A Little Known Fact About Her Majesty The Queen

Few people will realise that the Queen is the patron of pigeon racing in the UK, and perhaps one of its most passionate participants.

No doubt she will have help and support with the work of keeping pigeons, but nevertheless it is a little known fact that she is in this country's most prominent pigeon fanciers.

Keeping pigeons is something I know more than most about, because my father was a lifelong pigeon fancier, keeping and racing pigeons for most of his life.

I cannot help but imagine that this lonely hobby, spending much time simply waiting for pigeons to return to their home loft after a race, was the ideal pursuit for men of my father's generation, for whom perhaps there was much to contemplate, after the terrible experiences of a World War in which my father served for eight years, from 1940-1948.

One of his brothers, my uncle Harry, was also a pigeon fancier, and I'm sure they had much to discuss whenever they met, about the details that concerned them both about their breeding stock, and the prospects for the races that they both competed in.

My uncle Harry had also served during the war, but all I know about his war was that when he returned from his service, his young wife and child had been killed after the last V2 to fall on West Ham destroyed the house in which they lived.

Although uncle Harry remarried, he never again became a parent.

Perhaps for him the lonely vigil awaiting the return of his pigeons on race days was filled with thoughts of a life he may have lived, had his first wife not been at home on that fateful day.

Uncle Harry's first wife was never discussed, and I only discovered recently about what had happened. My memories of him as a child had no inkling of what had taken place for him during the war.

He was simply one of my father's 12 brothers and sisters, and one that he perhaps was closest to, whether because they both shared a passion for pigeons, or because of a shared background in service during the war I never knew.

The technical details of pigeon racing are fascinating, and probably not understood outside of the fraternity of pigeon fanciers.

It is a simple fact that pigeons will return to their home from enormous distances, and their capacity for navigation was not until recently completely understood.

Or perhaps it is still not completely understood, but it is nevertheless now known that there are several species of animals that are able to navigate in quite extraordinary ways.

Other animals include turtles, and of course many species of birds that regularly migrate huge distances to find warmer climates during the Winter.

It seems that there is some mechanism within them that can work just like a compass, so that for example if a magnet were attached to their beaks, their capacity to navigate is seriously impaired.

This inbuilt facility to navigate means that pigeons have been used in the 20th century for numerous means of communicating across distances, long before the development of more technical means of communication.

For example, sending messages in wartime.

Their instinct to return home is a strong one, and one that I can remember my father using to great effect on race days by separating a mated pair of birds just before a race so that the instinct to return to the nest was sharpened.

My father's most successful pigeon was a dark chequer hen that came third in the London Combine from Thurso, one year back in about 1969.

About 30,000 birds were able to race together, thanks to the way in which pigeon fanciers measure the speed of their birds from release to return to the home loft.

Pigeon fanciers that live 20 or 30 miles distance from each other can race against each other because the distance from the race point can be measured exactly, and each pigeon fancier would be equipped with an extremely accurate timepiece that is designed specifically to record the exact time of the return.

Quite simply, birds entered for a particular race are fitted with a unique numbered rubber ring, and then when the bird is recaptured at the home loft, this rubber ring is placed inside a metal thimble which is inserted into this accurate timepiece, which when ‘struck’ notes the exact time that the ring has been placed into the clock.

Clocks are carefully measured against each other for their accuracy at keeping time, and simply the velocity of the pigeon in yards per minute can be established because the time of release is known, and the exact distance to the loft where it lives.

Thus the winning pigeon is the one with the highest individual velocity, and for the race in which my father's pigeon came third out of 30,000, the race distance was around 600 miles.

Of course, the speed with which a bird can be captured by its owner and the rubber race ring removed from its foot is critical to a successful race winner.

The art of capturing a pigeon is one that is perhaps a function of the familiarity of the birds with their owner, and the fact that after a race, they will be hungry and can be lured by a few tasty nibbles so that they can be handled by their owner, and the ring entered into the clock.

I still have my father's pigeon clock, or at least one of them.

The one I have is a French model, a Toulet. Quite a beautiful timepiece, perhaps with much in common with a ships’ chronometer.

Clocks are sealed with a special lead seal for races, to make sure they are not tampered with, and something like a paper dial such as would verify the driving of a large lorry would be the proof of when a bird had returned to its home loft.

Pigeons for races are placed in special baskets that contain about a dozen birds each, and the special lorries that take them to a race point are designed so that these crates containing the birds can be opened almost simultaneously so that the races are kept as fair as possible.

Perhaps it will only take a few minutes for two men to open all of the crates in which several thousand birds have been transported to a particular race point.

For several years as a young boy I would attend with my father to the club where his birds participated in races, and where perhaps the majority of fanciers were men just like my father, content with a hobby that meant they spent many hours just scanning the sky looking for the return of a speck on the horizon.

It was perhaps the only occasion in the year when my mother would be taken to a dinner dance, to the annual Pigeon Fanciers’ Ball, when cheques and cups would be presented to mark the success of the years racing.

For my father, it could mean considerable winnings, in the order of several hundred pounds, at a time when this was a substantial sum of money.

Quite simply, every bird entered into a race could be entered into a pool, often of quite small sums like a shilling or a two shilling pool, but if the bird was one of the first in this section, the pool of money placed might amount to quite significant sums.

I can still remember the way in which my father taught me to identify the different colorings of bird types, and if I see racing pigeons in the street, wearing the permanent metal rings over their feet placed there when sufficiently small for the rings to be fitted, I cannot help but recall all of those occasions when I went to the club with my father to see his birds safely on their way to a race.