Terrier racing … the fastest thing on four very short legs
First published in Total Sport, September 1998
A great British field sport that combines One Man And His Dog with It’s a Knockout every weekend at a country show near you. Terrier racing … the fastest sport on four very short legs
“If you haven’t seen terrier racing before, don’t worry about it: you haven’t missed much.” The deadpan disclaimer comes from a man in a kilt, who, peering over his sunglasses, looks uncannily like Benny Hill. And the sporting events that will unfold this afternoon would certainly have done Mr Hill – no stranger to high-speed chases — very proud.
Adrian Francis is his name and terrier racing is most definitely his game. He’s got 16 of the “little buggers” yapping away in the back of his van, which is neatly emblazoned with the Terrier Roadshow Racing Team logo on back and sides, and piled high with cages. Commentator’s mic in hand, he’s about to introduce the punters to a great British field sport that fuses One Man and His Dog with Its a Knockout every weekend at a country show near you¹.
At one end of the arena, partner Ruth mans four traps. Plunging a steel lever, she’ll let loose the canine dynamos. At the other end of the arena stands a more elaborate contraption. Another team member, Christopher, stands behind an upturned bicycle, guarded behind bales of hay, all set to draw the lure, a piece of simulated fur, along the track. Children tug distractedly at balloons, Run Rabbit Run wrenches out of the Tannoy.
The yapping intensifies as four plucky contenders – young. dumb and full of Chum² - are installed in the traps. Christopher pedals with his hands, pulling the lure along the track at 30mph. Ruth makes the plunge and out tear the terriers. Ten seconds of frenzied sprinting later, the lure disappears through a bole in the hay and under a carpet-covered piece of pipe. One ecstatic dog follows it through, acrobatically flinging itself over the hay in pursuit. That’s the winner, wagging its tail feverishly and still mystified as to the whereabouts of its quarry. Three agitated runners-up, meanwhile. smash gleefully into the bales. And if that sounds like fun, you should see them go over hurdles.
The venue is Knebworth House in Stevenage, the Pets Pets Pets show no less, hosted by Sainsbury’s and Channel 4’s Pet Rescue. As early as 10am on a balmy July morning, cars have been peeling in off the A1. Topping a bill of decidedly rum attractions is Toyah Willcox, who seems to have forsaken the sexual revolution for Rabbit Revolution – a talk about getting your rabbit out of the hutch and into the home. Around the corner from her is the Pedigree Chum activity arena, where German shepherds bound over seesaws in the manner that enlivened many a dull episode of Wildtrack in Total Sport’s youth. Elsewhere, a young girl with an accent of purest Pauline Quirke anxiously checks the start time of the Reptile Rescue event (I’m ’avin; terrbile bovver wiv me iguana”). Meanwhile, over in the main arena, support acts for the terriers include the HM Customs And Excise dog ream, who helpfully demonstrate how to track down 20lb lumps of cannabis. Then there’s the Parade of the Pedigrees, “and what a bloody spectacle that is” chuckles our man Francis. Formerly a hunt service worker³, both in Britain and Italy, Francis would use terriers to drive out foxes which had gone to ground. His terrier racing career got off to a flying start.
“The particular hunt that I was with used to have a competition for the fastest terrier through a drain,” be recalls. “What they’d done was run drainpipes through a mound in an L-shape. It would be about 30 yands long and they’d put a stopwatch on it. We won that regularly. The dog was hopeless at working but by God he could go through drains! Won a superb tankard for that two years on the trot. Then, there’d be terrier racing.”
Francis’s finest hour came with Sue, a stray found at a sewage treatment plant and an insatiable racer for all her 16 years. “The one thing this little bitch used to love,” he reflects in hushed tones, “terrier racing. You’d put the traps out on the course and you couldn’t get her away from them. You’d let her off the lead and she’d go and sit beside them and she’d sit there all day long. Would not move. And she was the sort of bitch that would run and win and then she’d run back, and if they opened the traps, she’d pop herself back in!”
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Thus one house in Sutton Coldfield came to be stuffed full of rosettes and trophies. Soon, though, jealousy from fellow owners – they’d do anything to stop us from entering - forced Francis out of competitive races. That’s when he embarked on his programme of bringing the sport to the masses with displays like today’s, which carries a strong message about caring for dogs, plus a plug for Wood Green animal shelter. Francis has been known to disqualify “macho” racers for picking their terriers up by the scruff of the neck
The UK championship which Francis also runs, at Chatsworth in September, is open to all-comers. At least it was, before last year’s event was marred by a dog called Nipper. “The problem was that it’s open to any recognised working terrier breed,” recalls Francis. “Well, some bright spark brought in a Staffordshire bull terrier. Fortunately. the rain that we experienced on the Sunday when the final would have been held was such that the whole such that thr whole show was cancelled.”
Size matters in the terrier game. then – there’ll 11 be no dogs over 14 inches tall from now on – but temperament and team orders are important, too. Many’s the second-placed dog that has tried to gain an unfair advantage by grabbing the leader’s tail, only to see the mutt in third seize the moment and streak past. If a terrier so much as turns its bead in mid-race in “You want some?” fashion, it faces an early bath.
Terrier racing looks set to remain for ever part of this hunting and country show netherworld, sharing the limelight with sheepdogs and borse whisperers. And perhaps rightly so: as Adrian Francis admits. the results are too random to really be taken seriously.
“I’ll tell you what is a spectacle, though – dachshund racing. Their ears are flopping about everywhere.”
Footnotes
- You may wonder how a hip young gunslinger like me had ever encountered terrier racing. Well, in the summer of 1990, while staying with my sister, we went to the Westmorland Country Show, near Milnthorpe, and I found the terrier racing by far the most entertaining part of the day (there are only so many wax jacket stalls you can idly browse). Later that summer I spent some of the £50 a week my sister had paid me for labouring on her house going to see Plant & Page, Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Genesis, Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd at …Knebworth House. There weren’t any terriers that day, but wax jackets were well represented. That said, it chucked it down, so maybe the country folk had the last laugh.
- Young, dumb and full of Chum: as well as writing with the reader in mind, sometimes it’s irresistible to slip something in that wil make the commissioning editor spit out their coffee. In this case that was my old listings pal Duncan Steer, who in association with Matt Allen, ensured that a side order of irony helped all those dry features about sport go down. It was an attitude that was no doubt instituted by founding editor Danny Kelly. I only worked with Kelly on one issue but was heartily entertained by his long anecdote about Smiley Culture.
- Freelance subediting had a lot to commend it. Sometimes I would take a job just for a laugh (two weeks at Shooting Times, 16 floors down from NME in the same building, for more field sports fun. There literally was netting and a decoyduck on the ceiling, and a lovely co-worker had just come back from the family boar hunt in Bavaria. Similarly, taking occasional weeks at Total Sport meant I could see Duncan and Matt, and torture designer Del by replacing Level 42 with Mogwai, AC Acoustics and Urusei Yatsura on the office stereo (I miss office stereos). Also, unlike at other magazines, they were keen for me to fill my time writing stuff, and indeed nonsense, like the above. The fun wasn’t going to last for ever, though. Some editors don’t like terriers or Mogwai, and some publishers think moving such a sparkling mag to Peterborough and recruiting locally to save money is a neat idea. Anyway, that wasn’t for a while yet.
