age first started, keeping pigeons

[maxwell]

I was 4 when i had an interest in them with my father, unfortunately he was killed in a pit explosion when i was 7 and thats when i kept them on my own.

[OLDYELLOW]

as soon as i could crawl into the loft, Parents have raced for 60 yrs and Grandparents raced for over 50 yrs.

 

pretty much same as me my great uncle and my cousin once removed both raced and my great uncle kept fancy birds werent allowed in to the loft till i was 4 i was facinated by the colours i think still am lol  

[Guest ljb107]

10 (5 years ago, almost 6), saw some at an auction and my dad won them for me.  

 

Lloyd

[kev01293]

my brothers raced them so grew up with them and got interested, they built me a little loft of my own when i was about 11 or 12 but i insisted on getting my own birds (which were an assortment of streeters and strays that i caught in derelict houses etc) so i could beat them at racing :) ;D ;D if i remember rightly i kept them prisoners for ages cos i was scared of losing them and when i did let them out most of them dissapeared pronto apart from an old mealy cock bird named fred and a few others, i then found out that my brother had reported the mealy cock and the owner wanted it back ( boy did i chuck a wobbly ;D) anyway the mealy was sent back but returned to me twice before the owner eventually transferred it over to me apparently it had been a good racer for him but if i remember rightly its youngsters never did any good for my brothers,  i know i should have reported the mealy when i got him but as a kid i didnt see it that way,they were the good old days i packed up about 10 years later and only just got restarted about 2 years ago kev

[john@formula 1 lofts]

Born into them with my Dad being a fancier all his life and my grandad for most of his. and still i learn something new about them ever week  

[rebel]

the doos were there before me cant remember not having them started reading ring numbers before i started school

[Guest marksimpson]

old boy on my dads allotment had em spent a bit of time round his loft got the bug dad turned up one day with a basket full of an old chap settled two pair thus i started age 11 now 37 had a 3 year break becase of the other type of bird the end

[WELSH WIZARD]

i was 30 year old when my laddie was given 2 birds by a neighbour he gave up interest after a couple of days. so i decided to give it a go and i am still trying to get it right ten yrs later and still loving it.

[little sam]

My Grandad had them aslong as i can remember, I started with them when i was 12 just turning 13

[Guest Grasshopper Lofts]

I had them when i was 14 i used to clean out a top flyer in our clubs loft at weekend for some extra pocket money and got the bug. Then after school moved from home and had a few years out but got them back last year and there back for good now

[OLDYELLOW]

I had them when i was 14 i used to clean out a top flyer in our clubs loft at weekend for some extra pocket money and got the bug. Then after school moved from home and had a few years out but got them back last year and there back for good now

 

how much were you paid ? if it werent too much i have a scrapper here for you  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest Grasshopper Lofts]

 

how much were you paid ? if it werent too much i have a scrapper here for you  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

 

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D i could never do as good a job as u matey

[OLDYELLOW]

 

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D i could never do as good a job as u matey

 

ill train you you can start at black scrapper level  and get to gold scrapper level   if guy was a top flyer you must of been good lol  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D 10 bob a week is it  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest Grasshopper Lofts]

 

ill train you you can start at black scrapper level  and get to gold scrapper level   if guy was a top flyer you must of been good lol  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D 10 bob a week is it  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

 

lol  ;D ;D ;D ;D i better get medals and certificates as i work my way up or aint doing it  ;D ;D ;D ;D 20 bucks for the day i got there was 5 lofts to clean for that though was hard work  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[OLDYELLOW]

 

lol  ;D ;D ;D ;D i better get medals and certificates as i work my way up or aint doing it  ;D ;D ;D ;D 20 bucks for the day i got there was 5 lofts to clean for that though was hard work  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

 

might get 20 pamplets   ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest peter.j]

I had them when i was 14 i used to clean out a top flyer in our clubs loft at weekend for some extra pocket money and got the bug. Then after school moved from home and had a few years out but got them back last year and there back for good now

 

thats what you think jenny has her eye on a summer house and hammock for the garden ;D ;D ;D

[Guest Grasshopper Lofts]

 

might get 20 pamplets   ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

 

tight *expletive removed*  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest Grasshopper Lofts]

 

thats what you think jenny has her eye on a summer house and hammock for the garden ;D ;D ;D

 

lol she know better than that she will go before them birds ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest peter.j]

 

lol she know better than that she will go before them birds ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

 

ill rent it off you my kids can go in the yb section vinegar can go in the old bird section and ill have the stock section 40 quid a week but if you try give me an ounce of food a day ill lamp ya ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest Grasshopper Lofts]

 

ill rent it off you my kids can go in the yb section vinegar can go in the old bird section and ill have the stock section 40 quid a week but if you try give me an ounce of food a day ill lamp ya ;D ;D ;D ;D

 

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D you can stay there free of charge as long as you come home on the day  and ounce of food you want get that till you proove your selves  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest peter.j]

my old  ma used to say that was the problem no matter what state i was in i always found my way home unfortunately :-/

[kipper]

i was 9 years old 1962 . i had 4 babes that i got out an old barn . my dad was not to keen and took them up the road on his scooter. you guessed it? they beat him back.

[Guest THE DOO BOY]

i was 9 when i started now 12 this my second year racing and won 2 races this year

[Guest]

Mine is a bit of a tale... and would you expect anything less from m? ;D ;D.

I cocked up when I was young, there were reasons but they are not for here. I left school at 18 and got married at 19 a big mistake but as I say that's another story.  This story is recycled I have no doubt bits and piece have appeared elsewhere but it’s bucketing down outside and this helps relieve my boredom if not yours!

I lived in Dowlais, an old iron and steel town and of course an area full of miners. Merthyr was a very cosmopolitan area (Dowlais was a sub town/village of Merthyr). When I was 14 we moved, our house was being pulled down for 'redevelopment'. Most of the streets nearby were being pulled down for slum clearance as a part of the plan a new road was being built and our house a one up (with a hardboard partition making two) and small scullery and front room, no hot water and outside toilet was to be pulled down.

We were lucky in as much that we got compensation for the house and the offer of a brand new council house. The thought of putting the £500 compensation appealed to my mother, especially when we could have a house with down stair radiators, hot water and a proper bathroom and toilet! At the time there was a huge clearance program going on in Merthyr and the Gurnos Estate was being created, it ended up with 4000+ properties and quite a notorious reputation. And that’s where we ended up with many miners and steel workers, the salt of the earth, Tommy Price, Will Trecatty and from the steel heritage the Grans Bros to name a few. Merthyr at the turn of 1900 was the steel capitol of Europe with many migrant workers particularly Irish and Spanish and we also had quite an influx of Italians from the North around the Bardi area. Cardiff grew as a result of the Merthyr Cardiff canal built to export the iron & Steel. At the time Merthyr was bigger than Newport, Cardiff and Swansea combined.

Anyway when I got married my brother in law and father in law were about to start pigeon racing again. One day in autumn 1972 they and a chap called Bernard Hurley approached me, would I be sec of the pigeon club, my reply was to ask what’s a pigeon club, and the only pigeons I was aware of were the ones in Trafalgar sq. They explained to me that they raced pigeons and the Merthyr club had 69 lofts, the problem was that because of the topography of the valleys, the birds nine times out of ten came down the eastern valley, Abergavenny to Newport (we only flew North Road )and used to cut across the valleys at about Pontypool. What this meant was that the lofts at the lower end of the valleys would time first and have several miles overfly! They wanted to form a club for the fanciers at the top end so they could have genuine competition amongst themselves. I asked them why they wanted me to be sec; ‘you went to school’ was the reply. I was a little unusual living where I lived in the fact that I passed my eleven plus and went to Grammar school.  They had wanted to form a club for many years but had very few who had the literacy, numeracy skills required. They did not lack intelligence just education.  I agreed to do it. I met the prospective chairman Tario Grans who moved to Wales from Spain as a young boy with his parents and sister and two brothers Flo who he flew in partnership with and Jos his other brother who was to fly in partnership with his son in law Meirion Jones. We were an unusual mix a 19 yo who knew nothing about birds and Tario who had recently retired, me 6’2†and him 5’6†and he always referring to me as ‘boy’ which never felt or was intended to be offensive.

We called our first meeting at the Gurnos Social Club which was prepared to ‘adopt’ us. Prior to the meeting I had made enquiries to what I would need to do the job, the plan was to fly with a fairly new young Fed the heads of the valley, which Hayden Radford was sec of. I had several ‘phone calls with him and eventually went over to Abertysswg to meet him, where he taught me how to work out velocities; he gave me an aide sheet that could be used for each competitor at each race.

At our first meeting 29 prospective lofts turned up. Tario said ‘this young boy is willing to be sec of our club’, only 2 or 3 knew of me and Tario asked me to explain what I needed. I told them I needed to purchase maps to plot their loft locations (for the new fed), I needed a calculator, pens, paper, the RP velocity calculator help book (look up tables converting miles and yds and hours and mins to sixtieths) I told them I needed a £1 from each loft to start the club off. There was a challenge from the back of the committee room where we were holding the meeting, ‘why should I give you a £1 I don’t know you, you might disappear with it!’ I replied by saying ‘you’re choice I’m trying to help you, it won’t cause me any problem to withdraw’. The dissident was Brian Lewis who was Chairman at the time of the giant Welsh North Road Federation. Brian did withdraw (flew with his brother Alan as Lewis Bros). The rest stayed and paid their £1 and we had a further application from George Dunne who was just out of our proposed radius, which we opened to accommodate him!

At the end of the first year we had several hundred pounds in the kitty a replica trophy on each race, a photo on each the last three Yb & Ob races and a magnificent array of trophies, mainly supplied by the breweries who fell over themselves to stay in the Gurnos club. Of course I was not racing myself just the sec. I did the job for two seasons, our prizegivings had about 200 guests at each one and Dixey and Mel Mayo and their wives were the respective guests. In the autumn of 74 when I was 22 years of age the sec of the parent club the Gurnos Social Club, the biggest in Wales by consumption with a turnover of £1 million per anum had to give up through ill health. He and I worked in the same building, at the National Coal Board’s Welsh Computer Centre in Tredomen, he was a clerk with the NCB and I was a computer operator on a giant ICL mainframe at the other end of the building, we would regularly chat when he came up to my end of the building to pick up reports.

He approached me that winter and told me his heart was dickey and he would have to give up and how did I fancy becoming sec of the Social Club, I laughed at him. The club had a membership of some 4000, many did know me because I worked behind the bar during the school holidays before I was due to go to Teacher Training college to do a B. Ed. (which I never got to that’s another tale). However the committee was made up of 18 members men only some of the toughest hardest men in Wales, they weren’t going to choose me??? I forgot about it, then one Wednesday afternoon at work he approached me again; told me they were appointing that evening and to put an application in. I laughed again, he made me write out an application there and then and hand it to him. That evening I was sitting down watching Tele and there was a knock on the door, a committeeman I was to go with him to be interviewed????? I went and went back home. An hour later I had a phone call to say I had been made sec of the social club!!! Now how that came about and why is definitely a story worth writing but nowt to do with pigeons!

Anyway when I became sec of the club I gave up the job of sec of the pigeon club. So I was working full time in the computer centre and part time in the club. Over the next few years I was regularly pestered to get pigeons but didn’t have the time or the money really. However in 1979 I got head hunted by one of the brewers to become a free trade rep for them. The Gurnos Club was on one of the worst housing estates in Europe but had the reputation of being one of the best run clubs. I always believed this was because all the lads who caused trouble in pubs and clubs got banned from most of them; they couldn’t afford to be banned from their local club because we would ban them, and they would have nowhere to go. Don’t misunderstand me, we had some nasty incidents it wasn’t all straight forward. Anyway I took the job as a brewery rep, my money doubled, I had a brand new car (I’d only had old bangers) a Barclaycard to pay for petrol and I payed £10 a month for the private use of the car and that included the cost of all petrol with no mileage limit plus £150 a month maximum expense account!. Well I was living next to my father in law old Tom a lovely man who was 76 at the time. I asked him one day if he fancied a loft of birds and he jumped at the idea. That’s how I got my first birds, we put the loft up in my garden, paid £10 for it, an old ramshackle one from a tippler man a few gardens away; and we bought birds locally from Rono James and we were offered birds by every single member. We won our first two races with the same cock! Since then I’ve not pulled up many trees I gave up the birds in 89 when I moved to Yorkshire but regularly attended Tony Cowan’s Europa auctions at Ackworth and then Birdwell studying the eye, I’ve spent 30 years trying to crack the eye been ridiculed many a time, but now starting to bear the fruits of my quest! My only other achievement if you can call it that, was when Peter Bryant was appointed as General Manager of the RPRA I was one of the other 5 shortlisted and interviewed with him for the job. I was told by one of the councillors interviewing that it was a close call but he would tell me that wouldn’t he!

I started back in 98 in Holmfirth, then moved to Barnsley and flew yb in 2000 and then in 2004 moved to Devon and finally got a loft up to race YB in 2006! So I have a lot of racing to catch up on!!

 

[Guest bigda]

 

There is an awful lot of clubs up here will be scratching for cash to pay the lottery grant people back Jimmy if half the stories I have heard are true.

 

me,your the type of guy, who could  get rich on reward money, there   :X ??)