by Jim Haynes
There is even a more ridiculous ‘legend’ that Archer’s strapper, Dave Power, not only walked him to Melbourne, but rode him under Cutts’ name in the Cup . . . and was of Aboriginal descent.
Perhaps Power walked Archer to the nearest port of embarkation from his home on the south coast of New South Wales, or perhaps he walked him from the Port Melbourne docks to the hotel stables at South Yarra, where he was trained for the first Cup; but he certainly never walked him to Melbourne from his home near Nowra, nor did he ride him in the Cup.
Archer went by steamboat from Sydney to Melbourne three times to compete in Victorian races, in 1861, 1862 and 1863.
De Mestre’s horses usually boarded the steamer at Adam’s Wharf near his property at Terara, on the Shoalhaven River. However, floods in 1860 altered the course of the river channels and made navigation dangerous. So, from 1860 to 1863, horses needed to be walked to the wharf at Greenwell Point 13 kilometres to the east. Perhaps this was the origin of the ‘walking to Melbourne’ legend.
The longest distance Archer ever walked was the 250 kilometres from the end of the railway line at Campelltown to his owners’ paddock near Braidwood when he retired from racing in 1864.
Etienne de Mestre, cunning as he was, may have enjoyed spreading the ridiculous rumour about the walk as part of his plan to empty the pockets of Melbourne’s bookmakers. It is more obvious, however, that he achieved his goal by keeping the horse away from prying eyes and training him in what was then known as St Kilda Park, opposite the Botanical Hotel, where he was stabled in South Yarra.
If looked at devoid of its myths and fairytales, the first Melbourne Cup was a rough-and-tumble affair. One horse bolted off the course during the race, three of the seventeen runners fell and two died. Two jockeys were seriously injured and suffered broken bones.
Archer defeated the favourite, and local champion, Mormon, by 6 lengths in the slowest time in Cup history, 3 minutes 52 seconds, in front of the smallest crowd ever, 4000 people.
Archer had previously defeated Mormon over 2½ miles in the Australia Plate at Randwick. So the form was there to see and de Mestre’s betting coup was a real triumph over local pride. An injury to Archer, real or feigned, leading up to the race may have helped the price get out to an appetising 8 to 1 before de Mestre pounced and reduced the odds to 6 to 1.
Archer had won his last seven starts in Sydney, but those wins were spread out over a year and ‘inter-colonial’ form was not always well known. It was the Cup that would eventually bring Australian champions together from around the continent and give us a real ‘Australian racing scene’.
De Mestre single-handedly backed his victorious horse in from 8 to 1 to 6 to 1, with the result that the bookmakers of Melbourne were left reeling and more grist was added to the mill of interstate rivalry, or inter-colonial rivalry, as it then was. A further irony, which modern racegoers may not realise, is that there was no prize at all for running second.
The following day Archer won again, taking out the Melbourne Town Plate, also run over 2 miles.
Neither the handicapper nor the bookmakers of Melbourne missed Archer the following year. Of course, he added another chapter to Cup history by winning yet again, this time defeating Mormon by 8 lengths in spite of carrying 10 st 2 lb (64.5 kg).
The second year the odds were not as juicy. Archer won by 8 lengths, a feat not equalled until Rain Lover won by the same margin in 1968. His trainer took home £810 and another watch. Mormon again ran second and this time collected £20.
The story of how Archer missed running in a third Melbourne Cup is also part of the Cup legend.
In the true spirit of colonial rivalry, Archer was given the massive weight of 11 st 4 lb (72 kg) by the handicapper in 1863. De Mestre had paid the first acceptance fee of 5 sovereigns and was incensed when weights were announced. However, he eventually relented and Archer and another runner from his stable, Haidee, left by steamboat for Melbourne on 16 June.
De Mestre’s agents reminded him on 1 July that he needed to send final payment and acceptance that day, so a telegram was sent to the Melbourne office of George Kirk & Co., asking them to accept on his behalf. De Mestre sent the telegram himself, as the due date was a normal working day in New South Wales, and records show it was received at Melbourne Telegraph Office at 1 p.m.
However, Wednesday 1 July was a public holiday in Melbourne, and the telegram was not delivered to George Kirk until 7.30 p.m.
Acceptances closed at 8 p.m. and, when George Kirk handed the telegram to the stewards at the Turf Club the next morning, those honourable sporting men, having found a loophole to stop Archer once and for all, decided it was too late and the entry was not accepted.
This decision caused a furore at the time; even Victorian owners lobbied the club to accept the entry, but to no avail. Mind you, it was highly unlikely that Archer, carrying 11 st 4 lb (72 kg), could have won anyway, and the Victorian owners doubtless realised this. If he had run it would have been the biggest weight carried in the history of the Melbourne Cup.
All the interstate entrants pulled out in protest and only seven local horses ran in what is considered the worst and weakest Cup in history. It was won, in front of 7000 people, by Banker, carrying 5 st 4 lb (34 kg).
It is both fitting and ironic that the public holiday that enabled this unsportsmanlike decision to be made was Separation Day, the day that Victoria celebrated its official separation from New South Wales in 1851.
The original success of the new race, followed by the debacle of 1863, eventually led to the end of the rivalry between the two race clubs, which merged to become the Victoria Racing Club in 1864. The VRC has run the Cup at Flemington every spring without fail since that time, as its feature race for the year.
Archer was taken by train to Ballarat in August 1863 and ran poorly in a sweepstakes race. He was suffering from fever and an injured fetlock and returned to Sydney to recover and be trained for the Metropolitan Handicap of 1864. He broke down once more on the eve of the race, however, and never raced again.
Although Archer is shown in the record books as being owned by de Mestre, he was actually leased by de Mestre and was always owned by an old school friend of de Mestre’s, J.T. Roberts, in partnership with his brother-in-law and two nephews. He raced in his trainer’s famous colours, which were, rather ominously for the bookies of Melbourne in 1861, all black.
Archer was retired to stand at his owners’ property, Exeter Farm, near Braidwood, where he was foaled, for a fee of 10 guineas, but his progeny failed to win a stakes race, bearing out, perhaps, de Mestre’s opinion that Archer was not among the best horses he had ever trained.
Archer died, aged sixteen, in 1872. An ornament made from his tail hair, coiled into a horseshoe shape and set in silver and mounted on red satin, can be seen at the Australian Racing Museum in Melbourne.
Etienne de Mestre had developed land his father was granted at Terara, near Nowra, into a successful training and breeding establishment. Archer’s stable is still there. In fact, it’s a bed and breakfast establishment today and, if you are prepared to believe Cup and local folklore, you can spend a weekend sleeping where Archer was supposedly stabled for most of his racing life.
Maybe you believe he walked to Melbourne, too.
WESTWARD HO!
HARRY ‘THE BREAKER’ MORANT
Extract
***
The night’s a trifle chilly, and the stars are very bright,
A heavy dew is falling, but the tent-fly is rigged right;
You may rest your bones till morning, then, if you chance to wake,
Give me a call about the time that daylight starts to break.
We may not camp tomorrow, for we’ve many a mile to go,
’Ere we turn our horses’ heads round to make tracks for down below.
There’s many a water-course to cross, and many a black-soil plain,
And many a mile of mulga ridge ’ere we get back again.
That time
five moons shall wax and wane we’ll finish up the work,
Have the bullocks o’er the border and truck ’em down from Bourke,
And when they’re sold at Homebush, and the agents settle up,
Sing hey! A spell in Sydney town . . . and Melbourne for the ‘Cup’.
THE CUP IS MORE THAN A HORSE RACE
LES CARLYON
‘Mort from Chicago’—that’s how he introduced himself to me in an hotel dining room four years ago in Lexington, Kentucky. If the name sounds Runyonesque, Mort wasn’t. He was that peculiarly American creature, the urban horse investor. From the big city, he sent his money to Kentucky where thoroughbreds ate it, but in a tax-effective way.
Mort owned pieces of several swish yearlings to be sold in the pavilion across from Blue Grass Airport, where the Arab buyers had already parked in their jets much as we park Commodores. After we had been talking half an hour, Mort suddenly said: ‘Yeah, I bred a Melbourne Cup winner once.’ It was less than a boast—more like you or I confessing to having once kicked a goal for Mount Pleasant seconds.
Years earlier, Mort and his partners had sold a yearling to Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai, dreaming the colt would make them famous in the Derby at Epsom, England, or the Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, France. The colt ran second in a big German race and third in the Rome Derby before being bundled off to Australia. As At Talaq, he won the 1986 Melbourne Cup. Mort felt things could have turned out better.
I told him that while the Cup wasn’t as famous as the races he coveted, it was a lung-buster, perhaps the most honest staying race in the world, and never won by a soft horse. Cup day, I told him, was one of the world’s great booze-ups, a public holiday no less. Then I hit him with the clincher: kids from Moonee Ponds went along dressed as the Pope. Mort didn’t say much. I’m sure he thought it was Mt Pleasant seconds.
It’s hard to explain the Cup to an outsider. Most of the turf ’s fabled events were got up by racing insiders for themselves. The Epsom and Kentucky Derbies are about the supremacy of genes and the buying power of the ruling classes. The public is allowed to join in for the crowd scenes. The best colt of the year usually wins and is hustled off to the breeding shed. Sheikh What’s-His-Name doesn’t get too excited about the stake money because he’s worth a couple of billion anyway. Besides, he spent $20 million on yearlings that year, so he’s still behind, but who’s counting?
Our Cup is quirky. Got up for people, it is: a cross between a horse race and a folk festival. And it mocks good order because it’s a handicap. This gets rid of the preordained factor: just about any runner can win. It’s the best sporting idea anyone ever had in this town—if only because racing is international and AFL footy isn’t.
And the Cup is folksy. Ray Trinder, the Tasmanian owner who won in 1972, was seen outside the course holding the Cup in a cardboard box and trying to hail a cab. It doesn’t go like this at Epsom or Longchamp. In Melbourne, the script is by Shakespeare. The Cup is a saga about horses and the human condition, about lowbrows and highbrows, toffs and villains, irony and rough humour. And the improbable.
In 1987, Harry Lawton had bought Kensei out of a New Zealand paddock for $15,000. Now the chestnut had won the Cup. ‘Looked like a yak when I bought him,’ said Harry. ‘Had a coat about 3 inches long.’ Harry used to be a fitter and turner, and played footy for Preston at $4 a game. Rosedale, a bay stallion owned in America by Nelson Bunker Hunt, once thought to be the richest man in the world, ran third to Kensei. ‘Tell Bunker I’m sorry I knocked him off,’ said Harry. It only goes like this in Australia.
As the Cup field paraded last year, the crowd, as it always does, fell silent. When Fraar, owned by the above-mentioned Sheikh Hamdan, reached the top corner of the yard, a falsetto voice cried out: ‘I love you, Fraar.’
Next time around, Michael Jackson cried out even louder. ‘I want to marry you, Fraar.’
Only on such a day can a wag from Werribee, or wherever, make thousands laugh. When, around 15 minutes later, Ireland’s Vintage Crop came back the winner, a joker in white Arabic robes rose, arms outstretched, to welcome him. Here, having a day out, was Lawrence of Nunawading, or possibly Sheikh Akbar Bin Merv of Wagga. In 1992, maybe the same gent came as Batman. Next Tuesday he could be Roseanne. Only in Australia.
Cup crowds always seem bigger than AFL Grand Final crowds because racegoers need to move around more. Last year I was looking for an old friend, the Irish journalist Robin Park. I couldn’t find him. But when Vintage Crop swooped on the leaders, I heard Robin’s voice. Somewhere in that throng of 80,000, he was yelling as only a patriot with a bookie’s ticket can. I didn’t find his body until an hour later. Robin flushed and short in his action, mainly because of all the money he was carrying.
One reason the Cup has endured so well is that it keeps reinventing itself. In the early 1980s, it began to look worn. Too often it was won by mere handicappers, game horses but not the stuff of legend. People said the Cox Plate at Moonee Valley had more class. Without fanfare, the VRC began to handicap the Cup as a ‘quality handicap’, which favoured good horses. Up popped winners as classy as Empire Rose, Kingston Rule and Let’s Elope. Then, last year, the VRC attracted two European runners and took the race to the world.
So it was that in the wind and rain we heard Irish accents at the winner’s stall. Back came Vintage Crop, a long chestnut with a sheepskin noseband and a plaited mane. Hauntingly Irish, it was: the light soft and grey, the grass bruised and squelching, the rain incessant.
Back, too, came Mick Kinane, Vintage Crop’s jockey, mud spattered across his shoulders, face and crotch. He had struck the chestnut just five times with the whip. He had gone out along its neck, kept his head low, and helped the gelding to the line. Behind him, local jockeys were sitting up, flailing away, and generally demonstrating why Australian jockeys are no longer as popular as they once were in Europe. Vintage Crop changed the nature of the Cup. Kinane’s example may yet change the way Australian jockeys ride.
As usual, the return to scale made the running of the bulls at Pamplona, Spain, seem dull. Eventually Rod Johnson, the then VRC chief executive, took Dermot Weld, Vintage Crop’s trainer, and some of the print journalists to a bar. Here, we met a chameleon. One moment Weld would talk as clinically as a surgeon, explaining how he had planned the whole thing, which he had. Next, he was a romantic, reciting bush poetry. Can you imagine the winning trainer on Derby day at Epsom holding forth on Michael Magee, who owned a shanty on the outer Barcoo?
They drink at the Cup. Leaving the course in the dark after phoning in your story, you feel like the lone wowser at a Roman orgy. Cans rattle, glass crunches underfoot, tote tickets flutter, car boots gape. The air reeks of stale beer and you have to step around the bodies. Feeling absurdly chaste, one makes it to the street and hails a cab. Except the driver doesn’t stop at once; he slows down and peers. ‘Why didn’t you stop right away?’ I ask as we head for town. ‘Got to be careful who you pick up here,’ he says.
The carousing starts early. Arriving at the Cup one year, the first human I saw on the course was a youth, dead drunk and wearing only shorts, stretched out along the limbs of a shrub near the birdcage entrance, like a South American sloth but with tattoos. Far away a pipe band played ‘Scotland the Brave’. There were similar wildlife displays all over the course. The runners were going out for race one.
Long ago before the police brought precision to breathalyser queues, a knight of the realm was leaving the Cup in his Rolls with a crony. Both had enjoyed a top day of betting, drinking and lying. They were waved into the queue to be tested by the new-fangled breathalyser. Both at once tumbled into the back seat.
A policeman strode up. ‘Get this car moving . . .’ he started. ‘What’s going on? Who’s driving?’
‘It’s the damned chauffeur,’ said Sir M. ‘Just got out and ran away when we were signalled to stop. Must have been drinking.’
‘Well, one of you move the car,’ the policeman demanded. ‘Y
ou’re holding up the line.’
‘We can’t possibly do that, officer,’ said Sir M. ‘We’re pissed.’
Broadly speaking, four classes of people go to the Cup. A few men come in morning suits and toppers. They are the last surviving members of a class to which they never belonged—the English aristocracy. They look more self-conscious than the working-class kids who come dressed as Madonna. There are the thousands of women who dress so elegantly. You think of the Rome’s Via Veneto, then notice the lady is standing next to a drunk in a gorilla suit. And there is the suburban middle class. They stake out patches on the Flemington lawns. Things are so territorial here one thinks of the rookery scene in nature documentaries. Plots are marked out by a tartan rug on one’s corner, a Great Western bottle on another. Oh, and there are the racing diehards. They mostly hate Cup day.
The Cup is a reference point. Grand Flaneur, ridden by the crack Tommy Hales, won in 1880, days before they hanged another useful horseman, Edward Kelly, after a $30 trial. By 1895, Grand Flaneur was champion sire and no one knew where Ned’s body had been thrown. The wounded from Gallipoli limped around Flemington to see Patrobas win in 1915, the year Australia bought its nationhood with blood. Russia, a chestnut stallion, won in 1946, as the Allies realised they had licked Hitler only to inherit Stalin. Equally poetic, Think Big won in 1975, days before Gough Whitlam was sacked as PM by Sir John Kerr. A few years later at the Cup presentation, Kerr, slurring and looking like something gone to seed, tried to upstage a horse on Cup day.
In the country towns of my youth, the Cup was the reference point. A squint-eyed farmer would say: ‘We haven’t had a crop as good as this since . . . buggered if I can remember . . . when The Trump won the Cup.’
One of the townsfolk was a defrocked jockey who once rode a double at Flemington. In Cup week people bought him beers and took him seriously. For the rest of the year we treated him for what he truly was: a derelict.