Best Australian Racing Stories (41 page)

I seem to have seen the beginnings of a lot of things in my life and among others I saw the beginnings of the stipendiary system.

One of the first men appointed was my lifelong friend, Leslie Rouse, a solicitor by profession and son of Richard Rouse, a grazier and thoroughbred breeder of Mudgee.

Leslie Rouse had an inherited and unequalled knowledge of the thoroughbred horse, had been an amateur rider, and had graduated in bush racing where the prizes are small and the owners and trainers have to be
sans peur
if not
sans reproche
in order to get a living.

Before long there was an outcry that Rouse was catching only the small fry and was letting the big fish escape. He said in reply that it pained him like anything to put out the small and hungry battlers, but as they did such desperate things he had no option.

As he had no legal authority to compel witnesses to appear before him, he had to get his information as best he could.

‘The big races are all right,' said Rouse. ‘Nobody is going to pull a horse in The Metropolitan to win a race at Menangle; but when I see a horse running three stone above his form and somebody winning a million I always wish that I could catch the man who worked it, but I very seldom can.'

‘Unwisdom'

I was at a harbour picnic given by New South Wales Premier ‘Joe' Carruthers for the great New Zealand owner G.G. Stead, who had been over with his horses the previous year and had simply swept the board. First and second in the Derby, winner of the principal weight-for-age races, he had made turf history.

So, Joe Carruthers, who liked a punt on a good thing, invited me to join a harbour picnic he was giving for G.G. Stead. I did not grasp the idea at first but it soon became obvious that the object of the entertainment was to get Stead to talk about the chances of his colt Huascar, the only animal he had brought over that year.

The affair was a great success, up to a certain point. There was a feast of reason and a flow of champagne. We went around the harbour and visited the beauty spots and the training ships, but not a word about Huascar.

Just as we were getting back to the wharf, Joe came to me and said, ‘You know the old sphinx, ask him about Huascar.'

‘No,' I said, ‘you're the Premier of the State and you're giving the entertainment. You ask him.'

So the question was put, and Stead gave a true sphinx-like answer.

‘I've had a lot of experience in racing, Mr Carruthers,' he said, ‘and I found one rule that paid me all the time; and that is, when you don't know anything, don't bet.'

Good enough advice perhaps, but not what Joe had expected in return for his champagne.

After parting from our host, Mr Stead and I walked up the street together and he decided to talk.

‘If I told him not to back the horse,' he said, ‘he would think I was putting him off. If I told him to back it he would not believe that I was giving a good thing away. But I can tell you this colt isn't worth two shillings and I only brought him over to support the meeting as I won such a lot last year. You can tell anybody you like, for none of them will believe you.'

Feeling that I owed Joe something for his harbour picnic, I passed this information on to him.

‘Who told you the colt was no good?' he asked.

‘Mr Stead told me.'

‘Then I don't believe it. Do you mean to tell me that he'd bring a horse all the way from New Zealand if it wasn't a crack? He must think we're simple over here.'

This morbid frame of mind made him back Huascar and the animal, in racing parlance, ‘isn't in yet': which only illustrates the ‘unwisdom' of telling anybody anything on the turf.

The Gawk

A good many years ago I was asked to go along with a friend who had a commission to buy a yearling for somebody up-country. I think he took me along to share the blame if he bought a bad one.

We inspected all sorts, big and little, fat and thin, dumpy little fillies and big, awkward, angular colts.

Among the colts, one particular clumsy legs-and-wings youngster attracted our condemnation. To mark him for identification we called him The Gawk. We all agreed that if we bought The Gawk we would deserve to find ourselves in a lunatic asylum looking out, so we decided on a chunky, ready-made filly that looked like racing early.

The filly showed some early promise and then faded away into the backblocks and was never heard of again, while The Gawk, under the name of Bitalli, won the Melbourne Cup.

My friend's principal is still alive and only needs a few stimulants and he will talk for hours about the time he would have won the Melbourne Cup only to entrusting his commission to a couple of blind men.

If there is a moral to this disconnected narrative, it is that it is not as easy to buy a good yearling as one might suppose.

Honour among thieves

A friend of mine, a respectable grazier and dealer in sheep, asked me to meet him at Wollongong races to talk over a deal in sheep which might do both of us some good. He could not spare the time to come to Sydney. It had to be Wollongong races.

Arrived at Wollongong I was staggered when my friend asked me to put £300 on a horse for him. It was a horse called Valet Boy, a maiden which had never run.

I declined on the grounds that the ring knew very well that I was not a betting man and, if I came along with £300, they would smell danger.

He persisted, but I was obdurate. He and his friends put the £300 on themselves; the horse won, running away, by 6 lengths; and before it had passed the post there were cries of ‘I'll bet on the protest!'

Sure enough there was a protest and an investigation by stewards as to the
bona fides
of Valet Boy and I was asked to attend the stipendiary stewards' room as they had been told that I had put the money on.

It turned out that my ultra-respectable grazier had so far slipped from grace as to join up with a lot of bush sharps and they had ‘rung in' a well-performed northern horse as a maiden under the name of Valet Boy.

After months of patient enquiry, stewards disqualified the horse trainer and jockey, but they did not get my pastoral friend who was at the back of the whole thing.

Of course, I couldn't talk; there is honour even among thieves.

What do you know?

Dick Mason used to be a heavy bettor in his younger days and he'd have £1000 on a horse, but he got cautious as he got older.

I met him once at Randwick, when he had just landed with Gloaming and some other horses.

‘I've just come here straight off the boat,' he said. ‘Do you know anything for this race?'

‘Well,' I said, ‘I think so-and-so will win.'

‘That's no good to me,' he said, ‘what anybody thinks. Do you know anything? If you know anything, I'll have a quid on it.'

What he meant by knowing anything was that I should tell him that something had 3 stone in hand and that the others were all running dead.

That's the way fellows get after they have been betting for 40 or 50 years.

A murmur of discontent

At one hunt meeting in Sydney years ago a horse was being weighed out to run when a bystander remarked casually, ‘That's not Murmur at all; that's a horse called Shoo Fly, and he's won races at McGrath's Hill.'

The owner was rounded up and he at once admitted the soft impeachment.

‘Murmur went lame,' he said, ‘and I wanted to have a run, so I brought this horse.'

He thought that the officials were stupidly particular when they refused to let one horse run under the name of another!

The picture of misery

As a young man I went up to the Wellington meeting to ride a horse in an amateur hurdle race. This horse had been grievously maltreated, for he had started as many as three times in a day at amateur meetings with huge weights on him, and in his spare time he had been used as galloping companion to a Sydney Cup candidate. He went right off his feed and his owner offered him to me for £25 in full training, but I preferred the personal to the financial risk.

As his trainer refused to have any more to do with him, I handed him over to P. Nolan, who was just starting as a trainer. Nolan got him to face his victuals, and we won a brush hurdle race at Canterbury Park at his first start over jumps; then we took him up to the Bligh meeting at Mudgee. He travelled up all right, in fact he ate all the way up in the train; but as soon as we put him in the loose box at the local hotel he started to shiver all over, while the sweat ran off him and he looked the picture of misery and despair. We thought he was in for an attack of colic. The veterinarian Harry Raynor was called in and after examining him Harry said, ‘There's nothing the matter with him; it's just funk. He's remembering something that happened to him the last time he slept in a bush pub stable.'

Sure enough, Harry was right, for the horse won his race with the greatest ease, though he never ate a mouthful at Mudgee; and now, when I hear people say that horses don't remember and don't put two and two together, I recall that poor unfortunate animal shivering in his lonely box and thinking that he was in for another three races in the day with big weights up. There are lot of things that we don't know about horses.

Those who know . . .

As regards prospects for big races, it may be said that those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know, and this is particularly true of the racing fraternity. Such opinions as are expressed by trainers are mostly guarded and are not marked by enthusiasm.

The Day That is Dead

Harry (‘Breaker') Morant

Ah, Jack! Time finds us feeble men,

And all too swift our years have flown.

The days are different now to then—

In that time when we rode ten stone.

The minstrel when his mem'ry goes

To old times, tunes a doleful lay—

Comparing modern nags with those

Which Lee once bred down Bathurst way.

The type to-day's a woeful weed,

Which lacks the stoutness, strength and bone

Of horses they were wont to breed

In those days—when we rode ten stone.

But all of us remorseless Fate

O'ertakes, and as the years roll on

Our saddles carry extra weight,

And old age mourns the keenness gone.

The young ones, too—'mong men, I mean—

Watch not the sires from whom they've sprung,

They nowadays are not so keen

As when we—and the world—were young.

They've neither nerve nor seat to suit

The back of Paddy Ryan's roan—

That wall-eyed, vicious, bucking brute

You rode—when you could ride ten stone.

But, Johnny, ere we ‘go to grass'—

Ere angel wings are fledged to fly—

With wine we'll fill a bumper glass,

And drink to those good times gone by.

We've
had
our day—'twill not come back!

But, comrade mine, this much you'll own,

'Tis something
to have had it,
Jack—

That time when we could ride ten stone!

Racing in Australia circa 1895

NAT GOULD

The famous English author Nat Gould lived and worked as a racing journalist
in Australia for 11 years, from 1884 to 1895. His observations of Australian
racing, written more than a hundred years ago, make for fascinating reading.

A climate for racing

IN NO PART
of the world can be found more enthusiastic followers of the turf than in Australia.

Racing, in my humble opinion, is the most absorbing and interesting of sports. To love horses is an inherent characteristic of Britishers and the bulk of the Colonial people come from good old British stock.

In England the climate is often dead against enjoying racing in the most favourable circumstances, but in Australia there is very little to complain of as regards the weather. Sunny skies in that favoured island are the rule, and it is the exception and not the rule to be let in for a drenching day's sport.

Nine months out of twelve the climate of Australia is all that can be desired, and what more can a man expect?

The racing year commences on 1st August, from which the ages of horses date, so that the three-year-olds running in the AJC Derby in the middle of September* and the VRC Derby in the first week of November, or the last week in October, are much younger than three-year-olds taking part in the English Derby.

So favourable is the climate that flat-racing is going on all year round, and there is no closed time, as in the old country.

Occasionally in the winter months it is necessary to wear a topcoat, but even then the sun is generally warm enough to make it pleasant. The lack of east winds, or frost or snow, make racing a pleasure rather than a burden.

At Christmas it is racing in sunshine to perfection, and the meeting of the AJC at Randwick on Boxing Day may be described as a few hours turned into melting moments.

Many a time, as I watched the race for the Summer Cup at Randwick, has my mind wandered to the old land, and thoughts of the snow and dull leaden sky have almost made me shiver, even with the thermometer at close upon a hundred in the shade.

Christmas in Australia is indeed a contrast to that in England. Boxing Day races in the two hemispheres are also vastly different.

In Australia we have flat-racing amidst glorious sunshine. In England races are held under the National Hunt Rules, probably with a white mantle of snow covering the earth.

There cannot be much pleasure even in backing a winner when your fingers are almost too cold to hold the money, and it must be indeed a dreary occupation to be out ‘in the cold' and backing losers with the thermometer down at zero.

If Fortune be cold to us in Australia we have the consolation of knowing that Nature warms towards us.