Philip Dalling

Philip Dalling has returned to his first love of speedway racing for his latest book, which was published on November 5th 2020.

Saving Speedway The Provincial League & The Southern Area League (Halsgrove hardback £19.99 ISBN 9 780857 043481) is published to mark the 60th anniversary of the Provincial League, the competition credited with rescuing the sport from its steep decline of the 1950s.

British speedway faced deeply challenging time in the '50s. At the start of the decade the sport was still basking in the glow of its post-World War Two boom, with more than 30 venues from Eastbourne to Edinburgh and annual attendance figures which peaked at 11 million.

Dark clouds loomed on the horizon. Punitive entertainment tax, wet summers and the soaring popularity of television saw crowds dwindle and tracks close, leaving a hard core of less than a dozen professional clubs in the elite National League by 1957, with just two surviving in the North of England and none at all in Scotland or Wales.

In the South persevering or aspiring riders kept the fans interested through the semi-professional Southern Area League, whilst in the North and in Scotland speedway survived at venues as varied as beaches along Lancashire's Irish Sea coastline, a track carved out of an ash tip in industrial Manchester and at an agricultural showground owned by a leading Scottish aristocrat.

SAVING SPEEDWAY tells how the road to recovery began when a small group of men of vision re-opened long-closed venues, often in the face of opposition from the sport's authorities, and then, in 1960, formed the Provincial League, which doubled the number of speedway venues overnight and eventually led to a new Golden Age for the sport.

Philip Dalling has been active in recent times in fields other than speedway racing. Titles available include The Erewash Valley The Landscape of D H Lawrence (Coppice Books £17.99 ISBN 9 781527 208667, Jeremy Thorpe A Dazzlingly Talented Man -a biography of the former Liberal Party leader - (Halsgrove hardback £14.99 ISBN 9 780857 043368). Earlier speedway titles available include Nottingham and Long Eaton Speedway (Stadia £14.99 ISBN 9 780752 441634) and The Golden Age of Speedway (The History Press £14.99 ISBN 9 780752 458311).