My mother used to make marvellous pigeon pie. But then, she had plenty of practice; my father used to give her pigeons practically every week.
They were an incidental bonus, a spin-off from the Whittington Moor 'pigeon ledgers' - one of his many gambling activities. Most weeks he and a group of friends - up to thirty of them at a time - would indulge in this somewhat unsubtle pastime. A row of pigeon baskets would be lined up, each with a long string attached to it, the pigeons would be released one at a time by this primitive remote control and the participants took it in turn to see whether they could shoot their bird down. At the centre of activities was a complicated sweepstake which my father ran. And since he indeed organised the whole event he naturally had the pick of the pigeon victims.
All of this was typical of pop. If you could bet on it, he would organise it. And if there was something in it for him, all the better.
Many men in the mining villages round and about used to keep whippets, as they do even now (and my father used to oblige, of course, by organising whippet races). But father liked to be one better. So we kept boxers - not the dogs, the two-legged ones who wear boxing gloves. These lads were basically miners with some pugilistic ability. But in those days the wages that miners earned were so low that they could not afford to eat enough to maintain the physical condition necessary for the boxing ring. It is one thing to be a 'hungry fighter', another to be, literally, an undernourished fighter. My father's aim was simple; he would feed them up while they trained to be champions. So they came to live with us at the Queens Hotel. In style. Mother had to give up her best bedroom.
Chesterfield had produced some doughty fighters, and my father could see no reason why he should not have a hand in maintaining the town's image in this respect. Billy Green, the one-time boxing champion of England at 8 stone 6 lb, was an example to all local lads. And others such as Tommy Mitchell, a featherweight, and flyweights George Jaggers and Johnny Lowry have been local household names who could hold their own with the best. Billy Green took a Chesterfield pub, The Phoenix, when on doctor's orders he had to retire from the ring in 1923. His Pitman's Bantamweight Championship belt still hangs on the pub wall for, at the time of writing, he has been in the Phoenix for fifty-two years - the licensee with the longest run in any house in England. When I spoke to him recently on the secret of his unflagging spirits at the age of eighty-two he recommended: 'A drop of whisky, a good cigar - then sit back and let the world go by.'
But, to be honest, the quality of pop's pugilists was far from matching that of Billy in his prime. Possibly the man with the greatest potential was one Jim Booth, a middleweight. Somehow, though, his heart was not in the right place - at least not the right place for the boxing ring. And on top of this he had in his make-up another serious flaw: laziness. Certainly he never seemed to relish the prospect, at six o'clock every morning, of running over the rural roadways of Derbyshire. (Nor did I blame him.) But my father, hoping against hope that Booth would ultimately make the necessary mental breakthrough, insisted on this training, while to make sure there was no backsliding - and to offer much-needed encouragement - my father insisted on accompanying him. Needless to say, he performed this onerous duty in the comparative comfort of a pony and trap.
No doubt my father felt that he had earned, or needed, the relaxation of the pony and trap after the immense effort required each morning to wake up the reluctant middle-weight. My father tried alarm clocks, but these made no impression at a]]. Then he tried hand bells and any other banging, rattling or crashing sound he could conjure up. We marvelled at his inventiveness. But the most drastic method dreamed up to shatter unlucky Jim's dreams was to use his shotgun. One morning, in desperation, pop stood at Jim's bedroom window and blasted away into the darkness. With both barrels. And as there was a brick wall directly opposite, pieces of brick fell like shrapnel all around. For once in his life Jim emulated the gun by shooting out of bed. But my father's capacity for endurance did have its bounds. Jim went on to fight a few ineffectual bouts and was then sent back down the pit.
The old man was a great practical joker. His best effort was at the expense of one of the pub customers when he backed himself to race the customer to Whittington Moor from a remote spot called Cutthorpe, a good three and a half miles away. Came the great day, my father set off like one of the local whippets and was soon lost to sight among the high hedges that flanked the winding country road. Smiling to himself, his opponent jogged along at a pace more appropriate to a long-distance run, confident that my father would soon run out of steam. There was, of course, method in my father's apparent madness, for some way down the road a friend of his was waiting with a bicycle. My father hopped on and cycled gently to within half a mile of the finishing line, at which point he dismounted and trotted home as fit as a fiddle. Yet even with this advantage his opponent was coming into view as my father finished - though he was in nowhere near as good shape; they practically had to help him over the finishing line. Afterwards my father confessed to his ruse and no money changed hands. The other fellow took it with good grace and no harm was done. Or so the story goes.
When I look back at my father's activities, I can only wonder at his enterprise. At one stage, though I can recall few details, he ran his own football team. Curiously, since it is fair to say that it is not specially noted for its famous sons, Chesterfield has helped to produce three outstanding soccer players, generations apart. And all of them were goalkeepers. First came Sam Hardy who began playing for a local team, before the days of my father's side, called Newbold White Star. He was spotted as a talent and signed up by Chesterfield in 1903. It was not long before he was transferred to Liverpool and then, in 1912, to Aston Villa. He moved to Nottingham Forest in 1921 where he stayed for four years until retiring from the game. Later he returned to his home town, dying there in 1966. Out of Chesterfield more recently has come Bob Wilson who kept goal for Arsenal and Scotland whilst the already-legendary Gordon Banks, though born in neighbouring Sheffield, signed to play for Chesterfield in 1955. In 1959 he joined Leicester City for £6,000 and was transferred in 1967 to Stoke City, for whom he played until the car crash which effectively halted his playing career while the unchallenged holder of the England No. 1 jersey.
Sadly, my father never produced anyone remotely in this class in any of his sporting ventures. Yet another of his protégés never to have gone down in the hail of fame was a fellow rejoicing in the name of Tommy Thomas, whom pop sponsored as an 'even time' sprint runner. In training Thomas, pop put me to sprinting too and discovered that I was reasonably adept at it - though no good at all as a stayer. In due course I won several local sprints although, as I was only a lad, these victories were on handicap, not even-time. And if my father was pleased he never let me know about it! I also proved a useful hand at bowls, small ones of course. In the summer months we had great times on the green at the Queens Hotel. My mother would scuttle around putting on dinners for the bowlers (as she did in the winter for the footballers) while serving in the bar in between times.
The last of my father's hobbies - though where his hobbies ended and his business activities began was sometimes difficult to discern - was horse racing. His love of the sport was bred into him, as it were for his parents lived at the Chesterfield racecourse grandstand where they acted as caretakers. Chesterfield Races had a long and distinguished history. They were believed to have been started around the year 1685 by the first Duke of Devonshire, a noted sportsman, although the first printed record, in Ghent's list of horse races, is of a meeting held in the town on June 14th, 1727. The races continued until 1871 when they ceased to be recognised by the turf authorities. Yet even at their last gasp they managed to carve a little niche in racing history for it was in 1870 that the legendary Fred Archer, riding Athol Daisy, won his first race.
After 1871, like a Duchess in reduced circumstances, the races managed to continue as a flapping meeting until, in 1924, the land was bought by the Corporation for housing and recreation grounds.
The two-day meeting always began on the Monday before Goodwood and continued on the Tuesday, which was Steward's Cup day. The event always seemed to me one of the high spots of the calendar and my father was always deeply involved. He was a committee member and undertook various official functions from time to time. At the final meeting, I recall, he was the starter and on another occasion the judge.
But he was not one to sit back merely as an organisation man, no matter how energetic. He could not resist having his own horses and racing them, though not, of course, on the occasions when he was filling official roles. Over all, he had three horses, called Rosemary, Kitty and Salmon, which he bought at different times from Melton Vasey, the well-known Doncaster trainer. Among the many distinguished winners trained by Vasey was North Drift, owned by a friend of my father called Pip Downing, which won the Manchester November Handicap in 1931. Downing was a bookmaker and professional punter (he backed me to win the Billiards Championship in 1928). He fancied his horse strongly, but instead of backing it to the hilt he contacted as many people as he could who had drawn North Drift in the Irish Sweep and bought their tickets. As North Drift romped home Pip Downing cleaned up a large proportion of the prize.
It was not long after arriving at the Queens Hotel that my father had the idea of branching out into the cinema business since the silent movies were becoming very popular at the time. In 1912 he built an iron staircase outside the pub, leading from the street to a large club-room which ran over the stables in the pub yard. Naturally my hard-working mother was fully involved. This time her second-best bedroom was given up to be a projection-room, with a hole ignominiously knocked through one wall to accommodate the projector. And my mother herself ran the box-office.
My role - I could hardly escape having to do something to help out - was as assistant to the man who came to operate the projector for 25/- a week. One night, when we were showing The Great Train Robbery, I was told to keep turning the projector handle while he repaired one of the reels, which were always snapping. For a while I did as I was told, listening to the pianist beavering away down below, but eventually I turned round to watch die projectionist. At this point, as Hoffnung says in his famous brick-loading speech, I must have lost my presence of mind! I stopped turning the handle. The carbon-arc lamps took over. Up went the film in a spectacular blaze. The projection-room shutter came down - but not before someone below had shouted 'Fire'. Luckily I was able to whip off the reel and drop it into a bucket of water standing nearby. So I prevented a stampede, which would have been bad for business. But I still lost the job. Not that I minded. All that standing around as an unpaid projectionist's assistant was a terrible waste of good billiards time.