7 Days 1 December 1971SPORT

Billy Hack probes the fierce world of pigeon racing

THE WORLD'S MOST EXCITING SPORT

Stan Biss, pigeon racing's Mr Big, cradling Scout, £3500 worth of bird.

Pigeon racing has met its Mr. Big. Stan Biss, known to friends in the fancy as Jim, is out to change the “cloth-Cap-arse-out-of-the-trousers image” of the hobby. “Pigeon racing needs uplift, a new face, new ideas, and a great lurch forward,” he says. “It’s ready for all of them. I’ve seen to that.”

There are 100,000 enthusiasts for the sport in Britain, and all of them belong to clubs which are affiliated to one of the five regional homing unions. But Biss is not going to have too much trouble cleaning up. Pigeon racing, even more than dogs and boxing, is a working men’s game, and there’s not much money involved in it. For a big, English national race, there might be 10,000 entries, but the fastest bird would be lucky to win £300 for its owner in prizes and pools. Scotland is a bit better; this year, the winner of a big race took home more than £1,000 for the first time.

Biss wants to change all that. Although he has been caught up with pigeons since he was six, he has recently become obsessed with getting cash, quality, class and style into the sport.

Up to ten years ago, he flew with the London North Road Combine, the biggest club grouping in the capital. Here, he had phenomenal success. He became the first man to win over £400 in the LNRC, and the next year broke his own record by topping £673. But in 1963, he moved his headquarters to Hillside, a spacious country house in Brundall, just outside Norwich. Biss came to Norfolk on a rising tide of business triumphs. His career had embraced everything from fruitful muck-trading, through car rentals, to huge holiday caravan camps. He admits that he has enough money to do anything he wants.

Fair Flies the Bird from France3ut once settled among the Broads,

he found he could not win as many trophies as before. On long-distance races started deep in France, his birds had to fly 150 miles further than those of the London boys. Even though the birds are judged on their velocity, or average speed throughout the race, Biss still found that this made things pretty hopeless. But, recently, he has staged a comeback by setting himself up as a breeder, hopefully as the finest breeder in Britain.

He is hatching schemes on such a gigantic scale that they threaten to stand the game on its head. Biss has been paying visits to Pierre Dordin, the owner of the greatest pigeon stud in the world. Dordin’s birds were so successful that the Belgians, jealous of their reputation as the keenest fanciers in the world, drew in their radius for Inter­national races, thus keeping the French maestro’s birds out. They were fed up with Dordin’s strain regularly taking three or four positions in the first ten. Anyway, Biss met Dordin and shelled out £3,500 to persuade him to part with Scout.

When you see Scout, he does not look like much. A dolled up bird from Trafalgar Square, with a bigger chest and brighter eyes, perhaps — there’s not much in it. But Scout happens to be the King pigeon, an undisputed champ, winner of the coveted San Sebastian, national and International in the same year, and outright winner of the Angouleme national.

Scout had the kind of quality and class which Biss just could not resist.

“A Cassius Clay, a Jim Clarke, a George Best — you only see one like that in a man’s life time. And make no

mistake, Scout is of that calibre.”There’s a lot of blood from the

legendary Gavroche in him, and though his racing career is over, he is the prize breeder in the Biss loft. Other birds of similar classes have been added. The day we visited Biss, he had just acquired another two brothers from Dordin at a cost of £1,000 a piece.

Biss explains that quality stock will

be the life-line of the sport. He has sunk £20,000 into his stud, and given a couple of years, he expects to be able to change things.

“Pigeon racing is on the way back. Take all those guys in the tarmac bleeding jungle. Really they want to be able to get back to nature in their own back garden. And keeping a few bunny rabbits isn’t exciting, now is it?”

Perfect BodiesBiss, keen boxing fanatic, go-Kart

record holder, occasional motor-race driver, cricketer, soccer-player and fisherman, admits that he gets fantastic satisfaction from breeding birds with perfect physique. “Its like all sports. You can’t breed what’s in there,” he says tapping his head. “But you can, through breeding and training, get damn

near perfect bodies. That’s what gets me.”

The process o f breeding interests him, too, because he is dreaming of Pigeon Promotions Inc: this is the company which will back a £1/4 million English pigeon race, sponsored by big brewers, and financed through a £5 entrance fee for each of the 50,000 entries he expects it to attract.

The breweries are responding favour­ably, because the local Homing Clubs all meet in pubs, and Biss has put it to the brewers that special incentive prizes for owners of birds belonging to clubs attending pubs owned by the sponsoring brewery, could involve a massive increase in annual business for their houses.

Biss said, “I could o f course set the whole thing up in conjunction with the brewer, risk som e o f my own money guaranteeing the prizes and collect a tidy ten per cent” . He adds, “but I’m not going to, o f course.. I’m just not interested.”

Maybe not, but it looks like the days when a Durham miner could own his loft, and a dozen birds, and still keep his head high in the fancy with an outlay of £2 a week, are over. Already, in Belgium, pigeon racing is big, big business, and a single loft often supports three or four professionals who do nothing else but race birds.Biss wants to strip away the mystery of the sport, too. The magic of the whirling cloud o f birds heading for home from 600 miles away has never been satisfactorily explained. Keen fanciers have been known to chase them in planes and helicopters to find out how they do it. Biss scorns such methods as crude, but he wants to throw a whole race up on a radar screen, with minute bleepers attached to every birds’ legs. The old theory used to be that they followed the sun. Biss says it’s all due to magnetic fields.

Cocks OnlyIf how they do it is a mystery, why

they should want to is even more so. Undoubtedly, the Continental tech­nique of entering only cocks and allow­ing them an hour’s restricted mating as a reward for racing is an incentive.

So is the British business of making them hurry hom e to do their stint sitting on the eggs. But even without these prodders, on training tosses the birds will rush back, risking all weather conditions, telephone wires and over­head cables to get there. Biss tells the tragic story o f one bird which broke its wing and actually managed to walk the last three miles to the loft.

He puts it all down to a good home. ‘Look, it’s like all o f us isn’t it? If

you ve got a good home, peaceful like, you hurry back there wherever you are. That’s why a good fancier always keeps his lofts peaceful and calm. A bad one’s birds are always in a frenzy. They don’t make it back in such a hurry. If the Mrs. is always quarrelling and whalloping, and the kids are fighting, then you re not so keen on the place. I’ve got kids of my own. None of them want to go away to London or anything like that. The homing instinct is strong in all of us. It s the same with the birds . . . ”

Perhaps that’s where Biss with his big money, bold ideas and flamboyant flying plans for multi-million pound clouds of pigeons, is going wrong. The business is intimately linked to the working men’s local ideology: the home, the pub, the club, the cosy nest. And until all that has been changed the scale on which he is dreaming may not be welcomed — Scout notwithstanding.

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