Sport History

The first meeting was held in 1776 at Swaffham, and the club is still going great guns to this day.

The national coursing club was established in 1858 and for a time a sub commitee controlled the Coursing in Ireland. In 1916 the Irish coursing club was founded to regulate the sport in Ireland. The Irish Coursing club was reconstituted under the Greyhound Industy in 1958 and since then under the Wildlife Act of 1976

In England in the 1800’s when railway travel made it easy to get to the meetings vast crowds attended. Such as Altcar near Liverpool and in Scotland in Lanarkshire, it is recorded that the Scottish pit field stopped work for a Coursing meeting. In those days many of the greyhounds were owned by the pit men and ordinary people, and the greyhounds ran with dogs owned by the Aristocracy with equal chances.

In 1836 the Waterloo cup was first run at Altcar near Liverpool. William Lynn the landlord of the Waterloo Hotel in Liverpool sponsored the meeting and it was run in conjuction with the steeplechase meeting in Aintree. So the Grand National come into being.

Master M’Grath won the Waterloo cup three times and in 1881 a very famous bitch PRINCESS DAGMAR won the cup and the value of the stakexs was £500. Princess Dagmar also won the North Norfolk Markham Holmes Sapling Meeting, won the Puppy Stakes at Newmarket and divided the Plumpton Plate with Clyto at the Plumpton January Meeting. There were many famous coursing Greyhounds such as FLY,REMUS,FULLERTON and TINEY to name a few.

In the 1880’s Park Coursing flourished briefly but the results were to predictable and ruined the betting market wich in turn ruined the attendances. There has been no Park Coursing in England since 1914 when it was prohibited by the National Coursing Club rules.

The Irish Coursing Club controls the sport of coursing in the 32 counties of Ireland. In Ireland Park Coursing still take place at many of the meetings including the big meeting at Clonmel. Park Coursing takes place in a large enclosed field about 400 yards long and at the end there is the ‘ESCAPE’.This is a pole fence filled with greenary and wire netting. At the bottom there is a space for the Hares to get though but not the dogs. The Hares are caught and kept at the back of the field where they are fed and looked after until the meeting ends. When they go through the ‘ESCAPE’ they are directed by fences into another enclosure so the same hares are never coursed more then once. Since 1993 the greyhounds have been muzzled when coursing.

In England the Waterloo Cup and Purse are still run at Altcar. Many other Clubs still flourish such as Swaffham, the Old Yorkshire and the Isle Of Ely to name a few, All the coursing is open over land availble to the Clubs.

Coursing bloodlines are present in the pedigress of 77% of major winners of track events over the last ten years. Breeders in the USA and Australia are importing Irish Greyhounds with coursing bllodlines to boost the chasing instinct in the bloodlines of their greyhounds since the banning of coursing in those countries.

The Hunting Bill will go through the commons again eventually. Unfortunatley the Labour Government are simply banning Hunting and Coursing on a class vote not in the interests of wildlife or the rural community, Those matters they have simply ignored in their haste to do something against those that they imagine might have money. It’s very sad that a way of life that has been England for centuries should end on the whim of badly informed members of Parliment.