A SPORT FROM A BOMB SITE
When the first part of Ron Gray’s “Reminiscences” was included in the South Shields Local History Group’s April Newsletter, Bill kindly referenced myself as the source of the information, but it was entirely by accident that I came upon the piece, as I had typed ‘Cycle Speedway in South Shields’ into the search engine. The mention of the sport was tucked away in a few lines towards the end of the twenty pages which chronicled his childhood in the town in the 1930s and into adulthood in the following decades.
I was already aware that the sport had existed in Shields, as I had participated in its 1960s period, but I was searching for evidence of activity in the immediate post-war years (we had believed that we were pioneers, but some clues had subsequently emerged of an earlier era in the town). The sport of Cycle Speedway was initially regarded as a junior version of Speedway, but is now celebrating its 80th anniversary counting from the founding of organised league racing in 1946, when youths cleared open spaces and laid out tracks, just as Ron Gray described, then removed the brakes and mudguards from their bikes, strapped on breastplates displaying their team names, and raced against each other in emulation of their motorised heroes they watched each week in stadiums such as Brough Park, the home of Newcastle ‘Diamonds’.
In 1965 the short feature ‘Look at Life’, which appeared regularly in cinemas between the main features, giving focus to a variety of niche interests, devoted ten minutes to Cycle Speedway, showing how it had moved on from its origins twenty years earlier. It was titled ‘Out of a Bomb Site’, as many of the early tracks were created in cities where one side of a street was still intact and the other flattened by the wartime bombing raids. Local kids cleared away the rubble and used the house bricks to lay out makeshift tracks where they skidded round in imitation of the real thing (a 1951 film about a fictional London side was called ‘Skid Kids’).
Ron Gray identified the location of the Shields track as behind Black’s Regal Cinema which fronted on King Street, with the Billiard Hall at its rear, approximately where Union Alley joined River Drive (and a 1951 publication listing clubs and track locations named River Drive as the home of the Shields club, with Norman Carney of Farne Avenue as its Secretary). A March 1951 feature in the ‘Shields Evening News’ headed ‘Cycle Speedway is here to stay’, written by the paper’s cycling correspondent, Geoff Gauntlett – great name, if genuine – mentioned teams making up the Northumberland & Durham League, including South Shields and several clubs in Newcastle.. The title of the piece was unfortunately rather too optimistic, as the popularity of the senior sport, Speedway, fell sharply in the early 1950s, not helped by Entertainment Tax and other austerity measures. Brough Park closed its doors in 1951, and with bomb sites being redeveloped or turned into Car Parks, the pedal variety of the sport also went into hibernation on Tyneside until 1965, when it came back to life in Shields and Newcastle, independently of each other.
Whatever inspired us to take up the sport in 1965, it wasn’t that ‘Look at Life’ short because dates in the film show that it was in cinemas after we had already started racing. Self-preservation was something which influenced me personally – an aerial view of what was known as ‘The Nest’ in the Leas (where finishers in the Great North Run are channeled off to the right and down the slope towards the seafront, passing on their right the U-shaped hollow in question) shows cliffs round the hollow, and this was where a group of kids living in The Broadway/Bamburgh Avenue/Grosvenor Road area used to do hair-raising cycling along the path on top of the cliffs on the seafront side of the hollow, negotiating the narrow neck of land which joined two separate parts, oblivious to the risk to life and limb if they fell off on either side.
It seemed a more sensible idea to take up a sport like Cycle Speedway and race at The Nest, but on a flat surface and at ground level. A track was marked out using bamboo stakes – but soon abandoned after the numerous punctures they caused. This was the location for racing during 1965 and into 1966, but anyone walking on the paths on top of the cliffs surrounding the hollow could see where we were wearing away the surface of the grass, and we were summarily ejected
only weeks into the 1966 season, just a month or so after hosting a Test Match against a side from Newcastle, whose riders were teenagers like ourselves and also regular spectators at the revived Speedway in Brough Park. Their track was on unused land and not at risk of removal, and they also sensibly avoided off-track hi-jinks.
A team in Boldon Colliery – some of whom may have spectated at the short-lived initial promotion of Speedway at the East Boldon Greyhound Stadium – had their track next to where the Multiplex Cinema complex is now situated, but did not even manage to last out the 1965 season before being sent packing, and all this dealt a double blow to participation in Shields, and some riders never turned a wheel afterwards. Those wishing to continue regular racing had to cycle to the Tyne Pedestrian Tunnel, pass through and then up Howdon Bank to Walker where the Newcastle club had their track (although a one-off event was held on The Leas near Gypsies Green at the end of 1966 without attracting the ire of authority). 1966 had opened with local rivalry against Newcastle and closed with an adventure beyond the banks of the Tyne when we made a joint visit to Edinburgh with them, having first co-hosted a visit by two Scottish teams to Tyneside.
Our team called itself Trow Lea Mariners and the Boldon side were the Crusaders, but the riders from Grosvenor Road said that they wanted to be known as something which sounded like the ‘Touremsheekies’ because they claimed that it was Russian for ‘Jailers’ and they were just starting to learn the language and liked the sound of the word. When their details were included in a publication, the nickname appeared as ‘Gaolers’, which then led to a misprint elsewhere as ‘Goalers’, losing all the original meaning. Thanks, however, to the miracle of the modern Internet it has been possible to confirm that they were not having us on, and the Russian word is indeed ‘Tyuremshchiki, one of the more exotic team names in a sport where ‘Aces’, ‘Hammers’, ‘Pirates’, and ‘Monarchs’ abounded.
Being trackless was discouraging, as mentioned in a paragraph above, but with encouragement from Bill Bawden, the Sports Editor of the ‘Gazette’, we applied at the end of 1966 for help from the Council’s Parks & Recreations Committee and were pleased to be allocated a plot of ground on the edge of Temple Park, plus the amount of £70 towards the cost of laying out a track there. We were fortunate that the Deputy Borough Engineer was a table-tennis team-mate of the brother of one of our racers, and he stretched the grant beyond what it should have funded, even finding a load of brick dust to resurface the track in place of the original black grit which did not bed in properly. Unfortunately, it was not purely dust, but also chippings and even some half-bricks, all of which had to be sorted and sifted by hand, and the dust applied piecemeal to the track, which for a while was black in parts and red in others (the bricks did have a use as edge markers though).
Before signing off on the project the Borough Solicitor had requested a meeting with the Club, but was somewhat nonplussed when the three officials arrived at the Town Hall still wearing their Grammar School blazers, and a responsible adult had to co-sign the Agreement – the only time that an adult was directly involved in the Club’s activities. The Newcastle youngsters were more fortunate in that they had input from adults in the Speedway Supporters Club, but to some extent they lost the freedom to make their own decisions, something which we valued.
The track in Temple Park opened a new, if relatively short era for the sport. It was situated on reclaimed land and always temporary given that the town’s new Swimming and Leisure Centre was subsequently built over it. Interested riders again migrated to the Newcastle club, whose own continued existence would remain in doubt, as members left Tyneside for further education or for work-related reasons.
The ‘Gazette’ (and ‘Green Final’) of Saturday 28th October1967 devoted a whole page to photographs from the Tyneside Best Pairs Meeting. We also hosted Test Matches, Individual events, and visits from Edinburgh, Sheffield and Middlesbrough sides, with regular reports in the ‘Gazette’. It was fifty years before the paper featured the sport again – the edition of Wednesday, 19th July 2019, reported that Cycle Speedway was returning to Temple Park as part of a project organised by Tyneside Outdoors, and one-off demonstration races were staged on grass by Newcastle veterans who had raced on the original track, albeit that neither they nor the archaeologist associated with Tyneside Outdoors could pinpoint the old track, in spite of possessing earlier maps and photographs. A small exhibition was mounted later in Cleadon Park Library, attended by the town’s MP.
By Les Gustafson
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