Black Monday, October 19, 1987, saw a severe global stockmarket crash in which worldwide losses were estimated at USD 1.71 trillion. Taking its lead from Wall Street, the Australian market lost 25% of its value on October 20 and 41% by the end of the month. The asset price bubble overwhelmingly had been fuelled by borrowed money. The 1980s in Australia and elsewhere had been the era of the colourful and audacious entrepreneur – men like Alan Bond and Christopher Skase – who first became celebrated household names before the crashing sharemarket saw them fall into notoriety. “Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,” to quote Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey, “many summers on a sea of glory but far beyond their depth” – or more to the point, the depth of their shareholders’ pockets. Australia’s Treasurer Paul Keating, in one of his trademark quips, would contemptuously dismiss these footloose corporate pirates as “skid-marks on the pathway to progress”.
Category: AJC Derby Page 1 of 2
Anybody that can play Rugby Union for Australia, graduate as a Doctor of Medicine (MBBS) from Sydney University, and then after establishing a profitable orthopaedic practice, switch careers to become a successful horse trainer, is no ordinary man. When that same man in his new profession during the course of four years selects two future winners of the A.J.C. Derby out of the New Zealand National Yearling Sales, I think that he can be said to be a remarkable judge of a thoroughbred. Enter Dr Geoffrey Alexander Chapman!
Where do I begin the story of Bonecrusher? It seems to me that the Claudelands Yearling Sales at Waikato in 1984 is as good a place as any. Peter Mitchell, an Auckland businessman cum gambler who conducted his own finance company, was in attendance with his trainer, Frank Ritchie. Mitchell had a background in racing and gambling in that his father had once been a capable owner-trainer based in Ellerslie who had enjoyed high-level success with Misere. Now Misere in solo whist is a bid by which a player undertakes to win no tricks. Contrary to the name, Mitchell pere who, like his son was no stranger to a pack of cards, proceeded to win any number of tricks with this nondescript brown gelding of ordinary breeding, including both the 1965 A.R.C. Newmarket and Royal Stakes, as well as the W.R.C. Telegraph Handicap the following year.
It seems appropriate at this moment in our chronicle to introduce the character of Patrick Hogan and the Cambridge Stud, given the remarkable success of his foundation stallion, Sir Tristram, during the 1980s decade and beyond. Born in 1939, Patrick was the seventh child of Thomas Hogan who had emigrated to New Zealand from County Galway, Ireland, in 1914 at the age of eighteen. Hogan senior had established a family dairy farm at Fencourt, near Cambridge, and being Irish, perhaps the only thing he loved better than cows were horses. Over the years, he came to establish the Fencourt Stud as an extension of his farm and it had been the home of such stallions as Blueskin II, Forearmed, Final Court, Persian Garden and Philoctetes. As old Tom, a lifelong smoker, aged and suffered from lung cancer, his two sons, Patrick and John, began to assume more responsibility for the stud, becoming partners in 1965, and ultimately taking over with the death of Tom in the 1972-73 racing season, although more of the farm was bequeathed to John the eldest rather than Patrick the youngest.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the exquisite quality of thoroughbreds produced by David Hains’s Kingston Park Stud during the height of its fame from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Back then it was widely considered the most cost-efficient stud in Australia. We have already studied the first champion for which the stud was responsible in the shape of the 1980 A.J.C. Derby winner, Kingston Town. Just two years later the stud produced its second champion in Rose Of Kingston, a filly who would emulate the King by winning the 1982 A.J.C. Derby in David Hains’s famous colours, and in so doing become the first of her sex to take the classic in thirty-eight years. So, where did her story begin?
Few men came to have more influence on racing in Australasia in the last two decades of the twentieth century than Robert Edmund Sangster. Born 23 May 1936, Sangster grew up in a mansion near the Hoylake Golf Club, Liverpool, England, the only child of Vernon Sangster who had founded the Vernons Pools Company ten years earlier. Robert was educated at the exclusive Repton School in Derbyshire, the school featured in the acclaimed 1939 film ‘Goodbye, Mr Chips’ and apart from Sangster, numbered amongst its notable and eclectic alumni were Roald Dahl, Harold Abrahams and Jeremy Clarkson.
“The future belongs to those who plan for it.” It is a simple philosophy of life and one that Adelaide horseman Colin Hayes lived by every day. When he eventually realised his dream and first established the Lindsay Park Stud, nestled amidst the rolling green hills and massive, majestic redgums of the Barossa Valley in the Mount Lofty Ranges, Hayes had that philosophy inscribed on an iron plaque and placed on the grand entrance gates to the property. Colin Sidney (C. S.) Hayes, gentleman and racehorse trainer extraordinaire, might be regarded as the third man of Australian racing in the second half of the twentieth century. Together with Tommy Smith, seven-and-a-half years his senior, and Bart Cummings, three-and-a-half years his junior, Hayes came to exercise a disproportionate influence on the Australian Turf that lost nothing in comparison with the aforementioned pair.
In the 1869 chapter, I related the early story of the foundation of the Maribyrnong Stud. Its dispersal in April 1866 saw the property, and much of the stock, transfer from the hands of the Stud’s founder, Hurtle Fisher, into those of his brother, Charles Brown Fisher or ‘CB’ as he has become known to generations of the Australian sporting public. Curiously enough, the brothers, for all of their closeness in pastoral intrigues, never seemed to have been long-term partners in their Turf pursuits, although they could always manage to come to some arrangement with each other when it suited. Charles Fisher, like his brother, was one of a small group of Australia’s privileged and exclusive squattocracy, who though in a land quite different to England, persisted in adopting English styles of dress and custom common to the squirearchy of the old country.
No two brothers have made a more significant contribution to the Australian Turf than Hurtle and Charles (C.B.) Fisher. One of the pioneering families of South Australia, their father, was the first Resident Commissioner of South Australia and controlled the sale of land in that fledgeling colony during the first two years of its existence. In this role, Fisher senior was responsible to the Board of Commissioners in London and in many respects exercised more power than Governor Hindmarsh, with whom he worked in tandem.
When the A.J.C. began to transfer its attention to Randwick in 1858, the old trysting ground at Homebush was forsaken and fell into desuetude for some years. Despite the newfound splendour of Randwick in those early years, however, the holidaymaking public failed to engage with the new course as a place to combine the enjoyment of racing with that of a picnic. It was to satisfy this yearning for the atmosphere of a fete champetre that Homebush enjoyed a brief resurgence in the mid-1860s.