1989 Peterborough unveil their new £500,000 Raceview Restaurant.
2010 Droopys Del Sol wins a Sunderland 828 metre marathon open at 1-20f.
1963 In the on-going battle with the new betting shops, the three tracks owned by Clapton Stadiums Ltd, Clapton, Reading and Slough, decide to scrap starting times for their evening meetings. The ‘afternoon tracks’ have already adopted a similar policy.
1995 Canterbury trainers march on the council offices after the refusal to renew the betting licence
1973 Bletchley reveal that new arrival Seldom Sober is the biggest greyhound ever to have raced at the track. He bends the scales at 93lbs (42.2kg).
2003 Knock Split is made the 11-4 ante post favourite to win the Ladbroke Midland Puppy Derby after winning the fastest first round heat in 28.37. Things do not go so well for the highly rated Pond Neptune who breaks a hock.
1990 Figures released by the Irish Greyhound Board show that the export market trebled between 1980 and 1988 where it stood at £2,527,180. The biggest customer (£1.8m) and the average cost of the dogs was £281. The average price of dogs sold to Spain was 57. Over 3,700 dogs were sold at Irish auctions during 1998 with Shelbourne having the highest average price 428gns, followed by Cork at 422gns.
1963 Clapton Stadium is taken over for two nights by a film crew from Pinewood Studios. They are shooting scenes for a new film called Bethnal Green starring Rita Tushingham and Mike Sarne.
1991 Seven months after killing two spectators on the Catford carpark, drunk driver Anup Kothari is failed for three and a half years and banned from driving for seven years, by a judge at the Old Bailey.
2006 The BGRB launch a new initiative, designed with the aim of encouraging the top open racers to compete against each other in major events, rather than picking off smaller easier events. TOPDOG will comprise of 33 competitions and more than £120,000 in prize money. The first prize of £50K is not decided until the 32nd race on the list when it is secured by Essex Vase runner-up Westmead Aoifa. The dog’s event goes to brother Westmead Joe though the runners up places are not decided until the final event, the All England Cup.
1967 Charles Chandler is endorsing Swiss Roll Dog Flakes, priced at 1/8d for a 1lg bag, 3/2d for 2lb and 14/- for 10lb.
1952 Jockey Club detective John Walsh is featured in an article in The People newspaper which reads:
Big as their rake-off undoubtedly was form the turf, the gang-dopers, I am sure, never made the same ‘good thing’ out of horse racing that they did from their rule of tyranny over the dogs. They were at work in the golden age of greyhound racing – the boom days of the sport just after the war and the dopers really did pull off some incredible coups.
They worked the kennels for nearly seven years before their game was tumbled, and during that time no greyhound in the country was safe from interference. There was one course they visited so often that the dogs there almost became on tail-wagging terms with them.
One dog in particular appears to have become so friendly that I am assured that it would actually lick the dopers faces and try to shake hands every time they arrived to carry out their dirty work.
It was an era of big betting on the dogs and the track authorities for a long time decided that only kennel employees could be in a position to interfere with racing on such a scale. Scores of kennel lads lost their jobs as a result.
But as I now know, the big doping jobs were ALL done from the outside. The gangs began as one but soon split after a row over betting odds. Both worked to the same pattern. Individual dogs were seldom, if ever, tampered with. The practice was one of ‘block’ doping. Kennels would be broken into at night and all the male dogs doped. Next time it would be the females turn.
Or maybe the brindle coloured dogs would be done, or all those with white in their coats irrespective of sex. This block doping was common to both gangs and it once led to an extraordinary clash between them.
One gang tried to work a track in the Midlands, to break into the kennels at night and ‘stop’ all the male dogs whatever their colour. The other gang decided to do the same kennel and ‘stop’ all the brindles irrespective of sex.
The result was that all the male brindles were given two lots of dope within an hour and a half. Many were taken seriously ill. Some died.
The kennel veterinary staff diagnosed chronic gastro-enteritis with resulting hysteria. Racing had to be abandoned and both gangs got nothing for their pains.
It was not until long afterwards that the double-doping plot was discovered, and because of it, the gangs decided that in future, each would tip the other off as to its plans.
Dogs are far easier to dope than horses. The horse is a finicky eater. The average dog isn’t. A piece of treated sausage meat would be swallowed at a gulp and often the dog would wag its tail for more.
The drugs used to ‘stop’ the dogs – there is no known pep drug for them – were easier to get and less costly than those used in horse racing. One gang often used luminal which gave dogs the appearance of being outwardly bright but which in fact caused dizziness. Its effects were noticeable as dogs rounded bends in the track.
Luminal-doped dogs would lose yards in cornering because their brains would be in a whirl. If they thought vomit tests were likely to be made on dogs before they raced they would change their tactics.
I have evidence that on one occasion an attempt was made to stop dogs at Reading by smearing four traps with rabbits blood. The gangs hoped that the dogs would be more interested in the smell of rabbit than in racing and would break slower from the trap.
But their theory didn’t work out. The four dogs came out with a rush – doubly eager to get at the hare.
When the existence of doping on a large scale became apparent, and the authorities seemed powerless to stop it, two tracks decided on desperate measures of their own. One nearly caused a riot among its patrons one night by deliberately declaring the wrong placings in a forecast result.
They realised that some dogs must have been got at by the large sums that were plastered on one two-dog forecast. The dopers, angry and frustrated, began to create a disturbance in the crowd.
Unsuspecting patrons joined in the protest. There were threats of violence before police restored order. For every occasional failure, the dopers had literally scores of successes. And as they prospered, they grew increasingly more daring in their plans.
The usual practice, when a coup was on the stocks, was to place big bets with several provincial bookmakers to reduce the chance of the bookies re-investing on the track and so bringing down the starting price.
Then there came the night when the dopers had invested so heavily on a dog running at Catford, that to keep the price up, they cut all the wires leading to the public telephones on the course.
Confusion broke out among the course bookies and near panic among the staff in their West End offices when they found there were unable to keep in touch on current betting. But the dopers daring paid off.
Their dog won at 100-8! It was the enormous amount of late betting on unfancied dogs at Hendon Stadium that led to the final clean-up of the gangs.
For the officials discovered that the same thing was happening at Hackney Wick and the Hendon and Hackney Wick dogs are quartered in the same kennels.
When tests were made on six dogs about to run in a race at Hackney, four of them coughed up undissolved capsules containing dope.
Walthamstow was the next to receive the dopers attention. Running soon became so uncertain there that the late Mr Bill Chandler – one of the biggest bookmakers in the business and the track’s managing director – finally refused to do business with his West End colleagues when they tried to lay-off bets they had taken on dogs running on his own track.
Then Mr Chandler wisely called in the police – and from that moment the hunt was on in earnest. The National Greyhound Racing Club soon threw a vase security net over every licensed track. Scotland Yard detectives were engaged as security officers .
Kennels were rebuilt, many of them with false ceilings , to prevent any attempt to throw doped meat through the ventilators. Thousands of pounds were spent in rooting out the menace that was threatening dog racing.
Slowly but surely the dopers were squeezed out and it was not long before they moved to the racecourse. Their reign too is now at an end.
