The Big Book of Australian Racing Stories

by Jim Haynes

  Well, the day arrived in glory; ’twas a day of jubilation

  With careless-hearted bushmen for a hundred miles around,

  An’ the rum ’n’ beer ’n’ whisky came in wagons from the station,

  An’ the Holy Terror talent were the first upon the ground.

  Judge McArd, with whose opinion it was scarcely safe to wrestle,

  Took his dangerous position on the bark-and-sapling stand:

  He was what the local Stiggins used to speak of as a ‘vessel

  Of wrath,’ and he’d a bludgeon that he carried in his hand.

  ‘Off ye go!’ the starter shouted, as down fell a stupid jockey—

  Off they started in disorder—left the jockey where he lay—

  And they fell and rolled and galloped down the crooked course and rocky,

  Till the pumping of the Screamer could be heard a mile away.

  But he kept his legs and galloped; he was used to rugged courses,

  And he lumbered down the gully till the ridge began to quake:

  And he ploughed along the siding, raising earth till other horses

  An’ their riders, too, were blinded by the dust-cloud in his wake.

  From the ruck he’d struggled slowly, they were much surprised to find him

  Close abeam the Holy Terror as along the flat they tore.

  Even higher still and denser rose the cloud of dust behind him,

  While in more divided splinters flew the shattered rails before.

  ‘Terror!’ ‘Dead heat!’ they were shouting, ‘Terror!’ but the Screamer hung out

  Nose-to-nose with Holy Terror as across the creek they swung,

  An’ McDurmer shouted loudly, ‘Put yer tongue out! Put yer tongue out!’

  An’ the Screamer put his tongue out . . . and he won by half a tongue.

  WEIGHT WAS RIGHT

  A.B. ‘BANJO’ PATERSON

  Banjo Paterson was well placed to gather great yarns. Well known and well connected in both Sydney and the bush, he was often told yarns by friends and acquaintances. He used the anecdotes on his regular radio broadcasts and in his newspaper articles. Here’s an example.

  ***

  Once, years ago, a son of the then Governor of NSW secured a ride in a picnic race. Intensely enthusiastic and a very lightweight, this young gentleman turned up, full of hope, to ride his first race.

  He got on the scales with his saddle, and it turned out that he was two stone short of making the weight!

  Not one of the amateurs had a lead bag to lend him, but no one would dream of leaving the Governor’s son out. He was the main attraction of the meeting.

  The officials had never been confronted with anything like this, but the caretaker was a man of resource. He shovelled a lot of sand into a sack and strapped it firmly on the pommel of a big saddle; weight was right, and away the field went.

  It was an amateur hurdle race and, every time that the horse jumped, a puff of sand flew up, like the miniature spouts blown into the air by killer whales.

  Simultaneously jumping and spouting, the vice-regal contender saw the race out, unsuccessfully, it is true; but he got more applause than the winner.

  THE AMATEUR RIDER

  A.B. ‘BANJO’ PATERSON

  Him going to ride for us! Him—with the pants and the eyeglass and all.

  Amateur! Don’t he just look it—it’s twenty to one on a fall.

  Boss must be gone off his head to be sending our steeplechase crack

  Out over fences like these with an object like that on his back.

  Ride! Don’t tell me he can ride. With his pants just as loose as balloons,

  How can he sit on his horse? And his spurs like a pair of harpoons;

  Ought to be under the Dog Act, he ought, and be kept off the course.

  Fall! Why, he’d fall off a cart, let alone off a steeplechase horse.

  ***

  Yessir! the ’orse is all ready—I wish you’d have rode him before;

  Nothing like knowing your ’orse, sir, and this chap’s a terror to bore;

  Battleaxe always could pull, and he rushes his fences like fun—

  Stands off his jump twenty feet, and then springs like a shot from a gun.

  Oh, he can jump ’em all right, sir, you make no mistake, ’e’s a toff;

  Clouts ’em in earnest, too, sometimes, you mind that he don’t clout you off—

  Don’t seem to mind how he hits ’em, his shins is as hard as a nail,

  Sometimes you’ll see the fence shake and the splinters fly up from the rail.

  All you can do is to hold him and just let him jump as he likes,

  Give him his head at the fences, and hang on like death if he strikes;

  Don’t let him run himself out—you can lie third or fourth in the race—

  Until you clear the stone wall, and from that you can put on the pace.

  Fell at that wall once, he did, and it gave him a regular spread,

  Ever since that time he flies it—he’ll stop if you pull at his head,

  Just let him race—you can trust him—he’ll take first-class care he don’t fall,

  And I think that’s the lot—but remember, he must have his head at the wall.

  ***

  Well, he’s down safe as far as the start, and he seems to sit on pretty neat,

  Only his baggified breeches would ruinate anyone’s seat—

  They’re away—here they come—the first fence, and he’s head over heels for a crown!

  Good for the new chum, he’s over, and two of the others are down!

  Now for the treble, my hearty—by Jove, he can ride, after all;

  Whoop, that’s your sort—let him fly them! He hasn’t much fear of a fall.

  Who in the world would have thought it? And aren’t they just going a pace?

  Little Recruit in the lead there will make it a stoutly run race.

  Lord! But they’re racing in earnest—and down goes Recruit on his head,

  Rolling clean over his boy—it’s a miracle if he ain’t dead.

  Battleaxe, Battleaxe, yet! By the Lord, he’s got most of ’em beat—

  Ho! did you see how he struck, and the swell never moved in his seat?

  Second time round, and, by Jingo! He’s holding his lead of ’em well;

  Hark to him clouting the timber! It don’t seem to trouble the swell.

  Now for the wall—let him rush it. A thirty-foot leap, I declare—

  Never a shift in his seat, and he’s racing for home like a hare.

  What’s that that’s chasing him—Rataplan—regular demon to stay!

  Sit down and ride for your life now! Oh, good, that’s the style—come away!

  Rataplan’s certain to beat you, unless you can give him the slip;

  Sit down and rub in the whalebone now—give him the spurs and the whip!

  Battleaxe, Battleaxe, yet—and it’s Battleaxe wins for a crown;

  Look at him rushing the fences, he wants to bring t’other chap down.

  Rataplan never will catch him if only he keeps on his pins;

  Now! The last fence! And he’s over it! Battleaxe, Battleaxe wins!

  ***

  Well, sir, you rode him just perfect—I knew from the first you could ride.

  Some of the chaps said you couldn’t, an’ I says just like this a’ one side:

  Mark me, I says, that’s a tradesman—the saddle is where he was bred.

  Weight! You’re all right, sir, and thank you; and them was the words that I said.

  MOSSTROOPER—THE BRADMAN OF THE TURF

  PETER HARRIS

  In 1929 and 1930 Mosstrooper burst on the scene very much like the young Don Bradman did in cricket. By the end of the 1929–30 cricket season in Australia, the 21-year-old Bradman had played 66 Test or first-class matches and had a batting average of 79.47 runs per innings. Soon after, in the first three tests against England from 13 June to 15 July 1930, Bradman scored 131, 254 and 334. In, before an
d just after this period, Mosstrooper reeled off wins like Bradman amassed runs, causing a newspaper cartoonist to dub the all-conquering jumper Bradman of the Turf.

  When Mosstrooper returned to scale after winning the Australian Hurdle Race at Caulfield in 1930, his trainer and owner, Gus Powell, took off his hat and nodded in the horse’s direction. ‘Well, you’re a battler all right,’ he said, ‘and you did just what I expected you to do to them’. That was all. Powell did not fall about in a paroxysm of celebration. He did not punch the air or fall to the ground, and he certainly did not hug anyone. Maybe he drew a bit more heavily on his pipe. But all around him some 40,000 racegoers were cheering themselves hoarse. They knew what Mosstrooper had achieved on that Saturday in August. Ploughing through the mud and jumping fifteen hurdles over 3¼ miles, Mosstrooper added yet another victory to an unrivalled sequence of performances.

  It had begun almost thirteen months before, on 13 July 1929. As a novice jumper, Mosstrooper had finished a close and unlucky second in the Victoria Racing Club (VRC) Grand National Steeplechase at Flemington. Then, in the following month, he ran away with the Victoria Amateur Turf Club (VATC) Australian Hurdle and Steeplechase double. Come July 1930, he won with ease both the VRC Grand National Hurdle and Steeplechase in heavy going at Flemington. That was already more than any previous jumper had managed to achieve in so brief a period. When Mosstrooper romped home on a bog track for his second Australian Hurdle three weeks later, he was dubbed the ‘Bradman of the Turf ’.

  In just over a year, by winning the four major jumping events in Australia, one of them twice, Mosstrooper raced himself into turf fame and the hearts of the racing public. ‘All the superlatives have been used up in referring to Mosstrooper and his performances’, declared a prominent racing journalist in The Age, writing under the pen name of ‘Tasman’. For him, Mosstrooper was simply ‘one of the greatest jumpers ever seen on Australian courses, probably the greatest.’ The chestnut gelding’s record could stand forever, Tasman speculated, because no other jumper would prove so superior to his opponents. Eighty-five years on, ‘Tasman’ has been proven a prophet: no jumper has come within cooee of emulating Mosstrooper’s achievement in the jumping seasons of 1929 and 1930.

  The 1930 Australian Hurdle was to be Mosstrooper’s finest hour, the height of his fame. And so too for jockey Bob Harris. When Harris returned to the birdcage at Caulfield on Mosstrooper, Powell at once congratulated him. ‘It was a great piece of riding’, Powell told reporters. ‘We have never seen better.’ It was terse, but from one of Australia’s greatest-ever horsemen it was eloquent praise—praise that continued back at the horse’s race-day stall, as Powell told visitors just how well Harris had ridden.

  Mosstrooper gave Harris the chance to show a wider public how skilful he was as a jockey. Harris had been riding in races, with moderate success, for 20 years when he teamed up with Mosstrooper. Over the years he had become a heavyweight jockey, and his engagements were few and far between. In fact, it was chiefly because Mosstrooper was being handicapped with high weights by 1930 that Powell turned to Harris. He wanted to minimise the dead weight that Mosstrooper would have to carry. What had been a drawback for Harris now gave him his greatest opportunity, and the jockey seized the reins held out to him. He rode Mosstrooper to three of his five major wins, earning accolades for each ride.

  That Mosstrooper’s victory in the 1930 Australian Hurdle was also Powell’s finest hour is not so certain. At 62, he was a man of wide experience and outstanding accomplishment in the many ventures he had undertaken. All the same, he had never before committed himself to a task that had brought so much success, and with it such public affection and admiration. Through skill and hard work he had turned a former no-hoper into an undisputed champion. Although there were many great trainers in Powell’s time, none might have made the time or found the determination to work what seemed a miracle: the re-making of Mosstrooper. Pre-Powell, Mosstrooper could not win a single race from 16 starts on the flat; for Powell, in 25 jumps races up to and including that wonderful Saturday at Caulfield, he won 10 and was placed four times. In just two racing seasons, Mosstrooper accumulated prizemoney of £12,591 (A$912,711), already the most ever earned by a jumps horse in Australia.

  As the victorious owner-trainer, Powell should perhaps have been the most excited person at Caulfield Racecourse on 2 August 1930, but his reaction was typically low-key. Talking to reporters, he was keen to vindicate Mosstrooper’s achievement.

  I am glad my horse won, because by defeating Kentle and Swahili, he proved that his Grand National victories were not the flukes some people thought they were. Swahili fell in the Grand National Hurdle race and Kentle came down in the steeplechase. Both these horses stood up on Saturday, and Mosstrooper defeated them comfortably.

  A month earlier, on the Monday after the 1930 VRC Grand National Steeplechase, handicapper Samuel Griffiths had issued his weights for the Australian Hurdle and Steeplechase, to be run on the first and second Saturday in August. Mosstrooper headed both lists, with 11 stone 12 pounds (11.12) and 12.10 respectively, up 19 pounds and 14 pounds on the weights he had carried to victory in the Flemington double. Bookmakers did not believe the increases would prevent him from winning, and they immediately installed him as favourite for the ‘Caulfield Grand Nationals’ (as the Australian Hurdle and Steeplechase were still informally called). When the mighty Redleap won the Australian Steeplechase, in 1892, he had lumped a record 13.12, and three other winners since had carried over 13 stone. On those figures, Mosstrooper was in with a genuine chance.

  Unlike the bookies, many journalists were already prepared to say that Mosstrooper would not win the upcoming majors, still three weeks away. They thought that Swahili especially would beat him in the hurdle, and that Kentle, Mosstrooper’s half-brother, would back up from the hurdle race to lead him home in the steeplechase. Not only would both horses be meeting Mosstrooper on better weight terms, they could be excused, supporters argued, for their performances at Flemington. However, turf columnist ‘Flash of Steel’ in the Bendigo Advertiser could not rate them above Mosstrooper. He questioned whether Kentle, injured in the Grand National Steeplechase, would be fit enough for the 3¼ miles of the Australian Hurdle, and he was not sure Swahili could stay that distance. Weight would not stop Mosstrooper, for ‘Flash of Steel’ he was ‘the absolute winner’.

  Mosstrooper’s handicap, however, weighed on Powell’s mind. Mosstrooper was not a big horse. The allotted 11.12 was the heaviest weight—by 15 pounds—of his hurdling career, and a sizeable increase on the 9.10 with which he had won the same race a year before. He had lumped 12.3 to win in September 1929, but that was in a steeplechase at Moonee Valley over just 2½ miles. In the Australian Hurdle he would have to race 6 furlongs further at a faster pace, and probably on a heavy track. So Powell settled on a different race strategy for Mosstrooper.

  He decided that Bob Harris would ride him cold at the back of the field and only make a move late in the race. He would have to wait and wait, without letting the leaders gain a break that Mosstrooper could not overcome. Harris would have to bring him into the race gradually, but quickly enough to round up the leaders soon after entering the straight. Mosstrooper had come from well back before to win races. This time, however, his late surge might have to be longer and quicker overall. There should be no spurts, just a steady, sustained charge at the leaders. Harris would need all his patience and timing.

  When rain bucketed down at Caulfield on the Thursday night before the Australian Hurdle, and showers continued the following day, Powell, who trained his horses at Caulfield, knew ‘the heath’ would be on the nasty side of heavy come Saturday.

  On race day, in getting Mosstrooper ready for perhaps his greatest challenge, Powell had the horse’s tail plaited and his legs greased. The mud would literally be flying, and Powell wanted as little as possible to stick. Then he carefully placed one thick blanket after another on Mosstrooper’s back before easing a heavy saddle down on
top of them. In the saddling enclosure, before Harris was legged up, Powell told his jockey not to take Mosstrooper down the track for a look at the first obstacle, but simply to wait at the starting barrier. It was the ploy of a trainer with a load on his mind—a man concerned, if not desperate, to alleviate the weight his charge had to carry in dangerous conditions.

  Now it all depended on Harris and Mosstrooper, and luck in running. Going out of the straight the first time, Mosstrooper (the 3–1 favourite) was last, and for the first mile he would not stretch out. Harris had to niggle at him to remind him of the task at hand. The pace seemed too fast, too soon, and Mosstrooper was squeezed several times. Feeling claustrophobic, the gelding was unnerved by the crowding and by being closed in on the rail. But this was the cost of saving ground and conserving the horse’s energy until he made his late surge. Meanwhile, lightly weighted Rossgole, the heavily backed horse from Sydney, had raced out to a lead of 12 lengths over the field. Trying to run his opponents off their legs, Rossgole had set a cracking pace in the bog-like conditions from barrier rise, but he could not keep it up and was passed by Swahili entering the railway stretch 6 furlongs from home.

  The new leader was full of running, and many in the crowd doubted that Mosstrooper or any other rival could catch him. In fact, at the 1-mile mark, when Mosstrooper began to sneak around the field, two or sometimes three horses out from the rail, Reonui, who had been prominent early, came again to pass him. Mosstrooper seemed to be gone. But even 5 furlongs out, Harris was sure he would win. Mosstrooper ran into third place as Polygonum took the lead at the 4 furlongs, and soon after, when Polygonum crashed into the second-last fence, Swahili was left in front again. But not for long. He was a sitting duck for the relentless Mosstrooper, who ran past him as they entered the straight. Once over the last hurdle, Gus Powell’s champion cruised to the line 3 lengths clear of the resolute novice Lord Darnley (12–1). Kentle plugged home a further 4 lengths back in third place. Swahili (second favourite at 5–1) was a tiring fifth, and Rossgole (third favourite at 6–1) caved in to finish a distant last.