Best Australian Racing Stories (43 page)

Superstitions

The same superstitions exist as in the old land, and racing men are wont to regard certain signs and omens with an amount of awe not understandable to ordinary mortals.

I was seated in a tramcar one morning when a particular friend of mine stepped in and sat down. Suddenly, without a word of warning, he jumped up and rushed out again.

I looked under the seat to see if a dog had been secreted there, and had gone for his calves, but there was nothing to cause alarm in that direction.

Much to my surprise I saw him come in at the other side of the tram and quietly sit down.

‘What is the matter?' I asked. ‘Too much whiskey last night?'

‘No,' he replied, ‘it's race day, you know, and I got in the wrong side of the tram. It's unlucky.'

I suggested that getting out again and coming in the other side of the tram did not do away with the fact that he had originally made a mistake. He acknowledged this, but added that repairing the error might lessen the unlucky consequences of the action.

Another friend, who was a ‘chief ' on one of the Orient Liners, invariably backed a horse whose name suggested something nautical or reminded him of the ship he was on. He backed a horse called Oroya one day, beause it was named after an Orient Liner, and the horse won.

Some men invariably back the first horse they see upon entering the paddock and others back the mount of the jockey whose colours they first come across.

Women at the races

Women punters abound on the racecourses and the same faces may be seen meeting after meeting. As a rule these punters are middle-aged or elderly women, though there are a few young ones to be found.

It is amusing to watch the tactics of these women. Their faces plainly show the fascination that gambling, not horse-racing, possesses for them. The flushed countenances and restless expression betoken a mind and a system strung to the highest pitch by the pernicious habit they have acquired and which has, alas, thoroughly mastered them.

With a purse clutched tightly in one hand, and either a satchel or umbrella in the other, they push and jostle in the crowded ring, and dart from one bookmaker to the other to see which horses are backed. There is no bashfulness about these dames of the turf and I am afraid some of them forfeit a good deal of what self-respect they have to obtain information.

Some bookmakers, to their credit be it said, have a strong objection to betting with women; and I know more than one man in the ring who declines to bet with them. Others are not so scrupulous, and accept money, no matter from what quarter it comes.

On many occasions I have seen these women, when the race is being run, sitting on a seat in a quiet part of the course, waiting for the winner's number to be hoisted, and taking no interest in the race itself. All they think about is winning money, and for the sport they care very little.

There are thousands of ladies, however, at Flemington and Randwick, on Derby and Cup Days, who visit the racecourse out of pure love of the sport, combined with a natural feminine desire to be seen and to see others.

To the credit of the racecourse secretaries and officials, be it said that they use every endeavour to keep loose women off their courses, and in this they succeed admirably.

A racecourse demonstration

On racecourses in Australia the public are apt to express their opinions freely when anything suspicious takes place. I shall not forget in a hurry a scene that occurred at Eagle Farm, Brisbane, I think in 1887.

It was when Honest Ned won the Brisbane Cup.

At that time Mr C. Holmes was the starter at the club. There were some hot favourites in the race, such as Touchstone, who had won the Morton Handicap; Lord Headington, winner of the Derby on the first day of the meeting; Pirate, Theorist and several others.

Some heavy double event books were then open on the Moreton Handicap and Brisbane Cup.

Honest Ned, owned by Mr D'Arcy, was an outsider.

At the start there was a lot of delay, and at last the horses got off to what appeared to be a false start to the majority of the people. Some of the horses ran the course, and, of this lot, Honest Ned won.

Several of the horses, including most of the heavily backed ones, did not run but remained at the post. The jockeys of these horses declared—two of them to me personally—that the starter called them back.

No notice was taken of the race won by Honest Ned, and the people were waiting for the horses to go back to the post and start again. To the amazement and indignation of the crowd, a rumour quickly went round that it was a start, and Honest Ned had won. The stewards held an inquiry, and the race was given to Honest Ned, the outsider.

I have seen a few exhibitions of feeling on racecourses, but never one to equal that at Eagle Farm when this decision was given. The crowd rushed the grandstand enclosure and commenced to pull down the fencing. For a short time there was a riot, and some of the stewards were greatly perplexed as to what should be done.

The manager of the totalisator took the precaution to retreat with the money to a safe distance until the storm was over. I never saw a racecourse crowd more determined to show how they felt about a race. It was a deplorable blunder on somebody's part, and it would have been better to have run the race over again, but as the starter stated it was a start, the stewards had no option, and awarded the race to Honest Ned.

I met Mr Holmes the morning after as we were crossing the Brisbane River in a ferry boat. He assured me he gave the word to go, and that he was very sorry such a start had taken place. I told him jockeys who remained at the post said he did not say ‘go', and that they've heard him call out ‘come back'. To this the starter replied that they had made a mistake. It was a lucky race for the ringmen, as Honest Ned got them out of most of their double difficulties.

*This has long since changed to autumn.

Jim Bendrodt

DAVID HICKIE

WHILE BERNBOROUGH'S OWNER,
Azzalin the Dazzlin' Romano, advertised his famous nightspot Romano's restaurant as the swishest eatery in Sydney during the 1930s and 1940s, his great competitor, the equally flash Jim Bendrodt, ran Prince's restaurant on the opposite corner at Martin Place.

James Charles ‘Jim' Bendrodt—lumberjack, radio announcer, sailor, soldier, actor, champion athlete, professional dancer and restaurateur— was one of Sydney's most colourful entrepreneurs for 50 years, running dancing halls, skating rinks, nightspots and a string of racehorses.

Jim's father was a Danish sea captain who joined the Hudson Bay Company during its pioneering days around the remote coastal areas of Canada and ferried miners to the northern Arctic during the Yukon goldrushes.

Jim was born in 1896 and raised in the town of Victoria in British Columbia. As a teenager he learned to use his fists around the lumber camps of the Canadian backwoods, and boxed professionally. As a youngster he won titles at boxing, ice-skating and sculling, and played lacrosse at a high level as well as some semi-pro rugby.

Despite his obsession in later years to always appear among the best-dressed men in Sydney, with a red carnation in his buttonhole, he was also renowned for his ability to bounce even the toughest drunks from his nightspots.

In 1913, at age 17, Bendrodt had taken a job shovelling coal in the stokehold of a ship headed for Australia. He landed with a £5 note, one suit, one hat and a pair of boots. Within a fortnight of his arrival he was earning £30 a week as a roller-skating champ. He and partner George Irving performed a duo act described as ‘two daring young men with flying legs on roller-skates who entertained patrons of the Tivoli as they raced, tumbled and twisted to a climax like whirling dervishes'.

Bendrodt had held Canadian titles from 3-mile to 24-hour events and the roller-skating craze was just catching on in Sydney. Eventually he was matched against an imported US Champion named Echard in a 24-hour race billed as the ‘world championship' at Sydney's Exhibition Building. Bendrodt bet all his savings on himself but lost by a mere 40 yards.

When war broke out in 1914 he was the 198th man to enlist in the initial 1500-man force, which was given 11 days training and sent to annex German New Guinea. He was netting £200 a week from a dance hall, but within a fortnight he was a six-bob-a-day private on a troop ship in the Pacific.

A friend from those days later recalled:

Jim was a dandy—always the best dressed man in town, with that red carnation in his buttonhole. All Jim's mob were shoddily dressed in woeful looking uniforms, made in a hurry for soldiers in a hurry. But not Jim; he'd had his uniform tailor-made, and was a picture of sartorial elegance as he sailed away.

When he returned to Australia in 1915 Bendrodt felt he hadn't yet done enough for the Allies' war effort. He sold everything to buy a first-class passenger ticket on the RMS
Makura
, bound for Vancouver, and sailed off to Canada to join the Royal Flying Corps.

On his return from military service he marched into J.C. Williamson's one day and said he could act. They believed him and he landed small parts in several plays starring Madge Fabian, Lou Kimball and Link Plummer. He later recalled that he was a lousy actor but discovered he was a terrific showman.

He used that showmanship running dance halls in Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s, became a professional dancer and married his partner Peggy Dawes. He also ran a dancing school in Pitt Street. Bendrodt's enterprises included the Palais Royal dance hall at the showground and the Trocadero in George Street. By the late 1930s he'd switched to ice-skating and transformed the Palais Royal into the Ice Palace. He told reporters he had learned to ice-skate on the frozen Canadian lakes in his youth.

He also became a noted campaigner against cruelty to animals, was a prominent and vociferous member of the RSPCA, and bred German Shepherd dogs.

Bendrodt wrote several books about horses and dogs and his short stories regularly featured in major American magazines. Two of his most famous stories concerned horses named Gay Romance, a filly that won him a fortune, and ‘Irish Lad', which was in fact the story of his horse Spam who cost backers a fortune when he failed in the Melbourne Cup. Professor Walter Murdoch called Bendrodt ‘the Poet Laureate of the horse and dog'.

During World War II Bendrodt began his famous campaign in the press and on radio deploring the slaughter of pet dogs, given up by their owners to be gassed during the days of meat rationing. His plea began: ‘Why did you kill him, Mister? Why did you kill your friend?' The response was so amazing that newspapers and radio stations refused to charge him for the advertisements.

Bendrodt soon became a leading owner-trainer of racehorses, with stables at Kensington and a 150-acre model stud, Prince's Farm, at Castlereagh on the banks of the Nepean River, 40 miles west of Sydney.

In line with his obsession with kindness to animals, the facilities at the stud incorporated the ultimate in comfort for his horses, one visitor describing the stud as being ‘run on the lines of a first-class hotel for horses', Bendrodt objected to jockeys using whips on horses and other trainers often declared his kindness prevented him from working his horses hard enough to get them into racing condition. They were appalled by his habit of feeding them apples and chocolate.

Bendrodt was particularly criticised for the way he trained War Eagle, whom many experts considered would have been a champion under another trainer. War Eagle won the Lord Mayor's Cup at Rosehill in 1946, and ran placings in the AJC Sires Produce Stakes, Champagne Stakes, Hobartville Stakes and City Tattersall's Cup, but many considered he should have won numerous feature races.

Despite the supposedly easy training workouts, War Eagle held the 10-furlong record at Rosehill for many years. When he died Bendrodt erected a huge cage with eagles in it above the horse's grave at Prince's Farm.

The professionals also ridiculed Bendrodt for his handling of the preparation of War Eagle for the 1945 Melbourne Cup, when the horse finished 19th behind Rainbird. Bendrodt then imported the Irish St Leger winner Spam for the 1946 Cup and backed it to win more than £100,000. Ridden by Billy Cook, Spam finished 12th but Bendrodt always claimed the horse had been flattened by the Australian heat and the hard track.

Bendrodt's introduction to the turf was through a former jockey who worked as a waiter at his dance hall. In 1923 the waiter persuaded him to buy the pony Passella for £100. He kept the mare in a yard behind the dance hall and the waiter trained her in his spare time. The mare had her first start in Bendrodt's colours at Kensington and he bet £400 on her at 2 to 1 with bookie Jack Shaw. Passella, ridden by Bill Cook, dead-heated with another mare, Pretty Sweet, and in those days that meant the pair competed in a run-off an hour later.

Pretty Sweet just beat Passella in a jostling finish but the waiter urged Bendrodt to protest. The complaint was upheld and –Passella won.

Bendrodt then bought books, studied breeding and horse care, and began training his own small string of horses.

In 1931, at the height of the Depression, he bought a horse called Firecracker for 60 guineas. Years later a commemorative plaque honouring jockey Bill Cook was unveiled at City Tattersall's Club. It featured three champions: Rainbird, on whom Cook won the 1945 Melbourne Cup; Amounis, on whom he took the 1930 Caulfield Cup; and Carioca, on whom he won 11 races including seven in succession. The plaque also featured the forgotten Firecracker. Below Firecracker were the words: ‘the horse that saved the Palais Royal by winning at Menangle in 1931'.

In July 1931 Bendrodt had addressed his 150 employees at the Palais Royal. He had just sufficient cash to pay the £1200 he owed in wages. The Palais would have to close unless the staff adopted his daring plan to win enough to keep it going through the Depression.

Firecracker was entered for a race at Menangle, to be ridden by Bendrodt's friend Bill Cook. The plan was to bet the wages on the horse, with the employees to get double their money if it won and the rest of the winnings to be used to keep the Palais open. The employees agreed, and Bendrodt and eight of the Palais' bouncers drove to Menangle and backed Firecracker from 10 to 1 to 6 to 4, and the horse won by a length from the useful sprinter Gold-digger.