by Jim Haynes
‘No,’ he said, and nothing else.
I watched him reach for his tobacco pouch and papers. He rolled a cigarette and leaned over and put it in my mouth, then rolled another one. Above and about us the cyclone howled. He held a hooded match to my cigarette, and I said curiously, ‘Why, Bill?’
He answered, ‘Aw, hell, there’s times a man likes company. Let’s forget it.’
Then for a time there was nothing except the crazy roaring of the wind, and then Bill looked at me and his voice was gentle when he asked, ‘Getting tired, boss?’
‘Yes, a bit, Bill.’
Then I saw his eyes lift above my head and he said urgently, ‘Take it easy, boss. Keep that foot down hard, then take a look.’
I turned my head and there, coming round the shoulder of the mountain, a hundred yards away, was a bright red Buick Phaeton.
The driver had a steel tow rope, and he said he came from Denmark, which was a queer thing because my father came from Denmark, and you wouldn’t have found another Dane in all that thousand miles of mountain wilderness, especially one with a power-laden Buick Phaeton and a steel tow rope, on that tempest-ridden day.
You have to hand it to a man like that Dane. He knew as we knew, because we warned him, that when he took the strain my car might slip that bare 3 inches and, if it did, then he’d go tumbling down with us to where those treetops twisted in the gale so far below.
We thanked him a little later when the Marmon stood four-square on the road, and we drank his fiery advocaat and went on our way.
So that was Bill and that was loyalty. A handy thing. And rare. So now I beckoned Bill to bend down while my crowd of dance-hall people waited.
‘Bill,’ I whispered, ‘it’s worth the chance. They’ll get their £600 in wages on Friday, then we’ll have to close, and they’d get nothing else except the dole. Now, if Firecracker can make it, we’ll have lots of money to carry on for weeks, and this Depression cannot last forever. How about it?’
He looked at me with his bright blue eyes alight with laughter. ‘Sure, and I always said you’d talk the leg off an iron pot, but you’re crazy, boss. Gold-digger will beat that long-legged loon of yours by half a mile.’
So I tried again and this time I was cunning because I didn’t argue. I simply said, a little sadly, ‘Quitting is a queer thing for the Irish, Bill.’
He shook his head like an angry bison, and then stood up and his great voice filled that echoing dance hall.
‘Now, blast the lot of you,’ he roared, ‘what’s all this talk about anyhow? This bonny horse the boss has got is just a certainty. Sure, and it’s a fine idea and good enough for the little bit of money he wants from us. Now, get about your work. We’ll get our wages Friday, and for a lot of Fridays after that. It’s a grand notion, so it is.’ Then sotto voce to me, ‘May the good Lord forgive me for being Australia’s greatest liar, because it’ll be that chestnut rascal Gold-digger that’ll be paying off tomorrow afternoon.’
By the price of him, the bookmakers agreed with Bill, because when we reached Menangle Gold-digger was at a nervous 6 to 4. We had come up in the Marmon Speedster over the dusty country roads on a lazy summer day, and there were eight of us all told in a motor built for four. They were the smartest of my big boys from the Palais Royal.
You didn’t run a dance hall like that one without some headaches. Five and six thousand people in a night are a lot to care for in one big public place within four walls. They came and chattered, danced and flirted in that gaudy mausoleum, and as the night wore on the giant building shook and quivered with the thrust of stamping feet, or whispered like the wind brushing sand along a beach when the musicians played a waltz.
The smoke from cigarettes would curl up in lazy blue-grey layers to the caverns in the roof where brilliant lanterns hung in clustered thousands, and after a bit these would grow dim blood-red in colour, or hazy emerald-green, or faint old-rose. The jungle beat in the music thrust and throbbed relentlessly on the eardrums of the dancing multitude until they postured and grimaced and genuflected like a herd of mesmerised buffoons.
But you didn’t succeed in a place like that because of coloured lights and mass hypnosis. You knew that among these multitudes there would be people who came to prey on lads and lasses out for fun. They didn’t come to listen to the music. You had to keep the liquor out of crowds like these; I would as soon have nitro-glycerine in a place like that as sparkling wine. So you had your private army to guard your patrons from marauders, to rule your dance hall with an iron hand, and you knew you’d often have to use them in the hectic midnight hours when your famous dancing rendezvous exploded in your face.
I’d brought the best of them with me. I’d given them each one-eighth of all my money and their wages, and the funds I had borrowed on my car, my race glasses and on any other mortal thing I could get my hands on. Then, half an hour before the race, I gave each of my lads a square of bookmakers to work on. They were to commence to bet at a given signal. These bookmakers are hard to trap, especially at Menangle, but there were things that favoured me. I heard two of them talking before the race started.
‘Tom, what’s this Firecracker?’
‘Firecracker?’ Tom echoed. ‘Oh, ’im. Some goat that fellow Bendrodt trains.’
‘What! Trains ’im, does ’e? Well, wouldn’t that rock you! What next will ’e do? ’E couldn’t train a rabbit to run up a burrow.’
‘Naw,’ said Tom. ‘’E’s got Cook riding ’im.’
‘What!’ the other fellow said in pained surprise. ‘Cook! Why, ’ow did ’e get ’im to ride it, I wonder?’
‘Friend of ’is, I guess,’ said Tom. ‘Anyway, we needn’t worry about Firecracker, ’e’s never had a run. Gold-digger is a certainty.’
When betting opened, Firecracker was at 10 to 1 and, when the money flowed for Gold-digger, I took my hat off and ran my fingers through my hair and, in a flash, eight good men commenced to bet as one.
In 90 seconds Firecracker was at 5 to 1 and, in 90 more, you had to fight to get the bookies to lay you 6 to 4. And no wonder. My lads were old in this game, and they had bet a lot of money—for Menangle. The vouchers they carried in their pockets would keep the Palais Royal going for a decent time to come if Firecracker won. But could he?
I legged Bill Cook up and said to him, ‘Now, Bill, this is serious. So pay attention to what I tell you. This fellow’s got to win, because, if he doesn’t, five minutes afterwards I’ll just be passing Suva going strong. No foolin’, Bill, you’ve got to win it.’
And Bill, who rarely paid attention to anything I said, or for that matter to anything that anybody said, looked down at me and asked in consternation, ‘But, boss, what’s he done? He’s never had a race. I can’t come home without the horse, you know, it isn’t done.’
‘Quit fooling, Bill,’ I said. ‘Firecracker is a little peculiar.’ Then, as alarm spread over his face and I saw him take a tighter grip on the reins, I hastened to add, ‘But he’s fast, Bill, very fast. He’s only peculiar because his mother was Persian Nan, and she was a wee bit mad, so they tell me. You talk to him going to the post and get his confidence. Don’t hit him for heaven’s sake, or you’ll need a parachute to bring you down. And be careful at the barrier, Bill, because that’s where he really gets peculiar. He’ll only go for 5½ furlongs and then he’ll stop as if he’s hit a wall. So hug the rails as if you loved them, and don’t make him go an unnecessary yard. Out and home, Bill, that’s the ticket.’
‘Aw, for God’s sake,’ Bill replied morosely. He clucked at Firecracker and Firecracker obediently erupted through the gate onto the course and disappeared into the distance, with Bill Cook doing stunts that would have turned a Cossack green with envy.
They didn’t have announcers back in the days I write about, and I couldn’t see the start without my glasses. But the track was dry and sandy, so I knew when a bunch of horses travelled in a cloud of dust to a turn a quarter of a mile or more away. But I couldn’t see the colou
rs, and I didn’t hear the crowd. I knew a sort of dull, sick feeling, and it seemed that every second was a year.
Then in the distance I could hear their hooves thudding on the hard dry ground as the field swung towards the furlong pole, and I could see a tall black horse skimming along the rails with a golden chestnut close behind him, and the rest 10 lengths away. And then I became a cold stone statue, and the world a place where nothing seemed to focus.
Then a smashing blow hit me between the shoulder blades, and an Irish voice roared joyously, ‘By the holy saints, it’s Firecracker! It’s the feckless loon himself, so help me Bob!’
INTRODUCTION—A BRIEF HISTORY OF COLONIAL RACING
No nation in the world has venerated its champion racehorses as Australia has. Every few years we seem to find a new thoroughbred to admire. It is a part of our culture to have a champion to follow as each racing year unfolds. This tradition was established quite early in colonial times.
Australians have a particular obsession with racing, which is probably due to the importance of horses in the development of the colonies in the nineteenth century. The horse was the main mode of transport until the industrial age, and without the horse this vast country could not have been settled.
Apart from the convicts, the first settlers were mostly military men and most of them owned horses—and, when given a chance and a holiday, they enjoyed racing them.
As settlements spread out into the bush, horses became even more essential. Entertainment was limited and race meetings became the most common way to socialise, relax and celebrate.
General public involvement in racing is far greater in Australia than anywhere else in the world. It is amusing to speculate that the percentage of the Australian population who actually attended Spring Carnival racing in Melbourne in the 1890s, if translated into similar figures in Britain, would have seen four million people attending the Derby meeting at Epsom!
Australian racing officially began in the colony of New South Wales in 1810, when the first three-day meeting was held at Hyde Park in Sydney. The winning post was approximately where Market Street meets Elizabeth Street today, and the meeting established the tradition for right-handed racing in New South Wales, that being the most convenient way of going as the sun set to the west.
Both Arabian and thoroughbred horses had been imported into the colony from the time of the first European settlement, and match races had been popular prior to that first meeting in 1810.
When the 73rd Regiment was transferred to Ceylon in 1814, the colony lost its race committee and racing became uncontrolled and was banned for a time by Governor Macquarie.
The original Sydney Turf Club (STC) was formed in 1825 and began racing at Captain Piper’s racecourse at Bellevue Hill under the patronage of Governor Brisbane, who had banned unofficial meetings and dangerous races around the now dilapidated course at Hyde Park.
Colonial politics and a public insult at an STC dinner led to the next governor, Governor Darling, withdrawing his patronage from the turf club in 1827. Twenty-nine members resigned in support of the governor and formed the Australian Racing and Jockey Club (ARJC).
The STC raced at Camperdown and the ARJC raced at Parramatta, and from 1832 to 1841 racing was conducted on cleared scrub land at Randwick, which was known as ‘The Sandy Track’.
Racing in Sydney suffered from the poor condition of tracks until 1840, when the Australian Race Committee was formed to set up a decent racetrack at Homebush. This group then decided to form a permanent race club, and the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) was officially born in 1842. The Homebush track was used until the completion of the ‘new’ Randwick in 1860.
In Melbourne, racing started at Flemington in 1840. In 1848, 350 acres were officially designated to be a public racecourse, and a committee, which became the Port Phillip Racing Club, was set up to regulate racing. In the 1850s this club disbanded and two new clubs, the Victoria Turf Club (VTC) and the Victoria Jockey Club (VJC), became bitter rivals.
It was the VTC that instituted the Melbourne Cup in 1861. The third Cup, however, was a disaster: only seven horses started after all inter-colonial trainers, and many Melbourne trainers, boycotted the event when the committee refused to accept Archer’s entry on technical grounds. Politics and inter-colonial rivalry threatened to ruin the event until the clearer heads of both the turf and jockey clubs came together to form the Victoria Racing Club in 1864, and Flemington and the Cup became the property of the VRC.
Australia’s first popular champion racehorse was a gelding called Jorrocks, who raced in the 1840s. His story is told in this section.
Racing during Jorrocks’s time was a very different affair to the racing we know today. Races were started by a man on a pony whose job it was to attempt to muster the contestants into a reasonably straight line before dropping a large white flag.
Races were most commonly run over three heats and the winner was the horse with the best overall result. There was a large pole situated on each racecourse, sometimes about a furlong from the winning post or near the turn. This was known as ‘the distance’ and horses that did not ‘make the distance’ in a heat were ‘out of the running’ and could not compete in the subsequent heats.
If the judges considered a finish too close to call, the heat was declared ‘dead’ and the horses that figured in the close finish would ‘run off’ over the same distance again to decide the winner. So, in those days, a ‘dead heat’ was not a result, but a ‘non result’ which required another heat to be run.
There were no saddlecloth numbers until the 1870s and official colours were not compulsory for jockeys until the AJC introduced that rule in 1842. After each race the contestants would line up in front of the judges’ box. This was referred to as ‘saluting the judge’ and the tradition of winning jockeys saluting with their whip, holding it aloft or touching their cap as they come back to the winner’s stall is a carry-over of this old tradition.
The judges then looked at each horse and rider and checked the horses’ looks and jockeys’ colours against the ‘official entries’ list, or ‘race card’. The judges then announced the placegetters, who returned to scale to be weighed in.
Before the registration of names was properly controlled, different horses often raced with the same names. There were three Tim Whifflers in the Australian colonies in the 1860s: one was an imported stallion who sired the 1876 Melbourne Cup winner Briseis, and the other two Tim Whifflers both raced in the Melbourne Cup of 1867. ‘Sydney Tim’, trained by Etienne de Mestre, won the Cup and ‘Melbourne Tim’ ran fifth!
By the 1860s a new era of racing had dawned. Racing clubs had begun to regulate racing in the colonies, with the AJC taking the lead, and the famous Admiral Rous had standardised the rules of racing in Britain and established the weight-for-age system where horses of each sex carry a set weight at a certain age over certain distances. His close personal friend, Captain Standish, had left England, following a rather disastrous betting plunge in an Epsom Derby, to become Chief Commissioner of Police in the colony of Victoria.
Standish has two claims to fame in Australian history. He led the rather inept hunt for the Kelly gang and, as chairman of the Victoria Turf Club, he is credited as being the man who ‘invented’ the Melbourne Cup.
The Cup began in 1861, the same year that the AJC introduced the Australian Derby, and a new era of racing developed around it.
The rival clubs of Victoria put aside their differences and merged into the VRC in 1864. Meanwhile, in Sydney, the AJC, having returned to a new and improved Randwick in 1860, soon attempted to emulate the success of its Melbourne counterparts.
In 1866 the AJC introduced four new races, the Metropolitan Handicap, the first official Sydney Cup, the Champagne Stakes and the Doncaster Handicap. And along with the new races came a new champion, The Barb.
Australian racing had been through a stage of incredible growth in the 1860s, and the 1870s saw a series of unsavoury scandals involving trainers hiding hor
ses’ true abilities.
Two of the worst of these incidents involved horses from St Albans Stud near Geelong. A protest was entered the day after the 1873 Melbourne Cup over the uncertain ownership, age and identity of winner Don Juan. A tale of disguised ownership emerged, and the public image of racing suffered even more when a huge Melbourne Cup plunge on the lightly raced Savanaka occurred in 1877.
Savanaka lost the Cup to the Sydney champ Chester, but the unsavoury link between betting and training was damaging the image of racing. The tragic loss in a storm of nine Sydney horses bound for the 1876 Melbourne Spring Carnival on board the steamer City of Melbourne was made worse by the celebrations initiated by Melbourne’s bookmakers on hearing the news.
The bookies stood to lose a fortune on early betting for the carnival on the Sydney horses and those returning to Melbourne from the Sydney Spring Carnival, particularly on the Cup where Robin Hood—the best horse Etienne de Mestre ever trained, according to the trainer himself—had been well backed. Robin Hood died in the storm along with the Cup favourite and Metropolitan winner Nemesis, and the well-backed contenders Sovereign and Burgundy.
Racing was suffering from skulduggery and shady practices throughout the 1870s. The general public had lost faith in the integrity of the sport and it was heading into very unsavoury territory and risked becoming a ‘second-rate’ sporting activity in the eyes of the media and the average Aussie.
This general view was not improved by the disgusting behaviour of the Melbourne bookmakers in celebrating the loss of the horses in the storm of 1876 and their unbelievably audacious and unsporting gesture of presenting a purse to the captain of the City of Melbourne (the hilariously named Captain Paddle), as a reward for not turning back when requested to and thus precipitating the tragic loss, and painful deaths, of nine valuable thoroughbreds.