OBITUARY: Edmund Hall

Sent in by Les Gustafson

A belated obituary notice, as Edmund passed away last Summer, just a few days short of his 90th birthday. He is shown above with his team, the Holy Cross Demons of Wallsend on Tyne. His name may not be known to many in the sport unless they have visited the Newcastle CS History site, but he was contemporary in age with Len Silver, and Edmund showed the same flair for organization of the sport in post-war Tyneside as did Len in London (they may even have met, as Edmund made frequent trips to London to visit relatives, and spectated at a number of East London circuits – although didn’t pluck up the courage to ask to be allowed on the track). He marveled at the facilities which the London clubs enjoyed in the 1940s, compared to the spartan tracks in the North East, and he was impressed, when he attended a Northumbria Vikings match at their Cramlington base not long after it was constructed, to see how the modern-day sport had developed.



His time in the sport was relatively short, curtailed by the dreaded National Service and then by the demise of Newcastle Speedway, which also sent the pedal variety of the sport on Tyneside into hibernation for fifteen years, but his contribution in those early years was vital to the birth of the sport, and his recollections of the period provided vital information about the sport’s early years.