January 1966: Greyhound dogs for sale at Hackney Wick Stadium

Remember going to Hackney sales. Always well attended and were considered the premier sales at the time.

my friend brought a greyhound there 8 guineas was top class at hendon rathina lad trained by henry coalbrooke

anyone remember the casino after racing at hendon greyhounds was  upstairs

Travelled down many times mid 70's.
My wife thought Westmead County was most beautiful dog she had ever seen. I bought a young dog of his there to go flapping, turned out to be not very good. Another time also took a dodgepot I had to sell. Didn't get a bid. Took it home and sold it to a Kinsley bookie for £20.
My best buy was a bitch from a Highgate flap sale. Didn't win her trial,I just saw something in her.
Happy days with some good mates.

that is some picture sparrow, never ever be like that again. did you see what I did there. cheers.

Never saw a thing, bairn.

Apart from that great wide runner that is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TjnRI2NawU

apparently j r tolkien would have been happier living his life in a different time span than that of his actual life……looking at that photograph…..who here would prefer to wake up tomorrow back in the sixties……as you are now…..not time travel armed with the results of the passing years….for some of us effectively living their fathers lifetime others their grandfathers lifetime……living as they did…….on the wages they earned in the houses they rented…..with the technology….infrastructure and living wages of the time….

winja, it would all depend on a persons individual circumstances as to whether they would prefer to live now or in another era.

you would need to separate family and circumstances sparrow......very uncomplicated....purely academic....

Well to simplify matters I would have preferred to live in the 60s if I had been more prosperous. But I had only started work in 1962 so that would have been nigh impossible.

Trouble is, it is likely that a good few people in the 1960's would have preferred to have lived in an earlier era.

It is one of life's enigmas that none of us really know how good something or some time was until after it has passed!

Just think of the 1960's and 1970's for dog racing music. Christ, I would have been out every night at one or the other. Think of the top groups we could have easily gone to see before they became legends. Doesn't bear thinking about.

But those of us who grew up in the 60's and 70's took everything around us for granted because it was the norm. Now we know it wasn't.

your right about taking things for granted......i thought hackney dogs would be around forever as the land was marshland which was not conducive for housing estates but thanks to some skulduggery it went into receivership on the night the £12m relaunched track opened.....when it shut in 1997 it was finally acquired in 2003 and flattened with £700m of contingency funding allocated to pay for all costs associated with delivery of the media centre for the olympics which was built on the site with a construction cost of £355m.....after the olympics it was redeveloped again under the legacy heading with a further £150m spent turning it into various outlets including BT sports studios........the amount of poppy that was found to develop the site for things not associated with dog racing was unbelievable.......

Winja,

Yes, the whole business of the Hackney Wick development was pretty dire throughout. I was fortunate enough from 1992 to 1994 to be able to go to almost every Hackney meeting. Tuesday afternoon, every other Thursday afternoon and every Saturday morning. It was a track I had been to as a young boy with my father and then periodically after that, but 1992 saw me revisit after many years.

1992 and 1993 were brilliant but few of us regulars welcomed the news in the late summer of 1993 that an extensive redevelopment was on the way. We knew it could go wrong very easily and by the time in 1994 we had all been shifted to the stand tarted up on the other side of the track while the main stand was demolished the writing was on the wall.

Sadly, I can well recall the one of the heads of the syndicate that bought the track in 1993 being at Romford Dogs splashing around the fifties betting on every race. The word got around that this individual was betting with some of the Natwest millions which the syndicate had borrowed to do the redevelopment.

Once the new track, the Embassy Stadium, was complete I went a few times but the essence of the old track was gone and the very short run-in from the final bend seemed to wreck the chances of big finishers.

I went there for the final time in August 1994 and ended my time there with £140 to £40 a dog in trap 3 called, I think, Rose of Tralee. It was a short runner and only held on by a head that night because of the short run-in!

I knew the track was in trouble and then the history as you have described it kicked off. All very sad and I often wonder if Natwest took a bath over the original loan?