The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  Suavely ignoring the aroma of chip shop curry sauces, Ian gives me a crash course on the protocols of speedway. It consists of several rounds of races, each of which lasts four laps and takes roughly a minute on a track of shale, gravel or brick dust. It is not, in the words of famous cycling cheat Lance Armstrong ‘all about the bike’, but the pared down simplicity of the cycle is a large element of the thrill. ‘No brakes. No gears’ is the sport’s manta, its cri de coeur, its motto, and it is absolutely true. A speedway bike is essentially a steerable engine running on methanol, the fuel whose rich deep tang gives the stadium that characteristic smell. With no brakes, the rider negotiates the turns at speed using just the steering handles turned against the curve and by dragging his inside foot in the dirt. This explains the weighty, Frankenstein-style metal boot worn on one foot; it’s like an anchor. You do get the odd punch-up between riders, but they are rare which is just as well. You wouldn’t want to get kicked with one of those.

  There’s a buzz in the crowd as the first riders emerge. These young men, some British, many East European and Scandinavian, ride for clubs all over the world and travel nearly every day for a race somewhere. Aces rider Matej Žagar is about to race every night for the next 12 at stadia across Europe, getting by on snatched sleep in cheap airport hotels. ‘They fly EasyJet every day of their lives almost,’ says Ian, ‘and in Eastern Europe they’re superstars.’

  Speedway is massive in Poland where it’s essentially the national sport and races take place in huge arenas that are regularly full. Thousands will turn out for a midweek club meeting in the Polish Ekstraliga, the richest and most popular speedway league in the world, and since the fall of communism now luring the best riders from all over the world. Some of these are here tonight; revving up their bikes here on this damp, grey night in Gorton. ‘They couldn’t walk down the street unmolested in Gdańsk or Warsaw, these lads. They might get 15,000 quid for a meeting there. You could say it’s not bad for five minutes work. But then you’re not the one on the bike.’

  It is, Ian thinks, less dangerous than it was, chiefly because of the introduction of the ‘air fences’; chunky, padded barriers on the corners. If you watch footage of 1960s races from Belle Vue, you can see players regularly ending up in the dirt and almost in the crowd as they careen over the rope fence after a bad turn and a slide. But the effect of the fences has been to make the sport more exciting as riders are more willing to take chances. It is still gutsy, volatile and dangerous. Even with the better padding and safety improvements, several players have plates and bolts in their bodies that play hell with airport security scanners. Few get away unscathed. 2013 World Champion Tai Woffinden broke his collarbone twice in that glory season, the second time severely bending the metal bar that had been put in following the first break. Aces legend Chris Morton had an undiagnosed broken neck for two decades and some mornings had to literally lift his head off the pillow. Worst of all, the former Aces rider Alan Wilkinson’s career came to a sudden, horrible end on Saturday, 1 July 1978, when a crash during a match against Swindon consigned him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

  A draft system operates with the riders, rather like the one in American football, whereby the lowest ranking teams get first pick of the best players. Thus this season, a young rising star from ‘down the road’ in Gorton has ended up riding up for Coventry who were last year’s worst team. Tonight there’ll be eight races, each with four riders, and points from four to one are awarded to each rider depending on placement. Ian asks us if I want to watch the race from ‘the centre green’. As I have no idea what this means, I mumble and stall politely until some nearby enthusiasts intervene. ‘You absolutely have to do this. This would be a lifetime’s dream come true for lots of speedway fans.’ Humbled and a little sheepish, the tardiest of Johnny-come-latelys is thus led through the diehards, over the perimeter fence, across the red shale and into the grassy area in the centre of the track. There’s a small knot of us here, including 17 times Isle Of Man TT champion John McGuiness who is a speedway nut and diehard Aces fan.

  The Brolly Dollies, four young women with umbrellas in the riders’ colours who usher out the riders and herald the start of every race, are an anachronism that’s more quaint than offensive. They are doughty northern young women in sensible padded jackets, jeans and boots, and their function is more informative than decorative. They stand at the start, displaying to the crowd (who seem to write everything down in their programmes or little battered notebooks) which lane the different riders are in. Then they exit, leaving the riders revving and lurching their bikes backwards and forwards in the loose dirt. The aim is to gouge a furrow from which they can get vital purchase, the start being hugely important and advantageous in speedway. Powered by the almost-pure alcohol ‘rocket fuel’ in their tanks, they can pull away from the start as fast as a Formula One car. Nosing the tape, edging forward, rocking backward, they watch for a flicker from the starter. He waits until, walking away with seemingly blithe unconcern, the tape rises and they’re off.

  Though it shares some of the appeal for fans of statistics, speedway is at the other end of the sporting spectrum from test cricket. In place of the long contemplative stretches of ambient torpor, that delightfully textured boredom, is a compacted minute of crazed activity, a roaring whirlwind of helmets, shale and mud. The other spectators are right. The best view you can have is this one; close up, surrounded by noise and action, spinning around to catch the bikes as they circle you at speed. In this way, with the odd dash to the shed for lager, the next couple of hours pass in a hugely entertaining blur.

  Coventry may have been the worst in the league last year but tonight they eventually beat the Aces and take a little lap of honour, waving, in a sort of big tractor. This is definitely a protocol I would love to see adopted in the effete world of football. People write up the scores in notebooks, the riders disappear, and in spite of this mildly downbeat ending to the evening, my hosts are still wonderfully enthusiastic and hospitable.

  They give me a tour of the pits where the Coventry team is celebrating, high fiving, laughing and chatting in a quickfire blend of accents: Scandinavian, Black Country, northern. They are all on the small side, which could just be chance or perhaps, like jockeys, it’s an advantage. Are there big brawny speedway riders? Like any backstage environment, but particularly one that reeks of methanol and echoes with roaring engines, the pits are quite exciting for what are basically a couple of tin shacks with stalls for the home team and one for the visitors. There’s a reporter from Sky and the odd Brolly Dolly. The Aces pit staff are all volunteers. Ian tells us that he’s never been paid. ‘None of these guys get paid, it’s all lads and dads really.’ One turns out to have been one of the security staff on duty when a crazed gunman tried to abduct Princess Anne in the Mall in 1973, and was wounded in the process of saving her. He didn’t get a reward but a few months later, following a vague phone call from the security services, he found that his mortgage had been paid off.

  This is a fascinating story but, best of all, they let me sit on a bike. They show me the Dead Man’s Handle, a string and a peg attached to the arm basically, which cuts the bike engine should you fall off. ‘Think you could manage a few laps?’ says Ian, and I answer instantly in the negative. Give me a ball and I can hit it, head it or kick it reasonably well. But I know that even if I could rev the thing properly and then cool the throttle, even if I could make that groove in the shale for purchase and let the bike thrum against the tape, I know that once I had to loose that left hand throttle, feel the bike rear with latent power, I would either a) plough a slow and wobbly furrow through the red loam of Lancashire at a snail’s pace, or more likely b) bolt as if riding a deranged horse right off the tracks, into the barriers, scattering the crowd as bike and I somersault straight into the merchandise stall where that hairy guy is selling old speedway magazines for 5p. Instead, I buy a Belle Vue Aces scarf which is hanging on the wall above my desk as I write these words. Th
e new season starts in a month. I can’t wait.

  At the other end of the scale in almost every way from both rugby league and speedway is crown green bowls. If rugby league is all about the crunch of bone and the clamour of crowds, and speedway the rasp and roar of engines and the heady tang of burning fuel, bowls is the gentle click of polished wood and low murmurs of appreciation. While rugby league is pretty much all physical contact, bowls has none. At least it shouldn’t have, and I have yet to find any evidence of a great bowls brawl.

  It may be more genteel but it is a great, great deal older. In his twelfth-century biography of turbulent priest Thomas Becket, William Fitzstephen mentions, for some odd reason, young men indulging in an early version of the sport; the world’s oldest surviving bowling green dates from 1299. Disliked by Henry VIII and the establishment for its appeal to the lower orders, in 1541 an act of parliament forbade labourers, servants and apprentices from playing ‘Bowls at any time except Christmas, and then only in their master’s house and presence’.

  But then, as the centuries rolled on, bowls went through a schism with odd parallels of rugby’s class and geographical fissure. The flat green bowling that Sir Francis Drake had indulged in while the Spanish Armada approached stayed right there on Plymouth Hoe, and the south in general. In the north, a more complicated version, crown green, developed on greens with a raised hump or ‘crown’ in the middle. This was said to be an accommodation of the north’s hillier and more rugged geography. Crown greens were often at the back of licensed premises and it developed into a predominantly working-class sport in the north. As a teenager, I heard the funniest, and possibly the only, bowls joke I’ve ever heard. We were having a pint and a few ‘ends’ at the green behind The Bowling Green pub in Wigan (it’s a common pub name in the north). Nearby, a doubles match was going on. The protocol here is that when one of the pair has bowled, the other will run down to the other end to survey the scene around the jack – the small target ball – in detail and state the position. ‘You’re a foot in front!’ shouted one chap to his partner, who then turned to me and asked, ‘What did he call me?’

  The pubs and inns of Lancashire became the crucible of what became an unlikely big money ‘glamour’ sport from the 1830s onwards. Top bowlers began to command the kinds of earnings that we associate today with professional footballers, Formula 1 drivers, tennis players and golfers. Sports historian Peter Swain has uncovered the stories of bowling ‘celebs’ like Gerard Hart from Blackrod or Tom Taylor (known as ‘Owd Toss’) from Bolton.

  As the century wore on the triangle between Bolton, Westhoughton and Chorley produced most of the outstanding professional crown green bowlers of the day culminating in the heyday of professional crown green bowling around 1900. A top bowler at that time would earn around £800 a year in prize money which is worth about £300,000 today.

  That lucrative and high profile heyday is long gone. When then Labour MP for Sheffield, Helen Jackson, criticised Sport England’s 2004 decision not to award Lottery Funding to the sport, she pointed to bowls’ deep community roots and its high levels of voluntary support: ‘Clubs exist in every village and community, located in local parks, working men’s clubs, behind pubs and in the grounds of steel and factory premises.’ While her tone was measured, her message was clear. Crown green bowls, like coarse fishing, despite enjoying one of the highest levels of active participation of any British sport (including disabled players), was losing out because of prejudice, ageism and regionalism.

  In Australia, bowls was the sport traditionally taken up by sports mad Aussies when their days of playing more energetic, high impact sports were over. It grew through the late twentieth century, peaking in 1990 when there were 50,000 registered players making it the country’s fourth biggest participant sport. The numbers were huge but the image was fustian, and after that heyday the sport went into a decline for want of new players.

  But noughties hipsters changed all that. There’s been an influx of what are known to the Aussies as ‘barefoot bowlers’, cool kids who took up the sport ironically at first but have grown to love it and rejuvenated the ailing sport, generating a comedy movie about the phenomenon called Crackerjack and was featured in early episodes of hit TV show The Secret Life Of Us. Hundreds of barefoot bowlers began to show up at the clubs (every town has one) at weekends and new ones catering for the barefoots have sprung up. At Paddington Lawn Bowls Club in Sydney’s Eastern Suburb the club motto is, rather odiously, ‘bowls without the olds’, and they cater almost exclusively to the under forties.

  If bearded barefoot bowling ironists were to blossom anywhere in the north, it would surely be Chorlton, Manchester’s hipster enclave of bobble hats, craft breweries and vegan co-operatives. The Lloyd Hotel though seems to be cheerfully resisting this trend.

  The beautiful crown green at the Lloyd Hotel Bowling Club was laid in 1870, the year of the first ever international football match (England v. Scotland) and the death of Charles Dickens. This local landmark on Wilbraham Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy is perhaps the oldest and most successful club in the history of crown green bowling. They have been champions often and they are home to the second largest youth bowling competition in the country, which regularly attracts a field of over 50 players of under 18, giving the lie to the geriatric stereotype of the sport.

  The pleasant young barman is genially vague about when or whether tonight’s fixture will begin. ‘Oh they’re usually out there,’ offers a gravel-voiced woman nursing a blue WKD at the bar. The pub, newly refurbished, is almost in the nature of a deluxe corporate executive hospitality box for bowls-mad billionaires if only such things existed. One side of the pub is a huge window that overlooks the (deserted) green, and at the de rigueur stripped pine table, a young couple are getting to grips with two teetering overloaded burgers and a cairn of filled potato skins. I have a pint of Peddler and wait.

  Soon enough, there’s activity. Men of all shapes and sizes begin to emerge and congregate in the glorious evening sun, not in whites and flat caps but those billowy untucked sports shirts that corpulent darts players favour. A clutch of people begin to assemble at the perimeter with pens and books and the grave and responsible air of officialdom, like the Supreme Court. Time to get out there, I think.

  Taking my pint out onto the edge of the green and lifting my face to the late, soothing sun, I meet a ‘character’. He’s a fit looking pensioner in powder blue Manchester City shirt and a gold skull tie. He looks kindly yet seasoned, a bloke I fancy you wouldn’t have mucked about back in the seventies. He’s the kind of bloke you still find often in our urban working communities; genial, matey, but with an edge that means you are never fully at ease in case the handshake turns into a headlock.

  He spots this ingénue with unerring savvy and homes in, telling me at once without a shred of false humility, that he is ‘a legend’. Eric the Blue Legend, in fact. ‘Everyone here knows me.’ Bowls is his joint love, along with ‘City’. He is, he offers thoughtfully, ‘probably the greatest Manchester City fan in the world … I slept in a freezing, lorry at 15 to go up to Middlesbrough and it’s been love ever since.’ He is 68, been to a thousand City games, and yet managed to miss all five of City’s FA Cup Finals in his lifetime of fandom. One of these, in 2013, was their defeat to the mighty Wigan Athletic. This is my cue, of course, to tell him that I’m from Wigan and I was there to see his pampered, overpaid Galácticos get squarely beaten. He takes it in good part, and he is gracious in defeat. He may even have ruffled my hair.

  Eric becomes my chaperone and guide through a sunlit evening of bowls while offering a great many insights into his own life, sometimes almost poetically. ‘As a high profile blue, I’ve taken many a ribbing, goading and verbal battering. But I’m a tough old so and so. My father did his paper round in his bare feet so I know where I’m coming from. I was born on Halloween and I believe in fate. What brings you here? You look a bit official to me but then you have the casual style of the modern era.’

 
This is a West Cheshire Premier League clash between the Lloyd Hotel and arch local rivals Buddenburg. They don’t sound that local, I say. I find out that they are in fact the works team of a German engineering firm based in leafy Altrincham. Having recently moved into a new half a million pound sports and social club home, Buddenbrook resemble Chelsea – or indeed Manchester City; wealthy aristocrats of the game and a further example of Teuton sporting prowess. We will all be reminded forcibly of this later that night when Germany beat hosts Brazil 7–1 in the semi-finals of the football World Cup, a scoreline I thought had to be a typo when I saw it on my phone later.

  The match here, if not quite as gripping as that one, is now on in earnest. Several different pairings and games seem to be going on concurrently at a fair lick, the bowls criss-crossing at speed, the choreography bewildering. Obscure remarks and bizarre observations rend the summer night – ‘Bowling, mon!’ ‘That’s won it!’ ‘You’re two feet away!’ ‘4–7, Pete!’ ‘Short as a carrot!’ ‘Drop yer sand!’ At one quiet and terrifically tense moment, a hearty belch rings out across the greensward accompanied soon afterwards by low chuckles. At precisely this moment, enormous pizzas arrive for the scorers, the cue for a great deal of wonderful ‘Whose was the Meat Feast with extra olives?’ palaver and debate. Would that this happened with the officials at Wimbledon. ‘Advantage, Federer. Oh and mine was the Thin and Crispy American Hot, Dennis …’

  Eric, who has himself acquired a passing slice of Quattro Formaggi, explains that while tonight’s Tuesday match is a significant fixture, ‘Wednesday is the big Premier League night, certainly as far as Yorks and North Lancs is concerned. The pub’ll put a buffet on for that.’ In these days of gastro-pub gentrification, apparently, landlords are not always thrilled with or supportive of an association with a pastime as proudly and defiantly ‘flat cap’ as crown green bowling. ‘You know the sort of pub. The ones where they’ll put the tennis on the big screen but not the football. There’s plenty of them round here. This has always been a bowls pub but one landlord here, he used to boast he’d close the green down. But we have a 20 year lease. We saw him off.’