The Big Book of Australian Racing Stories

by Jim Haynes

  I lit another cigarette and turned away. A deep voice said, ‘So it’s selling sly grog now, Jim, is it. Well, you can come along with me.’

  Then another voice bit into the silence like a file, ‘Forget it, copper. It wasn’t ’im that sold it. It was me.’

  Well, there it was. Liquor is worse than dynamite in public dance halls. You had to have it at a function such as this one was, but you didn’t sell it. You had good sense enough for that. You let your patrons bring it in, and then you watched them. You limited the quantity they could take.

  You didn’t have the profit motive, so you didn’t care. But someone had sold liquor here tonight for profit, that was certain. Someone who couldn’t smell ‘Police’ beneath a tailed coat and white bow tie. And here at my side was a tiny chap with high-bridged nose and myopic eyes who said in his acrid voice, ‘’E didn’t sell it, copper, I did.’

  I hadn’t spoken. This was a situation when I thought a still tongue might pay dividends. The big inspector didn’t know that he was wrong. It wouldn’t have been the slightest use my telling him that I hated grog in a place like this just as much as he did.

  He looked at me for a long time. He knew the tricks of evidence, the difficulties in a court of law. I knew he had to take the little man in all the circumstances. There wasn’t any other thing for him to do.

  I smiled and said gently, ‘Well, Inspector, I couldn’t tell the answer. It’s up to you.’

  He glared at me, then beckoned with a finger, and two large, good-humoured fellows ranged up on either side of the little man, and he walked away between them with his head at about the level of their knees. I noticed that his legs were bowed, and that he had little narrow feet.

  In the morning an unsympathetic magistrate told him, ‘Ninety pounds or thirty days,’ but in the meantime my big boys had found the real culprit, so my cashier peeled the notes off, and brought the little fellow back to me.

  I told him to sit down, and smiled at him while he picked with stubby fingers at a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘What’s the name, lad?’ I inquired.

  ‘Tom,’ he said. He didn’t say Tom White or Tom Some-other-thing, he just said, ‘Tom.’

  ‘Well, Tom,’ I went on, ‘what did you do it for? You didn’t sell the wine, and you don’t know me. But you thought I had sold it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’ He grinned. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Well, Tom,’ I said, ‘the answer to that one would probably be very involved from your point of view. We’ll skip it. Now tell me, why did you say you sold it?’

  He looked at me with his hard little face set stubbornly, and then he grinned. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, boss. Your caterer put me on the casual waiter staff last night. I knew the set-up when the cops came in, and I figured you’d be generous if I took the rap for you.’

  I nodded. ‘An opportunist, eh, Tom? And apparently an honest one. That’s very interesting.’

  So that was it. He had come from a hard school, this one. You only had to look at him to know that. ‘But, Tom,’ I continued, ‘you’re no waiter. Now tell me just what are you?’

  ‘Waiter be damned!’ he said indignantly. ‘I was broke, so I took the job to get a feed. I’m a jockey.’

  ‘Jockey? But, Tom, if you’re a jockey, why don’t you work at it?’

  He shuffled his feet uneasily, and peered at me with his round myopic eyes, and then he grinned.

  ‘The stewards ’ad me in,’ he said, ‘and afterwards I figured I might as well buy a one-way ticket out of town.’

  He grinned again, but looked at me in astonishment when I asked, ‘But why one way only, Tom?’

  He studied me suspiciously, and then he asked, ‘Say, boss, do you know anything about horses or jockeys?’

  ‘Nothing, Tom. I’ve never seen a racecourse.’ His face cleared as if a great light had burst upon him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve ’eard of folks like you, but you’re the first I’ve ever met. Whadda you do on Saturdays? Perhaps you’ll understand when I tell you I rode forty-two favourites in succession and got beat on every one. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not a thing, Tom.’

  He peered at me again. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it does, boss,’ and he shook his head in a puzzled way.

  ‘Well, Tom,’ I said, ‘let’s forget it. For reasons best known to yourself, you have become a waiter and you don’t like it. Now what would you like to do if you had a choice?’

  He answered instantly, ‘Train a ’orse.’

  I looked at him. His object had been purely mercenary, but the fact remained that but for him my name would have figured prominently in the morning papers in connection with sly grog.

  ‘How would you go about that, Tom?’

  He looked at me disgustedly for a time before he answered. ‘Buy a ’orse I know of,’ he said at last. ‘A pony mare by Passing By out of Sweet Ella. ’Er name’s Passella. A ’undred quid will buy ’er. Then I’d rent a stable and . . .’ He paused. ‘Aw, hell,’ he finished indignantly, ‘anyone but you would know the rest of it! It don’t seem possible that you don’t.’

  I laughed. Then I said, ‘OK, Tom. Perhaps I should know. There’s a stable behind this building. Take it. Here is a hundred pounds. Go and buy your mare. By Passing By out of Sweet Ella, I think you said. If there’s anything else you want to train her, just let me know.’

  Well, that was the start of it. A queer entrance to the Sport of Kings.

  It wasn’t long before Tom had her ready. She was a pretty mare with a sweet true head, just 14.1 hands.

  ‘Now, boss,’ Tom said in the inevitable highly confidential manner of all trainers of a horse, ‘this mare’s in at Kensington tomorrow with 8 stone 1, and she’s a moral. What I want you to do is just go out quiet like and put about four ’undred on ’er, and she’ll come ’ome smoking her pipe.’

  The old, old story in the same time-honoured vernacular. How many men have fallen for a yarn like that! The confidence, the bland assurance, the fantastic triumph of hope over experience these little fellows always have.

  ‘But, Tom,’ I said, ‘four hundred is a lot of money. What makes you so sure she’ll win?’

  ‘Sure?’ Tom exclaimed with considerable asperity. ‘Sure? Of course I’m sure.’ Then with the crackpot logic of his kind, ‘’Aven’t I told you she’s a moral? Run three in thirty-seven she did this morning, touching the outside fence, with ’er ’eavy irons on. There’s a thing called Pretty Sweet in it, which of course Passella will leave for dead, but they’ll make a price for us. Well, ’ow about it, boss? ’Aven’t lost your nerve, I ’ope?’

  I remember that I felt a little bit ashamed. After all, this lad should know. Hadn’t he been beaten on forty-two favourites in a row? Wasn’t he steeped to his very ears in the chances of the racecourse? He had gone to what seemed to me a prodigious amount of trouble to get this mare ready.

  He was so confident. He spoke with such finality about so many intriguing aspects of the art of training horses. It appeared almost ludicrous to imagine this horseman wouldn’t know. Moreover, he was an amateur psychologist. He’d said, ‘’Aven’t lost your nerve, boss, I ’ope?’ A remark like that to a man like me! Just dynamite!

  Well, I went to Kensington, and Tom hovered at my elbow.

  ‘Now what do I do?’ I asked.

  Tom said, ‘There’s Jack Shaw, he’ll bet you. ’E’s a ’eavy better, ’e’ll take the lot.’

  ‘The lot, Tom?’

  ‘Yes, ask ’im for the odds to four ’undred quid.’

  So I did as I was told, and Mr Shaw bet me eight hundred pounds to four hundred, and I put the indecipherable ticket in my pocket.

  ‘Now what, Tom?’

  He looked at me, as a mother will a backward child.

  ‘Get into the stand,’ he answered, ‘and watch ’er win it.’ And he trotted off.

  So I sat down in the stand and they brought the ponies out, a
nd the jockeys mounted in their flaunting colours. And there was a chap called Bill Cook in my colours, which I’d never seen before.

  I didn’t know it then because I didn’t know horses, but she was a bonny little mare, this Passella. I could see the way she fought to reach the bay mare, Pretty Sweet, all the long way up that straight. I didn’t know a horse, but I knew a fighter when I saw one. I heard the crowd roar, and I saw the sign hoisted on the signal box. It read, ‘Dead Heat’.

  I went to look for Tom, and when I found him I asked in some puzzlement, ‘What now, Tom?’

  ‘We’ll run it off,’ he said.

  ‘Run what off, Tom?’

  He glared at me. ‘Yeah, run it off in an hour’s time. ’Ere, you go and ’ave a drink.’

  He muttered something under his breath I couldn’t catch, and hurried off as if he wanted to get away from me, which was unusual.

  Well, they came up that straight a second time, locked together, in a bitter struggle, those two game midget horses with their nostrils flaring, and their ears resting in their straining necks, with the jockeys flailing at them with their whips and the people shouting.

  They were very close together, so very close that in the last few desperate yards they seemed to lean over at an angle as if sheer weariness forced them to seek support. But Pretty Sweet won. No doubt of that. By the bare three inches. Her number showed in the signal box, and Tom came running and whispered urgently, ‘Protest.’

  ‘Protest, Tom?’ I echoed. ‘About what? To whom?’

  ‘Aw, hell!’ he snarled, and scuttled off, and as the ponies came trotting in I heard the crowd roar, ‘Protest!’ I looked at the signal tower where a green flag fluttered, and under it the word ‘Protest’ showed in black and white.

  I waited, and in a little time I saw another flag go up, and another legend underneath, ‘Protest upheld’.

  I saw Tom coming at a run, with a grin upon his face, and when he reached me I asked him, ‘What now, Tom?’

  His excited chatter stopped as if I’d hit him with a board.

  He took his hat off, and ran his stubby fingers through the remnants of his hair, and then in a voice devoid of hope, he said disgustedly, ‘Aw, hell! You run and collect your eight ’undred quid and then go ’ome.’

  The story’s true. You can read the records if you want to.

  BOTTLE QUEEN

  TRADITIONAL/JIM HAYNES

  Here is a yarn that I heard often as a kid. It concerns pony racing. The classic tale is about a pony which was trained by a couple of ‘bottle-oh’s’ and used on the bottle cart when not racing, and I’ve put it into verse. My version is based in Botany or Mascot, Sydney, but I have seen versions of this yarn from as far afield as New Zealand. Obviously the joke is that the horse was also trained to stop to collect bottles!

  ***

  We bred her in the suburbs and we trained her after dark,

  Sometimes down the Botany Road and sometimes in the park,

  And the way we used to feed her, it often led to rows,

  We pinched the chaff from stables and the green stuff from the Chows.

  Now her sire was imported but we never knew from where

  And her mother Black Moria, was a bottle dealer’s mare.

  We bought a set of colours; they were second hand and green,

  And we had to call her something, so we called her Bottle Queen.

  In the evenings when we galloped her I usually took the mount,

  We didn’t have a stopwatch, so me mate he used to count.

  She showed us four in forty-nine, one-forty for the mile,

  But she coulda done much better, she was pulling all the while.

  Now that’s something like a gallop, on the sand with ten stone up,

  It’d win the English Derby! Or the Wagga Wagga Cup!

  And when we thought we had her just as fit as she could be,

  Me mate, he bit his sheila for the nomination fee.

  We bunged her in a maiden and they dobbed her seven stone,

  Talk about a ‘jacky’, she was in it on her own!

  So we worked her on the bottles when the cart was good and light,

  It was bottles every morning and training every night.

  We walked her down to Kenso on the morning of the race,

  The books had never heard of her, we backed her win and place,

  Then we rubbed her down and saddled her and led her to the track,

  And told that hoop his fee was good . . . if he brought a winner back!

  Well, they jumped away together but The Queen was soon in front,

  As for all the others, they were never in the hunt!

  She was romping past the leger; she was fighting for her head,

  When some bastard waved a bottle . . . and our certainty stopped dead!

  Now when folks who know hear, ‘Bottle-Oh’, they say, ‘There’s poor old Jim,

  He mighta made a fortune, but the bottle did him in.’

  Yes we shoulda made a motza, my bloody oath we should,

  Except I guess you might say that The Queen was trained too good!

  So, don’t talk to me of racing, you can see I’ve had enough.

  It’s a game for men with money and for blokes who know their stuff.

  And if someone tries to tell you that the racing game is clean . . .

  Just remember what I told you, my tale of Bottle Queen.

  ‘BARON’ BOB SKELTON

  WAYNE PEAKE

  Robert Skelton was larger than life. He so dominated pony racing in Sydney in the 1920s that he is perhaps best described as unregistered racing’s equivalent of T.J. Smith, the famous postwar Randwick trainer whose career began two decades later, at Kensington, in 1942.

  Known as ‘the Baron’ or ‘Baron Bob’, Skelton was the embodiment of the phrase ‘colourful racing identity’ before it became merely a euphemism used by the press to identify a mobster, although for decades Skelton was indeed a plentiful source of copy for racing journalists.

  He was a participant in at least three racecourse brawls and a minor riot at the Richmond races, and was a weekly visitor to the stewards’ room, from whence, like a Saturday cinema-matinee hero, he routinely escaped seemingly hopeless entrapments.

  His two-storey home and stable, known as ‘the Castle’, which dominated the skyline on Barker Street, overlooking the back straight of Kensington racecourse, was, like Smith’s ‘Tulloch Lodge’ in later year, as much campaign headquarters as training establishment.

  Skelton was so dominant in the years between 1918 and 1925 that his career needs to be seen, again like Smith’s, as atypical. It is important this is appreciated, for he is the source of much of what is known or supposed about pony trainers.

  There are many possibly apocryphal stories about the exploits of Skelton. One suggests he once misled the ring by having a leading jockey change his name by deed poll; another relates how he sold a block of ice to finance a day at the course, and won an enormous amount. Although some of these stories have probably grown in the telling, there is no doubt Skelton enjoyed devising gothic schemes aimed at obtaining a better price for a horse that had been prepared to win.

  His brinkmanship tested the ARC’s rules of racing and he constantly flirted with suspension. Among his more straightforward devices was the bogus sale of horses that had been racing in poor form to a close associate, such as Barney Goldstein. The horses often won at their next starts in new colours after being heavily commissioned. Later the horse would return to Skelton’s ownership.

  Another often-told parable is said to illustrate how he escaped censure over a first-to-last performance by his horse by pointing out that test cricketer Herbert Collins, at that time an ARC steward, had recently scored a duck directly after a century—which he said amounted to the same thing as his horse’s inconsistent form.

  Skelton was twice suspended for twelve months in 1919, but on both occasions appealed successfully to the usually unresponsive ARC appeals board. He
was always on a war footing to engage with bookmakers and sometimes their skirmishes became more than intellectual. In 1933 he was escorted from the course after assaulting a bookmaker who had chaffed him over an unsettled debt.

  In the 1920s Skelton’s ascendancy among pony trainers was even more pronounced than premiership statistics suggest, as many immediately below him were in fact AJC trainers who, by the anomalous rules of the time, were allowed to race their smaller thoroughbreds in restricted heights races on ARC racecourses.

  Unfortunately for ARC trainers this border hopping did not apply bilaterally. AJC trainers who profited from the opportunity included Joe Burton, Joe Cook and Chris O’Rourke, a steel-grey headed veteran Randwick trainer who made numerous successful raids on the ARC racecourses with horses like Little Lady, the champion 14.1 hand pony of the mid-1920s, while continuing to prepare feature-race winners on AJC tracks. John Donohoe, an AJC trainer and member of the family associated with Victoria Park, had the 14.0 hand flyer Valora. Donohoe was also the master of the champion rider Billy Cook who was, coincidentally, the first AJC apprentice to gain a permit to ride in ARC restricted heights races.

  Skelton was a plumber before he became first a pony punter, then an owner and finally, a trainer, by at least 1916. He even dabbled in bookmaking for a short time. Initially he trained only a small number of his horses, preferring to send most to outside trainers such as Charlie Rudd. To a degree he owed his success to a deal he made with Les Bower, the racing manager of the leading registered owner John Brown (who raced under the name ‘J. Baron’), for Skelton to lease the undersized produce of Brown’s studs, particularly the progeny of champion sire Wallace, to race on the pony tracks. For this association Skelton was originally nicknamed ‘Baron Junior’.

  Skelton owned and trained in order to gamble. One of the earliest of the assaults on the betting ring for which he became noted occurred on 28 July 1920 at Kensington, when he prepared four winners, The Student (12 to 1), Smart Scribe (7 to 1), Precious Dust (10 to 1) and Prince Elect (4 to 5).