The Last Cockney: London Says Farewell
摘要
This chapter extends the previous one into the present day by outlining the ways in which the declining sport of greyhound racing has both reflected and impacted upon the London social scene, noting how a younger generation of ‘baby-boomers’, born in the 1940s, have viewed one of their parents’ and grandparents’ favourite recreations. Comparisons are drawn between the crowds filmed at White City Stadium for The Blue Lamp (1950) and the dog tracks described in Christina Jones’s Nothing to Lose (2000), Nicola Barker’s Reversed Forecast (2003), Dan Kavanagh’s (Julian Barnes) Going to the Dogs (2005) and Tony Parsons’s Men from the Boys (2010). TV series are also to the fore, including New Tricks from the early 2000s. Even live theatre has drawn, often nostalgically, upon the symptomatic state of the racing industry, from Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957) to plays by Heathcote Williams, David Eldridge’s In Basildon (2012), Matt Charman’s A Night at the Dogs (2005) and two plays by a visiting American, Sam Shepard. Edna O’Brien’s novel of 2015, The Little Red Chairs, goes further than most literary treatments by offering a ‘rehoming kennel’ as a model of cultural acceptance. By the early 2020s greyhound racing may have been a shadow of its former self yet, as the artistic record shows, it was still capable of provoking the creative imagination.