by Jim Haynes
Leilani was a great staying mare, winning six times at Group 1 level in a relatively short career. Her fourteen wins, six seconds and six thirds from 28 starts is a great record for a stayer, and her wins included the AJC Oaks, Caulfield Cup, Toorak Handicap, and the Mackinnon, St George, C.F. Orr and Turnbull Stakes. Bart Cummings’s decision not to start her in the Cup with 59 kilograms means we will never know if she could have been up there with the great mares who won it.
For my money it comes down to Wakeful and Makybe Diva as the two greatest staying mares in our racing history.
Both mares started racing late and missed the classic fillies races for different reasons. Wakeful was amazingly versatile and won the sprint double of the Oakleigh Plate and Newmarket early in her career, at four. Makybe Diva, on the other hand, having never won first-up and never won a race under a mile in distance, came out at seven and won the Memsie Stakes first-up over 1400 metres.
Wakeful won over 4800 metres, a feat not possible in Makybe Diva’s day. She also won ten races that would be Group 1 today, compared to Makybe Diva’s seven. On the other hand, she started twice in the Melbourne Cup and never won; Makybe Diva won three. The Diva raced a century after Wakeful and much had changed in that time; she never carried the weights Wakeful had to, and her record overall does not match that of Wakeful.
So, it all depends on how you look at it and which facts and figures you want to use. The greatest staying mare to ever compete in the Melbourne Cup? Maybe it was Wakeful, or maybe it was Makybe Diva.
The greatest mare to win the Cup? Well, history says that it’s Makybe Diva . . . and maybe it always will be.
AN ANTICIPATORY PICTURE
C.J. DENNIS
This poem, written in Cup Week 1931, gives us all the excitement of the race and concludes with a blank space in which we can live out our own Cup dream.
***
The scene upon the frock-flecked lawn
Is, as you please, a picture fair,
Or just a hunk of human brawn,
With blobs of faces here and there.
Stilled are the clamours of the Ring;
The famous race is on at last;
All eyes are on the lengthening string
Of brilliant jackets moving fast.
Torn, trampled tickets mark the birth
Of broken hopes all now would mend,
As quickening hoof-beats spurn the earth,
And the field thunders to the bend.
All men are equal for the nonce,
Bound by an urgency intense,
And eager questionings win response
From strangers tiptoe with suspense.
‘What’s that in front?’ All faces yearn
Toward the track in serried rows.
The field comes round the homeward turn,
As, wave on wave, the murmuring grows,
Waxes and swells from out that host
Till pandemonium begins,
And flecks of colour pass the post
To mighty cries of ‘(________*) wins’.
[* N.B.—Write your own ticket.]
INTRODUCTION—THE FORGOTTEN RACING GAME
Pony racing is a forgotten part of our racing history. Many people today assume that thoroughbred racing is the only form of horseracing we’ve ever had, but ‘unregistered’ or ‘pony racing’ was huge in Sydney and Melbourne, and other cities and towns, from the 1890s to the 1930s, and many horses were trained in suburban backyards for these races, although many ‘pony trainers’ had huge stables.
Prior to World War II there were six racetracks between the CBD and Botany Bay in Sydney. Apart from Randwick there was Kensington, where the University of New South Wales is now; Rosebery, which became a housing estate in the 1960s; Ascot, which made way for the airport, Victoria Park, which is now another housing estate near Moore Park; and Moorfields out towards Kogarah. These were exclusively designed as ‘non-thoroughbred’ or ‘pony’ tracks.
Other racetracks, which provided events for unregistered horses, were to be found at Glebe, Menangle, Parramatta, Hornsby and other suburbs. These tracks operated from the late nineteenth century as pony tracks.
I am deeply indebted to Wayne Peake for the inclusion here of ‘A Brief History of Pony Racing’. Wayne’s comprehensive history of this almost forgotten form of racing, Sydney’s Pony Racecourses—An Alternative Racing History, is the definitive work on the subject and we owe a debt of gratitude to Wayne for preserving the social history of this other, hugely popular, form of racing.
Men such as Sydney Lord Mayor Joynton Smith, owner of Victoria Park racecourse, and John Wren, Melbourne’s political powerbroker and pony track owner, were larger than life characters who shaped our social history in the early twentieth century.
Pony racing was deeply embedded as part of the fabric of life in our cities for 75 years, in an era when the only access to legal betting was at the racetrack.
While the gentry at Randwick watched five races, contested by small fields of ‘blue-bloods’, and enjoyed long lunches (the luncheon break at AJC meetings was often more than an hour and there was an hour between races), the hoi polloi packed Ascot, Kensington, Rosebery and other pony tracks to watch fifteen races with large fields, and bet and booze to their heart’s content. Pony racing, although perhaps loosely governed and slightly shady, was dangerous, exciting, accessible, affordable and fun!
Characters such as ‘Baron’ Bob Skelton are the stuff of legend. The Baron, and others such as bookmakers Andy Kerr the ‘Coogee Bunyip’, ‘Lordy’ Angles and Rufe Naylor, as well as jockeys Andy Knox and Alf Stanton, are now almost forgotten as the phenomenon of pony racing fades into the mists of time, unheralded except by historians like Wayne Peake.
The legendary T.J. Smith, a bush kid from Wagga Wagga, began his career as a trainer in Sydney living in a stable on the Kensington pony track. His one horse, Bragger, occupied the stable next door! Legendary jockey Billy Cook was one of many famous thoroughbred riders who rode countless winners ‘at the ponies’.
Jim Bendrodt was another great character in the heyday of both pony racing and, later, thoroughbred racing. He was a flamboyant entrepreneur in the 1920s and 1930s, an owner of dance halls and racehorses who later trained thoroughbreds himself with great success. Bendrodt was also a great writer of true adventure stories, and was my favourite author when I was a boy.
Several of his stories appear in other sections of this collection, along with David Hickie’s biography of the man himself. In this section, you will find Bendrodt’s story, ‘Passella’, which describes the events which first introduced him to the world of racing, via the pony track at Kensington.
This section also contains Banjo Paterson’s hilarious send-up of the greatest turf writer of all time, Nat Gould.
Gould more or less invented the ‘racing novel’; later to become a specific genre of fiction of which Dick Francis was the king. Born in Manchester in 1857, Gould came to Australia in 1884 and worked as a reporter in Brisbane and Sydney before spending eighteen months at Bathurst as editor of The Bathurst Times. While there he wrote his first novel, With the Tide, which was published in England under the title of The Double Event and was an immediate success. It was dramatised in Australia and had a long run as a play in 1893.
In 1895, after eleven years in Australia, Gould returned to England and began steadily writing an average of more than four books a year. All up, he wrote more than 130 novels and his sales ran into many millions of copies.
Gould was a great raconteur who didn’t take himself or his work too seriously. His modesty and sense of humour shine through in the accounts of his visits to Melbourne for the Spring Carnival, such as ‘Cup Memories’, featured in another section of this collection.
While his novels had no great originality of plot and tended to be melodramatic in the extreme, they were rattling good yarns and stand as proof that racing is a wonderful subject for authors.
Under the pen name ‘Knott Gold’ Banj
o Paterson, who was a friend of Gould’s, wrote a very funny piece parodying the Nat Gould style. Set in the pony racing world of inner Sydney, it is titled ‘Done for the Double’, a humorous reference to the title of Gould’s most famous novel, The Double Event, and it still makes me laugh out loud to read it today.
The pony tracks were closed, to be used by the military in World War II, and simply never re-opened for unregistered racing. The McKell state government took the opportunity to legislate for their permanent demise and then created the Sydney Turf Club.
A PUNT UPON THE PONIES
JIM HAYNES
There’s no movement in the suburbs, the silence is profound,
For the kids are at the Sat’day arvo flicks.
The missus has her mother and her sisters coming round,
So you won’t get tea till after half past six.
So with suit and tie and hat on you hurry from the door
To the tram stop, where you meet up with your cronies,
And you feel alive and happy, like a single man once more,
’Cos you’re off to have a punt upon the ponies.
For they’re racing down at Moorefields, Kensington, Ascot,
Or at Rosebery, or at Victoria Park.
So you take a hard-earned quid or two and maybe lose the lot
And face the music when you get home after dark.
But, then again, you might get lucky, get the good oil from a mate,
Make a pile and shout and boast and win some more,
And arrive back home in what’s called ‘an inebriated state’,
With some chocolates for the ‘minister for war’.
Yes, a punt upon the ponies is a working man’s reward,
Helps you tolerate your work . . . your kids and wife.
It’s the thing that keeps you going, keeps you looking forward.
Through the six-and-a-half-day misery of life.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF PONY RACING
WAYNE PEAKE
Pony racing was a form of horseracing conducted at regular meetings in Australia from the 1880s to the 1940s. This article concentrates on Sydney pony racing, which was undoubtedly its bastion in the twentieth century, but it was also significant in Melbourne (in particular), Brisbane, Perth and rural New South Wales.
I use this term ‘pony racing’ with some reluctance, as it seems to give people the wrong idea of what it was. They get visions of little kids riding Shetland ponies in hay bale hurdle races at agricultural shows or pony clubs. In fact in its most popular years around the First World War and the 1920s, at a pony race meeting conducted by the Associated Race Clubs (ARC) in Sydney, on a card of seventeen races as many as twelve would have been open to Thoroughbred horses of any height. But the alternative term for pony racing, ‘unregistered proprietary horse racing’, is too much of a mouthful. So pony racing it must be.
What was, for racing purposes, a pony? The usual definition was a beast that measured less than 14.2 hands (a hand is about 10 centimetres) at the wither. Those between 14.3 and 15 hands were called galloways—a usage that gradually disappeared in the 1920s. Anything over 15 hands was an ‘all heights’. In the early years the racing press often referred to restricted heights competitors as ‘littl’uns’. By the 1920s the colloquial name was a ‘macker’, a term derived from the rhyming slang ‘macaroni’.
‘Littl’uns’ was a fair enough description of the participants in pony races when a regular circuit became fully established in the 1890s. There was a myriad of classes based on height, and races for midgets of 12 hands or less were not unusual. Such events were often given twee names like the ‘Tom Thumb’ or ‘Lilliputian’ handicap. The competitors were a fairly motley lot, with the influence of pony breeds such as the Timor and the Welsh evident, but already Thoroughbred blood was becoming preponderant. As pony racing evolved, Thoroughbred dominance increased to the point that a modern racegoer would be hard-pressed to pick the difference between a meeting at Randwick in the 1920s and one say at the Victoria Park racecourse. All of the major blood horse sires were well represented at the ponies.
How did this phenomenon of pony racing come about? It is ironic that it was an indirect result of the rise of the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) to the role of principal club and regulatory body of racing in New South Wales. The irony lies in the fact that the AJC came to loathe pony racing like the squatter members of its Committee detested the rabbit plague.
Pony racing was a form of private ‘for profit’ racing—racing’s equivalent of the 1908 Rugby League breakaway. In the early 1880s the only race meetings in Sydney were non-proprietary and all took place at Randwick. On most Saturdays there was no racing and there was an obvious opportunity for someone to supply the undoubted demand for more.
In 1884, the Canterbury Race Club, adopting the model established some years earlier by the Cox family in Melbourne, gained registration to race on vacant Saturdays under AJC rules. Meanwhile the Agricultural Society had built a small racecourse at Moore Park on which trotting meetings took place. A few years later these were supplemented and ultimately replaced by races for gallopers that were graded on the basis of height. These first pony meetings at Moore Park were not registered with the AJC.
Canterbury began racing one Saturday a month and its success soon encouraged imitators at the new Rosehill (1885), Warwick Farm (1888) and Moorefield (1888) racecourses in suburban Sydney. Each ran meetings under AJC rules, which demanded certain standards for racecourse size, prizemoney, etc. Restricted heights races were not allowed.
At that time there was no government licensing of racecourses so there was nothing to stop sports entrepreneurs from building racecourses when and where they pleased. So long as they did not seek AJC registration they could set their own standards. These more transient promoters tended to gravitate towards the cheaper pony racing, establishing what the AJC regarded as ‘black market’ racing.
New racecourses for pony racing sprung up at Woodlands near Liverpool (1889), Lillie Bridge (1890), Botany (1891), the first Rosebery Park (1895), Brighton (1895), and Belmore (1900). The Kensington racecourse also opened for pony racing in 1893, across the road from Randwick. It was a much more ambitious venture than the others and boasted a first-class racecourse and grounds.
Surprisingly, in the 1880s and 1890s the AJC allowed its registered clubs to also conduct pony meetings, mostly on Wednesdays. It is a little known fact that pony racing once took place regularly on the Rosehill, Canterbury, Warwick Farm and Moorefield racecourses. Remarkably, the pony meetings at these tracks often drew larger crowds than those held there under AJC rules, probably because there were usually more races and larger fields, and thus provided better value for money. The AJC closed this loophole in 1898.
In the unregulated racing environment of early twentieth-century Sydney, racing was conducted on 235 days a year at up to a dozen racecourses. Wowser elements of society were appalled by this explosion and gradually gained the state government’s ear. At the end of 1906, a year in which the splendid new Ascot pony racecourse opened, the government passed new gaming and betting legislation which restricted metropolitan racing dates, outlawed racecourses under 6 furlongs and prohibited the construction of new racecourses within 40 miles of the Sydney GPO.
This meant the end of gallops meetings at the Epping and old Rosebery racecourses, although their owners were allowed to transfer their licences to the new Victoria Park (1908) and second Rosebery (1907) racecourses respectively. All the other pony racecourses except Kensington had already closed. Victoria Park was rated the second best course in Sydney behind Randwick.
There were three eras of pony racing in Sydney. The first, from 1888 to 1906, was the unlicensed and unregistered period. It took place at either the small, relatively primitive tracks like Liverpool and old Rosebery, at the suburban AJC racecourses, or at the independent Kensington course, which imagined itself pony racing’s equivalent of the AJC. The second era began with the introduction of government li
censing and regulation of pony racing in 1906. The four surviving clubs formed the ARC to rationalise its administration.
In addition to the meetings at Ascot, Rosebery, Victoria Park and Kensington on Wednesdays and 28 Saturdays a year, pony racing took place at provincial racecourses registered with the ARC such as Menangle, Richmond and Tuggerah. These meetings were on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was the ‘golden age’ of pony racing. The third era began in 1933, when the ARC clubs, seeking protection from the damaging effects of the Great Depression, obtained AJC registration. The AJC amended its by-laws to again allow restricted heights races on registered racecourses.
Pony racing was by then in decline and its courses, denied maintenance, began to deteriorate. The dangerous course of the war in early 1942 caused restrictions on racing. Pony racing bore the brunt of these. And each of its racecourses was occupied by the military. In 1943 Premier McKell created the Sydney Turf Club and invited it to take its pick of the proprietary racecourses. The pony companies were allowed a few years to wind up.
The last race meeting at Rosebery took place on 10 July 1940, at Kensington on Christmas Eve 1941, at Victoria Park on 14 February 1942 and at Ascot on 22 August 1942. Ascot was retained for training until 1948, and then resumed for the east–west runway of Sydney Airport. Construction of the University of New South Wales began on Kensington in the late 1940s. Victoria Park remained open for training until 31 August 1952, and then was redeveloped to become the Leyland Automotive plant that opened in 1960. Barrier trials and training continued at Rosebery until mid-1962. It became a housing development that included the new Eastlakes shopping centre.