PLEASE READ CAREFULLY SO YOU KNOW THAT YOU ARE BUYING A HARDBACK COPY OF "RAGS TO RICHES" AND A PDF OF "TWENTY TWO WATERLOO CUPS"

Twenty Two Waterloo Cups 1981-2005 was published in August 2022 and sold out within three months. It will not be reprinted. As there were so many disappointed customers, the author is now making it available as a PDF as part of a package with his novel Rags To Riches. Please see item number 115852312730 for all details of Rags To Riches,  an action-packed novel featuring a host of colourful characters and racing, coursing, and hunting scenes, including the Grand National and the Waterloo Cup.

For £20, including free UK postage (subsidised overseas rates) you will receive a hardback copy of Rags To Riches, and a 2GB memory stick preloaded with the entire PDF of Twenty Two Waterloo Cups 1981-2005. You will be able to read it, and enjoy all the fabulous photographs, on any PC, Laptop or notebook that is compatible with the memory stick. IT IS NOT AN E-BOOK THAT CAN BE DOWNLOADED ONTO A KINDLE OR IPAD.

Twenty Two Waterloo Cups 1981-2005

The Waterloo Cup, the “blue riband” event of greyhound coursing, once was a national sporting event. Its originator in 1836, William Lynn of the Waterloo Hotel, Liverpool, ran it as part of a sporting package in tandem with his great steeplechase, the Grand National. Its winners were feted as celebrities, the triple winner Master M’Grath even being presented to Queen Victoria. Enormous crowds flocked to the peat flats at Great Altcar, north of Liverpool, to watch the three days of the meeting.

By the 1970’s the event appeared to be in terminal decline. The last of the Earls of Sefton, who had hosted the meeting on their estate since its inception, died in 1972. In the interregnum before the estate was sold, its stock of wild brown hares, which were coursed at the event, was ravaged by local poachers. By 1978 it was no longer possible to run the event for its traditional sixty four runners.

When all seemed lost, a new organising committee revitalised the event by restoring and conserving the hare stock. The new owner of the estate, Lord Leverhulme, gave his enthusiastic support to the project. In 1981, after a hiatus of four years, the Waterloo Cup was run for again. It continued, with ever increasing popularity, until 2005 when the sport was banned by Parliament.

Charles Blanning witnessed all twenty two of those Waterloo Cups, firstly as a correspondent for the Sporting Chronicle and then for the Racing Post. He tells a colourful and intriguing story, not only of the famous greyhounds which contested the event, but also of the personalities involved.

There were the crowds who flocked in their thousands to watch – the “snobs and yobs” as Sir Mark Prescott refers to them in his hilarious foreword. While the “snobs” in the Nominators’ Car Park lunched off champagne and plovers’ eggs, the “yobs” on the Public Bank fried bacon butties on primus stoves and dived naked into the drainage ditches. There were the legendary trainers, many of them from Ireland like Ger McKenna, as famous on the greyhound tracks as on the coursing field. There was Michael O’Donovan from Tipperary, the “tortured genius” who produced the winner six times. And always there were the beautiful greyhounds themselves, perfected by evolution over thousand of years for a unique purpose