To fall from a thoroughbred

To fall from a thoroughbred

To say that I broke a long-standing family tradition may be perceived as slight distortion of the truth. However, my family is inextricably linked to the horse racing and gambling industry and, whilst I can ride a horse very well and know how to bet, I had absolutely no interest in making a career in the Equine industry, the Racing Game, the Gambling bug, otherwise known as “The sport of Kings”!

Please, allow me to explain:

My grandfather on my dad’s side of the family was a Frenchman whose primary occupation was to “break in” horses. That is to say he took semi-wild, unridden horses and “schooled” them to become rideable, useful animals. I suppose most of them were for domestic purposes, farm use, pony clubs etc, however some of them became race-horses. I have no idea how successful any of these fine horses were, as I really didn’t know him that well, but he was a gambler. I was only 5 years old when he passed away, at the ripe old age of 95. He had travelled to London to ply his trade, took a fiery Irish woman as his wife and raised a family back in the mid-to-late 1800’s.

My father, Bill, grew up within the sound of Bow Bells, making him a fully-blown, slang-rhyming Cockney from the East End of London. Born in January, 1918, he was the youngest of 16 – yes! 16 (sixteen) - children! One way or another, as he grew up, he developed a penchant for Greyhounds and Greyhound racing and learned some nasty tricks that one could do to give one’s dog an advantage over the competition and, of course, a better chance of a winning bet – none of which I choose to disgrace myself with by writing about any of them. The point here is that, from a very early age, the gambling bug eh inherited from his father infected him, and he passed this infection on to most of my siblings. I am the eldest of 6 children, 5 boys and 1 girl, - my beautiful sister and the protected species in the family!

There is an intriguing story about how my father met and married my mother. I’m not totally sure of the details but it involved a jealous and jilted beau, my father, (a tailor, and a very good one at that!),  who was working for my mothers’ father, (also a tailor and also a very good one), a gun, death threats and a wedding that was not preceded by the usual courting of the day! (No! It was not a “shotgun” wedding, just a very unusually short romance!). Whilst this was a strange beginning, their marriage lasted until my father passed away in 1998, just 2 days past his 80^th birthday, and produced 6 children. Thankfully, whilst both mum and dad are no longer with us, they never had to experience the tragedy and heartbreak of burying one of their own children, a concept of grief that I simply cannot grasp.

Throughout his life he gambled. In the early days he would often come home late at night having been out, losing his wages playing “Crown and Anchor”, (now illegal!), and betting on the dogs and horses. My mother was, of course, appalled that this should happen, but somehow managed to put food on the table and kept us all clothed. (It was handy that dad was a tailor, and could make hand-me-downs look like they were new clothes!). My mother and father were both devout Catholics, (my father actually converted to Catholicism as a condition to marrying her!), and there inevitably came a time when God’s divine intervention came about. Dad could see life in Britain was changing. Besides, he needed to change his lifestyle, so, in 1961 we all immigrated to Australia! You see, my father could not pass up a bargain. He often came home, proud as punch, with an item of complete uselessness, bragging about how cheap it was and magnificently stating: “What a bargain”!! So, when he discovered that he could get himself, his wife and his 6 children to Australia, to start a new life in a strange country on the other side of the world, for the princely sum of just £10, he was “All in”!

The journey, by passenger ship, to this new land of opportunity was long, slow and arduous, but unbelievably educational. As a 9-year-old it was the greatest adventure I’d ever been on! The migrant ship, the countries at which we stopped, the Suez Canal, the bartering Arabs, the abject poverty of Colombo, the flying fish in the Indian Ocean, Fremantle, The Great Australian Bight, and finally arriving in Port Jackson, Melbourne, - what a journey! Even the ship had an amazing history! However, a story for another day perhaps!

Dad both loved and hated Australia. He loved the sunshine, the deep blue skies, the open spaces, the rural surrounds we were in, around the old immigration camp in Nunnawading, (Now an up-market housing estate!), the ease with which we could do day trips, and the fact that he could gamble on virtually ANYTHING!

However, in the early 1960’s Australia needed tradesmen in carpentry, painters, bricklayers, electricians, concreters, joiners, plumbers and the like, not tailors. Australians only wore suits and ties to weddings and funerals, so there was no desperate call for a journeyman tailor. He hated that he could not find work as a tailor, hated the racial prejudice, (“Pommie Bastard” was a term we all had to endure and come to grips with, even at school!), and, rather absurdly, the inane fear of snakes and sharks!

Eventually, after many approaches and a lot of really vile prejudice, he gave up and went to New Zealand, before we ran out of money. Fortuitously, he gained employment in Auckland the day he arrived there. He was walking along the Karangahape Road shopping strip, saw a “Hugh Wrights” men’s clothing store, walked in, told them he was an English tailor and got a job on the spot! He worked hard, saved hard (except for the odd flutter on the horses!) and 3 months later mum and the 6 of us joined him in New Zealand. We lived in a number of places and went to a number of schools before we qualified for a “State Advances” or “Housing Commission” property in the suburb of Glen Innes, east of Auckland. Mum worked for the NZ Post Office as a mail sorter before nailing a good job in the accounts section of a large carpet manufacturer, and dad managed to stay in the tailoring business for a relatively long time. Together they managed to save and buy a house in a small suburb called Takanini, south of Auckland.

Ellerslie Race Course is the “Flemington” or “Ascot” of New Zealand horse racing and Takanini had a training track which was the official training track for Ellerslie Race Course. We were now living in the very epicentre of New Zealand horse racing. My brothers were in Heaven! Dad even made a few extra dollars making the silks for the jockeys. It was quite surreal seeing most of the country’s leading jockeys, very famous people, arriving at our humble abode to be fitted for hand-made racing silks. These men were house-hold names in the industry, brilliant jockeys at the top of their game, and there they were at our place, stripped to their underwear, being fitted for the silks they would be wearing on Saturday!

By now, the inherent horsemanship and gambling bug, bequeathed to the family by my grandfather, had kicked in and all 4 of my brothers had done apprenticeships as jockeys. They, too, were gamblers. Brothers 1,2,3 and 4 had all gone down the same derelict pathway, and whilst they have all managed to eke out a meagre living from within the industry, none of them have made a fortune or anything even close to one.

Mum and dad had now gained a small interest in breeding dogs and horses. Dad had some success as a breeder of good greyhounds and some progeny still race to this day, with the bloodline of “Venetian Queen”, one of dad’s favourite success stories, although I think he made more money selling her litters than he ever did as an owner/trainer. Mum bred a couple of horses, one of which won a few races, the most notable of which was a win where mum owned the horse, my brother #3 trained it, in conjunction with a licenced trainer for whom he worked, and my brother #4 rode it first across the line! Oh! The excitement! To me it was just another push on the barb, on the hook, on the line of ambition in the eternal and mostly futile search for a champion!

All 4 brothers had a modicum of success somewhere along the line, winning the odd race here and there as jockeys, and even had a couple of wins as trainers, all of which were celebrated in the usual, traditional family manner with all the family basking in the short-lived euphoria of winning a race.

And that’s the hook. A tiny success is enough fuel to keep the dream alive. Like the addiction of alcohol where one drink is too many and 100 not enough, a rare win is enough to sink the barb in just a little deeper, enough to make it just that little bit harder to get it out. Two brothers got too heavy – a destructive tragedy to any promising career of a jockey. The other two did not have the killer instinct to chase rides from the horse owners and trainers. The ability to ride well is a great thing when you are in this industry, and all 4 of them were exceptional riders. However, it is a punishingly ruthless business and the ability to ride well is not enough ammunition when there are far more riders that there are rides.

One of them had success as a farrier until his back gave out and it became just too hard to continue. He only has memories of the good days as a farrier. He was good at it, had a reputation, prestigiously did the track shoeing on race days, and was admired for his ability. But when you have nothing left to give, the “Sport of Kings” finds another hero to worship, (as long as there is a benefit in it for the admirers), and the scrap-heap gets another body to make it bigger. Amongst the success was pain and suffering. He was kicked in the face by a 500 kg, super-fit horse which split his top lip in half and fractured his upper jaw. One side of his top lip no longer works as a result. That pain, whilst very real and tangible, gets conveniently forgotten when re-counting how he shod the horse that won the Stakes at Ellerslie.

The horsemanship and cursed gambling bug were bred into us by a hard-nosed, tough Frenchman with an equally tough, harsh reputation. The tradition was continued to a large extent by his children, one of whom was my father. The tradition was interrupted by 2 world wars. I lost 3 uncles to the pointless savagery of war – my father lost 3 brothers. He served in the British Army in France and had the scars in his head to prove it, although he never spoke of what he witnessed in war as a soldier. In my eyes, despite being flawed by the “bug”, he was a true hero. How brave was this man to jump on a passenger liner, with his wife and 6 kids in tow, sail half way around the word, in an era that had only just discovered the convenience of international flight, with nowhere to stay, no job, limited money, land in an unknown country and face the world on his own? He was, and still is, a hero of mine and, despite his short-comings, always will be. His actions altered the course of my life for the better and I will be forever grateful.

He crossed the world to find a better life for his family, and he did, but even he could not rid the bloodline of a French horseman. Even my sister married a former jockey who also became too heavy to ride. My god! The stories that I can tell of what jockeys do to themselves just to “make the weight”. It is tough, demeaning and sometimes tragic.

 By some miraculous quirk of fate, I was not infected by the gambling bug or the desire to be involved in any form of Equestrian desire, and was far more interested in the “horses” under the bonnet of several different motor vehicles that I owned. I was essentially the “Black Sheep” of the family, due to this lack of interest, and I took a pathway that lead well away from the well-trodden track of my brothers, and so many other glory-seeking hopefuls.

I am eternally grateful for this lack of interest, as the “Sport of Kings” in my qualified opinion is only the “Sport of Kings” for a very lucky and select few. The general public only ever sees the glamourous side of the much-publicised racing industry through the pomp and ceremony of race-day meetings, the fashion parades, and the coverage from the various media forms. They are not allowed to see the human wreckage that inevitably goes hand-in-hand with the industry, the shattered dreams of hopefuls, all chasing that illusive champion, the physical and mental deprivation of the discipline required to succeed. I have seen far too much of it to ever want to encourage anyone to get involved. The lure of owning, training or riding a champion thoroughbred, or a Melbourne Cup-winning horse and the vast amounts of money to be won can become an all-consuming and obsessive pursuit. The odds of success are so remote that you may as well buy lottery tickets every week as you will have a far greater chance of winning something.

I feel that I have broken the mould, escaped the forlorn drudgery. I crave not the euphoria of a horse race, nor race win, nor a winning each-way bet. I don’t even need to partake in a sweepstakes on Melbourne Cup Day. I may waste a few dollars to make up the numbers in a sweep, but I have no expectation of a win of any kind. This may well be as un-Australian as you can get, but I care not for the accompanying exhilaration as I know it to be just another barb on the hook of just another addiction and I treat it as such. Too many lives have been shattered by it and I refuse to contribute to the destructive hunger of the horse racing industry, and its insatiable appetite for the dollars gambling on the outcome provides.

Yes, I have turned my back on the family “Tradition” and am very happy to have done so.

However, I will always remember, and be forever grateful for, the gamble my father took to get us all down under to a life that other populations crave. As you can read – I did not fall from the thoroughbred - because I never actually got on one.