‘The first words a Yorkshire child utters are not “Mama” and “Dada” but, “I didn’t steal your bloody dog.”’ Attributed to Lassie author Eric Knight, this bold statement set the hare running on the Observer Magazine’s January 1987 exploration of greyhounds and the people who raced and loved them.
Seven years before Blur’s Parklife album cover gave them a Britpop glow-up, ‘Dog tracks have been steadily shedding their traditional cloth-cap image and moving upmarket.’
Why had Britain gone (back) to the dogs? It was all too easy to get sucked in, as author Willis Hall knew intimately. After a, yes, Yorkshire childhood haunting his local track, he’d become a ‘fully fledged greyhound journalist’ then a serial, and serially unsuccessful, greyhound owner: ‘A lifetime of folly, money-down-the-drain and watching no-hopers lope home the last of six,’ with only a fistful of cheap trophies to show for it.
Despite this damning assessment, Hall had been recently lured back into joint ownership of a disastrous dog. Demonically fast, but ‘very silly’, Talog Kinki had managed to fall over, injure himself and never race again shortly after his only win; in enforced retirement he ‘spends his days thundering over green meadows and only falling down occasionally’.
If not winning, what on earth was the attraction? Was it, as a publican once advised Hall, that you can’t knobble a dog? ‘Your greyhound trainer can talk to a dog till he’s blue in the face – but it’s still going to run the same bloody race as it would’ve if he’d kept his gob shut.’ Or their beauty? Peter Lavery’s pictures show these sinewy, noble creatures of heraldry, tapestry and Chaucerian poetry unexpectedly off duty, placid on pleather sofas, or out for a potter in Essex.
Mainly, Hall confessed, the lure of the dogs was fun. The buzz of the track, bubbly, banter and the moment the lights dimmed, ‘The traps fly open and six perfect running machines fly out.’ It was irresistible, ‘particularly if you should happen to own the one in front’.
