One of my most enduring memories of growing up in Kidderminster in the mid-1970s is of the man who lived over the road from us.
If my fading brain serves me correctly, his name was John Foley and he owned a butcher’s shop on the council estate where my grandparents lived.
There are two things I will never forget about him, though; he had the most spectacular ginger sideburns and he was a fanatical Cradley Heath speedway fan (to my knowledge, the two facts are not linked).
Every week, he and his family would head off to Dudley Wood to watch the Heathens race motorbikes which had one gear and no brakes and could reach speeds of up to 70mph.
In those days, Cradley were one of the best-loved sporting clubs in the Black Country; they had a rivalry with their near-neighbours at Wolverhampton, as well as those across the West Midlands at Coventry, which made speedway hugely popular. The crowds were in their thousands, meetings had regional and national TV coverage (on proper television not pay-TV, which didn’t exist) and the riders were national names.
For a few years before I went off to university in 1982, I became infected by John’s passion. I, too, would drive the 20-odd miles to Dudley Wood on summer Saturday nights and inhale the pungent smell of the methanol which powers speedway bikes; marvel at the skill of riders who could swing a motorbike around a corner at 70mph with consummate skill, only occasionally ending up with a broken bone or three.
But then, things turned sour. Dudley Wood is now a housing estate and although Cradley Heath still have a speedway team, they race in the National League (the third level of the sport in Britain, below the Elite and Premier Leagues) and do so at Monmore Green, the home of Wolverhampton.
Yet speedway is still alive elsewhere in the West Midlands. Wolverhampton and Coventry have teams in the Elite League, as do Birmingham Brummies. The Brummies have been around on and off since the sport’s heyday in the 1940s and ‘50s, but their latest reincarnation, which began in 2007 and is based at Perry Barr greyhound stadium, has risen to the Elite League and they are looking very likely to reach the four-team end-of-season playoffs, which begin at the start of October.
I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the Brummies take on Kings Lynn Stars last week and although it was my first speedway meeting since at least 1981, I felt instantly at home. The familiar smell of methanol, the roar of the bikes as they flew out of the starting gate and yes, the ‘how do they do that?’ feel as the riders flung their machines around the four bends, seemingly losing control and then, a split-second later, bringing everything back into line and flying down the straight for a few seconds before reaching the next turn (the average race takes about a minute to complete four laps of a 300-metre track).
Mrs W and I watched the first two races of the night from a rickety wooden stand on the pits bend, loving the smell and the noise and getting covered in shale dust, before we headed up to the directors’ box to wash down the final 13 heats with a pint and a really quite splendid curry.
Plenty of the spectators watched from the bar area, where huge plate-glass windows shielded out the noise but still gave an excellent view of the races, while the really hardy stood outside on an increasingly chilly night, with just the width of the greyhound track between them and the action; if Mrs W hadn’t been with me, that’s probably where I would have been. I’m a firm believer in standing up at football matches (one of the many reasons I love non-league) and sports like speedway need to be viewed close-up to get a sense of just how brave and skilled the riders are.
The riders, incidentally, are a story in themselves. Heats are scored three points for a win, two for second place, one for third and none for fourth and last place. Riders get paid per point so if they struggle, they don’t get paid.
That’s why a lot of the best riders travel Europe, earning money by racing for teams in speedway’s heartland in Poland, Russia and Scandinavia as well as in the UK. So they could be in Coventry on Monday, Sweden on Thursday, Poland on Sunday and so on, throughout the summer season from March to October. It’s a tough life, never mind the constant risk of injury and, heaven forbid, death.
If you’ve never been to a speedway meeting, I urge you to give it a go. We enjoyed two hours of thrilling entertainment which saw the Brummies stage an impressive mid-meeting comeback to win 51-41 and further boost their play-off chances.
Generally, I don’t ‘get’ motorsport. I would rather paint the kitchen than watch a Formula One Grand Prix or a MotoGP race, yet my first visit to speedway in 30 years reminded me why I loved those Saturday nights at Dudley Wood. I’ll certainly be going back.
