | Average attendance |
| 1948 | 77 | 6,930 | 90 | 25.3 | 3,651 |
| 1950 | 70 | 7,550 | 105 | 22.5 | 3,071 |
| 1953 | 68 | 7,118 | 105 | 19.9 | 2,976 |
| 1955 | 66 | 7,992 | 110 | 17.9 | 2,455 |
| 1958 | 65 | 6,833 | 106 | 15.4 | 2,254 |
| 1960 | 64 | 6,787 | 106 | 15.3 | 2,254 |
| 1963 | 59 | 6,307 | 107 | 12.0 | 1,903 |
| 1965 | 58 | 6,003 | 103 | 11.2 | 1,866 |
| 1968 | 57 | 6,057 | 106 | 9.1 | 1,502 |
| 1970 | 52 | 5,585 | 107 | 7.2 | 1,325 |
| 1973 | 46 | 5,488 | 119 | 6.1 | 1,118 |
| 1975 | 48 | 5,874 | 122 | 6.2 | 1,055 |
Source: BS 3/26, Memorandum and Main Evidence of the NGRC Ltd to the Royal Commission on Gambling (Rothschild, 1976–78), 25 June 1976, p. 48.
Table 7.5 The declining number of NGRC and non-NGRC tracks, 1948–75
| Year | NGRC | Non-NGRC | Total |
| 1948 | 77 | 132 | 209 |
| 1950 | 70 | 130 | 200 |
| 1953 | 68 | 129 | 197 |
| 1955 | 66 | 126 | 192 |
| 1958 | 65 | 124 | 189 |
| 1960 | 64 | 124 | 188 |
| 1963 | 59 | 110 | 169 |
| 1965 | 58 | 106 | 166 |
| 1968 | 57 | 95 | 152 |
| 1970 | 52 | 88 | 150 |
| 1973 | 46 | 70 | 116 |
| 1975 | 48 | 59 | 107 |
Source: BS 3/26, The Memorandum and Main Evidence of the NGRC Ltd to the Royal Commission on Gambling (Rothschild, 1976–78), 25 June 1976, p. 48.
Table 7.6 Profits and return on capital for NGRC tracks, 1973–75
| Year | Profits (£ millions) | Returns on stadium (% capital) |
| 1973 | 66.7 | 8.2 |
| 1974 | 68.4 | 6.7 |
| 1975 | 74.2 | 5.77 |
Source: BS 3/26, The Memorandum and Main Evidence of the NGRC Ltd to the Royal Commission on Gambling (Rothschild, 1976–78), 25 June 1976, pp. 48–9.
BAGS and the streaming of greyhound racing
The process of moving betting off the track was furthered by the action of the large bookmakers in streaming live commentaries and then live action greyhound racing to LBOs, opened in 1961. In 1967 BAGS, the Bookmakers’ Affiliated Greyhound Scheme, was formed with the aim of offering gambling in betting shops on ‘wet winter days’ when there was no horse racing. It began to organise contracts with the greyhound tracks and in 2014 there were seventeen (of the then remaining twenty-five GBGB) tracks with contracts for this service to the betting office of bookmakers, where 25,000 BAGs races were being shown per year.43 In order to survive, many of the tracks (eighteen by 2017) sought BAGS racing as another source of income flow, thus succumbing further to the control of the bookmakers. Since the formation of BAGS other streaming organisations and schemes have developed. In 1987 Satellite Information Services (SIS) was formed as a news-gathering service and provided coverage of races to the bookmaker offices. Initially in competition with BAGS, and picking up some of its contracts when they became available, it worked in agreement with BAGS, which often negotiated contracts with the individual tracks whilst SIS provided the service. Now based at Media City Salford, Greater Manchester, in 2016 SIS had 850 employees and a net income of £159 million, supplying 5,800 LBOs. Like BAGS it was essentially owned by some of the large bookmakers and investment companies and in 2016 William Hill held a 19.5 per cent stake, Ladbrokes 23 per cent, Fred Done (co-owner of Betfred) 7.5 per cent, and the Tote held 6 per cent. Of the rest, Caledonian Investments held 22.5 per cent, Alternaterport twenty point held 5 per cent, and the other 1 per cent was owned by a variety of small owners including companies owning Leicester, Catterick, Thirsk and Stratford-upon-Avon racecourses. BAGS and SIS operating together have ensured that gambling on the dogs is almost entirely an off-course activity which the surviving tracks service.
The bookmakers have taken over greyhound racing and shaped its development as it has declined. There are variations in this service arrangement for in 2007 SIS provided different channel arrangements for live television channel coverage for each of the different bookmaking organisations – Ladbrokes, Coral (now Ladbrokes Coral), Betfred and William Hill. Other firms, such as Turf TV, formed in 2007, have also emerged to provide streaming activities, though Turf TV tends to focus upon horse racing.44
BAGS and SIS further strengthened their hold over greyhound racing in 2011 when they organised the BAGS/SIS Track Championship, the final of which was held at Monmore, and ran the championship until 2016 after which, in mid-2017, it was abandoned as BAGS and SIS went their own separate ways and came, once again, into competition for contracts and meetings to stream. The Greyhound Star (an online rather than hard-copy newspaper from the beginning of 2015) reported on 5 November 2016 that BAGS has produced a schedule of meetings but that the Coral and Ladbrokes amalgamation had thrown the whole industry into turmoil, and that the entry of the Greyhound Media Group into the potential streaming of the sport had raised difficulties of SIS being able to survive effectively on streaming 900 meetings per year when it probably needed about 1,500 to provide a viable service.
Nevertheless, the BAGS/SIS Championship lasted for six years between 2011 and 2016 as an autumn competition in which four areas – North, South, East and West – competed in a track-team based regional competition, with greyhound racing at different distances, different standards, different ages, on the flat and over hurdles, different standards to get to a final held at a neutral venue announced a few weeks before the final. Each track arranged a meeting of six races with a dog from each track. The winning tracks and the best two runner-up tracks sent one dog for each race to the final meeting of ten races in 2016. There were substantial rewards at all levels for the trainers, owners and the tracks, although the fine detail of this changed every year. The advertised 2017 competition was to introduce a new Elite race for dogs with five wins in top grade races and offered about £350,000 in prize money and costs, a major boost to the sport, and the finals were to be covered by Sky Sports over Christmas (there were 120,000 viewers in 2014, which was more than the number who watched the Greyhound Derby of that year).45 However, as indicated, the autumn 2017 championship never occurred because of the changing economic position of the companies running the streaming of the sport. The winners of this competition for 2011 to 2016 are listed in Table 7.7 (the track name for two years are not reported possibly because they were neutral tracks agreed upon when the finalists were established and do not get recorded in the sports reports) and the tracks designated for 2017 are indicated in Table 7.8, although they were never used. What is important here is that the sport is very much in the hands of the bookmakers, streaming companies and television, with most of the tracks – though some have been excluded because they are not of sufficient standard – involved in these types of competition.
Table 7.7 The annual BAGS/SIS Championship winners
| Year | Venue | Winner |
| 2011 | Belle Vue | Monmore |
| 2012 | Newcastle | |
| 2013 | Sheffield | |
| 2014 | Nottingham | Peterborough |
| 2015 | Perry Bar | Peterborough |
| 2016 | Towcester | Perry Barr |
Source: various sources, including Greyhound Star, 25 July 2015 (online).
Table 7.8 The four areas and the tracks involved in the BAGS and SIS Track Championship 2017
| Area | Tracks |
| The North | Sunderland, Belle Vue, Newcastle, Kinsley, Sheffield |
| The South | Crayford, Romford, Hove, Poole, Sittingbourne |
| The East | Nottingham, Peterborough, Doncaster, Yarmouth, Henlow |
| The West | Towcester, Swindon, Perry Barr, Monmore |
Source: Various sources including Greyhound Star, 25 July 2015.
Hall Green and Wimbledon were not included, and Mildenhall (in Suffolk), Pelaw Grange (Chester-le-Street near Newcastle), Harlow (Essex) and Shawfield (Glasgow) have never been involved in the BAGS-SIS championship, although they are GBGB tracks, probably because they have no contracts with BAGS or SIS.
The domination of the large bookmakers is even more evident in the number of tracks they own and the races they have and continue to sponsor. Ladbrokes owned the Monmore and Crayford stadiums whilst Coral owned the Brighton and Hove stadium and Romford. Ladbrokes took over Coral in November 2016, becoming Ladbrokes Coral. This means that at least a sixth of the GBGB stadiums in Britain are directly in the hands of the large bookmaking organisations. In addition, most large bookmakers have sponsored the major greyhound classic and open races for many years. The William Hill organisation sponsored the Greyhound St. Leger held at Wimbledon until 2016, and the greyhound Cesarewitch in its latter years until its demise when Oxford Stadium closed at the end of 2012.46 Ladbrokes sponsor the Ladbrokes’ Golden Jacket at Crayford and many other races. Betfair sponsors the Gymcrack, though it is much more involved in sponsoring Irish greyhound racing, and Coral sponsored the Gymcrack and the Regency. However, the premier event, the English Greyhound Derby – worth about £350,000 when all the prizes for regional qualifying rounds are included – was, in 2017, sponsored by Star Sports, a group of Indian sports channels owned by Star India – a subsidiary of 21st Century Fox.47 It is now clear that the betting organisations and the television networks run greyhound racing in Britain and that its future depends upon their decisions, which means that its continued existence is precarious. Indeed, the future of greyhound racing in Britain is not at all certain, especially since gambling on greyhounds and the returns to bookmakers are constantly diminishing. In 2017 SBC News reported upon the decline of the takings from greyhound racing. It noted that in the 2008–9 season the bookmakers (including totes) took £1,580 million in money wagered on greyhounds, a gross gambling take of £308 million, a yield of just 20 per cent. In 2014–15 betting on greyhound racing had fallen to £1,190 million in wagers and the gross gambling take was £216 million, a yield of just under 19 per cent.48 The economic prospects for greyhound racing look bleak.
The fact is, in the second half of the twentieth century onwards, and particularly from the 1990s onwards, greyhound racing has faced a third challenge in the wide range of alternative and competing gambling activities. Like the football pools it has lost out to the National Lottery, which began in 1994. It is also competing with online betting, scratchcards, slot machines, betting exchanges and another ten or so major gambling alternatives. One recent survey, which looked at how many times men and women gambled on about fifteen different gambling activities in 1999, 2007 and 2010, revealed the insignificance of betting on greyhounds. The average man gambled on the National Lottery sixty-eight times and the average woman sixty-two times in 1999. By 2010 those figures, for men and women, had fallen to sixty-one and fifty-six, respectively. The equivalent figures for scratchcards in 1999 were twenty-two and twenty-two, and had increased to twenty-three and twenty-five in 2010. For horse racing the respective figures were eighteen and nine in 1999, and nineteen and eleven in 2010. In comparison, the figures for dog racing were six for men and two for women in both 1999 and 2010.49 One suspects that the decline in greyhound racing since 2010 has meant that the average man and woman barely bet on the dogs.
Self-regulation of the sport
As if this were not enough, the major scandal surrounding the cruelty and slaughter of the greyhounds, which began this chapter, brought the situation of greyhound racing to a crisis point in 2006 and 2007. As a result, Tony Blair’s Labour government and the National Greyhound Racing Board felt that there was either the need to be improving the self-regulation of the sport or for government intervention to occur. Therefore, the Labour government asked Lord Donoughue, a Labour Peer, to report on the industry, assisted by Patrick Nixon, Secretary of the Bookmakers’ Committee at the Horse Race Levy Board, Clarissa Baldwin (Chief Executive of the Dogs Trust), Jim Crenin (former Greyhound Editor of the Racing Post) and Jim Donnelly (Head of Sport at PA Sport). The 2007 report (available online) suggested that greyhound racing should remain self-regulating but should create a single entity to conduct the governance, administration, finance and regulation of the sport. Lord Donoughue made thirty-six other recommendations to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and regulations and to raise welfare standards, and suggested that the two governing bodies – the British Greyhound Racing Board and the National Greyhound Racing Club, united as the National Greyhound Racing Board, be replaced by the Greyhound Board of Great Britain in 2009. Self-regulation was to continue but the report called for root and branch change under the new organisation.
Such self-regulation has been subject to further critical scrutiny, particularly over the continued cruelty of the sport. In 2014, the League Against Cruel Sports believed that the slaughter and maltreatment of dogs was continuing unabated. Indeed, it was extremely concerned about the fact that, as Table 7.9 indicates, well over three-quarters of greyhound registered in Britain were bred in Ireland, in circumstances and conditions of which little was known. Whilst this situation persists there will be a continuing campaign to end greyhound racing even though it is evident that it is moving towards oblivion. The Irish are often trainers of the dogs, and sometimes owners. But even they may be giving up on the sport as the financial rewards of the sport diminish. Attending the Wimbledon track just before its closure Ray Butler, who breeds dogs at his Ireland-based stud, Hollyoak, reflected that: ‘There are very few dogs left now, to be fair.’ Bemoaning the loss of prize money, and reflecting that many races is no longer make financial sense for trainers, he added that: ‘Some of the prizes on grade race [normally denoting a lower calibre of dog] are just not there. You might get £30 to enter and it will cost you £10 a day to train a dog. That dog can race only once a week. It just doesn’t add up. You used to get a lot of trainers coming over from Ireland but not anymore.’50
Table 7.9 The number of registered greyhounds in Britain and the proportion of Irish-bred greyhounds
| 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | |
Greyhounds registered in Britain |
10,101 | 9,781 | 9,012 | 8,672 | 8,552 | 7,972 | 7,914 | 7,520 |
Irish-bred dogs on the GBGB register |
7,640 | 7,639 | 6,943 | 6,602 | 6,536 | 6,228 | 6,264 | 6,203 |
% of greyhound racing dogs bred in Ireland |
76 | 77 | 77 | 77 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 83 |
Source: League Against Cruel Sports, The State of Greyhound Racing in Britain, p. 14.
Faced with this decline one might ask – what happened to the tracks that closed? The simple answer is that they have merged back into the housing of the community. The survey of the London tracks in 1963, referred to for the acreage of the greyhound tracks in chapter 4, indicated that the sixteen surviving tracks covered about 158 acres and that about seventy acres could be cleared and made suitable for residential accommodation – listing the stadiums at Catford, Harringay, Clapton, Hackney, West Ham and Wimbledon among the most suitable sites. Others were less suitable, and apart from the fact that Stamford Bridge (the home of Chelsea football club) was highly unlikely to be developed it is clear that the stadiums at Crayford, Dagenham and Romford, and particularly Park Royal, which was surrounded by industry, were deemed unsuitable.51 The first category was a wish list of closures by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. But much of it came true. West Ham closed after the last meeting on 26 May 1972, having been sold to a property developer in December 1971 for £475,000. The largest greyhound circuit in Britain was to be used in a redevelopment of 395 houses.52 Walthamstow closed on 16 August 2008. After several years of appeals Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, approved the plans to demolish the stadium, apart from the front façade with its neon lights, which was restored, and 292 new homes were built. Wimbledon closed in March 2017 to be developed for housing and a small football stadium. On 29 July 2017 BBC News announced that Hall Green Stadium, Birmingham had held its last meeting and was closing to be replaced by a forty-eight-room hotel and 210 new houses.
A similar picture of track closure and housing development occurred across Britain. Blackpool Greyhound Stadium (not to be confused with the short-lived Squires Gate greyhound stadium to its south) was opened in 1927 and closed in 1964, with the site becoming housing around Stadium Avenue.53 The Darnell track in Sheffield, opened in 1927, closed in 1964 and became part of the extended Poole Road area of the city. The City Stadium, Bradford, opened in 1932 and became a warehouse shortly after it was closed in 1965. The Powderhall Stadium, opened for athletics in the nineteenth century and famous as the place where the Olympic athlete Eric Liddell (whose story appeared in the film Chariots of Fire) trained in the 1920s, became a greyhound track in 1927 and closed in 1995 for housing. The simple fact is that the closure of upwards of 400 tracks in about ninety years has led to most of them being redeveloped, often for housing.
Conclusion
Greyhound racing has led a precarious existence in the twenty-first century and is now down to barely 10 per cent of the size it was at the beginning of the 1960s, already considerably shrunken from the late 1940s. Given the changes in leisure, forms of gambling and the growth on television, this was bound to occur. However, a combination of factors – discriminatory taxation, the rise of off-course betting and greyhound racing’s image as a cruel sport – have ensured an unexpectedly rapid rate of decline. Greyhound racing may not now be subject to the same level of discrimination it faced in the inter-war years but there is still a stigma attached to it, and those who frequent its gates, particularly since the revelations about the cruel treatment of greyhounds. It is no longer the ‘American night out’, the brash new bright-lights entertainment, that it was initially advertised as being in the 1920s. Instead, it is just another form of leisure and entertainment, a quaint and declining remnant of the past. It is no longer seen as the ‘working man’s turf’, or ‘Ascot for the common man’, but just a thrill for a small number of bettors of all classes in a society where class is no longer the defining social category that it used to be. Times have changed and greyhound racing has had to embrace this and adapt to these changes as it has become a mere adjunct to the betting firms who have increasingly owned and directed it and made it into a streamed service for LBOs. These betting firms now run the sport, they run the betting, they finance many of the races and they, along with property and investment companies, determine whether or not a track survives or dies. This dominance of the large bookmaker was evident in the short-lived but all-embracing BAG-SIS Championship series and the variety of races sponsored by the bookmakers. Faced with the decline of gambling on greyhound racing the gambling firms may, and certainly can, close down the tracks and leave them open to the property development firms. This seems a world away from the situation in New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland where the sport is still thriving. Bob Higgs, groundsman of Wimbledon Stadium for nearly thirty years, until it closed in 2017, reflected, pessimistically: ‘In about 20 years greyhound racing will be gone – it will be finished in my opinion. Closing things will have a massive knock-on effect.’54 His time-frame may be rather optimistic.
Notes
1Greyhound Board of Great Britain, ‘Track Search’; Morning Star, 7 March 2015. It suggests that this was the first stadium to be opened since 1985 but it should have been 1995 when Harlow, in Essex, was opened.
2Swindon Advertiser, 30 August 2016.
3Belle Vue (Manchester), Brighton & Hove, Crayford Stadium (Bexley, London), Doncaster, Hall Green (Birmingham), Harlow (Essex), Henlow (Bedfordshire), Kinsley (Pontefract), Mildenhall (Sussex), Monmore (Wolverhampton), Newcastle, Nottingham, Pelaw Grange (Durham), Perry Barr (Birmingham), Peterborough, Poole, Shawfield (South Lanarkshire), Sheffield, Sittingbourne (Swale in Kent), Sunderland, Swindon, Towcester, Yarmouth, and Romford Stadium (Havering, London). There were £2.5 billion wagers and about two million attendances. League Against Cruel Sports and Grey2UK USA Worldwide, The State of Greyhound Racing in Britain: A Mandate for Change (London, 2014). This report suggests and maps twenty-four GBGB tracks and nine Independent, or flapping, tracks, in 2014 though the composition of the GBGB tracks has changed and there are now (in 2017) two fewer independent tracks. Guardian, 25 March 2017, article by Paul MacInnes, ‘Gone to the Dogs: Gamblers and Day Trippers at Wimbledon Wave Goodbye to Eighty-Nine Years of History’ suggests that there are twenty-four GBGB tracks. An article in the Morning Star, 7 March 2015, indicates twenty-four GBGB tracks. A BBC Panorama programme suggested that the industry was generating £2.5 billion of gambling per year and, in 2013, that was based on 70,000 races per year which supported 7,000 jobs, and £237 million profits of which £55 million went to the government.
4The seven surviving independent tracks as of April 2017 are Askern (Doncaster), Easington (Durham), Halcrow (Dumfries and Galloway), Highgate (Barnsley), Thornton (Fife), Valley (Ystrad) and Wheatley Hill (Durham).
5Guardian, 25 March 2017.
6Belton, When West Ham went to the Dogs, p. 121.
7Ibid.
8Guardian, 26 July 2008, article by Laura Thompson.
9The [Portsmouth] News, 19 March 2010.
10Coventry Telegraph, 27 February 2014.
11Guardian, 25 March 2017. Greyhound racing was said to be the second largest spectator sport in Britain in the mid-1970s.
12Guardian, 25 March 2017.
13The internet and Wikipedia provide a constant supply of updates as to the position.
14Sunday Times, 11 May 2008, article by Daniel Foggo.
15The Associate Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare, The Welfare of Greyhounds (London: Associate Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare, 2007), pp. 6, 17–20.
16Ibid.
17League Against Cruel Sports and Grey2UK USA Worldwide, The State of Greyhound Racing in Britain, p. 30 of that report indicates that the Royal Veterinary College used 300 dogs for teaching and research, Liverpool University 93–95, the University of Cambridge 70, the University of Edinburgh 20, the University of Bristol 64, the University of Nottingham 8, the University of Glasgow 3–4, and the University of Dublin 212.
18Racing Post, 14 March 2018, p. 105. This article, by Philip Donaldson, also indicted that, in 2017, 728 dogs that retired were retained by their owner or trainer, 4,576 were placed by the Greyhound Trust/Charity, and that 1,129 were rehomed by the owner/trainer/breeder.
19Baker, ‘Going to the Dogs’.
20HO 320/64, from a five-page memorandum written on 9 February 1972.
21BS3/26.
22HO 320/64, from a five-page memorandum written on 9 February 1972.
23Belton, When West Ham went to the Dogs, pp. 120–1.
24BS3/26, Memorandum and evidence presented by the National Greyhound Racing Club to the Royal Commission on Gambling (Rothschild, 1976–78), 25 June 1976.
25Ibid., p. 27.
26Ibid., p. 9.
27Ibid.
28HO 320/64, in a five-page memorandum on ‘Credit Betting and the Greyhound Racing Totalistor’, referring to item BGL 60/1/12/67.
29HO 320/64, a five-page memorandum written on 9 February 1972.
30HO 320/65, notes attached to the five-page memorandum written on 9 February 1972.
31HO 320/65, note dated 1 March 1972; also a copy in HO 320/64.
32BS3/26, Report on the speech of Lord Mancroft to the Royal Commission on Gambling (1976–78), on 7 July 1976 in submitting and talking to the memorandum of the NGRC, 25 June 1976.
33BS3/26, National Greyhound Racing Club, Report to Royal Commission on Gambling (1976–78), submitted 25 June 1976, Appendix A.
34BS3/26, p. 60.
35HO 320/64.
36BS3/26, Memorandum and Main Evidence of the National Greyhound Racing Club Ltd to the Royal Commission on Gambling (Rothschild, 1976–78), 25 June 1976, pp. 7–9. And Appendix A, pp. 41–43.
37Ibid., p. 46.
38Ibid., p. 3.
39Ibid., p. 7.
40Ibid., p. 2.
41Ibid., pp. 15–27 deals with many of these requests and the reasons for them.
42Ibid., p. 27.
43League Against Cruel Sports, The State of Greyhound Racing in Britain, p. 16.
44Yorkshire Post, 23 December 2017, reported on Ladbrokes acquiring the Coral Group on 2 November 2017, but that this new group was about to be taken over by an online rival, GUC, for £4 billion.
45Racing Post, 27 December 2016.
46The Cesarewitch was run at West Ham between 1929 and 1972, moved to Belle Vue on the demise of West Ham, and then transferred to Catford (a sister stadium opened in 1932) until 2013 when it closed. Oxford Stadium, at Sandy Lane, opened in 31 March 1939, then took it over but was itself closed in 2012.
47The English Greyhound Derby 1927 – White City until 1984 with exception of 1940 when held at Harringay. From 1985 until 2016 held at Wimbledon. In 2017 it was held on 1 July at Towcester. The winner received £175,000 and total sponsorship exceeds £350,000.
48http://sbcnews.co.uk/eruope.uk/2016/05/08/.
49www.gamblingconsultant/co.uk/articles/whogambles.
50Guardian, 25 March 2017.
51HLG 131/229, a survey of the suitability of greyhound tracks for housing and housing regeneration in 1963.
52Belton, When West Ham went to the Dogs, pp. 120–1.
53Julia Barnes, Daily Mirror Greyhound Fact File (Lydney: Ringpress Books, 1988), pp. 34–97.
54Wimbledon online, 25 March 2017.