The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

  It’s a reasonable point. I used to go into a Cumbrian pub that was frequented by jockeys. In the end I had to drink elsewhere. I was freaked out constantly by the fact that, at five foot nine, I stood goliath-like at the bar and could have rested my pint on their heads, though that would have been unwise as they were pretty rowdy after a few pints. Anyway, out come the jockeys to the paddock area and it’s fair to say that their essential strangeness is not tempered by their garb. Silks. What is all that about? How have jockeys ended up wearing clobber that makes them look like camp paramilitary clowns? Why silk? Why the bizarre colours? The guy on Like A Prayer is wearing a pale cerise blouse with mustard polka dots and a matching cap. You could probably see him from the moon.

  In the week before coming to the races I’d listened to a sort of Any Horseracing Questions podcast – yes, I know how to live – and someone asked retiring champion jockey A P McCoy what the toughest part of the sport was. I’d expected him to say falling off or getting up at first light in midwinter, but in fact he replied instantly that it was the dieting. ‘It’s when you’re 10 stone 6 on a Sunday night and you have to make 10 stone dead by the morning. So you have nothing to eat all day and you go for a run at bedtime. Still not there. So you get up at the crack of dawn and go for another run. It’s OK if you’re riding a favourite but if you’re on a 25–1 outsider, you do think, “Is it worth it?”’

  In 1990, Marcus Armytage won the Grand National in less than nine minutes on Mr Frisk. Six years later, he tried again and fell at the first fence. He’d lost so much weight to try and make the race that he was simply too weak to control his mount, Bachelor’s Hall. It took a fence wildly, careered off, over-jumped and threw Armytage onto the track. As he lay stunned, the aroma of a nearby burger van wafted over him. ‘If I had any money in my breeches,’ he said, ‘I would have bought one. By the end of the day I must have put on 10lb, I consumed so much food.’ Dr Rachel Edwards-Stuart, a food scientist, came up with a 294 calorie meal especially for jockeys to eat for their Christmas dinner. It included turkey gel, dehydrated Brussels sprouts, potato foam and cranberry air. Because it just isn’t Christmas without second helpings of Cranberry Air, is it?

  Riddled with jockey guilt, I skip the twice-baked vanilla cheesecake and decide to cash in and go home. ‘Going to spend it on something nice?’ asks the lady who’d floored me with the query about ‘swingers’. ‘Chips,’ I reply, truthfully, as I pocket a few fivers and head out into the chill Black Country night. There are a clutch of little prefab shacks by the car park, overnight quarters for the jockeys. Most though will try and get back to their stables or to another town for tomorrow’s races. I see a van headed for a stables in North Yorkshire, four or so hours’ drive away, and I think of the little men inside, heading up the M1, stomachs rumbling, for a late night Ribena and some potato foam, if they’re lucky.

  However small and emaciated the jockey, they’re never going to fit on a greyhound. In greyhound racing, the little guy is in the crowd and at the heart of the sport. If horse racing is the sport of kings, greyhound racing is the sport of blokes. Far less glamorous than its haughty equine counterpart, it has hardly any opportunities for dressing up, wearing ludicrous hats or quaffing champagne in the Cotswolds, and because of this is firmly on my radar from the beginning. Greyhound racing is the poor relation of horse racing, literally. There is considerably less money in the game and far less coverage and cultural clout. But its roots are resolutely urban and proletarian. The tracks are in the hearts of our industrial cities, and the races happen at night so are not just the preserve of the fanatic, the wealthy or the leisured oddball such as John McCririck and Prince Philip. Working (and not working) men have traditionally watched the horses on a pub telly or in a cheerless bookmakers on a drab provincial high street. But we can all go to the dogs.

  I had, once. It was in the mid-nineties when the beat group Blur released a record called Park Life. The group had been on their uppers for a while, although their second album Modern Life Is Rubbish should have alerted anyone with ears to their promise. With Park Life, they fulfilled that promise and made the record of the decade. In fact, they made the record that made the decade, one that would invent the nineties and, for better or worse, usher in Britpop, by extension Cool Britannia and by even further extension, New Labour.

  Blur’s new sound was defiantly English in the face of a dreary tide of American grunge rock that had swamped pop music here for several tuneless years. Park Life was a whirlwind tour though several Golden Ages of British Popular Song, from music hall to Morrissey, parlour ballads to punk. So what better place to launch it in a blaze of new found patriotic confidence than Walthamstow Dog Track, a setting as chipper and proley as they come. My memories of the evening are a little vague. It was that kind of era. I remember trying to explain what ‘each way’ meant to Jarvis Cocker and I recall an all pervasive, and at the time radical, sense of Britishness, a funny kind of wry affectionate melange of Elgar and jellied eels, dimple beer mugs and mod scooters, Hancock’s Half Hour, Python and punk.

  Ironic then that modern greyhound racing is an American invention. Commoners and kings had ‘coursed’ for centuries, that is, chased terrified game such as rabbits and hares with packs of dogs. But it was an American Owen Patrick Smith who, revolted by the killing of the defenceless prey, turned the hunt into a race in 1919 by opening the first professional dog-racing track in Emeryville, California. O P Smith’s innovations, like the oval track and the mechanical hare were introduced to Britain in 1926 by another American, Charles Munn. Within a year, attracted by its cheapness and the opportunity to pop down to night-time meetings, 40 tracks were operating in Britain, mainly in the industrial north, Midlands and London. The people who came were almost exclusively male and working class and, by 1946, there were 34 million punters and hundreds of tracks.

  Those glory days are long gone. In 2013, the BBC homepage carried a story gloomily headlined ‘Is the end nigh for dog racing?’ It reported how the closure of the Oxford track meant that the sport was officially dead in central southern England with all four of its once popular courses gone. In the last 65 years, the number of stadiums had dropped from 80 to just 25. The once famous White City track in London is now the offices of the BBC. The piece concluded by wondering if greyhound racing would make it to its centenary in 2026, a hundred years after Britain’s first greyhound race. That race was at Belle Vue in Manchester, naturally, since Belle Vue had everything as we have seen, but I wanted to see if the decline of the British ‘dogs’ that had seen it gone from the home counties, the Thames Valley and the south coast had spread as far north as Birmingham.

  This is how a beautiful Indian summer evening finds me under the amethyst skies and basking in the tropical heat of a Friday night in Brum’s Perry Barr. From all around, the sizzle and scent of barbecues and baltis is overpowering and hard to resist. But I am going to the dogs, a rough and vulgar pursuit of the lower orders, sure to end in ruin. Now that’s my kind of Friday night.

  Appropriately then, Perry Barr Greyhound Racing Stadium is built on a former rubbish tip on the Aldridge Road. In the late twenties, it was turned into an athletics stadium for the famous Birchfield Harriers athletics club, venerable home of many an Olympian, from Diane Leather, who ran the first female five minute mile here in 1954, to world-beating heptathlete Denise Lewis. Then in their centenary year of 1977 the Harriers moved out, and left the stadium to the greyhounds and the Birmingham Brummies speedway team.

  On the stairs as I enter the grandstand, I pause to mop my sopping brow and take in the pictures of famous Birmingham Brummies down the years in the speedway hall of fame. Having been to two speedway meetings, I am now something of an expert and connoisseur of the sport and pause thoughtfully, head to one side, in that way people do when they are examining someone else’s bookshelves. The gallery is just brilliant, row upon row of intense, muddied men with ratty hair and Viking sideburns, looking for all the world like Uriah Heep after a rainlas
hed festival in a sodden Lincolnshire field circa 1971.

  Like Mark Twain’s famous remark upon seeing his own obituary, reports of greyhound racing’s death would seem to have been greatly exaggerated. The grandstand is packed and I can see through the floor to ceiling window that trackside is bustling too. There’s a healthy amount of young people, women and groups drawn from Brum’s rich mix of ethnic minorities. It feels bright and airy and still solidly working class, like Butlins or Alton Towers. It may be that this lovely Friday night has drawn the crowds and is not representative at all. Maybe most meetings are run in front of the proverbial three men and a dog – well, several dogs but you know what I mean – but apparently not. Though afternoon greyhound racing run by BAGS (Bookmakers Afternoon Greyhound Service racing) is done daily in empty stadiums purely for the sake of gambling and subsidised by the bookmakers, weekend meetings can still regularly draw well over a thousand people in the sport’s northern and Midland heartland. It is still, amazingly, the fourth biggest spectator sport in Britain, after football, horse racing and rugby.

  I head for the bar for something cool and long. A man with his arm in a sling and a bottle of WKD nods at me, ‘Not seen you here for a bit.’ As I’ve never been before, it’s hard to know what to say at this point. While I’m formulating my strategy he carries on, ‘Did you hear about how I did this?’ he nods at his sling. ‘Fell off Terry’s car. Sober as a judge too.’ At just the point when I am going to have to come clean, the barman asks me what I’m having and my new mate wanders off to put a bet on. Here inside the grandstand they are playing that ‘Stay the Night’ record that has blighted my summer, so I am driven by its horrible sexless stormtrooper ‘dance’ beats down the stairs and out into the sunlit trackside.

  Strolling aimlessly but contentedly around, I go into a reverie about how much I would have loved this as a kid. A sticky Friday night in late summer, the floodlights burnished and white hot in the gathering dusk, the sweet cloying scent of frying onions, the warm laughter of your own people, the literal buzz of electricity in the air, the silly, sexy, trashy glamour of the tinny piped music. Here we are all kids again, and the real kids here are among grown-ups they know and love who are taking their fun with the relish of their class. Three young girls of around ten, sucking on ice pops, are squealing with delight at the sheer joy of being here, and of a first glimpse of the dogs in their little jackets. Like all the kids here, of whom there are many, they know they are safe and happy in the warm, beating heart of their world. A little further along, by the first bend in the shale track, stand two Japanese girls with colourful outsize backpacks. They look both mystified and delighted by the unfolding evening.

  I go into the trackside bar and order a glass of wine without thinking where I am. Standing there with my teeny effete Merlot makes me feel like Quentin Crisp at a … well, at a dog track. There’s a different vibe here down here, sweatier, noisier, a bit lower rent really, burgers and beer bellies and gold chains, and it’s just as much fun in a slightly different way. A massive, deeply tanned, muscular chap in a polo shirt that shows off his huge brown forearms and the gold ingot nestling in his steel grey chest hairs, trundles between trackside and the bar in a mobility scooter that I can only describe as ‘pimped’. It has a little tray for snacks and a holster for his umbrella. It has wing mirrors. It may even have a machine gun emplacement round the back for a rear gunner. The people he leaves in his wake, me included, smile in wonderment and admiration. There appears nothing wrong with his mobility. He’s just making life a little sweeter for himself. Some, made fearful and angry by an innutritious tabloid diet of suspicion and jealousy, might find this appalling: I raise a metaphorical glass to him. He could pick me up in one of his mighty fists and chuck me from here into the centre circle at Villa Park. He is as fit as an ox. He just fancies riding around a stadium on a sunny evening on a customised mobility scooter. Who wouldn’t?

  I go back inside to the grandstand restaurant for the meal that comes as part of my ticket. This being Birmingham it is quite properly a balti with samosas for starters and, when it comes, my balti chicken is perfectly serviceable – with its top notes of curry powder and monosodium glutamate it makes me nostalgic with its echoes of the rehydrated Vesta meals of my youth, if not up to the city’s best. Some years ago, I was taken to a venerable, much lauded Indian restaurant on Regent Street by some nice media people who assured me of its world-class reputation and flair. Had it been slightly better, it would have been average. I realised that I had perhaps been spoiled by my time in Birmingham, where on every street in every district, chic or shabby, you can get a meal that knocks the spots off anything in the West End for a quarter of the price.

  Along with your dinner, you are given a fantastically helpful booklet, which outlines the many and varied ways you can lose all your money. These include placing it on ‘Totalisator’, a crime against English that makes my head hurt a little. The grandstand is almost full. Next to me, a table of several families arrive, laughing. One little man in light blue slacks is labouring under the misapprehension that he is hilarious and does a range of funny voices and walks. His kids, bless ’em, exchange meaningful looks and roll their eyes indulgently. Over by the window, the shale track below them, two young, smartly dressed guys sit at a table, chatting and laughing a little nervously. Is this a gay first date, I wonder? If so, well done lads for refusing to be slaves to convention and choosing Perry Barr dog track. They should put this in their literature as well as great for birthdays, anniversaries and works Christmas parties.

  When it comes to betting, in the absence of a shred of knowledge about the world of greyhounds, I go for names that I like. Romeo Militia stands out a mile, being the kind of name I might choose if I’d been in a Midlands glam rock band of the seventies. (Incidentally, racing dogs can only have three words in their name.) On the little screen at my table, I notice that Romeo Militia’s odds, indeed all of the odds, are changing and flickering constantly: 11/8, 5/2, 2/1. It’s extraordinarily confusing and hard to follow, especially when a young Afro-Caribbean woman, laughing uproariously, is ladling hot pungent curry from a tureen at the side of you as you’re trying to tot it all up and place your bets.

  Down below in the honeyed sun, beyond the short-sleeved men with their lagers and their families with hot dogs and cokes, the dogs limber up (or whatever dogs do), with white-coated owners who look disturbingly like vivisectionists. So with that thought in mind, we should address the darker side of greyhound racing. When I tweeted that I was writing about greyhound racing, one correspondent replied instantly: ‘Hope it’s all about how many are killed inhumanely just because they don’t win at something they have no choice in’. I replied as speedily that I would certainly address this side of the sport and could he point me in the direction of some hard evidence. He never replied.

  These allegations have, and I rue the weak pun here, dogged the sport for years. This book doesn’t have the scope and I don’t have the expertise to do those issues justice. There is lots of literature that does, both pro and con, and I’d point you there. The welfare of the animals has been a hot and contentious topic inside and outside the dog racing world for some time, with exposés and allegations about euthanasia, maltreatment and the sale of retired dogs to animal labs. In return, the sport is at pains to point out how this has been and is being tackled, and how well the dogs are treated these days. Around the track and in the programme are a great many adverts for canine charities, dogs’ homes and schemes for adopting greyhounds. From the side of the track, I have to say that they look healthy and happy enough, but then I am aware that this is what Shirley Maclaine famously said about the people of China after her visit in 1973, and wound up looking like the worst kind of dopey stooge.

  I spot a dog called Mr Fahrenheit in Race 3. This was a refrain bellowed by Freddie Mercury in ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, and having a cordial but enduring dislike for the music of Queen, I decide to back it. It comes last. Next up on the programme is
the strikingly titled Usain Bolt Handicap. ‘Unfortunately, Usain can’t be with us tonight,’ says the laconic Brummie announcer down on the track. ‘So we have a lookalike, our general manager Dave.’ Dave, standing glumly by him, is a fat bald white bloke. This makes me laugh a lot, as I do again when the joke is repeated for both the Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis stakes later in the evening.

  As for ‘going to the dogs’, well, it didn’t feel like it. There are ways of destroying yourself and gambling your life away for sure, but probably not with the balti meal deal at Perry Barr stadium on a Friday night. There are six dogs in every race, so if six of you come and bet on a different dog each time, one of you will always win and you’ll pay for your drinks if nothing else. At Perry Barr I saw some old neighbours of mine, Dave the roofer, his wife Mandy, Rob and Dawn. Mandy won £36 straight off for a quid stake and then sailed through the rest of the evening making fivers here and there with little surprised giggles. You can get a lot of tiny effete glasses of Merlot for that.

  The night I went to Perry Barr the papers and the scrolling tickers on the sleepless rolling news networks were full of a report that said the economy was on the upturn. Blather, of course, but even I could have believed it, as the fivers were counted and the small plastic bottles of Merlot uncorked, well unscrewed. But a week later, by the time my flutterings had taken me to the Gala Bingo Salford, the Indian summer was still sweltering on but the mood was chillier.

  Bingo is the proletarian Casino Royale. Bond sipping his martini at the gaming tables of the Côte D’Azur may seem a long way away from housey-housey on the seafront, but they are in essence the same; games of chance for money. There is no more skill in roulette than bingo. It just looks that way when dressed up in a dinner jacket, and when the prize is a few thousand euros rather than a large pink teddy bear. Neither one holds any appeal for me, and never has. There is nothing to watch, no skill, no art, no human drama. Just greed and luck, however sexy Daniel Craig may be. I’ve found, on the very rare occasions I’ve been inside one, that casinos are simply upscale bingo halls, with the same undercurrent of sadness and desperation. The stakes are higher in Monte Carlo and the locale is easier on the eye than Ordsall, Salford, but the impulse is surely the same, the thrill of something for nothing.