The first attempt to run the British Final was rained off and it was restaged the following Tuesday on 31^st August, a night when stock car racing was also being held at Newton Abbot. – more about this shortly!  The meeting was held up for over an hour following a rider strike over pay rates. After three rides Monk had seven points from three starts and was well on course for a place in the top six, who be the British representatives in the Wembley World Final.

Things started to go awry in his fourth outing when he developed a puncture and was beaten into third place but with eight points he was still very much in the hunt. Heat twenty had three rivals in Ken McKinlay with nine points, Monk on eight and Jimmy Gooch on seven, and the final two qualifiers would almost certainly come from these three. All Charlie needed to do was finish ahead of Gooch. Whether he beat McKinlay or not was irrelevant. It is not known whether Charlie understood this position prior to going out on the track, but it certainly didn’t seem that he did. Monk and McKinlay got away from the tapes ahead of Gooch and diced for the lead for two laps until McKinlay, on the outside, slid into the fence. The red lights were put on and Monk was excluded – a real home track decision! Speedway Star reporter, Paul Parrish, wrote, “I didn’t think Monk had anything to do with McKinlay’s fall” but out he went and his dream of appearing at Wembley was over. The sad thing was that Charlie didn’t have to beat McKinlay at all, just finishing second ahead of Gooch would have been enough.

BBC Sportsview cameras were at the meeting and when Trevor Redmond saw the transmission he immediately slapped in a protest to the Control Board. Quite sensationally, the Speedway Control Board upheld Tigers’ appeal and ordered that heat twenty should be rerun at West Ham the following Tuesday, just four days before the Wembley final. This was a quite incredible outcome, but, from a Glasgow viewpoint, it seemed the correct one. However the Management Committee subsequently overturned this verdict ruling that it would set a dangerous precedent that umpires decisions on matters of fact could be reversed. . In modern day football, it would have been like a disciplinary committee upholding an appeal against a sending off and ordering that the part of the match after the sending off should be replayed! On reflection they probably were correct.

However, if Redmond hadn’t been promoting stock cars at Newton Abbot that night, he would surely have been at Custom House, and he would certainly have understood the position prior to heat twenty. Things could well have been quite different and Tigers may well have had a rider in the World Final. Would Charlie have won the title? Probably not, no rider has won the title on his debut in modern times, but, on a night when favourite Barry Briggs was beset by bike troubles, a place on the rostrum would not have been out of the question. What a night it would have been, undoubtedly the greatest in Glasgow’s history…..if only !