Despite our first whippet, Whisky, being from racing stock the sport itself had passed us as a family by. That all changed when we got our second one.

It all sort of happened by circumstance. My dad had talked about Whisky’s mum winning some big race in the dim and distant past but that was really as far as our connection to the sport got. Then, just as we were thinking about getting another dog, out of the blue there was an article in the local paper about a whippet racing championships being run on the playing fields of the local Grammar school.

Presumably the article had been run because there was a dispute between the middle-class parents of children who attended the school and those who had agreed to the whippet racing event taking place on the sports fields.

I’m not sure when we became middle-class. It sort of happened by stealth. My parents definitely did not start out in the middle-classes having come from mining families, we were definitely not middle-class when I was born into a Derbyshire mining community and my dad drunk in the Robin Hood with the locals. I suppose it happened when we moved to Anglesey and they bought their first house. We must have been middle-class when we had a house down a road in another North Wales village that was home largely to people who drove Rovers and were members of the golf club. The thing is we might have been middle-class, but we were never snobs.

Whippets may be fashionable with the upwardly mobile today, but back in the sixties and seventies they were just ahead of ferrets as a badge of not belonging as far as the middle-classes were concerned. That never seemed to bother my parents at all.

As far as I can remember the whippet racing championships planned for the Grammar School field did not take place, but they did spark an idea in my older brother about how to get hold of a whippet pup for us. Somehow he managed to track down that whippet racing had a monthly magazine called Whippet News and got hold of the telephone number of the Editor.

Pauline Wilson edited Whippet News at that time and to this day is probably the best editor the magazine has had. She simply told my brother that what he needed was a ‘natural’, which we assumed meant a dog that would take to racing like a duck takes to water, and pointed us in the direction of a litter that had been advertised in the most recent issue. And so it was that we availed ourselves of a racing whippet.

We bought the new pup from a miner who lived near Wakefield and raced his dogs at Dewsbury Whippet Racing Club. He was a friendly chap called Derek (Dick for short for some reason) Chivers, who kept the pups in a pen at the top of his back garden with their mother. Outside his back door, essentially blocking access to the back garden, he had a black Staffordshire Bull Terrier that lived in one of those little dog houses you might have seen on Tom and Jerry. Unfortunately, the dog tended to welcome strangers with a wag of its tail and a slobbery kiss, much to Dick’s irritation.

Given we were complete novices he was very patient with us as we set about working out which one of the five pups we wanted. There were four bitches and we narrowed it down to two blue ones because we’d read that their grandfather was a famous whippet sire called Blue Peter who naturally enough was blue. My older brother wanted the one that was entirely blue, but she was at the bottom of the pecking order in the litter and I managed to persuade him that we should go for the blue one with white markings that was bossing all the others around. We paid £20 (£100 today) for her and arranged to pick her up in two weeks when she was six weeks old.

I know for most breeds of pup that is very young, but it was the norm in those days for whippet pups and there is some sense in it. Whippet pups, particularly racing whippet pups, become very fast, very early and by six weeks old they are racing around running into each other and anything that gets in the way. Separating them as soon as possible feels like it reduces the number of accidents. To be fair, the pups will have been on hard food for at least two weeks by then and seem to come to no harm leaving their mothers, who have had enough anyway as have the breeders!

We named the new pup Scamp and chose a racing name for her – Fine Blue. Scamp was a character. She terrorised old Whisky, charmed my mum by spending hours with her sat in the kitchen watching as she prepared meals for the family and excited us by her speed. At nine weeks old she could already outpace me. I was 15-years-old and not half bad at sport so I could sprint quicker than most boys my age, but I couldn’t sprint faster than her.

Unfortunately around that time disaster struck. One of my sisters found Scamp motionless at the top of the stairs with her head crooked to one side. She was alive and not obviously injured but we rushed her off to the vet. The vet was not hopeful and thought she may have contracted Parvovirus, which was not that well known at the time and not included in vaccinations. She gave her a sedative, I’m not sure why, and we took her home in hope rather than expectation. My brother and I sat up with her all night but she died early the next morning. Everybody in the family was shattered.