Going to the dogs: A history of greyhound racing in Britain, 1926-2017

By Keith Laybourn

Greyhound racing emerged rapidly in Britain in 1926 but in its early years was subject to rabid institutional middle-class opposition largely because of the legal gambling opportunities it offered to the working class. Though condemned as a dissipate and impoverishing activity, it was, in fact, a significant leisure opportunity for the working class, which cost little for the minority of bettors involved in what was clearly little more than a ‘bit of the flutter’ , This book is the first national study of greyhound racing in Britain from its beginnings, to its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and up its long slow decline of the late twentieth century. Much of the study will be defined by the dominating issue of working-class gambling and the bitter opposition to both it and greyhound racing, although the attractions of this ‘American Night Out’ will also be examined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526114532

Keith Laybourn

Keith Laybourn is Professor of History and the Diamond Jubilee Professor of the University of Huddersfield

Book preview

Going to the dogs

Going to the dogs

A history of greyhound racing in Britain, 1926–2017

KEITH LAYBOURN

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Keith Laybourn 2019

The right of Keith Laybourn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 1451 8 hardback

First published 2019

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Julia who probably stopped me ‘going to the dogs’.

Contents

List of tables

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction

1 The rise of greyhound racing in Britain, 1926–45: the politics of discrimination

2 Discrimination and decline: greyhound racing in Britain, 1945 to the 1960s

3 ‘Animated roulette boards’: financing, operating and managing the greyhound tracks for racing the dogs, c. 1926–61

4 Dog breeding, dog owning and dog training: dividing the classes

5 An Ascot for the common man

6 Policing the tracks, detecting malpractice and dealing with the racketeers and ‘shady’ individuals, 1926 to c. 1961

7 The decline of greyhound racing in Britain, 1961–2017

Conclusion

Appendices

Bibliography

Index

Tables

1.1 Annual attendances at greyhound tracks in Britain, 1927–2017

1.2 Attendances at NGRS greyhound tracks in London, Manchester and Glasgow, 1928–32

1.3 Attendances at the twenty-one ‘unlicensed’ London tracks in the week ending 8 July 1933

2.1 Greyhound tracks in Britain in 1948

2.2 The totalisator take at the British tracks, 1938–45

2.3 Dog-tracks: total annual totalisator stakes in Britain (1944–49) and at the eight leading London dog tracks

2.4 Estimates of betting on greyhound racing and horse racing, 1946–53 (tote and bookmakers)

2.5 Falling levels of tote turnover, pool owners’ deductions (6 per cent) and Pool Betting Duty, 1945–49

2.6 Number of bookmakers on some major tracks, 1948–50

2.7 Number of bookmaker licences issued in January of each year, 1949–53

2.8 The tote take and other tax paid on six tracks in 1949

2.9 The decline in the number of greyhound racing tracks, 1951 and 1977

3.1 Cost of tote installation, tote turnover and net profits after costs, 1932–33

3.2 Staff employed by seventy-three of the seventy-seven NGRS tracks in 1950

3.3 Employment details of sixty-two of the 132 PGTCO tracks in 1950

3.4 Attendances at the Provincial Greyhound Tracks Control Office track, 1949–50

3.5 Profit and dividend returns to capital employed at sixty-seven NGRS tracks, 31 December 1948

3.6 The distribution of the tote turnover for eight NGRS tracks in Britain in 1949

3.7 NGRS chart of average expenditure at NGRS tracks, 1950

4.1 Breeding a greyhound for racing in 1976: schedule of costs from whelping to fifteen months for greyhounds registered to the NGRC

4.2 Cost of training greyhounds according to the NGRC, 1976

5.1 Frequency of attendance at greyhound tracks, 1950

6.1 Totalisators in tote clubs and on greyhound tracks, February 1932

6.2 Commitment of Metropolitan police officers to London greyhound tracks

7.1 Greyhound meetings, attendances and tracks, 1948–75

7.2 Greyhound Pool Betting Duty on the Tote, 1948–76

7.3 Income of the NGRC greyhound tracks, 1973–75

7.4 The decline of greyhound racing, 1948–75, on NGRC tracks

7.5 The declining number of NGRC and non-NGRC tracks, 1948–75

7.6 Profits and return on capital for NGRC tracks, 1973–75

7.7 The annual BAGS/SIS Championship winners

7.8 The four areas and the tracks involved in the BAGS and SIS Track Championship 2017

7.9 The number of registered greyhounds in Britain and the proportion of Irish-bred greyhounds

Preface

Modern greyhound racing in Britain, with an electronic hare whirraxing around a circular track being chased by greyhounds, began at Belle Vue Stadium, Manchester on 24 July 1926. Although it had been tried in Britain about half a century before, it was not until its emergence in the United States that it began to attract interest in Britain by offering an ‘American night out’, with the lights, glitz and glamour that accompanied it, a sign of the influence of American culture on British leisure and sport during the inter-war years, as evidenced in the book edited by David Slater and Peter J. Taylor, The American Century: Consensus and Coercion in the Projection of American Power (1999). It became an overnight sensation in Britain, with more than 200 tracks opening by the early 1930s and with around thirty-two million attendances per year in a period of economic gloom and slump following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. In the words of a popular song of 1927, ‘Everybody’s Going to the Dogs’, beguiled by the successes of dogs such as Entry Bridge and Mick the Miller in the Greyhound Derby and the chance of a legal ‘bit of a flutter’. However, by 2017 the sport was down to around twenty-five ‘licensed’ tracks, about two million attendances per year and facing oblivion. This book deals with the economic, social and political history of greyhound racing in Britain from the mid-1920s, when it rose quickly until the late 1940s, though it also offers a substantial analysis of its decline from the 1950s onwards.

There are at least half a dozen interwoven important debates that drive this book in explaining why greyhound racing became one of the main gambling sports in Britain for about a quarter of a century, and relate also to its decline. One is concerned with the nature of the deep hostility to greyhound racing, which it faced from the start. Why did this emerge quickly after it began? Indeed, why did anti-gambling groups, religious denominations, local authorities and governments seem never to accept greyhound racing? Was it because they did not see it as a rational recreation, that they feared it would induce poverty and immorality, or perhaps both? Whatever the reason, the result was that greyhound racing faced a level of opposition rarely experienced by other gambling sports and, indeed, much less than its close rival, horse racing. An unattributed newspaper cartoon of the late 1920s or early 1930s, featuring a well-dressed man inviting a similarly well-dressed woman to a greyhound meeting, starts with

ONCE UPON A TIME

TO GO TO THE DOGS

MEANT A DEPARTURE

FROM THE PATH OF VIRTUE

NOWADAYS IT IS POSSIBLE

TO GO TO THE

BRASSY BOW WOWS

THREE TIMES A WEEK.

If that was the case in its early years it was a situation that did not last long in the teeth of opposition from the National Anti-Gambling League and fervent religious opposition to the sport, and ultimately with the intervention of the state.

Connected with this, though more tangential, is a second debate about the extent of its relationship with the local communities, which raises the question – was greyhound racing accepted or rejected by local urban communities? Although it is not easy to establish the closeness of local communities to their greyhound tracks, given the powerful local religious opposition greyhound racing faced, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that tracks provided employment for the local community and elicited both local support and pride. Closely related to this is a third debate, which focuses very much on those who attended the meetings. Was it a working-class sport or did it appeal across the classes? The evidence tends to suggest that at first greyhound racing drew interest from all classes – from the lower and upper middle classes to finance the tracks, from middle-class dog owners and bettors, but that after the first few years it became overwhelmingly the ‘Ascot for the common man’, as it was so aptly described by the Rt. Hon. Ormsby-Gore in 1933 (see chapter 5). This was undoubtedly one reason for the deep opposition it faced, particularly from Winston Churchill, who decried greyhound racing as an ‘animated roulette wheel’, impoverishing the poor of the working class, through betting, and encouraging criminality. Arising from Churchill’s criticisms, and similar comments from other politicians, is a fourth debate which focuses upon the criminality of the tracks. Was greyhound racing dominated by serious shady criminal activities or was it largely a clean sport faced only with petty crime? Opponents of greyhound racing presented it as a den of iniquity, racketeering and malpractice, and encouraged police intervention and the closure of tracks. However, with the exception of one or two gangs, such as the Sabinis operating at Brighton and Hove, greyhound racing was not a particularly corrupt sport. There was much low-level malpractice, though the greyhound tracks and their organisations tightened up on this through the registering of dogs and the introduction of veterinary checks. Indeed, greyhound tracks appear to have posed little problem and presented few social order issues for the police. Greyhound racing was also a sport of competing interests, particularly between the different types of tracks, the National Greyhound Racing Society (NGRS) tracks and the flapping tracks, and between the track owners and the bookmakers, and the track-owned dogs and the individual dog owners, and a fifth debate thus highlights the fragmented nature of the sport. Why was there almost internecine conflict within the sport, particularly between the large tracks and the small tracks? Was it the fact that large tracks were able to introduce their expensive totalisator machines for betting purposes from 1929 and that put them into conflict with many of the smaller tracks, who often could not afford the tote machines and relied upon bookmakers? This naturally raises a sixth important debate over how the tracks operated and what they offered. Were they operating different business plans? It is clear that the larger and smaller tracks offered different facilities and opportunities for their clients and that the resultant business strategies of the tracks conflicted over betting arrangements, the registration and grading of dogs, and what should be provided on race day. It was not until the early 1970s, when in sharp decline, that greyhound racing became more united, though this was only after the discriminatory legislation had already doomed the sport to sharp decline.

These debates are encompassed within the much wider all-embracing issue of the rise and fall of greyhound racing. Why did greyhound racing emerge so quickly between the 1920s and the late 1940s to fall away so sharply from the 1950s onwards? The evidence presented here suggests that greyhound racing offered the working class a sport which provided them with a cheap legal gambling thrill, ‘a bit of a flutter’. The fact that the industry was fragmented by internecine conflict in the face of the opposition of anti-gambling organisations put it under serious pressure from the start. However, it was the discriminatory actions and taxation of governments which ultimately forced betting on greyhounds from the tracks to off-course bookies from the late 1940s, signalling the decline of the sport and forcing it into the hands of the bookmakers, streaming to the Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs), television and property companies, whose interests were varied in a climate of increasing competitiveness in gambling.

Acknowledgements

All academic publications owe a debt of gratitude to the generosity of others, and this is especially the case in the writing of this book. My colleagues and ex-colleagues in the history section of the University of Huddersfield have been very supportive, and these include Sarah Bastow, Barry Doyle, Rob Ellis, Rebecca Gill, Katherine Lewis, John Shepherd, David Taylor and Paul Ward. I would also like to thank the support of Brendan Evans, formerly Professor of Politics and a Pro-Vice Chancellor, and Chris Ellis and Neil Pye, two of my former students.

Many thanks must also go to Tony Mason (Senior Commissioning Editor), Robert Byron, and my copy editor, for their help in preparing this book. Without their careful guidance, and that of the rest of the staff of Manchester University Press, this book would have been much longer in the making.

A considerable amount of this research has been conducted in the National Archives at Kew. I would therefore like to thank the National Archives, which gives automatic rights to quote from government documents and papers, under the rules of the Government Open Licence, which merely requires that proper attribution is made. I would also like to thank the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (Norwich) for permission to quote from crown copyright material, which is also subject to the rules of the Government Open Licence. In addition, I would also like to thank Julie Lamara, Collections Access Officer-Local Studies, of the Bolton Archives Museum and Archive for the use of its collections on local government and religious reaction to the emergence of greyhound tracks and also to the History Press (previously Tempus) for the use of several quotes from Brian Belton’s book on When West Ham went to the Dogs (2002), although their usage falls well within the normally accepted publishers’ guidelines. Many secondary sources have been used in the writing of this book but they are not substantial and fall well within the normal guidelines set by publishers, and all the sources have been fully attributed

Every effort has been made to avoid any infringements of copyright. However, I apologise unreservedly to any copyright holders whose permission has been inadvertently overlooked.

Abbreviations

Introduction

In 1926, three months after the first British greyhound meeting, held at Belle Vue in Manchester on 24 July, an unknown civil servant wrote, on the brown outer-cover of a Home Office file, a terse, though all-embracing, comment on the new mushrooming sport of greyhound racing:

This [file] refers to the ‘new sport’ which consists of an artificial hare, by an electrical contrivance, being sent round a course. Each time some half dozen greyhounds are released who endeavour to capture the hare. The hare by a mechanical regulatory device is kept just ahead of the leading greyhound and at the end of the course disappears down a hole. The winner is the greyhound which first crosses the line a short distance before the hole. The general arrangement resembles a race meeting as far as possible with paddocks etc. The sport offers considerable opportunities for betting. It is understood that a syndicate proposes to promote it in different places. It is exciting much interest in the USA where the sport is becoming popular. It appears to be lawful.

Refer Enclosure to CC [Chief Constable] at Manchester for report & etc.

LSB¹

28.10.26²

Another civil servant wrote that:

It may be added that the element of cruelty to a hunted animal is absent & that quite apart from betting, there is an interest in the North, among miners & others, in the performance of greyhounds whippets etc. etc.

AL 29. 10. 26³

These observations were almost prophetic, though not entirely accurate, indicating that modern mechanical greyhound racing was stimulated by developments in the United States, offered legal on-course betting to the working class, and was particularly popular in the North of England. Indeed, from its inauspicious beginnings in Manchester, before a small crowd of 2,550, greyhound racing, based on an electronic hare circulating on a track, developed rapidly over the next decade to more than 200 tracks, connected with the NGRS or acting as independent, non-National Greyhound Racing Club (NGRC) licensed, ‘flapping tracks’. There were well over thirty-two million attendances per year by the 1930s, as well as the millions of unrecorded attendances at the temporary ‘8-day [a year] tracks’, which were subject to a police licence under the 1934 Betting and Lotteries Act. Indeed, one calculation suggests about thirty-eight million attendances in 1936, although the more regular estimate is of about thirty-two million in the late 1930s, and attendances may have reached forty-two million in 1942 and forty-six million in 1946.⁴ Greyhound racing had become so popular by 1927 that the song ‘Everybody’s Going to the Dogs’ became an instant hit, highlighting its rapid growth as well as creating a euphemism for a wasted life, based upon the gambling it encouraged.⁵

There was a genuine sense of excitement about the new sport that attracted thousands, and which even the condemnatory report of the Daily Express on a meeting at Belle Vue in October 1927 could not dampen. Practically excluding men, who normally constituted the majority of greyhound crowds, it focused upon the moral turpitude of greyhound racing, stating that:

There was far more betting than in any ordinary racecourse. I saw a woman with a baby in her arms laying her shilling. Children in their teens betted as freely as other elders. Boys in school caps … girls in hats and red ribbons of secondary schools pushed their way through from bookmakers to bookmaker asking odds and staking where they secured the best price. Working girls of the typist and shop assistant class wagered by the half-crown or five shillings. There were … three races on the flat and three over hurdle events. There were 22,000 present on Saturday evening … All the land seems to be going to the dogs.⁶

There was excitement, a sense of the new, and of expectation as dog jostled with dog, and as the working classes were given wider access to gambling opportunities. This contrasts sharply with the decline of the sport, from the forty million attendees or more in the 1940s down to the two million of 2017, as a result of government taxation and the movement of betting on the dogs to off-course outlets. When the famous Wimbledon track, opened in 1928, was closed on 25 March 2017 there was considerable nostalgia, lots of photographs of bettors walking on the track, posing in the traps and drinking, but almost tired resignation rather than anger. The event almost slipped away in an atmosphere of jollity, indifference and acceptance. One regular suggested that ‘It’s inevitable that it would happen … We thought that it was going to close six months ago’.⁷ Older regulars felt that the track had been taken over by a younger generation intent upon drinking, gambling and eating in the Grandstand restaurant and having no interest in dog racing itself. One greyhound trainer who attended the closure of Wimbledon, who had an Irish training establishment at Hollyoak, could not see how dog trainers and owners could make the business pay when a dog could not run more than once per week and cost a £30 entry fee for a grades race and £10 per day to keep. Faced with such costs there seemed little point continuing. The excitement and commitment of the early years of dog racing had gone. Much of this contrasting experience is a product of the strong opposition greyhound racing faced after its rapid early growth.

From the beginning, greyhound racing was a sport and gambling activity which upset many of the middle class, local authorities, religious denominations and the National Anti-Gambling League (NAGL). The NAGL had been formed by Seebohm Rowntree, a Quaker chocolate manufacturer, social investigator and social benefactor from York, in 1890, and was supported by Christian religious faiths, though mainly, and fervently, by the Nonconformist denominations. It had enjoyed some success in 1906, with the passing of the Street Betting Act, which banned ready-cash betting on the streets and added to the constraints on betting imposed by the Betting Houses Acts of the 1850s. Its campaigns were supported by ‘respectable’ people, teachers, religious leaders such as the Anglican Canon Peter Green, the Dean of Manchester, and nonconformist groups. The NAGL was further supported by administrators, local authorities, councillors, figures in the police force such as Robert Peacock who was Chief Constable of Manchester from 1898 to 1926, and, of course, by many MPs. They were divided in precisely what they wanted, particularly so the Christian churches: the Wesleyan Methodists wanting an end to gambling, the Primitive Methodists and United Methodists hoping for better legislation to deal with gambling, the Baptists sponsoring a local option for local authorities, and other religions wanting to make it illegal for children to attend greyhound meetings.⁸ These forces of anti-gambling formed a small but powerful body of opinion both inside and outside Parliament, presenting gambling as ‘irrational’, somehow not respectable and possibly, often invariably, dishonest. It was they who overwhelmed the 1923 Select Committee on the Betting Duty with anti-gambling resolutions. Indeed, of the 2,000 resolutions received, 94 per cent came from various churches – the Primitive Methodists sending in 365 and the Wesleyans 311.⁹ Religious and social reform organisations formed the Council of Action in May 1923 to mount resistance to gambling and similar action was launched against greyhound racing stadiums in 1928 when, by May, the Home Secretary had received over 1,600 motions from religious and secular groups for state control and regulations to allow local authorities to ban greyhound stadiums. Bodies such as the National Emergency Committee of Christian Citizens published pamphlets condemning gambling as ‘an emotional deficiency disease’.¹⁰ John Gulland wrote a pamphlet entitled Canine Casinos for the NAGL, claiming that there was illegal betting going on at the greyhound meetings at the White City, London.¹¹ If, as David Dixon claims, in From Prohibition to Regulation, the NAGL was losing influence from the beginning of the inter-war years because of issues of changing personnel and leadership, one should remember that it was only part of a wider framework of opposition to gambling that carried considerable influence.¹² However, the correspondence of Rowntree would suggest that the decline of the NAGL set in during the 1930s and that this led to Rowntree financially abandoning the organisation.¹³

These essentially middle-class and Establishment opponents saw greyhound racing as facilitating legal ‘on-course’ gambling for the working classes, causing poverty, corrupting women and children, and creating a ‘something for nothing’ mentality.¹⁴ Since the betting was on course, and thus legal, as opposed to off-course ready-money gambling which was illegal, opponents of greyhound racing found it difficult to take action without incurring the wrath of the greyhound interest groups who pointed out that the peripatetic middle class and the locally based working class could attend and gamble at horse racing meetings without such levels of hostility. Despite the obvious discrimination in gambling that was occurring, throughout its first four decades, greyhound racing particularly drew the critical attention of the local authorities, local government and some chief constables, in a way which was not so obvious in the more middle-class dominated sport of horse racing, even as the hostility towards gambling in general was gradually diminishing in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁵ Winston Churchill, who sought to drown greyhound racing at birth, wrote a letter to the Home Secretary on 13 December 1927, warning of the dangers of the spectacle of the ‘animated roulette boards’, a phrase which he repeated in the House of Commons and which became widely used in debates on greyhound racing.¹⁶ William Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary who was often referred to as ‘Jix’, wrote in a memorandum of 30 April 1928 that the ‘mushrooming growth’ of greyhound racing increased the opportunities for the working-class bettor and consequent poverty.¹⁷

In May 1928 greyhound racing was attacked by John Buchan MP, the politician and famous author of the novel The 39 Steps, writing of his disgust at what he perceived happened at greyhound tracks:

When the darkness begins and the lights are lowered elsewhere the illuminated ribbon of turf becomes I am bound to say not unlike the green baize – the animated roulette board – to which it was compared in the picturesque description of the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Churchill].¹⁸

He added that he was not convinced that greyhound racing was ‘preventive of anarchism and Bolshevism’, which had been suggested by the industrial relations expert Lord Askwith, President of the NGRS, quoting a comment made by King Alfonso of Spain in a visit to Britain in 1928.¹⁹ In addition, greyhound racing was almost forced out of existence in the ‘Tote crisis’ of 1932–34, although it was then legalised and controlled by the 1934 Betting and Lotteries Act. Sir Stafford Cripps, returning from his ambassadorial role in the Soviet Union in the early years of the Second World War, placed greyhound racing alongside boxing as a distraction from work and war production, whilst at the same time ignoring the much more popular gambling sports of football and horse racing. Even though Mike Huggins has perceptively revealed how the opposition to working-class gambling declined during the inter-war years, and how a more relaxed attitude to gambling ensued, this was clearly not the case for greyhound racing in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. The Attlee Labour government of the late 1940s imposed a betting tax on greyhound racing and a licence tax on on-course bookmakers which were not imposed on horse racing and most other gambling activities. These actions cannot easily be explained away in more pragmatic than puritanical terms by Norman Baker’s in his analysis of the Clement Attlee post-war Labour governments.²⁰ Baker’s detailed analysis argues that there was no deep hostility towards greyhound racing resulting from the feeling that it did not meet the accepted views of what were true sporting activities, and from the fact that it was deeply associated with gambling, but that action against dog racing arose from the belief that it interfered with its objective of maintaining post-war industrial production. The fact is that there was no specific evidence that greyhound racing led to absenteeism from work and indeed speedway, which often operated on greyhound tracks to larger crowds and without restrictions, was potentially a greater threat to the occurrence of absenteeism. Nevertheless, Baker wrote that:

At best, dog racing existed on the very margins of social conceptions of sporting activities and furthermore carried the burden of an overwhelming association with gambling. Government was not on a mission to destroy the dogs. Rather what were presented as redeeming qualities that led ministers to moderate their policies towards other sports did not exist in the case of dog racing. Had they been a little bit less certain that they knew what was best for the working class, and had they been a little bit more familiar with the social ways and preferences of that class, the ministers of the post-war government might have pursued different policies.²¹

Nevertheless, despite arguing that that there was no conscious attempt by the Attlee government to destroy greyhound racing in Britain, it is clear from Baker’s own evidence that there was an unconscious decision to do so, emerging, perhaps, from the historic hostility to gambling of Ramsay MacDonald, and many other prominent Labour politicians influenced by religious nonconformity, who saw greyhound racing as different from other sports.²² Despite the working-class roots of many of the members of the Labour governments of 1929–31 and 1945–51, greyhound racing was never considered in the same light as the more favourably viewed middle-class sports and gambling activities, including horse racing, even though some Labour MPs such as Nye Bevan, Secretary of State for Health and Housing between 1945 and 1950, were much more in favour of greyhound racing.²³ It never enjoyed the level of acceptance of other gambling sports and, indeed, more recently, has been the subject of charges of animal cruelty to a level that even the death of horses in the Aintree Grand National horse race never achieved, even during the worst years for horse fatalities. Greyhound racing seems to have been especially selected for special restraining treatment because it was the working class who essentially attended its tracks – even though the porosity of class relations in Britain particularly drew some significant middle-class interest in the first decade of its existence.²⁴ This conscious and unconscious opposition to greyhound racing led to a discrimination in the taxing of the gambling involved in the sport which was to lead to its rapid decline from the late 1940s onwards. Yet for more than a quarter of a century, and particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, greyhound racing was an important part of the leisure, cultural and community environment of the relatively small number of working-class people who attended greyhound meetings on a regular basis, before facing a long decline.²⁵

Debates on working-class leisure and gambling

The emergence and subsequent long decline of modern mechanical greyhound racing resonates in the wider debates about British working-class leisure, which also has a protracted and contentious history often based upon the themes of class and social control. Originally, historians assumed that the leisure and sporting pursuits – the local fairs, cock fighting and traditional roots – of the working class were suppressed as a result of the rise of the middle class during the so-called Industrial Revolution. However, this view was seriously challenged by Hugh Cunningham’s book, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, which, in 1980, cast doubt on the belief that there was a fundamental change in working-class leisure at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the middle classes were supposed to have suppressed and controlled traditional sporting and leisure activities that did not meet with their more orderly, respectable and rational vision of British society.²⁶ Cunningham in fact revealed that many traditional leisure activities survived well into the industrial age, often prospering. Post-modernist in his approach, and thus critical of sweeping generalisations, Cunningham emphasised the need to view working-class leisure as pluralistic, with broad strategies of a vigorous commercial popular culture (often run by working-class