Mile Stones

By Harley Walden

1896 – Young jockey, Bobby Lewis, was already riding in peak form and began a long association with former top horseman and now trainer James Scobie, and the powerful owner, Ernest Clark.

The three men were known as The Triumvirate and became the most successful racing combination of their time.

The first film of the race for the Melbourne Cup was produced by a Frenchman, Marius Sestier who took a series of stills and flicked through them to show the movement of Newhaven’s win.

The result was distorted but proved to be a box office attraction for three months at Sydney’s Criterion Theatre.

By now communications had come a long way since the Hobart Mercury had been obtaining its Cup results via carrier pigeon.

1897 – The Judge at Toowoomba found  himself  in a tiz one day in June when forced to declare a dead-heat between four runners in a sprint.

There were no sook horses in these times.

The stewards ordered a re-run and Coronet narrowly won.

When he had caught his breath the strapper rode him five miles back to the stable.

The horse would have slept well.

Trivia-conscious racing enthusiast are assured that at the QTC’s summer meeting this year two full-brothers and their sister all won on the same day.

Their breeding was Buckenthorpe – Oliveria and the ages of the kin were three, four and six.

1900 – The cinema industry began with the screening in Melbourne of Soldiers of the Cross, a religious offering made here and acclaimed as the world’s first full length feature film.

The first motor cars-love them or hate them—began arriving in Australia.

Although they made life easier for some people, in a few years the smell in Australia would never be the same.

There were contradictions concerning the first use of starting devices in Australia.

The only certainty being that they came into use at some time in the mid-nineteen hundreds.

The new method, which came into play because punters and officials were fed up with the uncertainties of the fall-of the-flag method, involving a device in which strands of rubber acted as  a barrier and were released by stewards by a mechanical contraption.

Thus in theory if the noses of all runners were almost touching the strands then the device was sprung they would jump away in a perfect line.

The contradictory claims were that a type of mechanical barrier was first used in 1894 at Randwick to start the Great Metropolitan Handicap; that it was first used in 1n 1894 at Sandown Park, in Melbourne; and that it was first used in 1895 at Elwick, in Tasmania.

Whenever and wherever, the new device was an important advent.

1901 – The great Brown Land was hit by a wave of racing scandals in the infancy of its federation beginning with the San Fran affair, which was a mystery from start to end.

Because of the lack of hard facts the telling of the story must contain question marks.

It went as clearly as ascertained, like this.

In the Melbourne Cup of 1901 a horse named San Fran, which was unsound, had been weighted on 9st 7lb.

His main rival appeared to be Revenue, handicapped on 25lb less.

To give San Fran more chance of beating Revenue some villains dug a tunnel leading to a spot directly under the weighing room at Flemington, and the plan was that when a signal was given from above, which was a tap with a walking stick or a loud stamp on the wooden floor, a small person hiding under the scales would by some pre-determined means tamper with the weights.

In theory this would mean that Frank Kuhn, the jockey of San Fran, would register correct weight on weighing out and ride the horse something like 2st lighter, hopefully to win.

Then when the arranged signal repeated in the weighing area after race Kuhn would step onto the scales and pull correct weight again.

Stranger things have happened at sea, and much stranger things on racecourses.

The above description was merely the alleged plot, and whether it actually happened was never disclosed.

Bearing this in mind there was sustained heavy backing for San Fran and this surprised the connections, considering the horse’s ordinary form, his unsoundness and particularly the 9st 7lb he was asked to carry.

Two days before the Cup the rumour sprinted around that a tunnel had been dug,  etc., etc., but that the VRC was aware of this and had the matter under control.

Revenue narrowly beat San Fran and everything proceeded normally at the weigh-in, with no dramatic taps of walking sticks or a loud stamp on the wooden floor, and it seem certain that racegoers would then have dismissed the rumours of the scales having been rigged.

Little more than a month after Revenue’s Cup win, their memories were jolted when it became known that a tunnel had been found leading to the jockeys’ room, as well as a cubby, littered with scraps of food, an empty drink bottle and capable of hiding a small person directly beneath the scales.

To all intents and purposes the wrongdoers had managed to avoid detection, and the matter rested there because the VRC declined to make any official announcement.

The sports historian, Jack Pollard, gives a pointer to at least one suspect in his Pictorial History of Australian Horse Racing when he says: “Suspensions were handed out over the next few years to those believed to be involved in the tunnel diggings.”

The suggestion is that although VRC officials knew the identities of the perpetrators they had insufficient evidence to nail them, but that the ledger was squared when they were apprehended and dealt with for a later ramp.

How interesting, for this neatly leads us into 1903 and an introduction to one of the one of the great desperate of the turf James Grafter Kingsley.

Harley will be taking a well deserved break over the Christmas period and will be back with more columns in the New Year.