Keith Mott writes...

NRCC LERWICK WINNERS - PART 2  

This week we are going to visit some more North Road Championship Club Lerwick ‘King's Cup’ winning lofts. The NRCC was founded in 1901, basically to fly Lerwick, and the King's Cup was presented to the club by King George V. Fanciers have to fly over 475 miles from Lerwick to get in the NRCC which has a very strong membership of 2,000 lofts, with nine sections, 60 clock stations and four marking stations, the main one being in Grantham. The club races a four-race programme each season, with the highlight being the Lerwick National.

JAKE COTTERILL

OF BOUGHTON

Miner Jake Cotterill works in Bilsthorpe Colliery, near Ollerton. He started racing in 1981 and has won the NRCC twice, including the King's Cup Lerwick race in 1991. His winning pigeon was the Wildemeerschwidowhood blue cock 'Jake's Dream' which is now in the stock loft breeding winners. This handsome pigeon handled big in the hand, with nice silky feathers, and has not raced since his King's Cup win.

Jake works shifts and has a great loft manager in Henry Machin, who keeps the wonderful loft in great shape. Jake's very smart loft has four sections with two flights and the birds are trapped through open doors. Widowhood hens are housed in one flight and the stock birds go in the other for sunshine and a bath. Henry likes to see good hygiene and ventilation in a loft. The grille-floor young bird section houses about 50 youngsters each season. Jake races 24 widowhood cocks and seven natural pairs which are put together at the end of January. The Cotterill team races well from the shortest to the longest race and Jake enjoys all races but he did say one of his biggest mistakes in the early days was falling asleep after coming off night shift while waiting for long-distance NRCC pigeons. The widowhood cocks are shown the hens on Friday nights and are given them for about half an hour on their return from the race. The cocks are fed on a standard widowhood mixture and are broken down in mid-week.

Although Jake has a few natural pairs he says he prefers the widowhood system as he thinks it gets the best out of the birds. On of his best natural pigeons is the Lefebre Dhaenen blue chequer hen which won 1st Open Midlands Championship Club in 1988. The 1991 season was a fairy tale for Jake because as well as winning the King's Cup from Lerwick, he also recorded 1st Section, 3rd Open Thurso NRCC. Jake's loft is mainly made up from Frans Van Wildemeersch pigeons and he recently introduced Janssens to try out. His management is very simple, with plenty of training, good corn, clean water and lots of attention. The birds are trained several times a week in any weather except fog. Jake's motto is quality and not quantity and he rates Charlie Wooff as the best local fancier as he is at the top of the result sheet every week.

MITCHELL BROTHERS

OF BILSTHORPE

John & Gary Mitchell are masters at the art of breeding and racing pigeons. John is the stock man, and the stock lofts, Maid Marion Lofts, are at his Bilsthorpe home.

The racing lofts are at Gary's home as he is the racing man. The brothers won the NRCC Lerwick King's Cup race in 1993 with their champion Wildemeersch blue chequer cock ‘Number 7’. This game cock was raced on the widowhood system and after six days in the basket, took 14 hours to fly the 480 miles from Lerwick and lift the King's Cup.

The main old bird racing team is made up of 36 widowhood cocks. The system is very straight forward; they are paired up the third week in January and races over 200 miles are preferred. The brothers have three racing lofts. Widowhood cocks are housed in the main racing loft which is 22 feet long and faces north. The 16-foot loft holds old birds and youngsters, and all trapping is through the open doors.

The brothers' race record in recent seasons has been fantastic, winning, as they have, countless top positions in the federation and national. John & Gary breed 100 youngsters each year to race the programme through to 200 miles. The widowhood cocks are shown the hens on Friday night only on the shortest races and are given the hen for up to an hour on their return from the race on Saturday. They are fed on Spillers Breeders' Mixture and the widowhood cocks are only broken down on the short races. We looked at many of the brothers' ace racers on our visit, but one which was rather unusual was the red chequer Frans Van Wildemeersch cock which won, in 1995, 1st section, 4th open Lerwick NRCC. John says the red Wildemeersch are very rare and this cock was a bit special in the hand. Another Wildemeersch we inspected at the race loft was a nice blue chequer cock that had won 1st federation Perth.

The Mitchell Brothers started keeping pigeons with the boy next door, when they were only lads. Their first birds came from Bilsthorpe Church and they used to go up the belfry when it was dark and catch the feral birds that lived there but the birds kept going back to the church every time they tried to settle them. Subsequently they went in for Birmingham Rollers and when Gary got married, he started with racers and John went into canaries, budgies and British birds. Gary started with gift birds from

Harold Snowball and Bill and Alfie Armin, all of Spennymoor, and joined the Ollerton and Dist NR Club. The partnership was formed in 1975 and in 1976 John went to Belgium with Reg Haldron who took John to visit Georges Busschaert, where he bought some good birds. Over the years, Mitchell Bros have purchased 66 birds from M. Busschaert from all the champions. On their return to the ferry, Reg told John he knew of a good flier called Frans Van Wildemersch whom they called in on. Frans only had six spare birds, which John purchased for £7 each. In 1977, the offspring of the Busschaerts and Van Wildemeersch won everything in front of them, including the first seven positions in one race (586 birds), twice first six positions, and first five positions in another race. Right up to 1988 the brothers used to go to Belgium every six weeks in the winter months to buy more stock and they eventually purchased over 80 birds from Frans Van Wildemeersch.

After winning so much with the Van Wildemeersch birds, John and Gary decided to visit Jerome Kellens, where most of Fran’s best birds originated from. They bought some very good birds including the ‘Held Hen’, dam of the ‘Old Hen’, and she bred ‘Number.7’, the Mitchell Bros' Lerwick King's Cup winner, when paired to a half brother of Frans Van Wildemeersch's champion racer ‘Kleine Bliksem’. In 1988 the brothers decided to concentrate on the Frans Van Wildemeersch and Kellens, so they sold all the Busschaerts. Although they have tried several different families of pigeons, none are equal to the Wildemeersch and Kellens.

GEORGE DOBB

OF SUTTON-IN-ASHFIELD

For our next loft visit we stay in the Midlands and the NRCC Lerwick King's Cup winning loft of George Dobb. George has been a fancier for 75 years and in that time has won just about everything there is to be won in club, federation, combine and National pigeon races. The Dobb loft won the supreme north road prize, the NRCC Lerwick King's Cup race in 1992. George's winner was a 2 year old natural blue chequer Busschaert cock feeding a l4-day-old youngster. This excellent cock's hen was sold to a fancier in Scotland three days before the Lerwick race, so he won the King's Cup unpaired, but feeding a big youngster. George races on the natural system, but plays around with a few widowhood cocks, with all birds on both systems flying out around the loft together. He keeps his pigeons to suit himself and has no set time for pairing up, but it's mostly done in mid-February.

George thinks feeding is the most important component of successful pigeon racing and feeds his own light mixture twice a day. The birds are let out twice a day for one hour and he maintains his mixture helps to keep them flying well around the loft. He said going up and down the motorway training is a waste of time and likes to get the team fit with good flies around the loft. George likes the long-distance races and in the Lerwick King's Cup race has won 1st, 3rd,7th, 10th, 11th and 21st open, as well as countless other top prizes at other racepoints. His best hen is a Busschaert, a cousin to the King's Cup winner, and she has won over £2,000 in north road races. George had been top prizewinner in the E.K.M.W., with a membership of 36 lofts, for the past 20-odd years when he won the Lerwick King's Cup in 1992 against what was then a record entry of 4,450 birds (liberated in a west wind, with high humidity and dead calm to follow). He won 1st open by a big margin. George also won the NRCC Perth race in 1971 with a hen of his old family and recorded the lowest winning velocity at that time.

George has a wonderful, old, double-decker loft with the pigeons in the top and the bottom used for storage and a workshop. He built the five section loft himself and traps the birds through open doors into a corridor. The loft is very 'old worlde' and houses two sections for old birds and three for the youngsters. He breeds about 60 babies every year and races them right through to Perth, which is a 242-milefly – the Dobb loft, but has sent young birds up to 323 miles and clocked them. He trains the young birds up to Leeds, 48 miles and then jumps them into Berwick, 185 miles. George used to go to the odd show and had a Kirkpatrick cock which won 28 X 1sts in eyesign shows, but he said that it never bred anything any good, which sums up his idea of eyesign in pigeons. He sometimes breeds the odd latebred. In fact, the sire of his King's Cup winner was bred in July. He doesn't like deep litter and maintains a lot can be learned by cleaning out every day, which he enjoys doing.