The Big Book of Australian Racing Stories

by Jim Haynes

  RACING MEMORIES

  A.B. ‘BANJO’ PATERSON

  I first butted into the racing game about 60 years ago when I was taken as a small boy to Randwick and saw two three-year-olds, Chester and Cap-a-Pie, run a dead heat in a 3-mile race and they ran the dead heat off the same afternoon.

  I suppose you think that trainers ought each to have got six months for training three-year-olds like that, but races were not run from end to end those days. A Cumberland Stakes, 2 miles, in which Carbine beat Lochiel, took over five minutes to run. A trotter could pretty well do that nowadays.

  I can just remember James White, a fine big man with a beard and a thorough-going Australian. He believed we could breed first-class horses here and he used Australian sires to an extent that nobody has ever approached since. His great horse Chester was by Yattendon, an Australian-bred horse, and Yattendon was by the Australian Sir Hercules.

  Then Chester’s son Abercorn was put to the stud, so there were four generations of Australian blood even in those early days. Mr White was like the late John Brown; he believed in breeding and racing his own horses, but he wasn’t like John Brown in any other way. He stuck to the one trainer all his life, while John Brown took his whole team away from old Joe Burton simply because Joe told him that one of them was no good.

  My first experience as an owner came when a country friend sent me down a polo pony, a miniature horse-giantess, thoroughbred, as long as a ship and big everywhere except in height. She could gallop like Eclipse, but was useless for polo, as she needed a 40-acre paddock in which to turn.

  Obviously her game was racing, so I leased her to a pony trainer, one Jimmy Gordon, a strong silent man who was, I believe, brother-in-law to William Kelso, the crack trainer of the day. I thought that anything Jimmy didn’t know, Kelso would tell him.

  Then I moved in one glorious jump right up among the exclusives at the top of the business. Mainly because I was well known as a writer of racing verse I met and made personal friendships with owners like G.D. Greenwood (Gloaming), L. McDonald (Wakeful), Sol Green (Comedy King), R.R. Dangar (Peter Pan), W.A. Long (Grand Flaneur) and countless others.

  Recognising that I was horse-mad, that great trainer Dick Mason used to make me welcome at his stable and take me along with him when he was saddling Gloaming and others; and here is a queer thing. In all those years I never heard one of those men say that his horse had been pulled by its rider or that he had lost a race through roguery or by interference of bookmakers.

  When I first blundered into racing, Mr Henry Dangar was chairman of the Australian Jockey Club, a masterful man. He imported the great St Simon horse Positano—an animal which would never have left England only that he had a will of his own.* Mr Dangar entrusted the training of his horse to the capable hands of John Allsopp, one of the old school whose pessimistic outlook on life had earned him the nickname ‘Crying Johnny’.

  Positano had to go to Melbourne to race and Allsopp said that the horse would require a box to himself on the train; if other horses were put in anywhere near him he would spend the trip trying to get at them.

  Mr Dangar had never heard of such a proposition, and the trainer was ordered to attend a meeting of the owner and a few of his cronies to give an explanation. ‘Johnny’ put up such a good ‘cry’ that he got his own way: nor did he resent being told that the horse’s wilfulness must be his fault. Trainers are used to shouldering the blame for everything.

  Another English horse which came out here under somewhat similar circumstances was Orzil. He was a really high-class performer in England in the ownership of one of the Brasseys. Mr Pat Osborne, who was later to achieve fame as the owner of Valicare, was visiting England and happened to mention to Brassey that he was looking out for a horse. He could hardly believe his ears when Brassey said that he would give him Orzil. Give him, mind you, when the horse was one of the best performers in England.

  ‘He’s turned unreliable,’ said Brassey, ‘but I can’t sell him here for fear he might take it into his head to do his best and beat me in a big race. It would make me look a fool. If you take him away out to Australia and guarantee that he never comes back, you can have him for nothing.’

  I have seen them all, the big punters who bestride this narrow world until one day they are missing; the small battling owners and trainers, living in hopes of finding a big punter who will ‘dash it down’ for them on a specially prepared horse. Here and in England it is just the same.

  Taking it by and large, and expressing it in a comprehensive sort of way, the public got the idea that where there were six races in a day, there were six crimes to be detected, so stipendiary stewards were appointed to control racing.

  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. 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.’

  A good many years ago I was asked to go along with a friend who had a commission to buy a yearling for somebody upcountry. 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.

  * St Simon was the greatest sire of the era, but he was notoriously bad tempered and passed the trait on to his offspring, which is why the Duke of Portland purchased Carbine, who was famously placid, to stand at stud with St Simon as an outcross to St Simon mares, in order to breed controllable champion horses. It worked!

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  JIM HAYNES

  I have often been amazed and amused by the wonderful cryptic and appropriate names that owners come up with for racehorses.

  Some favourites of mine over the years here in Australia include Itchy Feet, which raced in Sydney in the 1960s and was by an imported French Stallion named Le Cordonnier, which means ‘the shoemaker’ in French, out a mare called Ticklish.

  As a kid I was amazed that race-callers didn’t ‘get’ the name of a well-performed Sydney horse. The name was spelled C-U-R-F-T-A and race-callers always said ‘Kerff-tar’ but, of course, with Curfta being sired by Arrivederci, which means goodbye in Italian, the name should have been pronounced C-U-rf-ta—‘See You After’.

  A few of the more ‘imaginative’ and amusing names of recent years have been None For The Road, which was sired by Noalcoholic, out of Road To Gold; Greenie, by Naturalism out of Ozone Friendly; and Rumpus Room, by Shemozzle out of Downstairs.


  Some of the most clever ‘Aussie’ names I can remember are Bowled Lillee, which was out of a mare named Courtmarsh; and VRC Derby winner Plastered, a West Australian colt whose mother was called Tipples.

  Wakeful was out of a mare called Insomnia, while Carbine and Martini-Henry were both named for types of firearms as they were sired by Musket. Robinson Crusoe was so named because he survived a shipwreck. Archer was by William Tell, who was named after the Swiss hero who shot an apple off his son’s head, and so it goes on.

  Some years ago a Tamworth friend of mine, the late Sue Keating, purchased a gelding by More Than Ready from a mare named For The Moment. The horse was already named Fill Her Up and had raced a few times. The owner needed to sell and Sue was offered the horse, which was trained by Tim Martin who also trained other horses she owned. Sue hated the name but liked the horse, so a new name was needed, even though there is a racing superstition that changing a horse’s registered name is unlucky.

  Sue was actually at a rehearsal for a show I was involved in at the Rooty Hill RSL Club in western Sydney when she took the call confirming the purchase, and so we talked about renaming the horse. We tried several names but none were available until Sue decided on ‘In Rehearsal’. More than ready for the moment, indeed! He went on to win the Armidale Cup and several good races in Brisbane.

  Another Tamworth friend of mine is Errol Leicht, who owns the bedding retail outlet Forty Winks in Tamworth. Errol has a handy filly sired by Ready As, from a mare called Time Release who was by Switch In Time. Errol came up with a wonderfully apt name which promotes his business and acknowledges the horse’s sire, dam and grandsire. The filly races as In A Wink, and won the listed race for fillies at Scone in 2015, the Denise’s Joy Stakes. In A Wink’s full brother, yet to race as this goes to print, is hilariously named Inner Spring!

  Errol’s horses are trained by Greg Bennett, who is famous for pre-training and conditioning the mighty Makybe Diva, whose name was derived by taking the first two letters from the names of the five female employees working in owner Tony Santic’s office at the time: Maureen, Kylie, Belinda, Diane and Vanessa.

  The winner of the 2015 Show County Quality at Group 3 level is a Clarrie Connors-trained gelding by Foreplay out of a mare called Daunting Thought—he races as Decision Time—now that is clever! Mind you, you don’t have to use the horse’s parents to be clever. A chestnut gelding with prominent white markings on three legs raced in Victoria a while back as Who Stole My Sock.

  Some names are quite obscure and the majority of racegoers may never see the cryptic ‘joke’ or reference involved. Caulfield Cup winner Railings, for instance, was out of a mare called Suffragette, a daughter of Emancipation, and the name was a reference to the early suffragettes chaining themselves to the railings in Downing Street. A son of Tale of The Cat raced in Victoria a few years ago under the name of Otto Messmer. It puzzled me till I did some research and discovered that Otto Messmer was the man who drew and wrote the story lines for the Felix the Cat cartoons in the 1920s.

  Bradbury’s Luck, a brilliant sprinter of a decade ago and now a successful stallion, was foaled from a mare named Skating, just after Steven Bradbury won Australia’s first ever Winter Olympic gold medal, coming from last to victory when the other four finalists all fell over in the 1000 metre speed skating final. Continuing the joke some clever owners of a filly by Bradbury’s Luck named her Atishoo Atishoo – which is, of course, a phrase from the nursery rhyme where ‘all fall down’.

  Suzanne Philcox works at Woodlands Stud and has to find names for up to 300 foals a year. ‘I try to use the dam’s name,’ she says. ‘I also try to keep names short for the callers. Crawl is out of a mare called Traipse whose mother was Elegant Walk; another of her foals was named Swagger.’

  Phar Lap is based on the Thai word for ‘lightning’, spelled with a ‘PH’ because trainer Harry Telford thought seven letters was lucky and horses with two-word names comprising seven letters won the most Melbourne Cups!

  With so many opportunities to be clever with names, I often bemoan the fact that owners miss golden opportunities to be inventive, coming up with unimaginative names when some thought could have produced a real beauty. For example, let’s say there’s an imaginary horse by Bogtrotter out of Cakewalk, it’s likely to end up being labelled with Bogwalk or Caketrotter or, even worse, Bogtrotter Lad or Cakewalk’s Lass. ‘Lad’, ‘Lass’, ‘Boy’, ‘Girl’, ‘Star’, ‘Prince’, ‘Lord’, ‘Lady’, ‘King’ and ‘Queen’ are thrown onto the end of sire’s and dam’s names with reckless abandon to create names which, it seems to me, are harder to carry than top-weight in a welter handicap.

  For me, the best and funniest racehorse name story comes from the early days of thoroughbred racing and is true—the best yarns are always the true ones!

  The horse was named Potoooooooo, or Pot–Eight-Os (truly!). He was foaled in 1773, sired by the great Eclipse, and bred by a bloke with a wonderfully posh name, Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon.

  The horse acquired the strange spelling of his name, ‘Potatoes’, when a stable lad was asked to write it on a feed bin. The lad’s version, Potoooooooo, was said to amuse his lordship so much that he kept it, and it appears in the English Stud Book.

  Potoooooooo went on to become a well-performed racehorse who defeated some of the greatest horses of his day. He won 34 races over the span of seven years, including the Jockey Club Purse three times, and the prestigious Craven Stakes. He retired in 1783 to stand at stud and became an influential stallion himself, siring 172 winners including Champion, the first horse to win both the Derby and the St Leger (in 1800); Waxy, who won the Derby Stakes in 1793; and Tyrant, the 1799 Derby winner.

  ‘Potatoes’ was finally ‘planted’ when he died at Upper Hare Park in November 1800.

  THE PRIZEMONEY CHEQUE

  BETTY LANE HOLLAND

  The welfare benefits of today were unknown during the Great Depression of the 1930s. A few people lived comfortably but there were many battlers who lived by their wits. One such was Bill.

  Bill, a battling racehorse trainer, was delighted when he won his first race for three years at a northwest New South Wales race meeting in the 1930s.

  In those days, country race meetings had prizemoney cheques pre-written so that as soon as correct weight was declared, all that had to be done was to write in the winning owner’s name and the cheque issued. As Bill was also the owner of the horse, he lost no time in going to the secretary’s office to collect his cheque.

  He was walking from the office holding the cheque at eye level, looking at it with admiration, and had only gone ten paces when he heard from behind, ‘Congratulations, it was a good win.’

  The voice was that of the local produce merchant to whom the trainer owed money and whose patience had been stretched. Times were hard and the trainer had paid a little off the account here and there, but whenever a payment was made, it seemed the account went a little higher the following week.

  Several times the produce merchant had threatened there would be no more credit but he had kept supplying as he knew the horse would be underfed if he didn’t.

  When the produce man said, ‘Think I’d better take that cheque off what you owe me,’ Bill realised he didn’t have much option, so said, ‘Sure, sure.’ He had survived the past three years by living off his wits, so thinking quickly, added, ‘But let me have twenty pounds for the phone bill. My wife’s not well and we need the phone and they’ll cut it off on Monday if I don’t pay.’

  Pleased to be getting a big slice off his long overdue account, the produce merchant plucked the cheque from Bill’s fingers then pulled out his wallet, counted out twenty 1-pound notes and handed the money across to Bill.

  As the produce merchant walked away, Bill with his head bent despondently, shuffled off in the opposite direction. He waited ten minutes then raised his head, stood tiptoes and scanned the area. It seemed all clear.

  Back to the secretary’s office with
a long miserable face, he said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve lost that cheque. Will you cancel it and write me another one please?’

  HARD LUCK

  A.B. ‘BANJO’ PATERSON

  I left the course, and by my side

  There walked a ruined tout—

  A hungry creature, evil-eyed,

  Who poured this story out.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘there came a swell

  To Kensington today,

  And, if I picked the winners well,

  A crown at least he’d pay.

  ‘I picked three winners straight, I did;

  I filled his purse with pelf,

  And then he gave me half a quid

  To back one for myself.

  ‘A half a quid to me he cast—

  I wanted it indeed;

  So help me Bob, for two days past

  I haven’t had a feed.

  ‘But still I thought my luck was in,

  I couldn’t go astray—

  I put it all on Little Min,

  And lost it straightaway.

  ‘I haven’t got a bite or bed,

  I’m absolutely stuck;

  So keep this lesson in your head:

  Don’t over-trust your luck!’

  The folks went homeward, near and far,

  The tout, oh! Where was he?

  Ask where the empty boilers are

  Beside the Circular Quay.

  BUSH RACES AND PICNICS

  JIM HAYNES

  As settlements spread out into the bush in the nineteenth century, horses became an essential part of life, and they were virtually the only means of transport. Whether it was a good saddle horse or a sulky, buggy, dray or Cobb and Co coach, horses were the only alternative to walking.