Albert Stratton has 80 pigeons, 56 medals, and two bird sheds. His garden isn’t much bigger than a bus shelter but over the years he’s bred more than 200 of London’s favourite pests.
He doesn’t just breed them. He races them. “Back in the day I was a force to be reckoned with!” he exclaims. “All them plaques up there - we boshed them! Cups and everything! We really gave them a run for their money.”
It’s true. The window sill is jammed with shiny dove effigies and bird busts. Instead of family photos there is a keepsake box with the homing pigeons’ ankle rings. When I ask about his children Albert pauses for a second: “Kids? Oh yeah. I’ve got one pest at university.” The humour passes him right by.
Pigeon racing is a dying sport and with it go Albert’s friends. “When I started in 1983, there were over 20 of us at the clubhouse. Now there are only three left.” He looks up at the heavy sky waiting for the answer to drop down and lighten his load. “It’s just Ixy, Smivvy and me… We’re old now, that’s the trouble.”
Two years ago Albert had a stroke; his left leg straggles behind the rest of his body and he uses a walking stick to get around. He leaves one at the bottom of the stairs and one outside the back door next to the lofts. Albert, 64, used to be a plumber but these days getting up and dressed is a morning’s work.
“I spend more time with the pigeons now. It gives me something to do.” As he struggles to get off the loft step he lets out a frustrated sigh. It’s the first time I hear him complain and he masks his words in a whisper. “I tell you, what you don’t want is a stroke. It’s completely debilitating.”
Charles Dickens wrote about a pigeon clubhouse near Spitalfields Market over a century ago. Albert reckons his club in East London is the same one. “It used to be huge,” he says. “The Queen is the patron. Her grandfather – George V – had lofts out in Sandringham. Mike Tyson does it too you know.” The testosterone laced, rough-talking boxer who once bit the ear off an opponent is a devoted ‘pigeon fancier’ and he’s a hero among racers.
Albert Stratton is a self-made champion. He’s won scores of titles, but he didn’t learn it from his family. “As a kid I found a pigeon that got lost in the flats where we lived. No meat on him at all, he’d flown himself out.
“Now my dad ain’t a big one for animals but he’d do nothing to hurt ‘em. Built a little box for him, fed it up, got it right again. He said it belonged to someone else so we let it go. But it never went. It stayed. Just kept coming back, right through my bedroom window for about two years. That’s what intrigued
me.”
Pigeons like baths I learn. In fact, “they’re the cleanest creatures on earth!” Boris Johnson calls them ‘flying rats’ and the packs on Trafalgar Square are known carriers of disease. But not ‘kept pigeons.’
Albert bathes his brood every other day in a red plastic tray with bath salts – and they love it. The best racers fetch thousands. Albert once paid £500 for a star breed but he can’t tell his wife.
Homing pigeons can fly 50mph and the longest races are 600 miles – up to the tip of Scotland. You do lose birds now and then; hawks are terrorising the skies. Let free by “do-gooders,” tuts Albert.
Out in the garden the well-kept birds natter and fuss away. Once environmental health was called round: “easy target for the neighbours,” his wife explains. The inspector took a photo of every roof in the square just to prove that their houses weren’t about to collapse under the droppings.
Albert once lost a five-time winner; he says it was heartbreaking. “But when you’re standing in your garden and a pigeon you expected at half past arrives on the hour, it really makes your heart pound. You think to yourself, ‘woweee, I’ve really got a good one here.’” He whistles the ‘woweee’ and you can feel his pride. Albert is an old man now but he straightens up, puffs up his chest and coos with glee. His pigeons do the same.
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