Best Australian Racing Stories (40 page)

I suppose you think that trainers ought each to have got six months for training three-year-olds like that, but races were not run from end to end those days. A Cumberland Stakes, 2 miles, in which Carbine beat Lochiel, took over five minutes to run. A trotter could pretty well do that nowadays.

I can just remember James White, a fine big man with a beard and a thorough-going Australian. He believed we could breed first-class horses here and he used Australian sires to an extent that nobody has ever approached since. His great horse Chester was by Yattendon, an Australian-bred horse, and Yattendon was by the Australian Sir Hercules.

Then Chester's son Abercorn was put to the stud, so there were four generations of Australian blood even in those early days. Mr White was like the late John Brown; he believed in breeding and racing his own horses, but he wasn't like John Brown in any other way. He stuck to the one trainer all his life, while John Brown took his whole team away from old Joe Burton simply because Joe told him that one of them was no good My first experience as an owner came when a country friend sent me down a polo pony, a miniature horse-giantess, thoroughbred, as long as a ship and big everywhere except in height. She could gallop like Eclipse, but was useless for polo, as she needed a 40-acre paddock in which to turn.

Obviously her game was racing, so I leased her to a pony trainer, one Jimmy Gordon, a strong silent man who was, I believe, brother-in-law to William Kelso, the crack trainer of the day. I thought that anything Jimmy didn't know, Kelso would tell him.

Then I moved in one glorious jump right up among the exclusives at the top of the business.

Mainly because I was well known as a writer of racing verse I met and made personal friendships with owners like G.G. Stead, owner of Maxim and many other cracks, G.D. Greenwood (Gloaming), L. McDonald (Wakeful), Sol Green (Comedy King), R.R. Dangar (Peter Pan), W.A. Long (Grand Flaneur) and countless others.

Recognising that I was horse-mad, that great trainer Dick Mason used to make me welcome at his stable and take me along with him when he was saddling Gloaming and others; and here is a queer thing. In all those years I never heard one of those men say that his horse had been pulled by its rider or that he had lost a race through roguery or by interference of bookmakers.

A strange thing, when you come to look at it, for the general idea is that racing is rotten with ramps and roguery.

Some of these men were notoriously mean with presents to riders but they got a square deal just the same. Owners of third-rate horses had plenty to say about the iniquities of riders, but up in the serene air of the classic contenders the subject was never even mentioned.

*

When I first blundered into racing, Mr Henry Dangar was chairman of the Australian Jockey Club, a masterful man. He imported the great St Simon horse Positano—an animal which would never have left England only that he had a will of his own. Mr Dangar entrusted the training of his horse to the capable hands of John All-sopp, one of the old school whose pessimistic outlook on life had earned him the nickname of ‘Crying Johnny' of the turf.

Positano had to go to Melbourne to race and Allsopp said that the horse would require a box to himself on the train; if other horses were put in anywhere near him he would spend the trip trying to get at them.

Mr Dangar had never heard of such a proposition, and the trainer was ordered to attend a meeting of the owner and a few of his cronies to give an explanation. ‘Johnny' put up such a good ‘cry' that he got his own way: nor did he resent being told that the horse's wilfulness must be his fault. Trainers are used to shouldering the blame for everything.

Another English horse which came out here under somewhat similar circumstances was Orzil. He was a really high-class performer in England in the ownership of one of the Brasseys. Mr Pat Osborne, who was later to achieve fame as the owner of Valicare, was visiting England and happened to mention to Brassey that he was looking out for a horse. He could hardly believe his ears when Brassey said that he would give him Orzil.
Give
him, mind you, when the horse was one of the best performers in England.

‘He's turned unreliable,' said Brassey, ‘but I can't sell him here for fear he might take it into his head to do his best and beat me in a big race. It would make me look a fool. If you take him away out to Australia and guarantee that he never comes back, you can have him for nothing.'

Randwick real estate

One wonders how long it will be before Sydney reaches out and swallows up Randwick. Possibly, from a town planner's point of view, the racecourse might be allowed to survive indefinitely as a lung of the city, but it seems possible that the trainers and horses may be pushed out, even though Randwick remains.

A trainer needs a large area for his establishment, and, as soon as prosperity returns, the prices and rents will go up, and the trainers will find it hard to stand up against the pressure of population. Already some of them have been driven into suburban backyards, and others are finding it very hard to meet the overheads. Asphalt or cement roads encircle the course on practically every side, and the clatter of a string of horses going out for the exercise at daylight is prolific of strong language among local householders.

No doubt Randwick will last our time, and when it does go the training fraternity will go voluntarily with it. One cannot for long pay Potts Point rents on Randwick profits.

A £30 purse

Did they ever race £30 at Randwick? ‘Too right' they did, according to an old racebook of the year 1866 kindly sent to me by Mr H.L. Harnett, a representative of an old Monaro family. The race-book of those days left a good deal to the imagination. For instance, the names of all horses' sire and dam were not given, but merely the name of the owner and the horse.

By way of compensation, the back of the book contains a number of perforated slips about the size of postage stamps to assist the then popular pastime of getting up a sweeps. Horses were few and prizes paltry, but they managed to provide a four days meeting, with five races on the first, second and fourth days, and four races on the third.

It was in the last race of the meeting, a forced handicap for all winners, optional losers, that the £30 stake made its appearance. The blow was somewhat softened by a sweepstakes of £5 from the eight runners; but the winner had to return 5 sovereigns to the club.

Riding positions

A thing that made a lot of talk at the time was the change from the old upright seat to the crouch seat. Ted Sloan was doing wonders with the crouch seat and our trainers wanted to try it, but none of them liked to take the plunge. So Tom Payten who trained for all the conservative swells—Sir Adrian Knox, Hon. Agar Wynne, and so on—took it on and he went about it this way.

Payten had a boy named Richardson, ‘Dingo' Richardson they called him, and this boy could ride the crouch seat pretty well. So, he had some private trials early in the morning. He made Richardson gallop sitting up and then he made him ride the same horse under the same conditions crouching on his neck.

He told me that the times were at least a second a mile faster with the crouch seat, and he made all his boys get up on their necks. When Tom led, the rest of the trainers soon followed.

The crouch method of riding was invented by the Negro riders in the southern states of America, so Tom Payten said, ‘There you are! We've been at it all our lives and it takes a lot of Americans to tell us that a horse carries weight better over his shoulders than over his loins.'

Use of the whip

There is a story of an English trainer who was putting up an apprentice for his first ride in a race. The youngster, very nervous, came to scale with whip and spurs, but before he weighed out the trainer said to him, ‘You had better take off those spurs, my boy; this horse doesn't like them.' Then, as a sort of afterthought, he added, ‘Now give me your whip, and you'll be all right.'

This might be regarded by the cynical as a good way of ensuring that the horse did not win; but modern riding has seen less and less use, or misuse, of the whip, and both the crack Australian rider Jim Pike and the crack English rider Gordon Richards are very sparing in the use of the whip. Pike hardly ever brings the whip into play at a finish, and if his horse is beaten he does not add a flogging to the other troubles of the animal. In fact, some grandstand critics have been heard to say that Pike cannot use the whip; but he has proved the fallacy of this opinion on occasions when it was absolutely necessary.

Richards uses a different method from that of Pike, for he flourishes his whip a lot at a finish. An official who interested himself in the matter says that he carefully examined a number of horses that Richards had ridden in what looked like flogging finishes and never found a whip mark on one of them.

Richards found that the mere threat of the whip was enough to get the last ounce out of 99 per cent of horses and that the odd 1 per cent consisted of horses that were slugs by temperament.

In the ‘good old days', now passed beyond recall, it was customary to see all the boys go for their whips at the turn, and the poet Gordon, himself a race rider, says:

Behind, the hoof-thunder is blended

With the whistling and cracking of whips;

Which makes one wonder why they were such good days, after all—at any rate, for the horses.

The aeroplane theory

The world moves, but it is a trite saying that some of us move faster than others. New ideas and new theories are constantly introduced, even into the somewhat stereotyped business of racing. For instance, we have had the figure theory and the heart theory, and now we have a new one—the aeroplane theory. This theory relates to ‘jockeyship', and is put forward by an amateur aviator, who mixes punting with tailspins and nosedives. Briefly put, his theory is that Pike's wonderful success in the saddle is due to his adoption of the principle of the aeroplane.

‘You watch Pike ride,' he said, ‘and you will notice that he does not sit like the other riders; he holds his body well clear of the saddle and well clear of the horse's neck, and he keeps his back quite flat and parallel with the ground. Well, what's the result? As he goes along the wind gets under his body and tends to lift him off the saddle; the faster that he goes the less he weighs, and if he could only go fast enough he would weigh nothing at all.'

A somewhat cynical suggestion was made that if Pike could only get fast enough he might even lift the horse off the ground; the theorist, being of a literal turn of mind, did not see any sarcasm in the remark. ‘Tell me this,' he said. ‘What makes a three-ton airplane with 15 passengers in it rise off the ground? Nothing but the pressure on the air under the upper wing of the machine, and if the pressure of air will lift all that weight, why shouldn't it lift a jockey's body?'

Not having Kingsford Smith at hand as an authority, it was somewhat difficult to combat this novel explanation of Pike's success in the saddle. But if the aeroplane theory should ever meet with popular acceptance, it might be necessary to tie the legs of the lighter boys under the saddle, lest they should disappear altogether.

Apprentices

Apprentice riders are supposed to be hardened little citizens, above the weakness of displaying any emotion; but, after all, they are only small boys of about 15 or so, prone to the excitability of other small boys of their age

As Kipling says of soldiers, they are ‘single men in barracks most uncommonly like you'.

The small apprentice Lightfoot, having ridden his first winner in the two-year-old race at Moorfield, burst into a storm of tears of excitement as he rode back to the weighing yard. It added a human touch to the proceedings.

It is a great thing for a small boy to ride his first winner while still at a weight at which he can get plenty of riding.

This boy Lightfoot is a son of the once well-known rider Joe Lightfoot, a jockey who weighed about as much as a box of matches, but had such wonderful ‘hands' that he could hold any horse at any pace in any company. The trouble with Joe Lightfoot was that he had an incurable habit of looking round while leading in a race; in all other respects he was one of the best natural horsemen at his weight ever seen on our turf.

Without knowing anything of the circumstances of the case, one may be permitted to hope that this youngster may turn out as good a horseman as his father without suffering from the looking-round complex.

The handling of racehorses by six-stone-seven boys is one of the wonders of the world. The average grown-up man, though he may figure with distinction on a hack, could not hold a racehorse for half a minute; but these midgets can put him anywhere, and do anything with him, without exerting any physical strength at all. They are the elect out of hundreds that go into apprenticeship, only to find that 95 per cent of them will never make horsemen. It is a case of survival of the fittest, and those that do survive are entitled to all the money they make.

One of W. Kelso's apprentices, on joining the stable, borrowed a book on race riding and started to copy it out in handwriting. It is not known whether he ever finished it—it was a large book—but at any rate he copied out enough of it to make himself a very successful rider, who at the age of 20 was earning more money than most barristers of 50.

The racing business is rather overcrowded just now, but somehow there always seems to be room at the top.

Stipendiary stewards

So much for straight-going experiences; now for the other side.

I have seen them all, the big punters who bestride this narrow world until one day they are missing; the small battling owners and trainers, living in hopes of finding a big punter who will ‘dash it down' for them on a specially prepared horse. Here and in England it is just the same.

Taking it by and large, and expressing it in a comprehensive sort of way, the public got the idea that where there were six races in a day, there were six crimes to be detected, so stipendiary stewards were appointed to control racing.