Lost Tracks / Darrell Williams / 11 March 2008 / 1 Comments

Boxing, baseball, football and then dogs... Darrell Williams harps back to London's fourth greyhound track...

From 1900 the home of Clapton Orient FC, now Leyton Orient, Clapton Stadium designed by the famous architect Sir Owen Williams, became London's fourth greyhound track, with the first meeting staged almost eighty years ago on 7th April 1928.

After spending over £80,000 to install greyhound facilities at the Millfields Road ground, which was also a major venue for boxing, and even in its early days baseball, the football team was soon asked to find a new home as the track invested in the dogs, opening its first restaurant in 1930 and building covered stands and a second restaurant in 1939.

The track, almost circular in shape with its short straights of only 75 yards and wide, easy bends made it one of the fastest tracks in the country, a factor which in its very first season resulted in it staging what would become the sprinters' Classic, the Scurry Gold Cup - a race that in its heyday would rival even the Derby in terms of prestige, it would remain the most important race to be staged at the East London circuit throughout the track's near fifty year tenure.

Staged over 400 yards, the Scurry attracted the fastest greyhounds in the land, and the list of winners through the years reads like a who's who of sprinting. Yet it took nearly twenty years before a local champion was crowned, when the Stanley Biss trained Rimmell's Black set new figures when winning the 1947 renewal. Biss, one of the country's most respected handlers - he had trained two Oaks winners from West Ham before the Second World War - was back twelve months later to double up with Local Interprize.

One of the all time greats, Local Interprize was also a dual Gold Collar winner, and went within a short-head of also winning the 1949 Scurry in front of a crowd of over 30,000, many of whom believed the result should have been a dead-heat. Clapton was renowned for attracting big name trainers, another was Jimmy Jowett who won a record four Scurry's between 1952 and 1960, two of those wins being credited to Gorey Airways, who became the first dual winner in 1959/60, a feat Don't Gambol would repeat in the early seventies.

Another trainer John Bassett also made his own piece of history when claiming three successive Scurry's in the early sixties, with Lucky Joan's victory in 1963 one of a record four Classics for the handler that year. In its later years, Clapton was a hotbed of Classic winners with no fewer than six Derby winners produced from its kennels at Claverhambury Farm in Waltham Cross between 1956 and 1972.

One of those winners, Palm's Print in 1961, created a unique double having also won the Scurry the same year for Paddy McEvoy, while Adam Jackson sent out the last Clapton Derby winner Patricia's Hope who claimed the first of back to back successes in the race in 1972..

An immensely popular track, Clapton's demise caused much upset when the track was sold by the GRA in 1969, eventually closing its doors for the final time on 1st January 1974. It was replaced by the Millfields housing estate in the early eighties.

Tags: Clapton Stadium, greyhounds betting