‘The Poor Man’s Racehorse’

Donnie Zehr May 30, 26

Homing pigeons are known to have been used to carry messages since the earliest times. In 776 BC the victors at the first Olympic Games were announced to cities throughout Greece by pigeons and Julius Caesar is said to have used them on his campaigns. In the 16th century they conveyed messages across the Ottoman Empire and by the early 19th century they were carrying news across the English Channel. It is no accident that, in 1815, word of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was brought to London by pigeon. 

It was not until slightly later that the idea of racing homing pigeons for sport took hold. It was most likely introduced to Britain by Belgian racers, who were releasing their birds from as early as 1819. Yet it did not really get going until the arrival of the electrical telegraph, a little over a decade later. With birds no longer needed to carry information, traders, newspapers and government agencies sold their stock on, making them more readily available to early hobbyists. 

Pigeon racing appears to have first put down roots in the south of England. The documentary record is patchy, but some of the first people to keep birds are found in London. Weavers in Spitalfields were rearing pigeons for flying no later than 1830. From there, the practice spread northwards. By 1850 it was so well established in Bolton that it attracted the attention of public health officials; by 1860 it had reached Derbyshire; and in 1877 it made its first known appearance in Northumbria. 

By then, races had already become a weekly activity in many parts of the country. They were, at first, short-distance affairs and generally involved enthusiasts from a single village or community. The set-up was rudimentary. The birds were taken to a pre-determined location, usually no more than ten miles away, and then released to fly back to their coops. When they arrived, their owners had to take them to an agreed meeting point, often a pub or shop. The first to get there was the winner. Later, longer races, organised along more formal lines, became the norm. In this case, trains were used to take the pigeons to the starting point; rings were attached to the birds’ legs to aid identification; specialised clocks were brought in to record the exact time of arrival; and winners were determined based on average speed, rather than arrival at a second, arbitrary, location. 

Participants could come from all walks of life. Longer races, in particular, tended to attract people from a wide range of different backgrounds. In 1892 a club in Newcastle counted doctors, businessmen and colliery managers among its members and, in 1899, the Prince of Wales even won a race in Lerwick. But, from the beginning, shorter races were dominated by working men and the sport as a whole continued to be seen as a stereotypically working-class activity. As one Wigton racer put it, pigeons were ‘the poor man’s racehorse’. Miners – especially in South Wales, northern England and central Scotland – were among the most ardent racers. Towards the end of the First World War, Jeff Bell recalled that, in his Cumbrian mining town, ‘everybody had a small loft …and we used to race from about a hundred and fifty mile’. A few years later, a Welsh miner estimated that in Rhondda villages, there were four or five lofts in every street.