SPEED & WHEELS

During that very brief spell in the late 1940s and early 1950s when cycle speedway became popular amongst the young (fleetingly popular, I should say, because its appeal did not linger long at many locations) our gang 'borrowed' a farmer's field in Docking's Halt, Long Sutton (Lincs) and used sticks and jackets to mark out a track. It was a tentative beginning, but our efforts did not last long, either, despite the lure of the speed and the racing, because it quickly became apparent that (a) crashes were commonplace, and (b) the chances of badly damaging your bike were high.
No-one could really afford to allow that to happen, because a smashed wheel or bent forks was likely to put a chap off the road for many weeks, or at least until pocket money savings measured up to the cost of repair and the spare parts. So instead, we decided to cycle off on high days and holidays to a much safer environment at Belle End, a few miles away, where the crowd-pleasing sport of grass track speedway was just beginning to develop.
We went, I think, three or four times, possibly as an alternative to playing football of going to the cinema, because in the years immediately after the War there was not much else to do and crowds, seeking entertainment and thrills, would quite frankly flock in huge numbers to watch almost anything.
Wind the story on to about 1960/61, and to a new location (Norwich), and I landed the job (or was ordered to do it) of speedway correspondent for our evening paper. In those days Norwich Stars were still pulling in 5,000 to 7,000 crowds at the Firs Stadium on Saturday evenings, though they actually had an even greater niche in speedway history. I heard yesteryear tales of 15,000-plus crowds, and speedway Test matches against the Aussies, with the local Press bringing out special editions.
Things were quieter and calmer in the 1960s, and the sport had lost a lot of of its general appeal, but it was still fun, approachable and friendly, and the Firs was the sort of ramshackle place where mum and dad could take the kids for an evening out to enjoy the floodlights, the racket of the engines, the racing, and the socialising. 
Norwich had three big sports stadia in those days (or four if you included Carrow Road), two of them - Boundary Park and City Stadium - being greyhound racing locations. But all three, including the Firs, were allowed to slip off the sporting scene largely because of the lure of housing development. Not before I got a little taste of what speedway must have been like in its heyday, though. I would wander the pits, talking to the riders and the tinkering mechanics, and chat up manager Gordon Parkins (who also kept the Firs pub) to persuade him to drop tit-bits and stories for my column. It was all very relaxed and good natured. Free and easy, almost.
So there was the social side, and the racing (though to be frank, I thought it a tad predictable; I once went through all the heats printed in the programme and picked out every winner). And there was Ove Fundin, who was in a different league. Tall, elegant, dedicated, he won nearly everything nearly all of the time. Even at Wembley. At one stage they tried to handicap him, making him start many yards back, but he still won. Most of the time. Then they sold the Firs, the whole caboodle, and that was the end, and I changed jobs and joined the morning newspaper.
Some of the city's glamour died when they switched off the Firs floodlights for the last time, but it was great stuff while it lasted.