Free How to Be English by David Boyle

BECAUSE of the use of sheds that the sports of pigeon-fancying and pigeon racing seem so English? Is it that peculiar link that working-class English males have to the wooden shack down the garden, full of nameless intricacies, that pigeon racing seems so much like a national sport? Or is it something to do with the squadrons of pigeons that used to descend on Trafalgar Square in London – until dealt with in one of the first acts of the new mayor of London in 2000?
    That isn’t clear. What is certain is that people have kept and bred pigeons in these islands, or used their homing instincts to deliver messages, for centuries and probably well into Roman times. But the sport of racing pigeons was actually developed by the Belgians, and it was only when the king of Belgium, the brutal Leopold II, gave the British royal family breeding birds that the sport began to take off over here in a big way. The first English pigeon race was held in 1881, encouraged mainly because the Belgians used to start their races from southern England.
    Since then, the sport has been declining steadily – along with cloth caps and whippets – though it is attracting big money in the USA and so will almost inevitably be re-imported at some point. There remains something distinctively northern about pigeon-fancying, and there is the cliché of the clipped and reserved Yorkshireman who lavishes love and care on his pigeons, but finds it hard to do the same for his own children. It is a small slice of the great paradox of the English, for whom animals have often seemed a more comfortable conduit for love than human beings.
    In fact, there is – as so often – rather a class divide involved. The working classes created their sheds out of old pieces of wood and scrap and concentrated on racing short distances, while the long-distance racers had to be aristocratic or anyway someone with the means to pay for it. The pigeons themselves came on to the market at low, affordable prices because the invention of the electric telegraph began to put them out of business as professional carriers of messages.
    The return of pigeon post came during the siege of Paris in 1870–1; the English watched entranced as French pigeons carried over a million messages in and out of the city, over the Prussian lines. Then the rise of football as a working-class pastime in England in the final Victorian decades seems to have driven out the pigeons again. The days when the birds could be described as black caps, yellow boots and chockers, and the husky voices of a pigeon-fancier could be recognised immediately – maybe an early example of what we now know as pigeon-fancier’s lung – have long gone.
    But it has been a slow decline. The London, Midland and Scottish Railway reckoned it carried 7 million pigeons during the 1929 racing season. In 1934, one pigeon racer described his feelings when a fancier could see his own bird returning and stood ‘transfixed, electrified; there comes the faint rustle of wings: almost simultaneously upon the small platform at the entrance to the loft, there is the bird of his dreams’. There is no doubt of the strange mixture of reticence and emotion about the whole thing.
    For George Orwell, pigeon-fancying emphasised what he called the ‘privateness’ of English life. He even condemned as ‘something ruthless and soulless’ the health and safety housing improvement regulations, which attempted to stamp pigeons out.
He marched off with a bunch of flowers in his hand and several pigeon eggs in his overall pockets … On arrival home, he put the eggs in a basin on the sink, awkwardly, almost abruptly, he handed the flowers to mother. No words, no glances, just a muffled grunt that seemed to say all that needed saying.
William Woodruff describing his father’s return to Blackburn from a pigeon race in
The Road to Nab End
(2001)

THERE IS A certain kind of dull-headed English