BFI

This jaunty and affectionate Mining Review item looks at a popular sport amongst miners: pigeon racing. It focuses on one miner, Kent-based Tom Lancashire, and his wonderfully-monickered bird Atomic Mealy, one of 15,000 competitors at the Pigeon Special event. Released in batches at ten-minute intervals, they were supposed to fly home as fast as possible, and the winner would be the pigeon judged the fastest, based on the time, the distance and the resulting speed.

In addition to showing footage of the race itself and the various mechanisms by which the pigeon speeds are calculated and registered, the item muses on the importance of the pigeon in wartime, when pigeon fanciers like Lancashire lent their birds to the government to use as couriers. They were particularly valuable at getting messages to and from Nazi-occupied continental Europe, and although many were inevitably lost, many others more than proved their worth.

Could this have been a veiled message to miners' wives: that while their husbands' hobbies may seem eccentric and exasperating to them, they could be instrumental in saving the country in the event of a future conflict?

Michael Brooke

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