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Speedway in Derbyshire

Men (and women on occasions) have been racing motorcyles ever since the two-wheeled mode of transport made its first appearance.

Road racing, hill-climbs, scrambles, trials and sand racing on beaches all gained in popularity in the early years of the 20th century. Grass track racing achieved particular popularity in the years following World War One, and Derbyshire was well represented.

The Haslam family of Ripley owned a coal mine at nearby Pentrich. Their home in Ripley, The Elms, had a field attached, where the family promoted grass track racing in the 1920s, attracting up to 3,000 spectators.

Racing motorcycles around an oval grass circuit meant that the surface on the bends would inevitably become loose, inviting the riders to take the bends in a controlled skid. This lesson had been learnt elsewhere too, particularly in Australia, where the New Zealand-born entrepreneur John S Hoskins pioneered speedway or dirt track racing in the form in which it survives to this day.

Speedway came to the UK in 1928 and the sport mushroomed, with more than sixty tracks operating by 1929. In some cases the promoters were looking to make a quick profit, and organisation was often sadly lacking. Ripley's W H `Bill' Haslam promoted the sport at the Olympic Speedway in Colwick, Nottingham, and there was huge early success, with crowds of up to 20,000 people.

Derbyshire had its first taste of the new sport in 1929, at the new Greyhound Stadium in Station Road, Long Eaton. The track was entered for the first year of league competition in speedway, registering with the English Dirt-track League, which catered for clubs in the north of the country. Long Eaton made speedway history and became the subject of a popular quiz question when it failed to compete in any league matches.

There were several individual meetings at the track, notably at Whitsuntide 1929 and at the same time of year tweleve months later. Riders from the Nottingham and Leicester clubs made up the bulk of the competitors, together with local club racers including Dennis Dunn of the Derby Pathfinders Motorcyle Club. Crowds varied between 1,000 and 6,000 - small by the speedway standards of the day.

Nothing more happened at Long Eaton until 1949, when a new company was formed to take advantage of the huge postwar spectator boom. Speedway was attracting more than ten million spectators a season, with crowds at Wembley occasionally topping 80,000.

Long Eaton gained a non-league licence for 1950 and the new Archers team raced friendly matches against teams from the National League second and third divisions. In 1951 the team gained a place in the Third Division, finishing next to bottom of the table. The Third Division was re-named the Southern League in 1952, and Long Eaton's nearest neighbours for local derby matches were Wolverhampton. Regular away trips to Exeter, Plymouth, St Austell, Cardiff, Ipswich and Aldershot were a struggle for both team men and supporters in those pre-motorway days.

Long Eaton's mediocre league form did not encourage regular high crowds, although for a 1951 Midland Cup match against Division Two Leicester an attendance of 16,000 was reported. The management began to lose money and the last match of this era was raced against Wolverhampton on July 31 1952, before 3,882 spectators - some way below the break even level of 5,000. Southampton should have been the visitors but their coach broke down en-route. Several Wolverhampton riders had been booked in for second half individual events, and they agreed to form an opposition.

In 1953 a team racing as Long Eaton rode at Kings Lynn, in a charity match in aid of the victims of East Coast floods. In 1954 the stadium lessee, Tom Beattie, and former Norwich rider Paddy Mills promoted unlicensed `pirate' meetings, following which at least one rider lost his official racing licence.

Stock car racing took centre stage at Station Road for nearly a decade after that, until a speedway revival in 1963. The sport had nationally fought a generally losing battle against television and other new attractions throughout the mid and late 1950s, with the National League dwindling to one division of ten clubs.

In 1960 a Manchester businessman named Mike Parker helped launch a new Provincial League, mainly formed of novice riders and a few old stagers. The league re-introduced speedway to many lost venues and was a huge success, with crowds often outstripping the National League, with its established star names like Peter Craven of Belle Vue, and Swedish star Ove Fundin of Norwich.

Long Eaton competed successfully in the Provincial League in 1963, this time with local derby matches against the likes of Stoke, Wolverhampton, Cradley Heath and Sheffield. For the first time the team began to feature a local discovery, the Derby motor dealer and all-round motorcyclist Norman Storer, who created a sensation by scoring heavily in his first league appearance, against Hackney Wick.

A second Derbyshire man, Peter Wrathall from Willington, also made his debut at this time.

In 1964 Long Eaton was part of a Provincial League running outside the jurisdiction of the Speedway Control Board. A year later, after a high-level judicial review by Lord Shawcross, the National and Provincial Leagues combined to form the eighteen-team British League.

It was the start of a new golden era for British speedway, and for three seasons Long Eaton played host at Station Road to glamour clubs such as Manchester's Belle Vue, West Ham and Wimbledon from London, and Coventry Bees. The track discovered future world-class riders such as England's Ray Wilson, and 1974 World Champion Anders Michanek of Sweden.

Although always classed as a cinderella team, Long Eaton hit the headlines in 1966 by signing Ove Fundin, five times World Champion. Sadly, Fundin only rode a handful of matches in Long Eaton's red and yellow colours, being banned for failing to compete in meetings in his home country.

At the end of the 1967 season, promoters Reg Fearman and Ron Wilson transferred the licence to Blackbird Road, Leicester, where they enjoyed huge success.

Long Eaton lay fallow in 1968, but in 1969 former rider Vic White, who still lives in the town, and the late Ivor Brown, the village postmaster at Wymeswold near Loughborough and a former Cradley Heath star, re-introduced racing in the newly-formed British League second division. There was a new name, the Rangers, as a tribute to the famous Long Eaton Rangers football team, which won the prestigious Birmingham Challenge Cup in 1887, beating West Bromwich Albion.

Vic White attempted to introduce speedway to the City of Derby itself in the early 1970s, but applications to race at either the old greyhound track in Vernon Street or at the Moorways Stadium were rejected by the city fathers on noise grounds.

From that point until the Station Road Stadium was closed and demolished in 1997, Long Eaton teams operated with just one or two years here and there out of the sport. A championship was won in 1984, and another local boy made good in the form of Alan Molyneux.

In 2007 Erewash Council seem to have brought a closure to speedway in the Derbyshire town, by turning down an application to build a new stadium, together with housing, on the Station Road site. The best hope for speedway locally now seems to be a move to build a track on former industrial land at Stanton.

Speedway racing continues in Derbyshire on a track built in the 1990s on the hills above Buxton, at the High Edge Raceway. The Buxton Hitmen compete in the Conference League, largely designed to bring on new British talent, against teams like Weymouth, Plymouth, Boston and Scunthorpe.

The period 1928-1967 is covered in a book by former Derbyshire journalist Philip Dalling. Nottingham and Long Eaton Speedway 1928-1967 is published by Tempus. The book is available (£16.50 including postage and packing) from the author at Culdoon, Cherry Bridge, Barbrook, Lynton, Devon EX35 6PE.

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County:  Derbyshire

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