Flights of Fancy: Pigeons and the British Timeshift

The pigeon.

Not just a bird, but a force of nature.

How many other birds can fly like they do?

The distance they do and the time they do? None.

The creature that, for centuries,

has been man's helpmate and companion.

They're quite quirky. They do have sort of an individual personality.

They're just a friendly, happy, curious little bird.

Come on, my little darling.

People who keep pigeons are known as fanciers.

I've never known anything more exciting,

to see a pigeon coming out of the sky.

Some breed pigeons to race them.

It's the same preparation, you know, with racing pigeons,

as it is for athletes and football players.

Others breed them to be, well, fancy.

What we look for is a lovely little apple-shaped body, like that.

It's a love that borders on obsession.

I've heard grown men who keep pigeons, and they'll coo, coo, coo,

for bloody hours.

But for some, the pigeon has been public enemy number one.

Neighbours regarded pigeons as nuisances,

often they made a lot of noise,

they created a lot of mess.

Yet, when it counts, this bird has always come through for us.

It was the humble pigeon that effectively brought help to save your life.

So, settle back in your deck chairs, and look up to the skies.

It's time to fly back through the decades

with man's best feathered friend.

Of all the ways to engage with pigeons,

racing is by far the most popular.

From the 1850s to the 1970s,

there were men that could hardly think of anything else.

It was a very serious business, because everybody wanted to win.

You know, you were convinced that you were going to win.

7-1-K-9-9-2-0...

It was a hobby - some would say a life's work -

steeped in rules and rituals.

Even before the first bird was released.

You spend all week waiting for Friday to come.

Friday comes and you've got a selection of birds

that you fancy for that weekend.

Put them in a basket, take them to your club,

where everyone else will be.

Lots of baskets of pigeons lined up.

1-7-4-N-6-9-5-7-6.

The whole attraction of pigeon racing isn't just the race itself.

It's a process, in many ways.

There's the rituals, of what time you feed the birds,

how you train them, how you release them.

It's part of your everyday existence.

And that means it's not a sport which is just a short, sharp excitement.

Because even the race itself, in terms of long-distance racing,

is actually quite a drawn-out process.

So, let's see how a typical race in the '70s would play out.

The pre-race formalities begin with each pigeon

being given a numbered ring.

And that would be wrote down on our race sheet...

..5-5-4-9.

..and put into an envelope, sealed.

And it would be put into the secretary's case.

Once registered, the birds are loaded onto transporters.

Cocks and hens travel separately,

so there's no fighting or funny business to distract them on the way.

The pigeons are now driven away from their home turf to an unfamiliar

release point.

It may be tens or hundreds of miles away.

Now their owners synchronise their racing clocks.

-Go.

-CLOCKS CLICK IN UNISON

Everyone would get together and you would set the clocks together,

exactly to the second.

And if anyone... Because you'd hear a noise that would go pchtow.

'At the third stroke,

'it will be 7.45 precisely.'

One, two, go.

CLOCKS CLICK IN UNISON

Any not gone?

And they should all read the exact same time so that there

is no fluctuation or people don't have an advantage.

The clocks get a last check...

Then it's off to the pub.

ORGAN PLAYS

To talk about pigeons.

A lot of it is just regaling stories about previous races or birds that

they've had in the past that have done weird things or that have been

particularly good.

You're all missing one thing which is the most

important of the lot, and that is character.

If the pigeon hasn't got the temperament, the character,

it'll never win anything.

We're all cracking jokes.

But deep down inside you're hoping

that you're going to knock hell out of them.

You're going to beat them.

We'll just bet an old-age pensioner wins the race tomorrow.

At first light the next day, the actual race begins.

Last chance for a drink of water until they hit the sea.

And if you've never seen one before, you're in for a treat.

Yes, they're all coming to the troughs now.

Get ready, Dave.

Right, let go!

All the fronts of the baskets drop, all hell breaks loose,

the pigeons go everywhere, feathers, sawdust fly everywhere.

And when they release the pigeons,

the only thing on that bird's mind is to get home as quick as possible,

to its loft.

They'd circle up in a big batch,

getting wider and wider.

And then eventually when they've figured out where they need to go,

then they've gone.

The homing pigeon seems to have an extraordinary global satnav

in its head.

So how exactly does that work?

Whenever I'm asked, I always give a fairly kind of...

..a fairly kind of non-specific series of answers.

Because I'm still not convinced that anyone really knows how they do it.

Homing pigeons have been recorded flying 600 miles in 15 hours.

The equivalent of driving at 40mph from London to Berlin

without a map.

Back at the pigeons' coops or lofts, the men's job is to sit still.

You would get up really early in the morning and you would sit in

a deckchair or chair in the garden and you would wait.

As the expected arrival time gets nearer,

excitement mounts.

It would all be, like, deadly hush.

There'd be no kites flying, there'd be no noise.

You'd have to be in the garden and quiet while the pigeon men were all

waiting for the birds to come in.

It was very therapeutic, just sitting there,

looking up at the sky.

It is something, you know, I haven't done since I was a child

and I was looking at clouds.

It was generally me mum who'd shout at us.

It wasn't the pigeon guys.

Because she'd probably get some earache off them.

You know, "Them bloody kids are making a noise in the garden,

"and my pigeons are coming in."

You know, so, it was just kind of a respect for the guys who had

the pigeons, you know. Don't make a noise in the garden, you know.

When the first pigeon appears, the next part of the ritual begins.

You'd know roughly what time the birds were coming back,

because you'd hear all the tins start rattling.

You know, "Come on, come on, come on. Come on!"

RATTLING

Come on.

And then the pigeon is almost there, it's almost in the garden.

They're really trying, but not trying to be too desperate,

because they don't want to scare the pigeon.

Precious moments can be lost chasing an athlete round the garden.

Come on.

I had one particular pigeon, it would sit on the house roof.

And it would sit there for an hour.

Didn't matter what I did.

It wouldn't come in.

And then the pigeon will eventually go in the loft and they'll clock it.

Ah... And then there's a breath of fresh air.

For the pigeons, the race is over.

For the men it's back down the clubhouse or the pub

for the final part of the process.

The opening of the clocks.

Three strikes, once on your printers, go!

CLOCKS CLICK AND RATTLE

The secretary would take the things all out of his case

and that's when the work started to work out who had won.

Racers learn the art of pigeon maths.

Distance divided by time equals velocity.

There's only pigeon in that I can see. It's in at 15 hours,

22 minutes.

Because the winner isn't the pigeon that gets home first

but the one that attains the fastest average speed

between the release point and its loft.

So pigeon racing is an absorbing passion.

And with gambling on pigeon racing illegal in Britain,

it's all done in the spirit of competition.

It's a sport that gets into your blood, you know.

And you just can't get it out.

Once you get interested in them they become part of you.

And that is really all you think about.

Training pigeons, breeding champions,

building the lofts and maintaining them,

preparing for race day,

finding the best birdseed, passing on what you know or keeping mum.

For many people, pigeons were an integral part of the fabric of life

and in some families they helped stitch the generations together.

There are people in their autobiographies who talk about how pigeon racing

brought them closer to their father, it was a shared activity.

They shared in feeding the birds,

they shared in clearing out the hutches.

I grew up around pigeons.

Jonathan Lee comes from a family steeped in all things pigeon.

My mum's dad kept pigeons,

his dad kept pigeons, and my nan's dad kept pigeons.

So, as my grandad would say, he was born with a pigeon in his hand.

They met through pigeons,

so arguably I might not be here if it wasn't for pigeons.

I first became interested in pigeons when I was very young because

my father has kept them since the age of 13

and he's now 77 and still keeps them.

As a teenager we never used to have a holiday that lasted seven days,

it only lasted from Monday to Friday because on the Saturday and Sunday

the pigeons would be coming home.

We used to always come back at Friday lunchtime

because Dad had to go and enter his pigeons at the pigeon race

on Friday evening.

And now I'd like you to meet Gerald Francis,

who, I believe you were judging, Gerald, yesterday, weren't you?

I was helping judge.

-How old are you?

-12.

Well, how did you become an assistant judge at that very young age?

Well, some of Mr Richards's friends who are judges...

Little Gerry Francis.

Years before he became a champion footballer,

he was a lad with a head full of pigeon lore.

I'd been the youngest ever steward

to judge at the International Pigeon Show at Olympia.

And so Peter Hague had me on there

with President Tito's pigeons

and the Queen's loft manager, Len Rush.

Well, congratulations on being a judge at your very tender years.

But, before we leave you, whose is that bird?

It comes from Czechoslovakia,

and I don't know the name of the person whose pigeon it is.

Wouldn't be Marshal Tito's by any chance, would it?

-Yes, I think it is.

-Think it is? Thank you very much, Gerald. Jolly good.

Like footballing, pigeon fancying

was a way of life in the industrial towns.

The art was handed down from generation to generation.

My life was probably mapped out for me a bit

because my father had racing pigeons

and was a professional footballer.

My mother's father was a professional footballer

but all his brothers had racing pigeons as well.

So, on both sides of my family

we had football and we had racing pigeons.

Probably my destiny was already written.

Now, this pigeon is Just For The Kids

and she was the one the kids picked out and she won over £2,000,

which bought them the quad bike and we brought her back and called her

Just For The Kids.

She's been producing winners for me now since 2006.

While Gerry learned about pigeons from his dad,

Loz began fancying with his grandad.

The thing about roller pigeons,

what we look for is a lovely little apple-shaped body like that.

You see that shape, it's like a lovely little apple shape.

Stop struggling, lad.

My grandfather only lived a few houses up from us

and he was a mad pigeon man

and there was, like a lot of the guys down the street,

there was a lot of flyers down this road, you know, in the early '60s,

it was very big, pigeon flying, back then.

So, kind of brought up with my grandfather,

putting rings on for him,

going with him to take the young birds on flights.

But, yeah, that's Lucky.

Been lucky so far, haven't you, fella?

Come on. Oh, shut up moaning.

This is a white bushart.

Colin Hill has kept pigeons for 70 years.

This pigeon is what we call Aaron.

He was born the same year as my grandson,

so we decided to call him that.

He's nine years old now.

He's bred some good young birds to fly.

Because we gave it to the grandson I've only raced it once

and he didn't come home on time.

So we never sent it no more, did we?

No.

But he's a nice pigeon.

-Yeah.

-And all the young 'uns he breeds are white.

-Yeah, they will be about 14.

-They're the young 'uns, aren't they?

From the cradle to the grave,

pigeons have been a source of fascination and consolation.

He's not a bad one, is he?

Got a good eye, hasn't he?

So that's like them eyes of yours, is that.

This man was holding part of everyday life in his hands.

In certain parts of the country pigeons would have been part of

the landscape. Anywhere where there was industry or large amounts of

working-class people, I mean,

it wasn't only working-class people that kept pigeons,

but it is synonymous with working-class life.

Packs of pigeons in the sky, you would have seen it on a daily basis.

The thickest clouds were seen in the skies around coalmines because

Britain's miners were famous pigeon fanciers.

In many mining communities there was simply space to keep pigeons.

There were allotments,

there were slightly bigger backyards in some areas

and this allowed people to keep pigeons.

And the other thing to remember is that miners were also relatively well-paid

when you compare them with other industrial occupations,

and pigeon racing was never a cheap sport.

You needed money for the birds, for feed,

for race entry fees, and maybe that is the key reason why it was popular

amongst miners.

They would be in the dark all the day

and then at the weekends they would come home and they wanted to look up

at the sky because it's something that they missed so much in their day-to-day life.

My family, coming from a mining background in South Wales...

Grandfather, as soon as he finished school, at the age of 14

or something, went into the mines.

It was either pigeons or greyhounds, or both, in their case,

at the time.

Can you tell me what there is about pigeons which is so fascinating?

Well, the most fascinating thing is when it comes home after a race.

-Yeah.

-There is nothing more exciting.

I've never known anything more exciting than seeing a pigeon coming

out the skies there and everybody has been waiting two or three hours,

sometimes two and three days, you know.

And I've done a lot of things in my life,

but that's the most interesting thing I've ever seen.

-Seeing a pigeon coming home?

-Pigeon coming home after a race.

Working men took up pigeon racing around the 1850s.

Until then, homing pigeons were used as messengers.

Everyone from Noah to Victorian bankers relied on pigeon post to

carry news of war, love letters, stock market information,

sporting results.

But when the telegraph arrived in the 1840s,

these useful birds were made redundant.

Thousands of unemployed pigeons flooded the market, to be picked up cheap by working men.

And the utility bird turned into a sporting bird.

But in 1914,

the outbreak of the First World War

changed the story for pigeons once more.

They were put back to work as messengers with renewed purpose.

Very important to this side

and many lives were saved in the First World War through the pigeons.

Once the major kind of land battles started taking place,

they realised that pigeons for communication were probably the most

reliable way of doing it.

So then, literally hundreds of thousands of pigeons

were used at the front.

They were remarkably reliable, over 90% reliability.

In the old days of kind of the field telegraph,

where you were relying on a cable,

if things were being shelled and those cables broke,

you had no contact with the people behind you.

It was the humble pigeon that effectively brought help

to save your life.

The wartime pigeon service was operated by men

who had been fanciers on civvy street.

They were dubbed the pigeoneers.

A pigeoneer,

his sole job was to look after the pigeons and to get them to the front

where they were needed.

The pigeoneer was in charge of a movable loft,

holding up to 150 birds.

They were pulled along the...

not far from the actual fighting.

They had a motorbike lad,

he used to have to put four pigeons in a basket,

go to the front line,

all through the shells and the bombing and God knows what.

Now, I would call that a brave man.

Because the front line moved around, the lofts had to be mobile.

Lofts could be basically anything from as simple as a cart

with the pigeon loft literally nailed to the back.

They even used converted double-decker buses,

even triple-decker pigeon lofts.

Remarkably, though their loft was on the move,

the pigeons would still find it.

We know quite a bit about the wartime pigeoneers

because they had their own annual.

And this is recording the exploits of pigeon fanciers

serving in the front lines, recording either their service,

sadly sometimes their demise, or their injuries.

So these were just normal working-class people who were

serving at the front

that happened to have an affinity with pigeon racing

and there were many pages and numerous pigeon fanciers listed.

The pigeon's contribution to the Great War

became part of its mythology.

-Yes, it's one of the King's carrier pigeons.

-No, it isn't...

This scene in Blackadder Goes Forth reflects

the significance of the pigeon's role.

Lieutenant, revolver, please.

Oh, now, sir, you really shouldn't do this, you know.

Come on, George. With 50,000 men getting killed a week,

who's going to miss a pigeon?

GUNSHOT

A role far more important than feeding a hungry soldier.

Well, not you, obviously, sir.

In any case, it's scarcely a court-martial offence.

Get plucking, Baldrick.

"PS, due to communication crisis,

"the shooting of carrier pigeons is now a court-martial offence."

In the peace time of the 1920s,

pigeon men resumed their passion and their sport got an unexpected boost.

Before the war, working-class fanciers

had only been able to do short-distance racing.

This was where baskets of pigeons

would be carried on foot to a few fields away before being let go.

But improvements in transport moved the sport up a gear.

Britain was now serviced by a vast railway network and the trains were

roped in to serve pigeon racing.

Steam trains meant that you could move large numbers of pigeons

relatively cheaply

and, as most steam trains ran from kind of centres of population,

which is where the majority of the pigeon fanciers lived,

you could then move large numbers of pigeons cheaply,

which meant that you could race pigeons.

And some railways, lines even had designated,

bespoke pigeon carriages

and they would be sent to the local station master,

who would take the baskets off, read his instructions from the club

as to what time roughly they wanted them liberating,

and the station master would liberate the pigeons.

They would then fly home.

Pigeon fancying attracted thousands of new members.

But at the same time the pigeon expresses were helping to promote the hobby,

local councils were plotting to stop it.

Through the '20s and '30s,

the government pushed through a national programme of slum clearance.

Thousands of working-class families

would be rehoused but their pigeons had no place in suburbia.

Local authorities across Britain are somewhat reluctant to allow pigeons

to be kept on their new estates.

They were perfectly aware that neighbours regarded pigeons as

nuisances often.

They made a lot of noise, they created a lot of mess,

there were allegations that they would damage houses and outbuildings.

The pigeon fanciers, however,

were blessed with long memories and foresight.

The pigeon associations start lobbying councils

saying remember just how important pigeons were in the First World War.

If there's going to be another conflict,

the country's going to need pigeons, and what we see in the late 1930s is

council after council going back on some of its previous bans on keeping

pigeons and we see pigeon racing allowed again

on some of the new council estates that have been built.

And thank goodness, because the pigeon associations were proved right.

In 1939, another war did break out

and Britain had a new batch of birds to send to battle.

You know, they were like the James Bond of the pigeon world

and they made a hell of a lot of good flights.

The RAF have got the bird, or rather the birds.

That's "pigeon" English for the feathered messengers

that are being tried out to speed up communication.

An RAF pigeon takes off from the cockpit.

Pigeons in the Second World War were called up to serve in the various

forces and this document is basically

the call-up papers instructing the pigeon fancier

where to deliver his pigeons to, and these in particular are

going to an RAF station.

Once the pigeons arrived at the RAF station,

the owner would then lose all track of where those pigeons are.

Pigeons in this war had two main jobs.

The first was as an aid to spying,

smuggling information out of occupied Europe back to Britain.

They also carried films back.

Where the Germans were releasing the doodlebugs and all them, the V1,

the first thing was the pigeon that brought

where that was happening back on his back, on a film.

The main problem here was how to deliver a pigeon to a secret agent.

Luckily, someone came up with a cunning plan.

What they quickly developed was a method of wrapping pigeons

so they could drop them from aircraft.

However, obviously, if you drop a pigeon that can't fly out from

an aircraft, it will inevitably meet its end.

And what they developed was the pigeon parachute.

They would set the pigeon into the tube.

It would have in there a bit of food

and a notebook, and then it would be fixed to a parachute.

This is a World War II pigeon parachute.

And then the pigeon parachute would be released from the small aeroplane

travelling over France.

And the resistance boys would be down, see it coming,

they would pick it up, and they were only allowed to keep them

for two days and then they would have to release them

and then we'd send more out there.

And many thousands were parachuted into France

and some pigeons did this on numerous occasions.

The second important use for pigeons was to act as SOS signals for

stricken planes.

Pigeons would accompany bomber crews on their missions.

Most aircraft that took off from here had

two pigeons put in two metal tins, and they went out with them.

If the plane was hit and the crew had time to act,

the pigeons would be released.

It didn't matter what time, night, what weather conditions it were,

they were thrown out to find home.

In February 1942, this happened to a pigeon called Winkie.

She was one of two birds returning home from Norway with a crew.

A Beaufort bomber had been hit by flak and it had ditched in the sea.

When possible, birds were sent back

carrying the coordinates of the crash location.

But in this case, there was no time.

And then liberated two pigeons,

Winkie, and the other one never made it, it was lost,

probably drowned in the middle of February when the weather was really

cold and wet and bad.

Covered in oil, Winkie faced a 120-mile journey in freezing winds

to her loft on the Scottish coast.

But Winkie did manage to fly back home.

The RAF knew when the plane had ditched and when Winkie had arrived.

Factoring in wind direction and Winkie's likely speed,

they worked out where the plane must be.

After Winkie done a fantastic thing, got back,

they made a medal up for all the animals,

what we call the Dickin medal.

And of the 65 awarded to date, there's been one cat, three horses,

29 dogs and 32 pigeons,

so pigeons at the moment hold most of the Dickin medals.

The very first Dickin Medal for animal gallantry

went to Winkie the pigeon,

and Ken Hall was a member of the club that bred her.

And he's still on display in Dundee Museum,

he's been preserved and he's on display

with his Dickin's medal right up to present day.

When the war ended, hundreds of thousands of pigeons

were released across the world as symbols of freedom and hope.

The hordes of pigeons made for a moving sight.

But they wouldn't always be viewed that way.

Come with me now as we fast forward to the early 1960s

and the centre of London.

Not yet swinging.

One of the most familiar landmarks in London,

the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

Notice anything strange about it?

-Anything missing?

-No.

-Take a closer look.

-Tourists, traffic?

-Have you guessed it?

-Living statues?

-No, pigeons.

-Oh, of course.

In the 1960s,

London councillors began their assault on the pigeons

in Trafalgar Square.

They piped lines of plastic jelly on buildings to stop them perching.

It didn't deter the pigeons for long,

they just found other places to land.

So why had pigeons gone from being heroes to pests?

Word had got out that generous Londoners

were handing out free meals.

And more pigeons meant even more pigeons.

Pigeons are prolific breeders.

A pair can produce up to a dozen youngsters a year.

And those young start breeding at six months.

So that means one pair can beget around 18 children and grandchildren per annum.

Each bird produces annually up to 25 pounds of poo.

Pigeon maths suggests that in the 1960s,

about 35,000 pigeons were aerial bombing Trafalgar Square

with 390 tonnes of guano a year.

Why are you so anxious to clear the pigeons away from the buildings?

To try and get the buildings clean and to stop the waste of public money in keeping them clean.

To get them in a more hygienic condition.

But wouldn't it be much easier to destroy the pigeons?

It would, but what about the people?

The people like them, they're a tourist attraction.

Public opinion is against us.

We'd like the pigeons to go onto the trees.

It's not the pigeons we object to,

it's what they leave behind on the buildings.

Pigeons are among the few birds that

have learned to thrive alongside man.

Their adaptability is the secret to their success.

Now, always in these programmes so far we've tried to go back into

the past and find the ancestor of the bird or the creature that we're

studying. And we'll do this now with pigeons.

First of all, we'll have a look at the five species of pigeons,

which we find in Britain and Europe.

The beginning, the first one, is a wood pigeon.

Pigeons are from the family of Columbidae

and all, no matter how fast, clever or fancy share a common lineage.

And that brings us on to the last of the five, the rock dove.

Now, the rock dove is the most important

and that's why we left it until last.

Note these black bars on this blue-grey back

and this very white patch here,

which we have above the tail.

The rock dove is the ancestor of all the tame pigeons.

No matter where you find them and how varied they are,

the rock dove is the one from which they came.

The wild rock dove's natural habitat is seaside cliffs.

They like to nest in the caves and cracks.

Hence the pigeon's fatal attraction

for our large and cliff-like old stone buildings.

What good was a squeeze of council jelly

against the might of evolution?

But as Britain moved inexorably into the age of washing whiter

and the clean, modern lines of concrete and plastic,

civic war was declared on the dirty old pigeon.

The '50s and '60s sees a whole host of developments in housing.

We see tower blocks, we see new council estates,

we see private housing estates on the edge of towns and all of these

things in many ways made it more difficult to keep pigeons.

Utopia was pigeon free.

Die-hard fanciers had to set up their lofts elsewhere.

Some of them did move to allotments,

into areas further away from where they lived,

but because you had to go there every day to look after your birds,

that would require time and effort.

Relocated, the lofts could be bigger and better.

These coops were a visible part of working-class communities

and they often stand out as well,

because many pigeon racers painted them bright colours in order

for it to be easier for the pigeon to spot which one of the coops

around was its home.

Pigeons are thought to be able to see millions of different hues.

They recognise their own lofts and nesting boxes by colour.

But the decoration of a new coop said something else, too.

It showed you cared, even if no-one else did.

Come on, then.

Come on.

'This is Sean Boy, named after my grandson, Sean.'

Come on, flower.

'This one has everything.

'Mainly, I should say, character.'

Come on, my lad.

'Lovely, silky feather, strong wings,

'noble looking head.

'Look at the look of intelligence that this bird has.

'One that you only breed once, probably, in each lifetime.'

The disaffected wives of fanciers were called pigeon widows.

Like local councils, many took a dim view of their husbands' obsession.

And I've heard men, grown men, who keep pigeons and they'll coo, coo,

coo for bloody hours outside the pigeon creek, talking to pigeons.

Well, it's just something I can't explain at all about them.

Well, I mean I get up at six o'clock in the morning,

my wife thinks I'm pretty out of my mind at times because I spend more

time with the pigeons than I do with my family.

I can't expect my wife to understand because she's a woman.

It's better than being in there,

being nagged all the while by a wife, I should say myself.

If you understand what I mean.

Some guys, it's just their whole life, you know,

and I can imagine what it's like to be with someone

who's just totally obsessed with one thing, you know.

But I know a few pigeon men now

whose, the wives just aren't interested.

It's just...it's just their thing, you know, and it's...

They're just pigeon widows.

This is part of him, you know, and I think every wife feels this.

Many, many times, you know,

you want to go out shopping and they want to go to the loft, well,

you can get them to stop going to the loft

and stop being a pigeon man for a short while,

but they always go back.

Even our courting days were all tied up with pigeons, I mean,

most of our courting time was spent in front of the pigeon loft,

you know, it was a case of love me,

love my pigeons, and that's every pigeon man, and if you don't,

well, then, you're just left outside.

There was one woman who did grow up loving pigeons.

The future Queen Elizabeth.

That's her during the war.

And here is a small girl hanging out at the Royal lofts.

The Sandringham loft was established in the 1880s...

..when the King of Belgium gave a pair of prized pigeons to

the Royal Family.

Now, these pair of youngsters are roughly nearly three weeks old and

they're the pure strain.

They're a fine pair of youngsters to look at now.

What they'll turn out to be, well, of course, one never knows.

Go on.

Len Rush became the young Queen's loft manager in 1962.

In the 1980s, he talked to the BBC about his passion.

Go on, boy. Go on, boy.

I always had had pigeons for many, many years and the birds I had then,

they were the same strain as the Royal Lofts.

Of course, those pigeons came from the Royal Lofts.

And when I took over, the Queen very kindly gave me the chance of keeping

my own pigeons and racing hers.

And, of course, there was a big contrast in having about 30 pigeons

to roughly roundabout the 200 mark.

On days when she wasn't busy ruling,

the Queen would drive out to the suburbs and chat on with Len about

bloodlines and bird seeds.

I love my pigeons.

They're part of me and although they belong to Her Majesty,

I look upon them as my pigeons.

Let's leave homing pigeons there and turn our attention to another branch

of pigeon fancying.

One of its most famous practitioners was the naturalist Charles Darwin.

Darwin was fascinated by a phenomenon

that took hold in the 1800s,

when fanciers began breeding extreme physical traits into their pigeons.

Darwin had a theory that if man could do this, then so could nature.

His findings became a cornerstone of his ground-breaking book.

And since then, man has got genetic tinkering down to a fine art.

This is Hein Van Grouw.

He breeds Romanian Naked Necks.

The Romanian Naked Neck, most people don't like it

because, as you can see, it has a naked neck.

Clearly there are people who liked it

because the mutation and the breeds are still around.

It was never popular,

even not in the country of origin.

Come on, you go now.

But, yeah, after more than 100 years, it's still there.

Hein also breeds Silky pigeons.

And he's got a little experiment on the go.

Here, this one has just hatched today

and a few hours out of the egg.

It's already

filled up here a little bit with pigeon milk,

so the parents have already fed it.

Pigeons grow very fast.

In one week, this will become this.

In the next two weeks, he will be more or less fully grown,

leave the nest and more or less being independent then.

And this is a certain cross that will give silky feathers pigeons,

if I'm lucky. I can already see on the way the down is curly,

this is silky.

That's sort of what he's aiming for, but a different colour.

No other domestic animal has lent itself to being bred into such

a bewildering variety of forms.

Or behaviours.

My interest in pigeons is the Birmingham Roller pigeon,

as it's called, which is a performing pigeon.

Well, it came originally from the area around Birmingham,

the West Midlands, the Black Country.

Birmingham Roller pigeons were first bred in the 1920s when a breeder

called Bill Pensom noticed a pigeon do an unusual aerial roll.

He could pick that trait out and he knew exactly what he wanted and it

must've took him a long time.

Hopefully, you'll see the birds go straight up, usually not,

you need a flag to get them up because they're lazy.

They will circle the garden initially really tight

and then hopefully they will gain altitude

and fly together as a group.

And then they'll get to a certain height,

usually around 200 feet maybe,

sometimes higher, and then as the birds turn into the wind

they will all break, flip backwards and roll down.

It's very difficult to get 20 birds flying like that.

Recent research suggests the trait that is being bred

may be narcolepsy.

In other words, these birds could be temporarily nodding off in flight.

A more extreme creation is the Parlour Tumbler,

a pigeon that has been bred to do this.

The Parlour Tumbler has lost the ability to fly.

The record for tumbling in a straight line

is a mind-boggling 200 metres.

That just went about three.

In 1984, cameras captured some of the methods then used

in competitive fancy breeding.

Some of these birds as young birds get drained so they get used to it,

of keeping always the crop filled up with air.

I will just shortly demonstrate how that is done

but it is one of the part of the training of training a cropper bird.

This practice is now frowned upon.

Fancy breeding is often for competition.

Breeders use all kinds of methods to show their bird

to its best advantage.

This is an African Owl.

One of the few breeds of short-faced pigeons,

which are not very good at feeding their own young.

One of the main features is that that particular bird

should have a short as possible beak.

Fanciers use a little matchbox and file the beak down.

Mainly to do it straight.

It doesn't hurt the pigeon.

Also, we can give it a little bit of cosmetic surgery

of painting the wattles white.

This is not illegal.

All fanciers are doing it.

Fancy breeding takes years to get results.

But in the 1980s, if you didn't have time or the patience,

you could just cut corners.

Before the war, there were a lot of exotic birds here

that lived on grapes and bananas, and when I went to the war,

they died because there were no grapes or bananas

and everyone was rather sad.

And then I came back on leave

and I thought what I could do to cheer the place up.

Pigeon fancying appealed to all classes.

It's just that the working class generally did most of the work.

They have to be put in separate boxes in the airing cupboard

to dry because otherwise they get together and their colours run.

How fancy pigeons came to look as they do is easy to understand.

But the remarkable homing instinct continues to perplex.

We've got plenty of birds in the world that can fly from A to B...

..on migration,

but they're the only bird that can fly at speed.

In the 1970s, scientists were convinced

they could solve the mystery.

The birds act as though, upon release,

they somehow from the map determine, in the abstract,

that home, in this case, is south-east.

We know very little about that map,

that small voice that tells the bird

where he is and where home is.

There's hundreds of theories.

The Americans years ago spent a fortune,

and I mean a lot of dollars.

If one wants to find out the role of the eye and the role of vision,

the best thing is to eliminate vision,

but eliminating vision does not work in pigeons because

as soon as you cut out vision, then the bird does not fly any more,

so we reduce vision by inserting frosted contact lenses

into the bird's eye.

They made them blind by patches over their eyes,

they've done everything.

But nobody knows.

There are so many ways man has engaged with pigeon.

All too often, the pigeon has come off worse.

GUNSHOTS

Not so much pigeon fancying as whether you fancy pigeon.

This was a wood pigeon.

At this time of year,

which is the best time for pigeons, when they're feeding grain

and young vegetables in the fields,

and become very tender, plump little birds.

We've never liked to eat city pigeons,

considering them disease-ridden vermin.

But come autumn,

the plumptious wood pigeon is consumed in 100 different ways.

The other pigeon dish we're doing at present on our menu

is a roast pigeon in a sauce with Armagnac and juniper berries.

That looks delicious.

Is it?

It's really delicious.

-Really delicious.

-Oh, delicious.

I thought it was delicious, thank you.

Yes, I thought it might be.

City pigeons continue to be targeted in a different way.

In Trafalgar Square,

what had started in the '60s with a jelly gun

ended in the noughties with a ban.

There are just a few hours left if you want to feed the pigeons

legally in Trafalgar Square. From tomorrow,

a new bylaw comes into effect

outlawing it, to get rid of what some people call flying rats.

There was some public outcry and a campaign was launched.

This pedestrian precinct that we're standing on here

does not come within the confines of Trafalgar Square.

People would therefore be perfectly within the law

to feed in those areas.

But this time, the council won.

In the world of pigeon racing, things were looking bleak, too.

The glory days were well and truly over.

So, the peak was in the '60s and '70s,

pigeon results were placed on the back of the Sunday newspapers

and pigeon racing had a much higher kind of social profile.

Everybody understood what pigeon racing was about

and really it's been a steady kind of decline from the '70s onwards.

The pigeon's old champions in the industrial towns

were losing their own battles.

That's the era when, in many ways,

the traditional working-class communities

are on their last legs in their traditional form.

It's the era of mass closures in the mining industry,

it's the era when people feel

an old way of life is starting to fade away,

and pigeon racing is part of that.

Today, the number of fanciers is way down on what it used to be.

People want cleaner, less consuming pastimes.

There's not much room for people to keep pigeons.

You can't let them fly out any more.

Even if you keep them indoors, like I do,

you might have neighbours who start complaining about the noise.

Nowadays, perhaps to be cynical, everybody wants to go on holiday.

I know by experience, very difficult to find people who want to look after your birds.

And, of course, they never do it as well as you do, anyway,

but that's a different story.

So, I guess it's the whole modern world nowadays.

But men like Ken Hall grew up with pigeons.

And the modern world just can't compete.

These are the allotments.

Can we come and have a look inside at your birds?

Yes. Come in.

Come on, my little darlings.

Come on.

So, how many have you got in here, Ken?

There's about 32.

Most of them have flown the Channel, mind.

Would you like me to catch one?

-Yes, please.

-I'll try to if I can.

Come on, my little darlings.

Come on. Come on, my little sweethearts.

Come on.

I used to race reasonably regularly.

Today, at my age, I don't race as such

but I do send my birds away with the club and they

are liveried with the club.

The good pigeons,

they're hard to come by. Few and far between.

I picked this, this is the oldest pigeon in the loft.

It's a Czech white hen.

Hello, lass. I'm not going to hurt you, you know.

I don't know why you're...

This will be my last year.

I just can't look after them properly as I should be.

Now I just enjoy...

..and watching them come back.

Is that a baby, Alan?

No, it's me.

The average age of a British pigeon fancier today is 65.

One way forward is to encourage younger members

but that isn't always easy.

The younger generation...

..don't really want a lot to do with the pigeons.

It's a full-time job.

I've got two young grandchildren.

The eldest one of the two,

he has actually spent hours in my pigeon loft

but he would still like to go out and play football.

Do you think one day you'll race pigeons as well?

-No.

-No.

Because in our garden we probably haven't got the space to keep them.

Yeah. We've already got loads of pets, that's why.

Pigeon fancying might be in decline in Britain...

..but the sport has migrated all over the world.

In Eastern European countries,

and also southern Mediterranean countries, pigeon racing is growing.

Average age of the fancier there'd probably be late teens,

early 20s, and it's mainly on the back of kind of one-loft racing,

where the prizes associated with a one-loft race are

kind of life-changing.

One-loft racing is a modern way of getting into the sport.

You can win money but don't need to spend any on having your own loft.

It's an innovation that has brought in a lot of new blood.

It's not impossible to imagine a future

where suddenly people rediscover pigeon racing. After all,

the attractions that made it so popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

are still there.

It is still a sport that challenges people,

that gives people a sense of excitement and people a sense of

accomplishment as they see their bird grow from a small chick into

an adult that can race and can bring some fame and stature to them as individuals.

This is today's typical pigeon fancier, somewhere in China.

But he could be any British pigeon man of the last 160 years.

Their faces express the same hope, the same focus.

Come on.

Perhaps this is a good time for a last bit of pigeon maths.

Patience plus purpose

equals pleasure.

For me, there's nothing better than early on a summer's day,

you let your birds out to fly, they go up like tiny little dots.

They'll come sweeping down, you hear the wings coming across your head...

WINGS FLAP

..back up and disappear off.

That's a magical sight.

We keep saying, me and the wife, we'll get rid of them,

we'll pack it all up.

But the next day I go up there and sit in me chair.

No, life wouldn't be worth living without the pigeons there.

I think so, anyway.