In the first in a series of articles on non league speedway, Doug Nicolson looks at the Open Licence seasons of the 50s.

 

Looking back, open licence seasons were often thought to be a trial year for a fledgling promotion to prove its worth to the authorities. However there were very few teams that were required to serve an open licence “apprenticeship” during the immediate post war boom years in the late 1940s when new tracks invariably went straight into league racing, usually in division three, although Fleetwood and Edinburgh secured division two membership, possibly due to geographic considerations more than anything else.

 

For “openers”

In 1948 Rayleigh ran an open licence season, but their late start at the end of July suggests it was down to delays in building their track, rather than the need to serve a probationary period. They ran 14 meetings through to mid October in a packed half season and were admitted to division three the following year. Despite not having a home track, both Halifax and Leicester rode in a handful of challenge meetings that year. Halifax, known as the “Nomads”, rode at Hull, Plymouth and Rayleigh, while Leicester appeared at Rayleigh, in their opening meeting, at division three Coventry and at non league Santry (Dublin) and High Beech.  

Eastbourne, despite having won the inaugural division three title in 1947, dropped out of

league racing and contented themselves with non league action for the intervening seasons until they joined the newly formed Southern Area League  (SAL) in 1954.

 

A rare success

Disappointingly, there were few instances in the 50s of teams progressing to full league status after a non league season, with Motherwell being a rare “success”. They opened in 1950, running ten meetings from mid July through to September. Their two Aussie signings, Noel Watson and Clive Gressor being augmented with Glasgow juniors Jim Blyth, Joe Ferguson and Niven McCreadie with heatleaders being borrowed mainly from Glasgow and Newcastle. The new promotion seemed to be well funded and received good cooperation from other tracks in the north, leading to them signing Derek Close from Newcastle, Gordon McGregor from Glasgow and Ashfield pair Keith Gurtner and Ron Phillips. Indeed of all the Scottish tracks, the Eagles looked like being the one to ride out the dip in the mid 50s. Sadly, teams were reluctant to come north following Glasgow and Edinburgh’s closure and they were voted out of the league for 1955.

 

‘Shots fired

Aldershot followed Eastbourne’s example, dropping out of the Southern League at the end of 1952 and running “open” the following year before becoming founder members of the Southern Area League in 1954. While this was a virtually amateur training league which ran until 1959, apart from a fallow season in 1958, I have recognised its league status for this article. Teams included Aldershot, Brafield, California, Eastbourne, Ipswich, Ringwood, Rye House and Yarmouth at different times, although the Southern Rovers, a nomadic team, were formed in 1956 and 1957 to ensure there were four teams in the league.  Bob Andrews, Colin Goody and Tommy Sweetman were among the league’s most successful “graduates”.

 

Early 50s drop down disasters

If truth be told, Ashfield was doomed from the moment that the sad news, that Ken LeBreton had been killed, was broken in Glasgow, although the Giants competed in division two for the next two years. Things were never going to be easy without the “White Ghost”, but the departures of Keith Gurtner and Merv Harding in successive seasons to Motherwell and New Cross respectively finished off any realistic hopes of survival. The programme for the final meeting of the 1952 season more or less accepted the inevitable admitting that, without a good team, crowds weren’t going to cover their costs, but they did hope to continue with open meetings in the hope of training up local juniors. Johnnie Hoskins clearly saw the writing on the Ashfield wall and left to become Belle Vue’s general manager in 1953, but not before transferring Willie Wilson to the Manchester club for a staggering £1500! It was left to Norrie Isbister to take charge of Ashfield after they managed to secure an open licence for 1953.

The season started in mid June, a very late start by anyone’s standards, and a handful of meetings were staged including a Scotland v The Dominions which drew around 5,000. The previous season’s Scotland versus England had attracted over three times that figure, highlighting the problems facing the promotion.  Crowds for the following fixtures fell to well below break-even point of 3000. Perhaps fittingly, the LeBreton Memorial Trophy, held at the end of September, after a long gap in the fixture list, proved to be the final meeting. The promotion realised it was time to give up the unequal fight.

Fleetwood and Long Eaton were two other tracks at the time to follow Ashfield’s model of dropping down from league to open licence status, and with a similar lack of success too. Weymouth had a seemingly fruitful, if short, trial season in 1954, when around half a dozen meetings were staged during the holiday period of August and September. This led to admission to Division Two the following year but the earlier start, poor weather and a string of home defeats led to crowds being so disappointing that the plug was pulled before June when holidaymakers may well have swelled the attendances.

 

Irish tracks

Santry, Chapelizoid and Shelbourne were all Dublin based stadia staging the sport at differing times from 1948 onwards, although 1950 was the only year when all three were in operation and, with Belfast’s Dunmore Park also to the fore, it was a boom time for the Emerald Isle, although there was never any real possibility of any of them making the jump into league racing. The Wimbledon virtually turned out en masse as Shelbourne Tigers in 1950 and the following year it was a base for an American squad.

 

Glasgow’s short return

It was no great surprise that Glasgow closed after only a couple of meetings in 1954, as, after running at a big loss in the previous year, they had sold both Tommy Miller and Junior Bainbridge just to get to the tapes to start the season.

However Miller and Bainbridge maintained an affinity for the Paisley Road West track and along with former starting marshal, Peter Thomson, formed a consortium to stage a short season’s racing in 1956. The first meeting was on 16^th May when Scotland lost 57-49 to “auld enemy” England, for whom Peter Craven scored a paid maximum on his debut at the Paisley Road West circuit. This international isn’t included in all the record books, possibly because of its unofficial status and the scorers were

Scotland: Miller 14; McKinlay 11; Bainbridge 8; McGregor 7; Wilson 6; Lazarus 3; W Templeton 0:

England: Craven 17; Forrest 12; Wright 10; Fisher 8; Lightfoot 7; Barsby 3; Edwards 0:

Some reports suggest a crowd of nearly 17000 turned out. If this was the case then they may well have been disappointed as it was said that the track was “not packed tightly” and that “racing suffered”. Perhaps the new promotion wanted to gauge the viability of their new venture before committing themselves to extensive track preparation.

The track was in better condition for the following meetings, which saw the Tigers race fortnightly against Birmingham, Bradford and Norwich as well as a Britain v Overseas event. Interestingly, despite the Tigers never having been in division one, the visitors all came from the top tier. The fans were getting quality riders and good value for their money…if all the visitors turned up! Disappointingly, Bradford arrived without Arthur Forrest and Ove Fundin was the “no show” for the Norwich meeting, the last meeting before the traditional break for the Glasgow Fair holidays in the last fortnight in July. A resumption of racing in August would have required floodlights, and the short season was over. It had probably provided a few extra meetings for the riders concerned and possibly just about cleared the promotions costs. However it wasn’t such a success that the promotion felt inclined to repeat it the following year, possibly not helped by Tommy Miller’s disenchantment with the sport that had led to his early retirement.

 

A bad start but things improved

Things started to improve when the iniquitous Entertainment Tax was finally abolished in 1957, leading to both Exeter and Liverpool making comebacks on open licences. Coventry’s Reg Duval rather tactlessly declared he could make a fortune by reopening Liverpool but found too many obstacles put in his way and the operation closed in early June. He also found his team place at Brandon in jeopardy. However he did ride for Liverpool when it reopened in 1960 but as it closed after just one season, it’s doubtful that it was ever going to be his personal goldmine.

Exeter fitted in eight meetings from the end of July, including visits from Norwich, Southampton, Oxford and Swindon.  Poole too staged open licence meetings starting around the same time and Rayleigh raced a couple of NL meetings there in September, a prelude to Vic Gooden moving the promotion to Wimborne Road for 1958.

 

On the edge

Tracks at the extremities of the sport opened for 1958, with Motherwell in the north and St Austell down in Cornwall joining Exeter in The South West Peninsula and, although the SAL didn’t operate, former members Aldershot, Eastbourne, Rye House and Yarmouth again staged junior meetings.

Motherwell didn’t really leave league speedway in the mid 50s. In some ways, the league left them.  No teams were prepared to come north of Manchester for the 1955 season, and they were more or less expelled from the league. Ian Hoskins led the Eagles return in 1958, basing the season on junior racing, although most of the Golden Eagles had previously ridden for at least one of the Scottish tracks – the Templeton brothers, Doug and Willie, Jimmy Tannock, Red Monteith, Gordon Mitchell and Fred Greenwell. However it was the final member of the squad, George Hunter, a young grass tracker from Fife, who came to the fore in the preseason practice sessions held at Milton Street and was Hoskins greatest ever “find”.

Motherwell staged a short series of challenge matches against juniors from Belle Vue, Bradford, Coventry, Leicester and Ipswich. These meetings showed that there was still an interest in speedway north of the border, but the visitors’ travelling was quite demanding, with one team resorting to coming up by train to Motherwell station, a short push to the track. The Eagles were generally too strong for the opposition, and the problem of finding visitors willing to make the long journey north on a Friday was all to evident, with Jack Kitchen, Brian Meredith and Colin Goody, all being booked for at least two meetings.

Had the Eagles opened up again in 1959 for a similar short season, then this venture would probably have been considered a success, and may well have led to Motherwell, not Edinburgh, becoming Scotland’s first entrants into the fledgling Provincial League in 1960, but once again persuading riders to travel north, and the costs involved, had proved to be an insurmountable obstacle.

Exeter staged five meetings, spread out from Easter until mid September, team events against Wimbledon and Southampton, and three individuals, one being a “Stars of Tomorrow“, with St Austell running a similar number but fitting them in during August and early September. The Gulls had an impressive guest list with Ove Fundin, Ronnie Moore, Peter Craven, Jack Young, Ken McKinlay, Peter Moore and Barry Briggs being amongst the big names who made the long journey down to Cornwall.

Rye House were similar late starters while Yarmouth fitted their meetings into the prime weeks of the holiday season. The Bloaters certainly gave the juniors their chance but “tooled up” with Young, Craven and Moore for the local derby against Norwich which they narrowly lost 46-50.

 

1959

Bristol, Plymouth and New Cross all ran a short non league seasons, with the first two including a meeting against Swedish tourists. Bristol rather bullishly announced that they hoped to sign Bjorn Knutson to lead their team in the following year. Sadly he joined Southampton shortly after this announcement although he did turn out for the Bulldogs in two late season meetings. Bristol were founder members, and title contenders, of the newly formed Provincial League, but were shocked when their Knowle Stadium home was sold for redevelopment after their first year in the newly formed league. The team moved virtually en masse to Plymouth, retaining their Bulldogs nickname for the first year there, although speedway only survived for two seasons at Pennycross.  New Cross, too, had a shelf life of just two league seasons before closing at the end of 1961.

 

Historic meetings

The decade closed with some seemingly minor meetings being staged that summer and they never got the recognition at the time that history now affords them. Mike Parker ran a couple of Cavalcade of Sport meetings, involving both speedway and cars at Bradford and Liverpool in late July, with a similar event being run at Cradley’s Dudley wood stadium.  They would prove to be Genesis chapter one verse one for the Provincial League, while up in Edinburgh there was a truly remarkable meeting, a university students charity meeting. Imagine a junior rider getting permission to stage a meeting at a currently unused track and persuading a former World Champion to appear. Even for a good cause, it would never happen today. Well way back in 1959, Ian “Bruno” Hart did just that. While a student at Edinburgh University he first persuaded the university’s Engineering Society of his charity plan, before getting the local council, the owners of old Meadowbank and then the riders on board. He must have been quite a persuasive character.

On April 18, 1959 he supplemented Doug Templeton, Willie Templeton, Fred Greenwell, George Hunter, Gordon Mitchell and Jimmy Tannock, all of whom had turned out for Motherwell, with Jimmy Cox, Bill Landels, Bob Torrance, Jimmy Cramb and Norman Wright, throwing himself in for good measure too. Doug Templeton won the meeting with 14 points, losing only to Fred Greenwell in his last race. Greenwell and Willie Templeton were joint runners up with 12. In a Challenge Race, Ronnie Moore headed home Fred Greenwell and Willie and Doug Templeton. This historic meeting probably led to Hoskins deciding that Edinburgh would be his preferred location for a PL team in 1960.

Interestingly Bruno staged a similar event the following year – and on a night when the Monarchs were making their PL debut at Stoke. Undaunted, he persuaded Bradford riders to travel north for the meeting which also featured Wimbledon’s Ron How.

 

Do these count?

The Middlesbrough team transferred to Newcastle for the 1949 season and, unlike others, were refused an open licence to continue at Cleveland Park. However the Middlesbrough Motor Cycle club staged a handful of meetings between 1953 and 1955 using various bikes which contemporary reports say had brakes but that they were disconnected for racing. Even more bizarrely some bike races were staged in a Cavalcade of Sports event at London’s White City, featuring top liners Jack Young, Aub Lawson, Bill Kitchen, Split Waterman and Freddie Williams riding on Vespa motor scooters, as it was feared speedway bikes would damage the running track!

While league racing at Wembley ended in 1956, World Finals continued to be held there, but you wouldn’t exactly call them open licences!