Originally the site of travelling fairs for over five hundred years, the ‘Crayford Fairfield’ was a patch of land located on the junction of the London-to-Dover Road and the London-to-Rochester Road. In the spring of 1930, it was idenitfied by the Bexleyheath & District Motor-Cycle Club as an ideal location to build a speedway track (on essentially a grass surface) and hold fourteen open meetings throughout the coming summer months.

Initially an announcement appeared in the local Dartford Chronicle newspaper dated 21st March 1930 advising any Club members who anticipated racing on the newly established speedway track to contact the Clubs’ racing organiser, Mr GW Snowden.

Following a mid-week open practice, the second meeting took place on the afternoon of Saturday 10th May. The programme mainly consisted of scratch and match races although the final event of the day was a 4-lap relay race between two teams of three riders. This race proved a fitting finale as Hewstone and Green dead-heated after a final two laps of “wheel to wheel” racing. The track record was lowered on two occasions, first by JA Hitchcock and then recaptured by WJ Hewstone with a time of 2m 5.4secs. The Bexleyheath & District MCC promoted their third meeting at the Crayford Speedway on Saturday 24th May where yet another large crowd witnessed, “the best racing yet staged on the track. Delays between events were reduced to a minimum, while the loud speakers showed vast improvement. The riding reached a high standard, and the applause given the riders at the end of the meeting was well deserved”. It was also announced that all future Saturday meetings would commence at 6pm, and not 3.30pm as previously.

Speedway continued throughout the summer months and attracted plenty of talented riders to the new track. One of the most celebrated was twenty-year-old Harold Daniell who hailed from nearby Forest Hill in South London. Daniell was to become one of the first ever stars of Crayford Speedway, winning the Plumstead Cup on 7th June; the Kent Cup on 22nd June and towards the end of the season also winning the Westminster Cup, Chelsea Cup and the Grade A Riders Championship. He also smashed the track record with a winning time of 1m 47 1.5secs on 22nd June. The final meeting of the season was held on Sunday 4th October when FL Oliver won a series of match races to collect the Barbara Cup. The Bond Championship Cup and the title of Club Speedway Champion was decided using the cumulative results from all the speedway meetings held throughout the season and was won by EAJ Angus (98pts) with HW Osborne (83pts) the runner-up. Harold Daniell remained the track record holder at the seasons end. The impressive Daniell went onto become a leading road racing and Grand Prix motor-cycle star winning the Isle of Man TT an incredible three times (1938, 1947 & 1948) and holding the Isle of Man lap record for over twelve years. He finally finished his motor-sport career racing Formula 3 cars at Brands Hatch in the early 1950s.

Despite heavy rain and soggy track conditions, the new season opened on Easter Monday 6th April in front of a large number of spectators. Unfortunately, the wet spring continued resulting in a heavily flooded Crayford Fairfield and the Bexleyheath & District Motorcycle Club were only able to stage this sole meeting during the first five weeks of the season. It even forced them to set up a telephone hotline where interested parties were asked to, “phone Mr Snowden on Woolwich 1826 on day of event”. Thankfully, by early May, the weather had relented and the Club were able to begin their season in earnest. During the winter months they had decided to offer a number of local motorcycle clubs challenge matches over the standard six rider, nine heat format.

And so on Sunday 10th May, history was made when the first ever team match at Crayford Speedway was staged between Bexleyheath MCC and Sidcup MCC. In a one-sided affair, the homesters won by 37-17 with FL Oliver scoring a twelve point maximum and also winning the second half solo event. A week later, the Club sent a side down to Sunny Hill Speedway to race Sittingbourne, where unfortunately, they struggled to cope with the unfamiliar track losing 15-39. However, despite the defeat the team had travelled in style, with all the riders and their equipment transported down in a “team” lorry. The challenge matches continued at Crayford throughout the summer with the home side in dominant form. They trounced Darenth 41-11; gained revenge over Sittingbourne with a 40-14 thrashing and in the final team match of the season, they beat The Optimists 41-13. Such one-sided contests obviously produced an array of impressive statistics. At Crayford, home riders won all but two heats with FL Oliver (38pts) heading the scorers and unbeaten by an opposition rider. His four maximums would have been equalled by HW Osborne (27pts) but for an engine failure in the match against Sidcup. Other notable performances came from EA Angus (25pts), CA Lewis (20pts), EH Langman (12pts), R Williams (12pts) and last seasons star Harold Daniell, who made a rare but welcome return to Crayford, when he rode in the home match against Sittingbourne scoring a nine point maximum.

Due to the lack of competitive team opposition, the remaining home meetings reverted back to individual scratch, handicap and match race competitions. CA Lewis won the Crayford Silver Trophy and Treasurers Cup to go with his early season victory in the Crayford Cup. HW Osborne won the Chairman’s Cup and on 4th October, the Club promoted the ninth and final meeting of the season where J Collins emerged victorious to collect the Kent Cup. The end of season award of the Bond Championship Cup and the title of Club Speedway Champion went to HW Osborne (81pts) with CA Lewis (45pts) finishing runner-up. And the track record at the seasons end was held by HW Osborne with a time of 1m 46 2.5secs. At their Annual Dinner and Dance in January 1932, the Club Chairman, Mr RJ Holloway announced, “the speedway at Crayford, which proved such an attraction last season, would be given up”. He stated that although speedway had been a success, it was an experiment and the meetings had given them a lot of work. With the land at Crayford Fairfield now vacant, the expansion of greyhound racing in the area continued as Wilson Greyhound Racing Track Ltd stepped in and built a 450-yard dog track to rival the new venues at Sidcup and Dartford. Advertised as “The Ascot of Greyhound Racing”, the new track opened for business on Easter Monday 1932.

At 8pm on the evening of Friday 16th August 1935, a meeting was held at Crayford Stadium to discuss the formation of an amateur dirt track riding club with the intention of resurrecting speedway racing after an absence of just over three years. The Club planned to use a cinder circuit laid inside the dog track and although smaller than the one that operated in 1930-31 before the greyhound track was built, this new speedway track would be much more akin to other existing local venues such as New Cross and Wimbledon. The newly formed Crayford Amateur Speedway Club, the first of its kind in the South of England, initially held a trial meeting on Sunday 18th August where ‘Ace’ Coborn set a track record of 87secs.

Then a week later on Sunday 25th August 1935, they staged the first official meeting of the new Crayford Speedway with ‘Ace’ Coborn once again showing his liking for the track, winning all his races and breaking his own track record by 4secs. Other riders known to have competed in this opening meeting were JC Parker, A Barrett, Alf Markham and Freddy Wiseman. Now officially branded the Crayford Speedway Stadium, meetings continued there every Sunday afternoon throughout the late summer and early autumn. Although the original intention was to only stage open individual events, towards the end of the season the Club decided to add a new dimension by promoting two special team contests. On Sunday 22nd September, despite heavy rain, the first match took place between two sides of six riders representing the North and the South. The six-heat match saw some extremely competitive racing with the North, captained by Arthur Mason and ably supported by team-mate Pat Taylor, emerging victorious by 23-12. Owing to bad weather, the following weeks meeting was postponed but on 6th October the return match was staged with the South, including the impressive Bill Weston and Pip Daily, gaining revenge with a 27-9 victory and an overall aggregate win of 39-32. It was also announced that with, “the track rapidly gaining enthusiastic supporters among the spectators”, a Crayford Speedway Supporters Club had been formed with HL Thornton as its secretary. Sunday 13th October, saw Crayford host a special series of match races between riders representing London and Leicester, with Paddy Mills of Leicester in dominant form. However, the meeting was marred by two nasty accidents, which saw both 19-year-old Frank Pollock (leg injuries) and 21-year-old William Giddy (face and back injuries) detained in hospital.

The final meeting of the season took place on Sunday 3rd November, when the Club held its Championship Cup and Claude Rye Cup events. RT Allen emerged victorious in both and in other end of season presentations, Freddy Wiseman won the Amateur Dirt Track Riders Points Cup for best overall performance throughout 1935 and Geoff Godwin from Leicester won the Gold Medal for the most points scored in a single meeting. Arthur Mason and Bill Weston jointly held the track record of 73secs at the seasons end, with Weston remarkably setting his record time in his first ever race at Crayford. As an aside, many years later in 1948, Weston was to gain notoriety as a stunt double in the speedway racing sequences of the BAFTA nominated film, ‘Once A Jolly Swagman’ starring Dirk Bogarde and he also raced in Barcelona, Spain in 1950, when an attempt was made to introduce the sport to the country.

For reasons that now lay lost in the midsts of time, the Amateur Club moved their operation to the new track at Dagenham for the 1936 season. However, speedway continued at Crayford under new ownership and still remained focused on amateur and novice riders. The new season opened on Sunday 5th April and meetings then continued throughout the summer months with the club racing every Sunday afternoon and admission to the public costing 1/- inc. tax. Unfortunately, press coverage of this season was virtually non-existent but riders known to have raced at the track during this period were John and Reg Guntrip, Archie Windmill, Wilf Jay and Wilf Plant. Interestingly, Plant who rode for Leicester, New Cross, Wimbledon and Middlesbrough, was the father of modern day speedway rider Graham Plant, who raced at Crayford in 1968, top scoring against the Highwaymen and then rode there again in the ’80s against the Kestrels.

In an interview about his early career Wilf Plant said, “They ran meetings in the same place, although there were no grandstands. I can remember the railway line running past the track. I was a junior in those days and got much of my early training at Crayford“. And to give just a flavour of the conditions under which these pioneers raced, Archie ‘Spider’ Windmill, who went onto ride for Hackney, Wimbledon, Walthamstow and Aldershot over a sixteen year career, had an amusing anecdote regarding a meeting he contested at Crayford as a young twenty year old, “at that time, the fencing was wire mesh on concrete posts” and in one of the races he hit the fence damaging both the fence and his leg, although neither seriously.

At the end of the racing he went, as was the custom, to the office to collect his pay earned that night, only to find they wanted to stop money from his point’s earnings to pay for the fence!

In 1937, not for the first time – or the last, speedway was unable to continue at Crayford, as the site was to be redeveloped for dog racing. Work on the new ‘Crayford and Bexleyheath Greyhound Stadium’ by builders W & C French of Essex had begun at the beginning of the year with the deadline of a mid-summer grand opening. Unfortunately, the new structure “erected in the Crayford Fairfield on the site of the former greyhound racing and motor-cycle dirt-track” at a cost of around £50,000 (equal to £2.8 million in 2012) was, as its new name suggested, designed for the sole use of ‘the dogs’. The new, state of the art stadium boasted two glass-fronted grandstands, a restaurant and was fully covered throughout offering greyhound racing spectators similar facilities to Wembley, White City, Wimbledon et al.

Over three decades had passed before Crayford was considered again as a venue for speedway. Enter onto the scene serial promoter and entrepreneur Mike Parker – who along with partner Bill Bridgett – had reopened speedway at another dog track at Wolverhampton in 1961 as a Provincial League outfit; and steered the Wolves into the new British League four years later. Three years into the great BL adventure, a new second division was to be formed and for such a brave new world, promoters like Parker were on the look-out for venues. Deeper into Kent, the then 75 year old founder of speedway itself, John S. Hoskins was to open the county’s first fully-fledged league track at the home of Canterbury City FC; and prompted by this incursion to the Garden Of England (an area where motor-cycle sport including grass track was already very popular), Parker and Bridgett found what seemed the perfect location for a nursery side for their Wolves in the Crayford and Bexleyheath Stadium.

So – with Parker also opening Stock Cars and Bangers in the stadium (and illustrating each of his motor sport endeavours on the front cover of the programme) – at last, speedway returned to Crayford on 12th June 1968 (just a month after Hoskins’ Canterbury had staged the first ever Division Two match) – Crayford beating another brand new club, the Nelson Admirals 50-27. When it came to riding personnel, the new north-west Kent side did very much have the flavour of a Wolverhampton second team about it, with no less than five riders in the initial line-up who’d been members of the West Midlands outfit the previous term: number one, Mick Handley, Derek Timms, Stuart Riley, Dave Parry and skipper Geoff Ambrose. Reappearing on the scene was Tony Childs – who’d had a season with Wimbledon in ’66. For a nickname, a local newspaper competition produced the romantic moniker: the Highwaymen – a nod to the area’s past infamous reputation as a haunt for those villains of the road of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Highwaymen had a solid first season in the sports second tier. They attracted some very good crowds, in fact attendances that many a First Division outfit would have been proud and finished in a respectable mid-table position. This was due in part to an excellent home record as visiting teams struggled to cope with the tricky London Road circuit.

Interestingly, their home record nearly included a meeting hosted by Wolverhampton, when in mid September the local River Cray broke its banks and the Crayford track was submerged under three feet of flood water. Eventually, after deciding not to race at the Midlands track, the Highwaymen’s final league match against Plymouth went ahead over a month later at the end of October after the London Road circuit had been pumped dry and dead fish removed from the pits!

22 year-old Mick Handley finished top of the averages with an excellent 10.48 CMA. His outstanding contribution was complimented by respectable returns from both heat leaders and second string riders with Tony Childs (7.68), Derek Timms (6.54), Colin Clark (6.05), Dai Evans (5.88) and Geoff Ambrose (5.87) all posting solid numbers. Timms’ retirement towards the end of the season opened the door for Cradley Heath second-half rider, Archie Wilkinson, who grasped the opportunity with both hands making an explosive start for the Highwaymen. In the three matches Wilkinson contested at the tail-end of the 1968 season, he was beaten only once by an opponent to record an impressive 11.33 CMA.

22 year-old Mick Handley finished top of the averages with an excellent 10.48 CMA. His outstanding contribution was complimented by respectable returns from both heat leaders and second string riders with Tony Childs (7.68), Derek Timms (6.54), Colin Clark (6.05), Dai Evans (5.88) and Geoff Ambrose (5.87) all posting solid numbers. Timms’ retirement towards the end of the season opened the door for Cradley Heath second-half rider, Archie Wilkinson, who grasped the opportunity with both hands making an explosive start for the Highwaymen. In the three matches Wilkinson contested at the tail-end of the 1968 season, he was beaten only once by an opponent to record an impressive 11.33 CMA.

Ambrose was a vastly improved rider, who capped a season where he nearly doubled his CMA by winning the Division Two Riders Championship at Hackney. In addition, the Highwaymen were the only team in Division Two to register an unbeaten home record and complimented this with a massive 54-22 victory at Berwick on April 19th – the largest ever away win recorded in either division of the British League and a match where the visiting Highwaymen won every heat. The result was all the more impressive because Crayford came from one of the smallest tracks in the country and Berwick’s was one of the largest. Individually, the Highwaymen continued setting records when Mick Steel created British League history by winning four consecutive heats in the match against Crewe and then went on to complete a five ride maximum in the space of just six heats; and Archie Wilkinson was involved in Division Two’s first ever dead-heat when he tied with Barry Crowson at Eastbourne.

Just as they had done at the end of the 1968 season with Mick Handley, parent club Wolverhampton recalled last seasons equally, if not more impressive number one and reigning Division Two Riders Champion, Geoff Ambrose. His natural successor was Archie Wilkinson (9.55), who had already showed his undoubted talent in Crayford colours over the last two years and ably skippered the side last season. And true to form, Wilkinson stepped up to the mark, scoring over one hundred points in his first ten matches. Unfortunately for him and the Highwaymen, his season ended there. Struck down by a mystery illness initially diagnosed as an acute appendicitis, Archie was to spend the remainder of 1970 in and out of hospital whilst specialists tried to treat him. Although the team bravely soldiered on, led by Crayford stalwart Tony Childs (7.97) ably supported by newcomer George Devonport (7.00) and the return from Doncaster of Derek Timms (5.19), Wilkinson’s absence was noticeable and it was a miracle the team didn’t finish even lower than fourteenth of seventeen.

The poor League performance was compounded by the complicated circumstances under which speedway was promoted at the track. The early arrangement with the stadium landlords hadn’t allowed for stock cars and speedway to operate on separate nights within a contemporaneous season and so the two separate motor-sports had to share a race-night, meaning speedway couldn’t be guaranteed every Wednesday. The writing was on the wall when Parker and Bridgett hurriedly changed four Wednesdays in the middle of the school summer holidays from speedway fixtures to banger racing meetings. Clearly crowds for the motorcycling part of the promotion were not up to scratch; and with losses around £3,000 that year, the plug was finally pulled. It hadn’t been for want of tinkering with the product though.

After the initial season, the notoriously bumpy 300 yard circuit was torn up and a new grey quarry track (like the one Hoskins used at Canterbury) was laid.

So was a new drainage system: rain seemed to bedevil Crayford over all of the twelve years the stadium eventually was to stage speedway. Then at the end of the ’69 campaign there was major track re-modelling again: reducing down to a smallest in the country, 270 yards. Reviewing the three year existence of the Highwaymen, although Wilkinson, Timms, Clark and Armstrong all rode every season, one rider in particular stands out – Tony Childs. Not only was Childs ever-present, riding in every single one of the 83 league and cup matches Crayford contested, he also finished top three in the averages each season (1968 = 2nd 7.68; 1969 = 3rd 8.24 & 1970 = 2nd 7.97). And to illustrate just how dependent the ‘Men were on Childs at times, his performances on the 1970 Northern tour provide ample evidence. Over a period of just 24 hours, Childs scored 13 out of 26 points at Berwick and then 8 out of 15 at Rochdale – in each case scoring as many (or more) as the rest of the team put together!