Luckily, the stupidity that I’m complaining about prevails only once or twice every decade in Victoria. After one instance, about twenty years ago, I wrote a short letter to the editor of the weekly Winning Post. The letter was published, and for a few days I hoped that my few simple paragraphs would be read by someone of influence who would talk to someone else of even more influence, and so on, until an ancient wrong would be righted at last. Nothing of the sort happened. I thought at least one other reader might have written to the editor in support of my argument, but no such letter was published.
Perhaps ten years ago, after another of the monstrous injustices had been perpetrated, I found among the letters to the editor of Winning Post a letter rather like my earlier one. The writer was Bruno Cannatelli, a well-known photographer who attends every Melbourne race meeting. I had never spoken to Bruno but I did so a few weeks later at Sandown. I felt encouraged to be speaking to someone who shared my own views, but I wondered how we two could ever convince the thick-headed majority.
After I wrote that paragraph above about Teddy Ettershank, I left off writing for a few days. I travelled to Melbourne to see the Caulfield Cup. (I’m writing these pages in 2013, and the Cup was won by Fawkner, carrying Dark blue, white armbands and cap.) On the day before the Cup, I attended the annual dinner of the Thoroughbred Club of Australia. Along with ten others on my table, I was a guest of Kevin O’Brien. Kevin and his wife, Tanith, are proprietors of Lauriston Stud at Corinella (Orange and green quarters and quartered cap). Near me at the table was Bruno Cannatelli. I reminded him that we had met a few years before at Sandown and had shared our views on protests. I told him that I had since left Melbourne and hardly ever mixed with racing folk any more, whereas he was a widely known and well-respected racegoer. I urged him to go on fighting the good fight: to try to persuade anyone who would listen that a better way exists for the settling of protests by third placegetters against winners.
I may have sounded to Bruno as though I had given up the cause, but I’ll make this one last effort. I hereby appeal to all fair-minded readers of these pages. Surely you can appreciate the injustice of the present system of amending the placings after a successful protest by the third placegetter against the first horse past the post. And surely, also, you can appreciate the fairness of my suggestion for changing the present system. Well then, fair-minded reader, would you please talk to other racegoers about these matters? Would you use whatever influence you might have to bring forward the day when the stewards use common sense and not quaint rules of their own whenever they amend the placings after a certain sort of protest?
Fawkner’s Caulfield Cup is only a memory now, and I’m back at my desk trying to describe Teddy Ettershank. He was small enough to have been a jockey or, at least, a track rider. He must have applied, at some time, for a licence to train; my father told me once that the then chief steward, Alan Bell, had said to Teddy, the hopeful applicant, ‘As long as I’m chairman of the VRC stewards, Ettershank, you’ll never be a licensed trainer.’ Nowadays, a person in Teddy’s position would seek legal advice and would exercise his right of appeal to this and that higher authority. In Teddy’s heyday and mine, the issuing or the withdrawal of licences was wholly the province of the stewards. All their hearings and enquiries were carried out behind closed doors. An aggrieved person could appeal against the stewards’ decision but only to the committee of the Victoria Racing Club, the employers of the stewards. (I am not at all implying that racing was less ably managed then than now. In fact, I incline to the opposite view.) Anyway, Teddy was never a licensed trainer or even a registered owner, although he certainly owned and trained many a horse, using my father and others as front men or dummies, and I suspect that he enjoyed his reputation as a man of mystery. In Teddy’s time racing, as I’ve explained by now, was much concerned with secret knowledge, and Teddy was widely believed to have an abundance of such knowledge. I never saw him followed by a knot of spectators, as Jim Jenkins and other noted punters were sometimes followed, but if Teddy and his trusted man, Gerald Lavers (another Gerald!), had backed a horse, news of their doing so was soon all through the betting ring.
What seems most remarkable about Teddy as I recall him today, three or four decades after his death, is that he was never observed to engage in any sort of paid employment. Put plainly, he never had a job, a position, a calling. My father said sometimes that Teddy lived by his wits. I wonder how Teddy described his occupation on his taxation returns, assuming that he bothered to submit them. The expression professional punter was not much used in the years when Teddy was most active. Persons describing themselves thus in recent decades have mostly turned out to be launderers of money gained from other sources. No such suspicion was ever attached to Teddy. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I’m obliged to report that Teddy Ettershank was the only man I ever met who supported himself wholly by betting on racehorses.
When I first heard of Teddy, he was a widower and aged probably in his forties. He owned a comfortable house in the Travancore estate, in what was then the better part of Ascot Vale and not far from Flemington racecourse. He lived with his mother and Gerald, his only child. Teddy always drove a near-new car. He sent his son to Melbourne Grammar and later to university. When Teddy was in his fifties, so I heard afterwards, he married a much younger woman and became the father of at least two more children. To the best of my knowledge, he financed all this from the proceeds of his betting.
My father, as I wrote earlier, called Teddy his best friend, but even as a boy I saw that the two men were not equals: my father was more like a client or even a hanger-on. My father visited Teddy often and phoned him even more often. I can’t recall my father’s receiving any phone calls from Teddy, and I suspect that Teddy’s one visit to our house, in 1950, when we lived in Pascoe Vale, was for the purpose of taking my father in haste to Geraldo’s stable, there to pose as the horse’s true owner and so to avert some possible crisis with officialdom. Teddy’s information certainly helped my father to collect some lucrative bets. On the evening of Geraldo’s win at Cranbourne, I saw my father counting out a share of his winnings to my mother in their bedroom—the bedspread was covered with brick-red ten-pound notes, each of them worth much more than five hundred dollars today. In 1956, after my father had had to sell our house to pay his gambling debts, he won the deposit on another house by backing one of Teddy’s tips in a race at Mornington. (The horse was named Valley Vista—Pale-green and purple hoops—and had poor form, and yet it won easily at short odds, causing my father to suspect, and to whisper to me under pain of secrecy, that Teddy had organised, or had at least been privy to, an old-fashioned ring-in.) It may well be true, and my father sometimes ruefully postulated it, that if he had never followed his own opinions when betting but had backed only Teddy’s recommended horses, he would have had a successful career as a punter, but this is to suggest that Teddy was more open and more benevolent than he actually was.
Towards the end of Tamarisk Row, Augustine Killeaton has one last, desperate bet and loses. As a result, he has to flee from the city of Bassett and the bookmakers that he has no hope of paying. He makes his ruinous bet after receiving some incomplete information from the man that he calls the Master, Lenny Goodchild, in faraway Melbourne. Augustine is too ashamed to contact Goodchild afterwards, and the next week the horse that ruined him lands a massive plunge, as a racing writer would put it. Augustine is more distressed to have been left out of Goodchild’s operation than to have missed out on winning enough to settle his debts. Nothing so dramatic ever happened between my father and Teddy. I even recall Teddy’s visiting my father in hospital on the day before he died unexpectedly. And yet I had in mind while I invented my fictional goings-on a few occasions when my father seemed on the point of admitting that Teddy sometimes kept from him things that my father deserved to be told and one occasion when my father was telling me about the disappointing career of my namesake in the years before my birth. He recalled a da
y when Gerald had run unplaced at Moonee Valley. My father had backed the horse heavily and he wondered aloud in my hearing whether Teddy had arranged that day to have the horse beaten and had absentmindedly, or even deliberately, not told my father.
I called this section after two horses linked to me by name. When I planned the section, I intended to end it with the information that both horses, Gerald and Geraldo, were sold in mid-career and afterwards did surprisingly well for their new owners and trainers. Gerald won a number of races in Western Australia and Geraldo in the Wangaratta district of Victoria. I was going to speculate that I was somewhat like my horsey namesakes, in that I performed better after having got away from the influence of my father. Even his early death played into my hands. How could I have written Tamarisk Row while he was still alive?
Yes, I named this section after two horses, but it was taken over, you might say, by the man who secretly owned the horses and had such a powerful influence on my father. I don’t think often nowadays about my father but, whenever I do, I think also about Teddy Ettershank, who could probably be said to have been my father’s hero. Or, rather, I think about a man named Ettershank who might be Teddy himself but is more likely Teddy’s father or even grandfather. My father once told me that Teddy’s forebears had been racing men from around Flemington for several generations. Ettershank, the image-man in my mind, always appears to me as though he stands in close conversation with another image-man on the day in September when the first north wind blows from the inland across Melbourne and then across the bay and out into Bass Strait. The connotations are obvious to me. Spring and early warm weather in Melbourne are linked with the Spring Racing Carnival, perhaps the greatest racing carnival in the world, as European trainers and owners have only recently learned to their surprise, and the first north wind reminds persons such as myself that another Spring Carnival is in the offing.
Little survives today of what I call Old Flemington but, as recently as thirty years ago, I could drive from Epsom Road along Sandown Road towards Ascot Vale Road on my way home from a meeting at Flemington racecourse and could call to mind easily how the area must have been during the Great Age of Racing, which began eighty years before my birth and ended twenty years after it. Nearly every house in Sandown Road had behind it a paved stable yard and half a dozen loose boxes with a feed loft above them. In the decades when motorcars were rarities, the streets in the early morning darkness echoed with the clatter of horseshoes on bitumen as hundreds of horses walked from their stables in streets all around to be exercised at Flemington racecourse. Generations of Ettershanks would have been up and active before dawn, but my defining scene takes place in early afternoon during the few hours when racing men (they were always men in those days) had some brief, precious leisure time before the horses in their care required their afternoon exercise. My defining scene takes place against a background of pepper trees, probably because the old Newmarket sale yards were lined with such trees and a few still stand in the now-fashionable quarter of Kensington that was established after the closure of the yards. The warm north wind agitates the dense green foliage of the pepper trees in some shabby street near Flemington racecourse, and the same wind overlays all of my defining scene with a golden mist.
We think of air pollution as something relatively new, but a woman of my mother’s age told me once that when she worked as a young shop assistant in Melbourne in the 1930s the streets of the city were always spattered with horse dung. In cold or rainy weather, the stuff lay moist where it had fallen. In hot weather, it soon dried, and when the north wind blew in spring and summer the air above the streets was thick with particles of yellow chaff flung up from the desiccated dung. The same yellow haze swirls around my mythical Ettershank and his nameless companion while they stand beneath the waving pepper trees somewhere in Old Flemington on a spring afternoon long before my birth and while they devise together a plot against the bookmakers. I hear nothing of what passes between mythical-Ettershank and his mate but I hear a paraphrase of a passage I last read as a schoolboy. I hear Macbeth’s declaring that terrible things were done in the olden time.
The previous paragraph might well have been a suitable ending for this section, but I can end it perhaps even more aptly by reporting my sister’s reaction when she first met Teddy Ettershank. She was not quite one year of age and was perched in her mother’s arms when the diminutive egg-bald man strode into our kitchen in Pascoe Vale, stepped up close to her, and made what he surely intended to be a friendly noise. My sister turned her face to her mother’s shoulder and burst into tears.
6. A. R. Sands, Demigod
RACE MEETINGS OF fifty and more years ago attracted huge crowds by comparison with today, and yet the facilities in the public areas, as distinct from the members’ areas, would be considered intolerable nowadays. My father and I travelled by train to the Derby Day meeting at Flemington in November 1956. We stood and swayed among the press of passengers in one of the dozens of special race trains running express from Spencer Street Station to the platform beside the racecourse. The weather was fine and warm, and the betting ring and its surrounds were densely crowded all day, except for the few minutes when a race was being run. Surely there were seats provided somewhere but, as I recall it, my father and I spent most of the day standing in the ring or edging our way with thousands of others to and from the lawn before and after each race. This was in the public enclosure, as it was called. We understood that things were different in the members’ enclosure. We glimpsed some of the members on the far side of the so-called rails, where leading bookmakers took bets from both us, the paying public, and them, the members of the Victoria Racing Club, all of them men and many wearing the top hats and morning dress that was traditional on Derby Day. The members’ enclosure was shaded by elm trees, with plentiful seating beneath, and overhung by the massive members’ grandstand, with spacious dining rooms and bars on its ground floor. We tens of thousands who had paid the equivalent of about seventy-five dollars in today’s currency had only a small grandstand that was full long before each race. My father was one of the many who liked to stay in the ring until the late money arrived, and so we watched each race from the lawn, which was not even sloped or elevated and from which most spectators saw nothing of the horses until they rushed past in the straight. The weather on Derby Day in 1956, as I’ve reported, was fine and warm. If rain had fallen, a few of us might have found shelter in the public bars or in the lee of the totalisator building, but the rest of us could have done no more than turn our backs to the weather like sheep or cattle.
My father never read a form guide or a race book. He learned all that he needed to know by watching the betting or listening to smart men, as he called them. His philosophy of racing, so to call it, had been developed on a single afternoon at the Warrnambool racecourse, which is about halfway between his birthplace at Allansford and his grave in the Warrnambool Cemetery, beside the estuary of the Hopkins River.
Reginald Thomas Murnane died in his fifties more than fifty years ago, and I often wish I had questioned him more about his racing exploits while I had the opportunity. He was a talkative man and he would willingly have told me about plunges planned months in advance, secret track gallops, certainties beaten by the narrowest of margins, or bookmakers asking for time to pay up, but I recall only brief anecdotes and off-hand references.
How old was he when he went to the Warrnambool races for the first time? I estimate the date to have been in the early 1920s, when he was about twenty. He was the eldest son of a prosperous dairy farmer and might have become a farmer himself, but his life changed when his appendix burst at the age of sixteen. His family expected him to die, yet he survived thanks to a remarkable medico at the Warrnambool Hospital, a man named Bannon, who spent hours cleaning out of my father’s guts every last skerrick of the muck that might have led to fatal septicaemia if it had remained inside him after his surgical procedure. My father spent a year recuperating, and during that time he visited
cousins in New South Wales and Queensland, and developed his lifelong love of travel and changes of scenery. Perhaps he went to his first race meetings during that time, when he was far away from his father, whom I remember from my childhood as the unsmiling tyrant of the household. All I learned from my father are a few details of the fateful Warrnambool meeting mentioned already.
My father would have known numerous locals at the Warrnambool races, but the famous steeplechase meeting in May drew owners and trainers and punters and bookmakers from Melbourne and elsewhere. These would have been unknown to my father, and yet, early during the meeting he identified a group who knew what they were about. Or, did he identify more than one such group? He stood unobtrusively near them. He followed them. He backed what they backed. He won money, and more money, and here I must digress.
Whether it was the result of that first wondrous day at Warrnambool races or whether it came from some natural recklessness in him, my father could never bet responsibly, to use that sanctimonious expression. He handed over to my mother every fortnight the modest salary cheque that he earned as a low-level public servant, and he lived frugally, neither drinking nor smoking. When he bet, however, he seemed to forget the monetary scale that governed his everyday affairs. He seemed to think he was an owner or a trainer or one of his revered smart men. If someone he respected tipped him a horse, my father would bet on it, at the very least, a sum equal to half his weekly earnings. If he did not have such a sum at hand, he usually knew an illegal off-course bookmaker who would let him bet on credit. In his bachelor years (he did not marry until he was thirty-four), he won many a time a sum that might have bought a block of land in an outer suburb or even a single-fronted cottage in a working-class inner suburb. And yet, his and my mother’s first home after their marriage was a room with a double bed in a boarding house in Brunswick. He wore a bespoke suit and a gold-plated Rolex Prince watch and one or another of a collection of grey felt hats with peacock feathers in their bands, but he died with no assets to speak of and owing many thousands of dollars in today’s currency to his brothers and to who knows how many bookmakers that he welshed on, to put it bluntly.
Something for the Pain Page 4