1975 Bord na gCon purchase Limerick track at Markets Field. They now own half of Ireland’s 18 greyhound stadia.
1953 February 12 In the Quarter Final of the Waterloo Cup, the 1952 English Derby winner Endless Gossip is outstayed in a long and strenuous course by the Earl of Sefton’s Sucker, who goes on to lose the final to Holystone Lifelong. On the same day over in Clonmel in the International Cup Mr C H Chandler’s Magourna Reject is beaten in the final by Ardboula Chief.
1934 1932 Derby winner Wild Woolley breaks the ‘550 world record’ when beating Bellas Brother in a match race at Clapton. The time was 27 spots quicker than Queen of the Suir’s previous best.
1962 Former racing director at Flagler H M Barton recalls the most enthusiastic piece of ‘head turning’ of his career. It occurred at Hamilton in Ohio. He said: “Eight dogs were coming to the top of the stretch turn all of a sudden, one took a snarl at another. Then a third got in on it. In a split second all eight dogs were on the ground right there at the head of the stretch, scrambling, rolling over, trying to bite each other through their muzzles. I was in the judges stand. We stood there waiting for them to untangle so that three of them would cross the finishing line and the race would be official. But they kept fighting for a full five minutes. Finally we had to send the boys out to pull them apart. We declared it a no-race and took the dogs back to the kennel to cool off. Twenty minutes later the same dogs ran as a perfect a race as I’ve seen.”
1947 Coventry acknowledge the growth in the number of private trainers – there are 82 registered for the new year – by staging an open race competition just for them. The 18 runner event fills easily.
1998 Walthamstow trainer Paul Young is sacked after Soda Gale finds 53 spots in a graded race after being backed from 6-1 to 9-4.
1937 February 12 The final of the Waterloo Cup, worth £500 plus cup, is won by R Rank’s Rotton Row (bkw d Burletts-Red Robin, Mar 34). He is the first greyhound to win the event, after being runner-up the previous year. He beat C G Osbourne’s Mellow Outlook (bdw d Genial Noble-Fleet Flight) Rotton Row’s sire Burletta won the first St Leger at Wembley
2013 Owner Stuart Forsdike has a night to forget when former Oaks finalist Aero Scramble and hurdler Aero Lillee are disqualified some 80 minutes apart.
1946 February 27 Owen Patrick Smith dies. Who is he, you ask? Well, he was the man he patented the first mechanical hare in the USA in 1912, which eventually found its way to Belle Vue in 1926. At Miami Beach Kennel Club, the O P Smith Memorial Classic was staged for many years in his honour.
1937 The former Stan Biss trained pair Whipped J and Whipped Lass respectively land the 10,000 franc Prix de Feves and Prix de St Aubin at Paris’s Courbevoie stadium.
1947 Captain W W Harrison is the latest breeder to give up his profession due to the ongoing issues with distemper. Based at Harrietsham in Kent, Harrision has lost 56 out of 70 puppies to the disease in the past 15 months alone. However, debate continues to rage among the veterinary profession about identifying and naming the specific disease with the word ‘distemper’ being generic for a wide variety of different ailments (the bubonic plague was once referred to as distemper). The Central Veterinary committee admits that there are a variety of names currently used to describe the disease with the symptoms of distemper. They include: ‘show fever’, ‘cat plague’, ‘influenenza’, and ‘kennel ill’ among many others.
1963 Bord na gCon issue their list of 70 major competitions to be staged during the year. Most would be familiar to current racegoers,, though subsequent track closures have cost us Dunmore’s Spring Cup, Junior Cup, National Sprint, plus the Dunmore Puppy Cup and the Dunmore 600 and Dunmore 700. The demise of Clones, caused the loss of the Border Cup. Celtic Park staged the ‘Ulster’ prefixed Sprint, St. Leger and Cesarewitch, plus the Autumn Cup. The same track staged the only lost classic, the Trigo Cup, though the Irish Cesarewitch would eventually move with the closure of Navan. The Irish Derby would be held at Harolds Cross concluding on August 9 and the Irish Grand National was staged at Thurles.
2018 Doncaster introduce Saturday afternoon open races. They fill six the first week with the star attraction being Laurels winner Hiya Butt.
1982 Shelbourne steward belatedly fine owner Patrick Booth for finding 152 spots in a graded race in the previous July. The dog clocked 29.29 following a qualifying trial defeat in 30.81. Four months after the fine is imposed, the dog Killimy Ivy, contests an English Derby Final.
1952 Ruston Smutty is voted Champion Greyhound of 1951 by a press panel in London. The Cheshire bred dog contested 40 opens, won 10 and finished in the first three on 39 occasions. His winning prize money totalled over £4,000 – equivalent to around £134,000.
1998 SKY’s coverage of greyhound racing is to be extended with coverage of the Grand National from Hall Green. The programme will be hosted by the broadcaster’s popular young presenter Jeff Stelling.
2012 Express Trend is installed as 7-2 ante post favourite for the Ladbrokes Golden Jacket. In fact, the first six over the line in the decider are Blue Bee (12-1), Blackrose Monach (40-1), Farley Zach (6-1), Lottes Girl (10-1), Wise Signal (12-1) and Springwood Bob (40-1).
1985 Eleven years after the introduction of the permit scheme, the NGRC announce plans to extend it. The new scheme will allow ‘full’ NGRC tracks to stage permit meetings in addition to their regular meetings. In addition, permit trainers will be able to run their dogs in open races at all tracks.
2002 8-1 ante post favourite Murtys Gang was declared the Irish Coursing Derby when his litter brother Cillowen Harbour was withdrawn from the decider.
1965 The first successful use of pre-race chromatography is hailed when three dogs in the same race fail tests at Stamford Bridge.
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. There reign there too is now at an end.
1978 With his team leading the fourth division, Watford chairman Elton John announces plans to build a ‘super stadium’ on the Vicarage Road site and GRA are given until October to give up their greyhound operation there. It will be almost exactly four years since they introduced their regular BAGS meetings at the Hertfordshire venue.
