We’d narrowly missed out on future superstar Swift Ellie when she’d been sold to Dave Chapman at the end of her puppy season. Dave had paid £300 for her and her owner Colin Edmunds had implied that Dave might be gazumped if I offered more, but I didn’t like the idea of a bidding war and declined. When her mother, the fabled Swift Wind, had another litter I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

Steve Rowell had been keen to get hold of a well-bred pup for us and even insisted that the owner of the very good bitch Mirage should give us a pup rather than giving him a fee for using his stud dog Strimmer. The owner was reticent to let us have a pup despite the fact that his grand-daughter had attached herself to us at the races and spent more time with us than she did with him. In the end Mirage laid on the pup that had been set aside for Chris Cornish, who as it happened owned Cobweb’s main rival It’s Rosie, and we were told our pup would be given to Chris and we would not bet getting one. It was a bit of a blow but was lessened when the pup turned out to be a very ordinary racer and disappeared off the Open circuit very quickly.

It was to be one of those fortunate twists of fate because almost immediately afterwards John Collins and Steve Rowell both called to say Swift Ellie’s mother, the fabled Swift Wind, was in pup again. Having been too conservative to have acquired Swift Ellie, I decided to make Colin Edmunds the owner of the mother Swift Wind an offer he couldn’t refuse. I said I’d pay £300 (about 4x the going rate for a racing whippet pup at the time) for pick of the litter and with both John and Steve putting in good words for us the breeder agreed. He did then charge everybody else the same price as we’d paid for a pup of course.

Around that time I’d written a letter to Whippet News that appeared in their Racers’ Write feature. Letters in Whippet News were usually really private messages of congratulations or condolence. Mine was a very brief blueprint for the sport that had halved in size in a decade and was in danger of continuing to lose popularity unless something was done. Thirty years on I can now say that nothing has been done and that the sport is now about a quarter of the size it was in the nineties and not much more than 10% of the size it was in its heyday of the seventies.

The letter caused quite a stir and led to me being persuaded to stand for the National Secretary’s position in the British Whippet Racing Association (BWRA). I have no idea who stood against me but I won a landslide victory and assumed a position that I wasn’t really suitable for nor knew anything about. I asked Marty Collins who was running Whippet News what the role was and he simply said “you are Mr Whippet Racing, you control the sport”. Well, it turned out that Marty accidentally misled me.

The BWRA was a democratic body controlled by it members. It’s ideals lie in the socialist committees of miners’ welfares. The National Secretary didn’t run whippet racing, the members of the BWRA did. The National Secretary was not a strategic position it was an operational one. You were there to do what the members wanted not to captain the ship to the sunlit uplands. Apart from anything else my mild political leanings were Conservative and my ideal and my day job involved me being an autocrat with a vision. Steve Rowell was Treasurer of the BWRA and tried to support me in bringing the blueprint I’d outlined in my letter to Whippet News to fruition, but I clashed badly with the Chairman who saw me as a Johnny Come Lately from the other side of the tracks. What the sport needed was a wise old head, a patient, relentless, canny diplomat with a vision, possibly my vision, but I wasn’t any of those things. I’d flown too close to the sun and my wings had melted. I lasted six months, achieved nothing and resigned, frustrated and embarrassed by my lack of maturity, but most of all relieved that I could once again concentrate on training my dogs.

Bizarrely, nobody seemed to blame me and two years later at an extraordinary general meeting of the BWRA held at a race meeting I was attending, Chris Cornish, who had taken over Whippet News, proposed that I return as Secretary. It was clear that the whole room of about a hundred people supported her, but I didn’t. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

While I was briefly National Secretary of the BWRA Cobweb ran abysmally. She was carrying a minor injury and not being prepared properly and it taught me that if you want dogs to run well you need to give them 100% of your attention.

We’d named the Swift Wind pup we’d acquired Swift Dancer (Swift for short) and not for one moment did we doubt that she would be a supreme racing champion. She was beautifully bred, her sire was Supreme Racing Champion Laura’s Dream and Swift Wind was regarded as one of the two greatest whippets of all time, and actually still is. Swift looked the spit of her mother, was going to be about the same size at 24/25lb (her mother was 23lb) and we had an unshakeable belief that given the right tackle that we could train her as well as anyone and better than most.

I had said in conversation to Steve Bateson and Dave Hudson before we acquired Swift that what I really wanted was to have a supreme racing champion. Dave and Steve were shrewd whippeteers who’d both had countless top-class dogs and both had had supreme champions. I don’t know whether they had watched us gradually improving Cobweb or not or were just being supportive, but Dave said “you will, you just need the right dog”. I believed that Swift was that “right dog” and told my partner (soon after wife) Gill when we got her that this was the beginning of a great adventure. And so it proved.