MEET the Paynes and their beautiful young pup Brandon – a familiar name to fans of the Coventry Bees speedway team.
Made up of Linda, Jill, Dawn and her partner Chris, the family have been going to watch the Coventry Bees since before they can remember.
But the family’s Friday nights will have to be filled with a different social activity this year following Bees’ axe from the 2017 SGB Premiership.
It all started decades ago when Linda used to catch her regular connecting bus from Broadgate to go and watch her beloved Bees race at Brandon in front of tens of thousands of speedway loving fans.
Throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Linda remembers watching some of the speedway’s most iconic names race around the Brandon circuit.
She said: “I was brought here as a baby.
“My first memory of Coventry Stadium is the pits being in a different area, I also remember hundreds of people queuing for buses after race meetings.
“You couldn’t watch the scratch races after the main meeting as you can nowadays, if you did you’d miss the connecting bus to Broadgate.
“I brought my husband in the 70s and introduced him to the sport before having my two daughters Jill and Dawn.
“Jill was six weeks old when she first came and Dawn was six months.
“We don’t miss fixtures as we travel parts of Britain where meetings take place and have holidays at those venues.”
Linda’s daughter Dawn, who met her other half at the Bees, said Brandon is a very special place to her.
She said: “It’s devastating the Bees won’t be racing this year, we just have to live in hope – that’s all we can do.
“There’s no valid reason for the sport to be lost – we don’t know life without speedway.
“What are we going to do on a Friday night now?
“We plan to meet up with the people we’d normally go to watch the speedway with.
“My mum lives on her own now so it’ll be hard to get her out socialising. Coming to speedway is a social event, we never missed a meeting.”
Though they’ll be no speedway at Coventry this year, the Brandon name will continue to run in the Payne household as Jill decided to name the latest family addition after the famous venue.
She said: “If speedway returned to Coventry it would be like our lives return to normal.
“At the moment it feels like there’s a big chunk missing.
“I brought my boyfriend here and we decided to get a dog – what other name to call him than Brandon.
“My life is earning money to do speedway meetings.”
