JON CARTER
It is with deep regret that we report the death of John ‘Mr Sheffield’ Carter. He passed away on Wednesday morning aged 81.
The expression ‘larger than live character’ was probably invented for this kind, generous, innovative and genuinely decent human being.
John was of the ‘old school’. He lived life hard and fast, but always with great humour and good grace. Quite frankly it was impossible to not like Jon Carter.
Current Sheffield boss Dave Perry said: “Jon was my mentor. I have known him for 25 years and at Sheffield he was just always known as ‘the old boy’. He lived life to the full and treated every year as a bonus; nobody else in his family had lived beyond 65.
“Without Jon’s intervention after Hillsborough, when the local council closed down the track, Sheffield wouldn’t be here today. He was also responsible for Nottingham having a greyhound and of course, his legacy is our homefinding kennel.
“As a person, Jon was so interesting and engaging. He would be the sort of person you would want at any dinner party to keep all the other guests entertained. He was thought of fondly by everyone at Sheffield. Such lovely memories of a great man and personal friend.”
To fully appreciate Jon’s character and contribution to the greyhound industry, we have traced down a ‘Off The Leash’ column that he and I put together in 2011. He had already retired but the fire was still burning brightly. I very much hope that you enjoy reading it, as much as I enjoyed talking to this amazing gentleman
Floyd Amphlett – Editor
OFF THE LEASH – WITH JON CARTER – 2011
Greyhound racing remains a great business if it is run correctly. Good racing should be a track’s first priority. Tracks must never forget that the consumer is ‘she’.
Just three observations of the hugely popular and respected Jon Carter who celebrates 50 years involvement with Sheffield later this year.
Far from being jaded and disillusioned with an industry that has given him its fair share of knocks, Sheffield born Jon retains an enthusiasm for the game that is a effervescent as the bubbly that he once used to flog for a living.
Jon was whelped in 1937 into a medium sized but successful brewery company, Carter, Milner and Bird (later a founder member of Bass Charrington).
Nine years earlier the company had taken equity en lieu of debt at the local Sheffield speedway stadium. On 7 January 1932, Jon’s father and grandfather introduced the most exciting new leisure activity greyhound racing.
(Jon’s father’s brewing expertise was commandeered by the Government at the end of World War II to help establish a British presence in the Caribbean.
Among his colleagues was the first head of MI5, Sir William Stevenson. Not only was Flemming the original ‘M’ and Ian Flemming’s boss, his tipple would be one made famous by the line ‘ Martini – shaken not stirred’).
Greyhound racing thrived after the Second World War and during the 1950s, and even survived as the national speedway league folded in 1955.
(There is an interesting story as to how Sheffield became arguably the best racing circuit in Britain. Jon says: “It happened by accident. Originally, the greyhound track was on the inside of the speedway track.
“Unfortunately, the speedway circuit was too big which led to boring and uneventful race. Whoever led from the gate invariably won. So in an attempt to make speedway more exciting, they swapped the two circuits.)
But by 1960 the stadium was struggling. Fearing the loss of a local amenity, Sheffield Corporation bought the site for £183,000 in 1961.
However, they had no expertise in the greyhound industry and an innovative estate surveyor opted to lease the stadium back to the Carter family who then took over the running of it.
Jon was invited onto the Sheffield board in 1961 and has been actively involved ever since.
However, it was not a full time commitment. After attending Harvard Business School in the USA, Jon was appointed as Export Director for Canadian Breweries.
The huge corporation owned 16 breweries and had strong links with the family firm which included the granting of the UK franchise for Carling beer.
Jon said: “Harvard Business School was fascinating and gave a real insight into how the Americans do business.
“We were sent out to 30 of the biggest combines in the USA to see how they operate at middle management level; people like Proctor & Gambol and Hewlett-Packard. We were shown around Disneyworld by Walt Disney. An amazing experience.
“My patch working for Canadian Breweries was from the Caribbean to Calcutta and I lived in the Bahamas for nearly 10 years.”
Jon continued to stay closely involved with Sheffield and had weekly reports from the track.
It was a golden era for Sheffield most notably when Jim Hookway sent out the 1-2 in the 1967 English Derby Tric Trac and Spectre.
Jon said: “There were the other two brothers too, Forward King, who won the St Leger and Forward Flash
“I followed it all closely. We had the most wonderful racing manager at the time, Sam Vintner. It is impossible to run a successful stadium without a top class racing manager, these people are so undervalued in this industry.”
Although ‘in absentia’ Jon authorised the building of a new £100,000 grandstand in 1969, it was an inspired move, when many other promoters were looking to bail out of greyhound racing.
Jon said: “Until the improvements were made, we had very few female patrons with the exception of a few lady owners.
“This was something that the Americans were very strong on in business, recognising the value of attracting women. The importance as something as basic and nice ladies’ loos has often been overlooked.”
In fact, it was the arrival in Jon’s life of future wife Anne, that led to the end of his self imposed exile.
He said: “I was fed up after 10 years of relentless travel and after a beautiful lady came into my life, I thought it was time to settle down.”
Jon took over the running of Sheffield in 1972 but he harboured plans to expand.
Before the decade was out, he had reached agreement to bring racing back to Nottingham, which had been without a track since 1970, with a new stadium at Colwick Park. The racing manager was Jim Woods.
It opened on 24 January 1980 and attracted a crowd of around 2,500 including many regulars from Long Eaton which had closed within the previous month.
It seemed a fine business plan. The council supplied the land at a mere £5,000 per year rent leaving Jon to raise £450,000 to build the stadium.
It was a perfect site with good access and plenty of parking.
What could possibly go wrong?
Jon says: “Our problem was not that the stadium wasn’t trading profitably, it was that under Margaret Thatcher’s government, base interest rates had risen from seven percent to fifteen and a half percent.
“There were no medium term loans available back then. I was assured by the banks to borrow the money to build Nottingham on overdraft and I was paying seven per cent.
“In the end I was paying nineteen and a half percent on the loan. It was unsustainable.
“The banks took the first opportunity to foreclose on the loan – one of many businesses that went to the wall during that period”
Jon was inevitably forced into selling the stadium onto local trainer and builder Dave Conway, who later sold on to a consortium headed by Terry Corden.
However, Jon’s financial difficulties were far from over and in March 1982 he also sold his lease on Sheffield to Corden.
Jon stayed on to continue to run one of the most successful and profitable tracks in the country.
Although the Nottingham episode proved a disaster for Jon, there was a bizarre twist in the tale.
By the late 1980s, Sheffield Council (usually referred to by JC as ‘the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’) had agreed to host the 1991 World Student Games. It would prove a financial disaster.
They were looking to raise cash and the prospect of selling off Owlerton Stadium must have been tempting.
It was post the Hillsborough disaster, so they appeared perfectly entitled to undergo safety checks at the neighbouring stadium. However. . .
Jon recalls: “They gave us a list of improvements which we carried out to the letter. They then came back and found some more alleged faults and decided to shut us down.”
The turnstiles remained closed between September and December 1989. The following year, the council discovered that the stadium’s betting licence had lapsed and shut them down again.
Jon said: “For many years, the NGRC had automatically renewed the betting licences for all the tracks. Our company secretary had not spotted that the procedure had stopped and we were caught out.
“The council must have been praying that we couldn’t survive the two closures and would forfeit our lease.
“But thanks to Terry Corden we were able to take the whole shooting match to Nottingham and stage racing there until the issues were sorted. We wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”
The council finally admitted defeat by offering the stadium a 25 year lease in 1991 when the stadium was sold to Dave Allen’s A & S Leisure Group.
The current owners turned down an offer of £10m from a supermarket chain in 1998 and have since secured the long term future of the stadium by buying the freehold from ‘the People’s Republic’.
(“I had a string of conflicts with the Council” recalls Jon, “I think they took exception to my accent and thought I was a bloody toff. I wouldn’t mind but I was born within two miles of the stadium.”)
Jon’s blueprint for a successful greyhound industry is based on principles, successful and failed, that he has both observed and experienced during the past half century.
He says: “First and foremost, tracks need to define exactly what business they are in.
“In my opinion, greyhound racing is primarily a sport. It is the racing that makes us different from every other form of entertainment and should never be undervalued. Secondary of course, we are in the leisure industry.
Comboine the two and it makes us a social sporting club.
“To view greyhound racing as a failed industry is not accurate. If in 1961, when I got into this business, we had had the same opportunities that the tracks have today, things would look very different.
“Back then, we were only allowed to take a six per cent deduction from totalisator pools and charge the bookies five times admission and two eight-race evening meetings per week.
“For a company like GRA to still be trading following a catalogue of very poor decisions in the property market during the sixties and seventies, surely demonstrates that this must be a strong industry!
“Clive and his team are doing an incredible job to keep the ship afloat.
“When you consider the problems caused by the scheme of arrangement and the huge indebtedness that it then put on the balance sheet, it would have been far from easy.
“Having said all that, had the company not been handicapped by the legislative handcuffs I mentioned earlier, it would have had sufficient return on investment to offset those setbacks.
“However the tracks who continued to invest and were well run, like Walthamstow, continued to thrive. The Chandlers did an excellent job under the control of Charles senior. It was a damn good business.
“The more successful tracks have been those where the management have a strong personal interest in their success.
“These are often tracks owned and run by families who appreciated that greyhound tracks must never lose touch with the local demand.
“For the others, particularly those sitting on expensive plots of land, the outcome was usually closure.”
Successful, profitable, Sheffield is often held as an example of how a greyhound stadium should be run. What is the secret?
Jon says: “Everything comes from the top. Our chairman Dave Allen is a great chap and sets very high standards.
“If I had to name his top priorities in business, I would say they are: staff training, customer care, attention to detail, and cleanliness.
“He employs people with a similar mindset and John Gilburn is absolutely brilliant at running a greyhound stadium.
“Anybody who has seen John operate would know that he is also meticulous and professional in everything he does.
“The importance of good staff training almost certainly comes from the company’s casino background where it is compulsory.
“However high levels of training are consistent throughout the company, even to include the re-homing kennels whose staff have higher national diplomas in greyhound management.
“We also work extremely hard on the marketing side. Getting people into greyhound stadia has never been more difficult, there are so many other alternatives. Doubling the size of our restaurant was a very good business move.”
It is sometimes intimated within the industry that few tracks took greater advantage of the BGRF capital investment grants than Sheffield.
They received £800,000 towards their restaurant and more than £100,000 for a new entrance.
Jon says: “I can’t see a problem with that. The money was available, we applied for it, and got it.”
So are there more major expansion plans?
Jon said: “The holding company did consider a plan to build a function room capable of seating 400 people but have chosen not to proceed while the market remains so weak.
“There are existing options in the city for that sort of facility, but it also seems that parties tend to be getting smaller. The days of a factory taking over the stadium for the night have long gone.”
Jon currently works alternate weeks in the track’s marketing department but also spends a great deal of time in his role as chairman of the track’s home finding operation.
He says: “Home finding is nothing new. Forty years ago I leased a farm and put some railway carriages on it as kennels for some of the ex-racers.
“Overall, there was a different mentality to retiring greyhounds back then. Owners would often put them to sleep for fear that they might be sent onto the flapping tracks.
“Even now finding volunteers is quite tough compared to some of the southern tracks. I’ve often wondered whether it is the old Yorkshire mentality of ‘not doing owt for nowt’.
“Our kennel at Gosling Moor Farm in Wortley, which is run by Lynda and Roy Cattlin, has spaces for 20 greyhounds. The lease and staff costs are funded by the stadium.
“The other running costs, of between £70-80,000 per year, have to be raised by the organisation. We get around £25,000 per year from running our ‘Beat The Book’ tipping sheet.
“How much would that bring in nationally if it was repeated at every track?
“It is on sale to the punters coming into the stadium at 50p per time though quite often racegoers will put a fiver or tenner in the bucket.
“Apart from the money raised, it is a wonderful PR opportunity. Race goers seem to appreciate the fact that we are making the effort.
“We also do the country shows and other events like many other home finding groups.
“We home roughly 10 dogs per month at an average cost of probably £1,000 per dog. So far we have homed well over 1,000 greyhounds.
“The greatest asset of having the kennel is that it brings people into contact with the dogs as a social occasion.
“The public can just come along, walk the dogs have a cup of tea and a bacon roll and have an enjoyable day.”
So – given his long career in the greyhound industry, does Jon still see greyhound racing as a good investment?
He says: “Absolutely, but the land is key. You cannot afford to pay upwards of a millions pounds an acre and then spend £10m building a grandstand. The figures simply don’t add up.
“The sport badly needs a flagship and if I was a few years younger, I would be looking to approach a council somewhere near the North Circular in London, between the A1 and M1.
“If you could persuade them to let you have a piece of land for leisure use, you could build a stadium and in return provide facilities for the local community.
“I could easily imagine you selling out a thousand seat restaurant on a regular basis.”
At 73, Jon Carter’s days as an open class entrepreneur are probably at an end.
But spend a few minutes in his company, soak in his unbridled enthusiasm and love of the greyhound industry, and it is quite clear that he is not heading for that retirement kennel any time soon.
