BENNY GREEN
it must be at least ten years now since I first realised that London was a thing of the past, and at least five since I made a resolution to go quietly about it. The Simpletonian-Shoe- box school of architecture having succeeded in its plot to use straight lines and right angles to send us all raving mad, there is going to be precious little for any of us to salvage from the wreck, least of all me. As my elementary school, my local fleapit and my youth club have already disappeared, I consider myself quite hardened to the process by now, but I must confess that the latest episode in the campaign to dehumanise the city and dis- orientate my mind depressed me more than usual, if only because nobody seems to have grasped its true significance.
The announcement that the White City Stadium is to be 'redeveloped', which will probably turn out to be a polite name for halving its size and doubling its hideousness, drew forth a great chorus of lamentation from choirs of middle-aged men who mis- spent their youth galloping around its running track, bUt not so much as a paragraph, a line, a word about the really important loss which the passing of the old White City will entail. Wooderson, Chataway and company can shed as many crocodile tears as they please, but it is ridiculous to pretend that anyone ever associated the White City with any sport other than greyhound racing. The White City and the dogs have always been synony- mous, and the real reason why the bookies never turned up for the athletics meetings was that the whole thing was too dull for anyone to want to speculate. You have only to think of the sheer absurdity of trying to nobble a lady discus-thrower to see that.
The extent of the vast chasm separating the two-legged runners from their four-leg- ged brothers was illustrated to perfection last week by the ex-varsity athlete _Sir Bernard 'Four-Minute' Miles. It appears that even before news of the redevelopment, the Amateur Athletic Association had been toy- ing with the idea of holding no more public meetings at the stadium, on the feeble excuse that the public no longer came to them. Sir Bernard's solution for the problem of the vanished audience is that for the important matches the White City 'should be filled with dummies'. If only Sir Bernard had realised it, the White City already is filled with dum- mies, every Saturday night,.and has been for more than forty years, a dummy in this context meaning a man who pays admission for the privilege of putting his money on a dog he has no affection for, which has been trained by a man he has never met, in a Physical contest whose mechanics he knows nothing about. I know, because on exam- ination a remarkably high percentage of those dummies turn out to be close relatives
of mine.
As no punter ever reads anything but the !tailing prices, it is very possible that my lather and my uncles are still unaware that the old track may be built over. When they
do learn the news, and realise that there is a conspiracy in the wind to deprive them of their favourite device for keeping themselves on the breadline, the howl will be audible from here to the cheap stand of the remotest flapping gaff, such being human nature. For as long as I can remember, my relatives have been drawn to the dogs and the horses like moths to the flame, and for such men, to whom the patter of little feet means an apprentice race for two-year-olds, the White City has always possessed a very special charm, a symbolic as well as an actual impor- tance, the dog-backer's Camelot where the Holy Grail lies somewhere behind the facade of the totalisator board and Lancelot is anyone who tips you a winner. One of the definitive effects of my childhood is the sound of stampeding herds of blood relations converging on the place with the feverish haste of men who are utterly convinced that tonight is the night the track officials are giving money away.
There was even one time, during the last war I think, when we actually owned a dog and ran it at the White City. He was to be the making of all our fortunes, but as I remember it, something went wrong. I was never very clear about the details, but appar- ently it was something to do with the poor mutt's temperament. His name- escapes me, but I do recall that it had a deadly propen- sity to socialise with the other dogs, so that when it hit the front, instead of trying to stay there, it would turn and wait for the others to draw alongside, at which point it would trot along with an amiability which was no doubt good for its soul but fatal for the family hopes. Eventually my uncle gave him away, but that never worked out either. Most dogs in such a situation would run away to return to their original owner, but not our champion. He walked away. •
This was all in the days when you could say to a cab driver 'White City' and be con- fident of ending up on the terraces. Today if you do that you are just as likely to end up in a discussion group on Late Night Line Up. But as part of my campaign to preserve the real London inside my head if nowhere else, I shall always think of the White City as it was in the days of its true greatness, when 60,000 people attended the final of the Greyhound Derby and 59,990 had to walk home afterwards, or best of all, of that lost Saturday night of a million years ago when a mathematically inclined cousin of mine from the north, went to the White City armed with his notebooks and reference books, the results of years of intense study, lasted out for three races and then wired home the immortal message, 'System going well. Send more money.'
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