If you do a google search you'll be hard pressed to find any articles about this genius of a racing man, but he was the Racing Manager at Wimbeldon between 1936 and 1976. He was the finest grader of his time. Sometimes you need to look back and try an understand the history of a sport and some of the notables who were by far ahead of their time. ****** was one of these.
A friend of mine was lucky to be able to gather some of his manuscripts and together we develop algorithms to make it possible to compute races in a matter of minutes.

A notable Robert V Rowe (USA) wrote the following from half way around the world about ******.
"For instance, ****** Stevens, racing manager at Wimbledon in the 1960s, was the pioneer of sectional timing and grade classifications. ...racing remains at Wimbledon. That's the main thing."

Biggest hero in greyhound racing ****** Stevens, the former Wimbledon racing manager. If his like had been around in the last 20 years the sport might still be thriving. He was strict but fair, gave no favours. He used to walk the track and announce the going before racing. He was the pioneer of racing.

Towards the end of 1943, the then Wimbledon racing manager, ****** Stevens, came up with a special invitation race for puppy champions.

"Perhaps the finest grader in the history of the sport was ****** Stevens, for many years racing manager at Wimbledon Stadium; because he was rarely known to be swayed by his emotions, however exciting the racing, he became known as "TheSphinx". When making up his card he gave each greyhound a class figure, beginning with A1 for the top race; A2 for a slightly lower grade and so on all the way down to A8 which was allotted to the lowest-class dogs. After every race he awarded points to each of the six dogs taking part in relation to the position in which they finished. A league points table for each dog enabled him to see at a glance how the dogs moved up or down the table each week and he could grade them accordingly. So meticulous was ****** Stevens in his efforts to please everyone and to give his patrons the best possible racing that he placed staff around the track at each meeting to note the position and running of each dog every few yards. This information was taken into consideration when making up his card for future meetings. Indeed, nothing at all was left to chance"

****** Stevens was Racing Manager at Wimbledon from 1936 until 1976. In addition to the techniques listed above he also incorporated into his grading system the criteria by which winning runners were automatically up-graded.

Similarly, runners without a second or third placing in three runs were automatically downgraded ... And all long before the day-to-day use of computers.

Leafing through the archives from 1951 I discover that this was the year when Wimbledon's ****** Stevens determined that a length should be calculated to .08 of a second, whereas everyone else was working to .06.