A cheetah named Helen

When a madcap idea turns out to be just that

Oct 07, 2022

Good morning!

Welcome to issue 2. Today, rather ironically, I’m sitting on the sofa to write this. I apologise and promise next week I’ll move back to the kitchen table.

Issue 1 I asked a very important question, perhaps life’s biggest? That’s right, I’m talking about What’s the greatest sandwich of all time? Thank you to everyone who contributed. It seems to make the perfect sandwich you need egg and you need cheese. But combined? I’ll leave that up to you to try.

My thanks, as always, to Ferry Gouw for this letter’s illustrations.

Until next time!

Your pal,
Katie

A CHEETAH NAMED HELEN

I once led a friend halfway up an A-road before realising my error. We were not, as I had assumed, heading towards Romford greyhound stadium but were in fact about to join the M25. Course redirected, we found the stadium quietly tucked away behind a horseshoe of residential houses. The stadium wasn’t quite stadium-like but instead small and unceremoniously bland in that betting shop kind of way. Nevertheless I was excited about the prospect of losing all my money to badly judged bets.

I remembered this evening when I recently stumbled upon a surprising fact about the place:

For two brief weekends in the winter of 1937, the stadium replaced the greyhounds with… cheetahs’

What?

History, I find, is full of ridiculous facts like this. We know too much now! Everything is boring. Imagine the excitement thinking cheetahs could be the future of racing. Our logical 21st century brain reads that and immediately thinks, nope.

Declining attendance forced the stadium’s founder, Archer Leggett, to get creative. Out in Kenya the explorer Kenneth Gandar-Dower had been taming cheetahs with the intention of introducing them as a greyhound alternative to the UK 1. Twelve arrived for Leggett, tamed and ready to race.

There were initial glimmers of hope when a cheetah named Helen (Helen!) outraced the dogs during trial runs 2. Helen the cheetah, it seemed, was about to be written into the history books.

But opening night told a different story.

Bad weather beset the course making it difficult for the cheetahs to run, though this did little to thwart attendance; for the first time in a long time the stadium was full. The following weekend drew even larger crowds as word of the cheetahs spread. “Most people had never seen a cheetah," a 91-year-old spectator, George Bowler, said. "At first people were apprehensive, but the moment the trap opened they were amazed by the flash of the cat. They were just so fast and, if you looked round all the mouths were open." 3

But Leggett was already realising the cheetahs’ racing limitations: they were terrible.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone because cheetahs are, after all, just giant cats. Cats do not like doing what you require them to do and that is why we love them.

Greyhounds are motivated to race with the hope of catching a mechanical hare perpetually out of reach, but the cheetahs saw through this trick. Released too late and the cheetahs couldn’t be bothered to move. Released too early and it would be caught before the first turn. As an extra incentive meat was attached to the hare (though they should’ve tried a laser pen — that drives my cat wild), but it was no good. After just two races Leggett pulled the plug. Cheetah racing was over.

All subsequent races were cancelled, with officials citing complaints from local residents and safety as the issue and not that, maybe, perhaps, cheetahs were a bad idea.

The greyhounds had their jobs back and the cheetahs were never mentioned, nor heard from, again.