Something for the Pain (15 page)

The first two meetings of my new career were at city courses. I felt reluctant to rush into betting. Instead, I told myself I would bet in only small amounts as a sort of warm-up or induction program. On each day I backed my hoped-for winner and made a minuscule profit on my small bets. I still felt no eagerness to bet on my intended scale, but I no longer had any excuse for delaying my career as a professional or, at least, a semi-professional punter.

The next meeting was at Werribee, only a short train trip from Melbourne. Werribee was more a country town than a suburb then, and the race trains used to stop at a special platform beside the course. I strode from the racecourse platform towards the betting ring with a hundred dollars in what I thought of as my racing pocket. Each of my five bets would be twenty dollars straight out, that is, win-only.

The first two horses that I selected and backed were beaten—one thoroughly but the other only narrowly. I had lost forty dollars, or about five hundred in today's currency. Having a large bank is meant to keep a punter calm during losing runs of ten or twelve. I had backed only two losers but I was by no means calm. I let two races pass, telling myself the betting gave me no clear indication. Before the following race, one horse was clearly being backed by men in the know. Its odds shortened from eights to fives or sixes. This was the horse that I had to back.

I have never been able to recall the horse's name. I recall that it was trained at the old Epsom course in Mordialloc and that the rider wore mostly black with markings of green and yellow. My not recalling the name tells me that I must have been under considerable strain at the time. I won't try to describe how I dithered and hesitated or how I went past one after another bookmaker with my twenty-dollar note in my hand until something caused me to push my way out of the betting ring and to go to the totalisator and bet five dollars win-only on the shortener, which, of course, won with ease.

I had no more bets that day. I had to stay until the last race because my only means of getting home was by race train. If the meeting had been in Melbourne, I would have gone home at once by train or tram. I was neither angry nor upset. I was bemused by what I had learned about myself that day. Unlike my father, who seemed to lose all sense of the value of money when a race was in the offing, I seemed to have a built-in regulator that would not allow me to bet more than a certain amount. I might have said that whenever I stepped onto a racecourse my arms became short and my pockets deep.

What surprises me nowadays is that I had not already learned my limitations as a punter nearly fifteen years before, on the day when Basil Burgess brought his two horses, On Parade and Agathis (both carrying Red, royal-blue sash) to a meeting at Moonee Valley. Many New Zealanders brought their horses each year to Melbourne for the spring carnival, but Basil Burgess had crossed the Tasman in midwinter and each of his two horses was entered in a minor race.

The New Zealanders fascinated me—the owners and trainers, I mean. For one thing, their country had legislated bookmakers out of existence decades before. The only legal form of betting was with the totalisator. To launch in New Zealand the sort of betting plunges that took place in Australia would have been counterproductive—the greater the sum invested, the less the win dividend. How, I often wondered, did the many smart men in New Zealand profit from their smartness or their inside information? I supposed that their policy must have been secrecy at all costs; that knowledge of a horse's prospects must have been shared among the fewest possible people; that a stable's commission was launched not by three or four well-known identities in full view of other punters but by one person alone—perhaps someone's nonchalant-looking wife or mother-in-law—with instructions to wait until three minutes before the race before discreetly handing over a bundle of notes at a tote window.

Whether or not as a result of their having only the tote to bet with, the New Zealanders seemed to me even less predictable than the shrewdest of their Australian counterparts. I recall an example of New Zealand acumen at work. At a Caulfield meeting not long before the Cup itself, a New Zealand trainer had two horses engaged. When interviewed by a racing journalist on the Friday, the trainer talked up the chances of one of the horses, which was a leading contender for the Caulfield Cup. The other horse was not mentioned in the interview. Even if the journalist had asked about the horse, the trainer must have claimed it was not worth writing about. On the Saturday, the Caulfield Cup hope ran fourth at short odds. The other horse, named either Cybeau or Sybeau, and carrying dark-green-and-white stripes, ran in a minor race on the program. The horse was leading the field by three lengths when they passed me in the old Guineas stand and was even further in front at the post. It had been friendless in the betting, as the saying goes, and had started at forty-to-one.

On the evening before the meeting at Moonee Valley, I spent much time and effort in trying to anticipate Basil Burgess's moves. I was convinced that one of his horses would win or go close to winning while the other would be saved for another day. On Parade was third- or fourth-favourite in an early race on the program while Agathis, which had very poor form, was an outsider in a later race. I had such an exaggerated opinion of the cunning of men such as Burgess that I arrived at the course almost persuaded not to back On Parade and to have two pounds—my standard bet at the time—on the unfancied Agathis. I might have followed this extreme course of action, except that On Parade seemed unwanted in the betting before the race. I could not resist the ten-to-one on offer and had what I would have considered a half-bet on the horse: ten-pounds-to-one, win-only. On Parade won easily.

As the time for Agathis's race drew near, my thinking was tangled indeed. I was trying, or so I thought, to outguess a man who made a living, or so I thought, from conduct that was unguessable. The most obvious possibility seemed to be that Basil Burgess had achieved his goal for the day and that Agathis would finish in the ruck and would be worth backing at a later date. But I began to question this line of thinking about fifteen minutes before Agathis's race when Frank McCann, easily the biggest bookmaker in the old South Hill enclosure, was betting thirty-three-to-one against the horse. These were lucrative odds for a horse trained by a cunning New Zealander. I began to consider the possibility that Basil Burgess was putting into practice that day what I have since heard described as reverse psychology. What if the New Zealander was demonstrating his cunningness by behaving without any seeming cunningness? What if suspicious punters such as myself were tying themselves in mental knots in an effort to anticipate Burgess's plans while he himself was behaving with transparent honesty? In short, I came around to the conclusion that Agathis was worth backing.

If I'd had the courage of my convictions—if I had dared to back my assessment of the deviousness of Basil and his fellow countrymen, then I should have bet all my winnings from On Parade on the stalemate in the hope of winning more than three hundred pounds, which would have been a small fortune for me. The thought of risking my ten pounds, however, caused me to question my own judgement about the degree of Basil Burgess's cunningness. My doubts multiplied as the time for the race approached. Before I left the ring, I had half a pound, or ten shillings, on Agathis at thirty-three-to-one. The other nine and a half pounds of my winnings stayed at the bottom of one of my deep pockets and well out of reach of my short arms while Agathis completed a winning double for owner-trainer Basil Burgess at Moonee Valley.

15.
P. S. Grimwade in the Central Highlands

I'VE MENTIONED THAT
racing is for me what religion is for another sort of person, and that this is a serious matter. Racing provides me with a set of beliefs and a way of life. Racing also, like many a religion, has its saints. These are, for me anyway, legendary rather than historical figures. The legends surrounding the saints are all of my own making. This could hardly be otherwise, given that mine is largely a one-man religion with myself as bishop, priest, congregation and, in this instance, hagiographer.

In the years when I was mastering the art of reading, we had few books in our house but I got plenty of practice with headlines in newspapers, captions on advertisements, word balloons in cartoons and comic strips, and labels on packets, cans, and bottles. I don't know why my father kept a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the bathroom. Did he clean his teeth with the stuff? Put drops of it into his ears to dislodge wax? Anyway, I saw the bottle often. The glass was brown. The label had a border of green and was dense with black words on a white ground. I would have read the words often, although many were surely beyond my comprehension. I remember three today: the three surnames comprising the business name of the company that had bottled the stuff. The three were Felton, Grimwade, and Guerin.

I don't recall having seen the name Guerin in any context since I read it on the label of the bottle nearly seventy years ago. (After I had written that statement, I looked into a Melbourne phone directory from ten years ago and found about forty subscribers with that surname!) When I was first taken to the art gallery, as we called it when it was housed long ago in part of the building now given over to the State Library, I saw the words
Felton Bequest
displayed beside many a painting, although I did not learn until many years later that one of the family of the bottlers of patent medicines had left an immense sum to the gallery. If I had read the business pages or the society pages of newspapers when I was young, I would surely have seen the name Grimwade from time to time. I was never a reader of those pages, and yet, when I first saw the name in a race book in the late 1950s, I had somehow learned that bearers of that uncommon name were likely to be company directors from Toorak or nearby suburbs and direct or indirect beneficiaries of a fortune mostly accumulated during the nineteenth century.

I know few facts about Mr P. S. Grimwade, but I recall the day when I first backed one of his racehorses. It was early spring in 1957, and racing was at Moonee Valley. A few days before the Moonee Valley meeting, I had heard from Martin Dillon, my colleague at the Royal Mint, that a horse named Sanvo (colours will be provided later) was surely being set to win a city race at long odds. Martin had noticed Sanvo at several recent country meetings. The three-years-old had been at comparatively short odds but had run poorly and had been
dead
in the sense of the word that Martin and I understood.

This is the place for me to report about Martin the belief or doctrine of his that most earned my admiration. My father, Teddy Ettershank, and most other punters that I knew or knew of reserved their biggest bets for favourites or horses at short odds. If they backed a horse at long odds, which they did only rarely, they outlaid only a fraction of what they would have bet if the horse had been at short odds. Martin Dillon was fond of saying that if he fancied a horse at long odds he would put
much more
on the horse than his usual stake. Martin liked to appear a man of quirks and eccentricities, but his fondness for long odds was genuine. I was with him in the paddock enclosure at Caulfield on Memsie Stakes Day in 1957 when a man with stable information told him that Gay Saba (Black-and-white stripes, red sash, sleeves and cap) was going to be well backed to win a sprint race.

Gay Saba was a middle-distance horse returning from a spell, and I was reluctant to back him, but Martin Dillon had fifteen pounds on the horse at twenty-to-one, after which I had my own modest bet. Martin even coupled Gay Saba in doubles with the favoured few horses in the race following. Gay Saba duly won, as did one of the favourites in the later race. I won modestly and Martin collected the equivalent of about twenty thousand dollars in today's currency. His colleagues had often told me of Martin's achievement with the horse Lucky Stride (Brown-and-white quarters) in the Oakleigh Plate of 1956, which was the year before I went to work at the Mint. Lucky Stride, which came from New South Wales, had finished only midfield in the previous Oakleigh Plate, in 1955, but Martin maintained that it might have won if it had not been badly checked in the straight. Before the 1956 Plate, he told anyone who would listen that the horse would win and that he was going to have twenty pounds on it. Lucky Stride won, and Martin got forty-to-one for his money.

When Martin had first told me about Sanvo's being set for a city race, he was hoping to back it at twenty-to-one or more, but no more than ten-to-one was bet against it at Moonee Valley. Martin and I were in different enclosures that day, but he told me later that he'd had a big bet on the horse. For once, I had a big bet myself, according to my own scale of betting. Everything that Martin had predicted proved accurate, except that the horse dead-heated for first and we collected only half our anticipated winnings.

That was the day when I first had the opportunity to study the Grimwade racing colours and to infer from them that the man they represented was thoughtful, discriminating, and with a preference for the uncommon and the subtle. The colours seemed simple at first sight: Green-and-white hoops, blue cap. Unlike most sets of colours, however, which I took in at a glance, these provoked me to ponder on them; to call them up again and again in my mind; to try to analyse their effect on me. Green and white was by no means an uncommon combination in Victoria in the 1950s. The Steele family, who had made their fortune from retailing furniture, had the colours Green, white sash, sleeves and cap. The Silk brothers, wealthy wholesale merchants of fruit and vegetables and owners of the champion Carbon Copy, had the colours Green, white band and armbands. Green and white had a certain amount of attraction for me, but these colours with a blue cap was something else again. That blue cap was no mere detail but spoke eloquently of its owner's taste for the unexpected and the unlikely. This might become clearer if I compare the Grimwade colours with a set that appeared often in New South Wales at the time. These were the colours of Sir Frank Packer, whose business was newspapers. Sir Frank's horses carried Green-and-white hoops with a red cap. The effect on me of those colours is wholly different from the effect of the green and the white and the blue. The red cap seems predictable, even crass, and the work of someone with a preference for making points by shouting rather than by persuasion. The blue cap, on the other hand—and it was a bright azure or sky shade of blue, rather than a dark shade that might have stood out more boldly against the green and white—seems to have been added not as a mere detail but as part of a pattern, and not to dazzle us but to invite us to look beneath the surface.