Shine on Me by Tim Wells

Author:Tim Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800181588
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2022-03-31T16:37:36+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The dogs: after football the second biggest spectator sport in the country. To the middle classes that often comes as a surprise. The Hackney Wick Stadium was the borough’s main sporting venue since the Orient had moved to Leyton in 1937. It wasn’t just ye workers who arose from their slumber for the team. The Orient had some toff patronage, too. In 1921, on 30 April, the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, became the first royal to attend a football league match. They played Notts County and beat them 3-0. No saviour from on high delivers, no faith have we in prince or peer, but he turned out to be lucky that day.

The King came to thank the team for their patriotic example during the Great War. Forty-one members of the team joined up, all to the 17th Battalion Middlesex Regiment which became known as the Footballers’ Battalion. The Orient were the first team to join up together and had the highest number of players join up than any other team.

Hackney Wick was home to both the dogs and the Hackney Hawks for speedway. Joe had seen the Hawks walk out to the exciting and familiar strains of ‘The Magnificent Seven’, but the speedway attracted too many grebos for Joe’s liking. The dogs, though, that was a good night out.

When the Orient moved out of their stadium in Clapton to go to Leyton, greyhound racing had moved in. The stadium closed in 1974 but locally to Joe there were the Hackney Wick, Walthamstow, and over by Finsbury Park, Harringay tracks. In 1937 Harringay had twice raced cheetahs.

Joe liked a night at the dogs, and Ingrid quite enjoyed it, too. You get a decent pie and can have a drink. Joe made the joke about the country going to the dogs.

‘Symbolic, innit?’ Ingrid responded.

‘Them greyhounds,’ she continued, ‘they stick a muzzle on their boats, tweak their nuts, stick ’em in a box and send ’em tearing after a decrepit toy rabbit. No wonder them poor dogs are highly strung.’

It got Joe to thinking about one of the best books about their part of the world; Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife. Baron had lived on Foulden Road and wrote about it in the book as Ingram’s Terrace. The residential road was a short walk from Joe’s street, Cazenove Road, at the far end of Stoke Newington High Street past the old bill station, well known as London’s worst, and opposite the Walford pub.

Joe’s grandfather reckoned Baron’s From the City, From the Plough to be the best book about the Second World War. Joe saw the irony in someone who’d fought the Nazis in Italy and Normandy coming back to Blighty and having to anglicise his name, from Bernstein to Baron, in order to get his work published. That book about the war came out in 1948. The jackboot needn’t be so heavy to be felt.

The low concrete terrace looked over the track, on the far side a large blackboard

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