by Jim Haynes
And they found it was Father Riley’s moke!
He was neat enough to gallop, he was strong enough to stay!
But his owner’s views of training were immense,
For the Reverend Father Riley used to ride him every day,
And he never saw a hurdle nor a fence.
And the priest would join the laughter, ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘I put him in,
For there’s five-and-twenty sovereigns to be won.
And the poor would find it useful, if the chestnut chanced to win,
And he’ll maybe win when all is said and done!’
He had called him Faugh-a-ballagh (which is French for ‘Clear the course’),
And his colours were a vivid shade of green:
All the Dooleys and O’Donnells were on Father Riley’s horse,
While the Orangemen were backing Mandarin!
It was Hogan, the dog poisoner—old man and very wise,
Who was camping in the racecourse with his swag,
And who ventured the opinion, to the township’s great surprise,
That the race would go to Father Riley’s nag.
‘You can talk about your riders—and the horse has not been schooled,
And the fences is terrific, and the rest!
When the field is fairly going, then ye’ll see ye’ve all been fooled,
And the chestnut horse will battle with the best.
‘For there’s some has got condition, and they think the race is sure,
And the chestnut horse will fall beneath the weight,
But the hopes of all the helpless, and the prayers of all the poor,
Will be running by his side to keep him straight.
And what’s the need of schoolin’ or of workin’ on the track,
When the saints are there to guide him round the course!
I’ve prayed him over every fence—I’ve prayed him out and back!
And I’ll bet my cash on Father Riley’s horse!’
Oh, the steeple was a caution! They went tearin’ round and round,
And the fences rang and rattled where they struck.
There was some that cleared the water, there was more fell in and drowned,
Some blamed the men and others blamed the luck!
But the whips were flying freely when the field came into view,
For the finish down the long green stretch of course,
And in front of all the flyers—jumping like a kangaroo,
Came the rank outsider—Father Riley’s horse!
Oh, the shouting and the cheering as he rattled past the post!
For he left the others standing in the straight;
And the rider—well they reckoned it was Andy Regan’s ghost,
And it beat ’em how a ghost would draw the weight!
But he weighed in, nine stone seven, then he laughed and disappeared,
Like a banshee (which is Spanish for an elf),
And old Hogan muttered sagely, ‘If it wasn’t for the beard
They’d be thinking it was Andy Regan’s self!’
And the poor of Kiley’s Crossing gave their thanks at Christmastide
To the chestnut and his jockey dressed in green.
There was never such a rider, not since Andy Regan died,
And they wondered who on earth it could have been.
But they settled it among ’em, for the story got about,
’Mongst the bushmen and the people on the course,
That the Devil had been ordered to let Andy Regan out
For the steeplechase on Father Riley’s horse!
Note: I find this poem very amusing in an Irish accent. It is the only poem I know of Paterson’s, apart from ‘A Bush Christening’, where he uses zany ‘Irish humour’ with jokes such as ‘a banshee (which is Spanish for an elf)’ and ‘He had called him Faugh-a-ballagh (which is French for “Clear the course”)’. Faugh-a-ballagh is an ancient Irish battle cry which means, in Gaelic, ‘Get out of the way’ or ‘clear the way’. It is the motto of the Royal Irish Regiment.
HARRY CALLS A WINNER
WAYNE PEAKE
From Wayne’s collection of humorous racing stories, The Gambler’s Ghost, Ascot Press, 2012
***
Harry Trump had been a race-caller for more than thirty years. He had started out in the days when broadcasters were banned from racecourses, and had had to rely on their own inventiveness to call races from the outer. He had called the 1937 Melbourne Cup from half way up a tree on the far side of the Maribyrnong River, and in the excitement of the finish had fallen out and almost hanged himself on the microphone lead.
He had called from the top of removalists’ vans, mounted on fire-engine ladders, lowered from a French aviator’s dirigible airship, and on one memorable occasion on a trampoline, when he’d had to time his bounce so that he was in the air as the horses passed the post. He had called camel races in North Africa with the Second AIF. During a fact finding tour of world racing venues in 1957, he had outraged the British by falling down the grandstand steps blind drunk at Royal Ascot (his dislodged top hat landing in the lap of the Queen Mother), and bemused the Americans at the Kentucky Derby, on spotting the dirt track, by commenting that he’d never seen a racecourse in worse condition, even in Woop-Woop. He advised any who cared to listen (and many others who would rather have not) that they should transfer the Derby to another course until the grass had had a chance to grow back.
Harry’s manner of speech was colourful and dotted with turf metaphors, and he invariably addressed his interlocutors as ‘sport’, or ‘brother’, which saved him the bother of remembering names. His clothes were equally idiosyncratic, whether observed at the bar of the local RSL or the races; two-tone shoes with pointy toes, voluminous bottle green trousers, vest and hound’s-tooth sports jacket with red-rose buttonhole, felt hat turned down at the front. From beneath the hat wafted the elusive scent of an exotic hair oil. He had a glossy art-deco haircut like Bill Ponsford the 1920s cricketer that reflected the light like a wet road at night.
On race days Harry was preceded through the entrance to the commentary box by a battered old Gladstone bag. The bag contained the four tools of the trade to which Harry attributed his great success. These were a set of ancient but excellent binoculars, a little battery operated fan, a facecloth steeped in Eau De Cologne, and a bottle of black label scotch.
As the years passed this last item increasingly diverted Harry’s attention from the first three. It would perhaps have been going too far too describe Harry as a booze hound—he would have scoffed at the idea himself—but a lot of listeners came to feel that Harry’s first call of the day usually had much greater clarity than the last.
One Thursday morning in the late 1960s Harry was not particularly surprised to be summoned to radio 2RAW station manager Joe Jones’s office. Though he was seriously hung-over, he had some recollection of an unfortunate incident the previous day at Randwick, something to do with the last race, maybe . . .
Joe Jones quickly provided the forgotten details. ‘You called the wrong horse the winner, Harry!’ he said, pointing at the photo-strip of the finish in the racing paper.
‘Oh, yeah—I remember now. Sorry, sport. You know it was that bloody silly old “Crasher” Gates’s fault. If a trainer’s goin’ to start two horses in a race, why doesn’t he make sure that their colours are different? Where’s the sense in using the stable colours on both and puttin’ a white cap on one jockey, and a yellow cap on the other? Eh? Askin’ for trouble, I reckon. But look—sorry—I’ll be more careful here-on-in.’
‘It’s not that easy, Harry. Do you know who owns that horse you called the winner?’
‘Nope—enlighten me.’
‘Never noticed a bloke being chauffeur-driven to the front door here in a silver Rolls Royce?’
‘Little shifty lookin’ bloke with beady eyes in a homburg hat?’
‘That is he. Sir Reginald Barry is his name—ring a bell? He happens t
o be the owner of this station. Yes, he’s the man who’s been covering your gambling losses these last twenty years. He also happens to be the owner of that nag you called the winner of the last race. However, as the morning paper reveals, it did not win, but rather ran twenty-eighth in a field of twenty-nine.’
‘Big field, that,’ Harry pointed out.
‘Big mistake, I’m afraid, Harry.’ Jones sighed as he opened a drawer in his desk and withdrew a sealed envelope. He handed it to Harry. ‘Sorry to do this to you, old boy.’
‘What’s this—tickets to the opera or somethin’?’ asked Harry, looking with distaste at the envelope.
‘No, it’s your final cheque, Harry. You’re fired.’
‘Fired!’
‘Effective immediately. Please clear your desk and be off the premises within the hour.’
‘Hang on, don’t I get a second chance? This is the first blue I’ve made since that triple dead heat in the ’56 Hotham Handicap.’
‘Sir Reginald doesn’t give second chances, especially when the mistake is one that affects his pocket. He laid out big on that horse yesterday Harry, and as he couldn’t be at the track, he listened in on the radio. Do you get the picture?’
‘You mean he was listening to me—and I called his horse the winner when it wasn’t? S’truth, no wonder he’s a bit dirty on the world.’
‘He’s more than dirty, Harry—he’s as cranky as a jockey forced to waste at Christmas. And Mr Barry is a very mean man. He’s so careful I heard he found a band-aid once and cut himself because he couldn’t wait to use it straight away. And, what’s more, he’s decided that you were shickered when you called that race. He’s a typical big businessman; vindictive, doesn’t like to be let down by underlings. Really, you’re lucky he’s decided to break only your contract and not your legs as well.’
‘Still, it isn’t my fault that ’is horse is a hay bandit,’ Harry replied.
Joe Jones’s craggy features softened slightly. ‘You understand this isn’t my doing, Harry. I hate to turn a legend like you out on the streets with the finishing post almost in sight. But it’s out of my hands—you see?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ responded Harry absent-mindedly, suddenly wishing that he had opened a savings account thirty years ago rather than last week. For Harry knew what this sacking meant. Race-callers, unlike brickies’ labourers or short-order cooks, are not advertised for each morning in the Herald. Opportunities are finite and limited. And if word got out that he’d been full on the job . . . which it had by lunchtime . . .
***
It was a day some six months later when Harry Trump, a couple of days’ growth on his chin, approached the entrance of his bank. In his hand was a cheque in his favour drawn against the account of his sister Beryl. He had received several similar cheques in recent months, the amount each time smaller than last. He was now firmly advised that this was the last of its kind that he could expect to receive. The family, he was told, was no longer prepared to pay for his stabling.
It had been a tough six months, Harry reflected. As he had anticipated, offers of work were not forthcoming. Doors slammed in his face with cyclonic ferocity. In the first weeks Harry had gathered up what little assets he could claim as his own and converted them to cash money. His aspiration was to eke out a modest existence punting. But Harry found that he had little talent for identifying winners—a fairly essential component of the skill-set of a successful professional punter.
It dawned on Harry for the first time that he had always been a lousy judge—good race-caller, but a lousy judge. What winners he had backed were almost always the result of inside information he’d received at the track. He was suddenly aware, albeit without any sense of guilt, of the financial deprivations that anyone who had followed his tips for any length of time must have suffered. How many marriages had he sent down the gurgler, he wondered.
There was just one other customer in the bank when Harry entered, an elderly gentleman in a hat, who was already being attended to by one of the tellers. Harry waited his turn at the top of the otherwise empty queue.
‘Next, please,’ called the other teller, who was now free. He smiled at Harry.
Harry began to move forward, but he happened to look down and notice that one of his shoelaces had worked free.
‘Bugger!’ he said to himself. ‘Hang on, mate,’ he called to the teller. ‘I’ve loosened a plate here! I’ll ’ave to be reshod! Be with you in a moment.’
Harry noticed an artificial palm tree in the corner of the bank. It was housed in a planter box which he judged was just the right height, if rested on, to enable him to re-tie his shoelace. He shuffled over to the box with this in mind.
Now, as a race-caller, there was one area where the public always agreed that Harry had it all over his rivals. He had an uncanny ability to call the ‘swoopers’—the horses finishing fast from the rear in the last half furlong in big fields—much earlier than anyone else.
Although Harry just took this talent for granted he was in fact blessed with exceptionally good peripheral vision. At that moment, courtesy of this great gift, he was aware of a sudden, violent movement almost directly behind him. And even as this movement registered in his brain, it was joined by an instinctive suspicion that whatever was its source, it bode no good for Harry Trump.
It was well known among returned servicemen that while with the Second AIF in North Africa Harry had also developed great expertise in finding cover, even in the seemingly featureless desert, to avoid contact with the enemy, and he didn’t hesitate to put that skill to good use now. He had already begun to bend down to tie his lace, but now he modified that movement into a neat forward tumble that carried him over the planter box and out of sight behind the palm tree.
Harry quickly righted himself and looked forward into the bank from between two palm fronds. He was certain that the tree would conceal his presence from anyone standing in the public section of the floor.
He saw three men wearing masks rush into the bank. The foremost was waving a sawn-off shot gun at the bank officials and the lone customer.
‘Property is theft!’ he cried in a gravelly voice. ‘You pair!’ he called to the tellers. ‘Turn around and put your hands up! Now!’
‘Right, lads,’ he said to his two accomplices, ‘get over the counter and get the cash—and don’t muck around. They’ve probably hit the alarm already.’
As his partners leapt the counter, the man with the gun and gravelly voice turned to the elderly customer. ‘OK, old man, you can reach, as well,’ he ordered. Then he grabbed the lapel of the old man’s suit and rubbed it between his thumb and index finger. ‘Say, great bag of fruit this! Top of the range cloth, that. Bet this didn’t come off the rack at Solly Cohen’s cheap-and-cheerful menswear, eh? You’re some sort of capitalist, I’ll warrant. Hand over your roll so I can redistribute some of your surplus of production!’
‘This is an outrage!’ spluttered the Suit.
‘Nyet, Rockefeller,’ responded the robber, firing a shot into the air, then bringing the butt of his rifle down on the customer’s head. As that person crumpled to the floor, he reached inside the victim’s coat and removed a plump wallet which he replaced in his own pocket.
‘Jeez, I’m well out of this,’ said Harry to himself, concealed behind his tree. ‘Worse than bloody Tobruk.’
Then Harry heard the sound of a distant siren, rapidly drawing nearer. The gang-leader heard it too, and he cocked his head, as though to discern which direction the sound came from.
‘Fall back, boys, it’s the cops,’ he yelled to his henchmen.
Obediently his deputies leapt out and sprinted for the door. Gravel Voice backed behind them providing cover. As he reached the door he called to the bank clerks, ‘Come after me and I’ll blow a God-damn hole in you!’ Then he turned and ran off.
Moments later three policemen entered the bank. Once it was clear that the robbers had fled two of them set off in pursuit. The third, a young man of se
lf-confident bearing, had been at the scene several minutes before Harry decided it was safe to emerge from his hiding spot. With a rustle of palm fronds he stepped out into the open. The policeman, who had begun interviewing the tellers, turned at the sound.
‘Hello, where have you come from?’ he asked Harry.
‘Oh, I’d forgotten. This gentleman was in the line before the robbers struck,’ said one of the tellers. His eyes narrowed. ‘Perhaps he is an accomplice!’
‘Accomplice nothin’,’ Harry said, ‘I just came here to cash me tight sister’s Kleine cheque.’ He noted a safe, its door swinging open, its interior empty. ‘And I suppose that plan’s a late scratchin’, and all, judging by the hungry look of that cashbox.’
‘Never mind about that,’ said the policeman. ‘I was just about to ask these fellows for a description of the criminals.’
But the bank men could offer little help, as they had been made to face the wall during most of the raid. Both also frankly admitted that they had been too scared to notice much anyway.
The police officer looked Harry up and down, then asked none too hopefully, ‘I don’t suppose that you, sir, would be able to describe—’
Harry cleared his throat like he used to when the runners were moving into the starting barrier.
‘Maybe I can at that, captain,’ he said. ‘Now: there were three of these blokes. The first—the one who thought he was Ned Kelly holdin’ up the bank at Euroa—was wearing a sort of khaki blouse with a belt around it, and a houndstooth floppy cap like the pommy workers wear.’
‘Hey, that’s right!’ confirmed one of the tellers. ‘I remember now.’
‘The second bloke,’ continued Harry, ‘was wearing white and blue striped seersucker trousers, and a tan jacket with white arm-bands.’
‘That’s the fellow!’ agreed the teller again. ‘Bloody crook dresser, he was!’
‘And the last one,’ went on Harry again, closing his eyes, ‘green gabardine trousers with white contrast stitching, blue body shirt with dark blue yoke and inlays under the armpits. White footie beanie with red stripes and pom-pom.’