Gone to the Dogs: the last race at Walthamstow Stadium

As an atheistic rationalist, I have only one superstitious belief in life. I always back trap five in the last race at Walthamstow greyhounds. Leaving my fate in the lap of the dogs has often changed the luck of this poor punter for the better. But my luck is about to run out. Sometime around 10.30 tonight, I will fight my way to the front of the betting ring and back trap 5 in the last race at the ’Stow.

The Stow is the top dog track in the country and the Art Deco jewel in northeast London’s dowdy crown. Now the Chandler family, whose grandfather built the stadium 75 years ago, have sold it to property developers. There will be no more racing after tonight, unless a “Save Our Stow” campaign succeeds in buying it back – and that’s a long shot. Rumours of a sell-off have been going around the track for years, but it is still a mighty shock. As one official put it, “It’s as if Manchester United decided to close, and Old Trafford was being turned into housing.”

Few places truly live up to the label “magical” and make you feel more alive for being there. For me, Old Trafford is one such place and, for more than 20 years, Walthamstow dogs has been another. There is nothing like standing with friends on a packed night as the last frantic bets are laid and the lights go down, the dogs crouching in their boxes and the crowd coiled, waiting to explode as the greyhounds burst from the traps. The race is a bolt of energy that often lasts less than 30 seconds, charged with hope, fear, grief, joy. Among the punters, that is. The dogs just run regardless, impervious to our frantic advice. Yet still we shout at them, for our own good rather than theirs. I have been going hoarse over dogs since I first found the Stow as a summer substitute for the football – somewhere to let off steam and behave as you do not at dinner parties, exorcising everyday demons even if it does embarrass your wife. Where else can we do that now?

Since the closure was announced, the Stow has been packed like the old days, with Saturday crowds nearing 5,000. Many are saying goodbye to an old friend. Others have turned up for a belated gawp, like anthropologists exploring “the lost world of the

dog men”. The gaudy glamour of Walthamstow dogs has often charmed those in search of something authentic and exotic out east (London), from the Hollywood gangster George Raft to Brad Pitt (Vinnie Jones brought him) and Blur, photographed there for their iconic Parklife album – on a quiet midweek evening, perhaps because it was less stressful than posing among the Essex and East London boys and girls on Saturday night.

When I first dined in the Paddock Grill, the classy restaurant at the top of the main stand, the maître d’ was big Val, his name spelt out in gold across one thick finger. In more than 25 years, Val had seen them all, from Sean Connery to the character who left £20,000 in a bag under a table. “We had that Stanley Baker running around the track one night,” he told me. “In the rain. In his underpants.” For charity? “No. For a bet, of course.”

Photographs from the 1933 opening night at Walthamstow show Amy Johnson, the aviator, alongside William Chandler, proud proprietor of this new palais de dogs. He was a street-corner bookmaker from Hoxton who fought his way up alongside William Hill and Joe Coral before staking all on the boom sport. The first proper greyhound race in Britain had been run at Belle Vue, Manchester, in 1926 – the year of the General Strike. The dogs quickly became a mass spectator sport of the working classes. By 1930, the annual attendance at registered tracks was 17 million; in 1945 it peaked at 50 million.

After the Second World War, as people had more money and more things to do with it, the dogs lost ground. By 1960, attendances were back to 15m. In 2006, they were down to 3.2m. Once Walthamstow goes, there will be 29 registered tracks remaining with only one, Wimbledon, in London – and that owned by private equity capitalists. The Stow is the biggest dog track now, but the owners report crowds of 2,200 on Saturday nights earlier this year, and only 300 on a cold Tuesday, compared to the 20,000 packed in just after the war or 15,000 one night in the Sixties. Annual turnover from the Tote – the track’s in-house betting pool – peaked at £16.85m in 1989. Last year it was down to £8.76m.

Yet as gambling at the tracks has declined, off-course betting on the dogs in shops and on the internet has boomed – up to £2.3 billion in 2006, only a few million of which goes back into the sport. Greyhound racing seems at risk of becoming background noise in betting shops that televise poor-quality afternoon races run in front of tiny crowds at tracks owned by the big bookmakers. You can even bet on non-stop computer-generated “virtual” greyhounds now. So who needs live dog racing?

We do. The dogs should not only be saved, but savoured as a live sport that pulsates with life, red in tooth and paw, amid our shrink-wrapped and CGI culture. It is like a real street fight rather than a Hollywood one – and as in a real fight, the first punch often counts most. The run to the first bend, where dogs near 40mph before cannoning around, is an exhilarating rush for spectators, too. Perhaps it is why Winston Churchill, MP in nearby Woodford, called dog racing “animated roulette”.

Churchill, incidentally, featured in one of the biggest upsets seen at the stadium, where the war hero gave his last speech of the 1945 general election campaign as odds-on favourite to win. But as others have discovered at the Stow, there is no such thing as a sure thing. As Churchill addressed a big local crowd, many in service uniform, he was booed. Somebody threw a stone, while soldiers and sailors chanted, “We want Labour.” It was a sign of the shock Labour landslide to come. It is also a sign of how times have changed since greyhound racing’s golden age. What are the odds against a prime minister holding an open rally at a dog track today, or crowds of working-class people chanting for a Labour government?

The Chandlers, all cousins, have been accused of poor management and selling out the grand old track to developers. Charles Chandler, the urbane chairman who has spent his life in greyhound racing, blames the shift to off-track gambling and points to a £500,000 loss in the year ended February 2008. But as with a beloved football club, while the owners might sell the shares, the crowd believes that it truly belongs to them.