Dirty Work

Two happenings in 1991, separated by 64 years, brought topicality to a highly specialised form of sport: speedway racing. The first was a meeting In London on Christmas Eve, 1927. The second was the closure of London’s only remaining speedway that summer. The first directly concerned My Friend Harry; the second filled him with nostalgia.

It was on Christmas Eve, 1927, that Cambridge graduate Lionel Wills and motor dealers Fred Mockford and Cecil Smith got together to decide to build a dirt track at Crystal Palace. Lionel, Harry did not know. Fred and Cecil he knew well.

They were the Rootes concessionaires at Maidstone and elsewhere in Kent, but more significantly, so far as Harry was concerned, they ran motor-cycle road racing at Crystal Palace -- where Harry regularly competed in company with a fellow member of Rochester Motor Club, Howard Wallis.

Fred and Cecil had looked in at one of the club’s monthly meetings a month or so earlier to say that they had in mind a dirt track at Crystal Palace and that all racing members would be welcome to attend a special practice and familiarisation session when the track was built and before it was officially opened. Dirt track racing had never been seen in England but everyone knew that plans were afoot to import the sport from Australia and America and the whole country was agog at the prospect.

The quarter-mile Crystal Palace circuit was duly built-where the athletics track now is. It was not, however, the first dirt-track in the country. Discounting a ‘real earth’ circuit near Camberley used in May, 1927, and a hard-cinder trotting track at Droylsden, Manchester, in the following month, the first ‘accepted’ dirt track was at King’s Oak, Epping, which was launched in February, 1928. Even that wasn’t a ‘proper’ dirt track, for the surface was hardish; there was no safety fence and spectators were on the inside as well as the outside.

Nevertheless, the King’s Oak inauguration brought in 30,000 paying customers to watch eight main events and 50 - odd races. There clearly was a market for dirt-track racing.

The first purpose-built track in London was at Stamford Bridge around the perimeter of Chelsea football pitch - with floodlight racing. Before the year was out, London had no fewer than 12 tracks. They were sited at King's Oak, Greenford, Stamford Bridge, Crystal Palace, White City, Wimbledon, Harringay, West Ham, Lea Bridge, New Cross, Hackney and Wembley.

At that time, it was all individual racing. League racing was not introduced until 1929. The Crystal Palace track was completed in May, 1928, and Howard Wallis and My Friend Harry took up Fred and Cecil’s invitation to try their hands.

Howard and Harry and a dozen other racing types from South London spent an educational hour at Crystal Palace circling the track and then gathered in the infield, well satisfied with their progress. At that moment, a chap appeared on a Douglas twin (it turned out to have been the legendary Freddie Dixon’s TT bike), did a couple of pretty reasonable laps by the watchers’ standards and then went raving mad.

Belting down the stand straight, he hurtled into the bend without shutting off, sprayed cinders far and wide as his back wheel strove to overtake the front, and belted round in similar style for four lunatic circuits. Then he joined the open-mouthed watchers in the infield.

“Hallo," he grinned, “I’m Billy Galloway." Billy Galloway and Keith McKay, both great riders and affable sportsmen, had been brought over from New South Wales by the famous dirt track promoter, Johnny Hoskins. Before the afternoon was out, Billy had wised all the locals up on the technique of dirt track racing. Clenching their teeth hard, they strove to emulate his demonstrations - and decided there was a lot to learn in a very short time.

Harry and Howard, with a dozen London tracks to choose from, usually managed to ride at five meetings a week on average. They soon discovered that although they weren’t ever going to be stars, they were good enough to make a pretty good killing, what with appearance money and money for race points. It was all cash-in-hand, of course. They used a variety of names, partly to keep the tax man at bay and partly to keep their racing activities from their employers. Howard was a welder in Chatham Dockyard and My Friend Harry was a dogsbody on the local paper. How, then, did he cope with all the evening assignments the paper gave him? He paid chaps on the opposition papers to put in ‘blacks' (carbon copies) for him. As the union minimum in those days was £4 7s 6d a week and he was pulling in anything from £60 to £100 a week from dirt-track racing, he could afford to be generous.

And what did Howard and Harry do with their riches? Blew them! They had, of course, to pay for the services of skilled mechanics and tuners and to meet all their outgoings. There weren’t any sponsors in those days, but they did get free oil, chains, tyres and sparking plugs.

After nearly two years, by which time tracks were retaining riders on contract and team racing had been introduced, Howard and Harry hung up their helmets. Three years later, Harry blossomed out as racing manager for the new Rochester Speedway, the youngest such manager in the country. He didn’t make as much as he did as a rider, but there was a handsome dividend seven years later.

The General heading the Royal Armoured Corps commissioning Selection Board he faced turned out to be a speedway buff! He ensured that Harry went straight to Sandhurst without all that pre-OCTU nonsense at Blackdown!