They Shot Phar Lap Didn't They? Read online

  THEY SHOT

  PHAR LAP,

  DIDN’T THEY?

  GEOFF ARMSTRONG

  AND PETER THOMPSON

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Phar Lap, by Geoff Armstrong and Peter Thompson, was published in October 2000 and was acclaimed by many critics as the definitive biography of the great horse. Armstrong and Thompson have been associated with a number of sports books — often in collaboration with high-profile sportspeople such as Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting and Merv Hughes — in the years before and since that book was released, but still consider their overall work on the life, death and Melbourne Cup of Phar Lap to be their most important publishing achievement.

  First published in 2005 as Melbourne Cup 1930 by Allen & Unwin

  This edition published in 2010 by Pier 9, an imprint of Murdoch Books Pty Limited

  Murdoch Books Australia

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Phone: +61 (0) 2 8425 0100

  Fax: +61 (0) 2 9906 2218

  www.murdochbooks.com.au

  [email protected]

  Publisher: Colette Vella

  Cover design: Design By Committee

  Text design and typesetting: Kirby Jones

  Text © 2005, 2010 by Geoff Armstrong and Peter Thompson

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Cover design © Murdoch Books Pty Limited 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Armstrong, Geoff.

  Title: They shot Phar Lap, didn't they? [electronic resource] /

  Geoff Armstrong and Peter Thompson.

  eISBN: 9781742662558

  Subjects: Phar Lap (Race horse)

  Race horses--Australia--Biography.

  Melbourne Cup (Horse race)

  Horse racing--Victoria--Melbourne.

  Other Authors/Contributors:

  Thomson, Peter, 1960-

  Dewey Number: 798.40099451

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  ONE HELL OF A STORY

  IT’S THE BOOKIES, MATE

  PERCEPTIONS CAN BE EVERYTHING

  THEY INTENDED TO KILL HIM

  NOT THIS CUP FAVOURITE

  SECRECY IS THE KEY

  THE VICTORIA DERBY

  NO SUCH THING AS A CERTAINTY

  PHAR LAP HYSTERIA

  TUESDAY CAN’T COME QUICK ENOUGH

  BLUEY AND BRADMAN

  THE CALL OF THE CARD

  UNDER ATTACK

  THE CASE IS CLOSED

  CUP DAY

  PRIDE, RAGE AND DREAD

  HERE HE COMES!

  THE PERFECT CRIME

  POSTSCRIPT

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The authors are extremely grateful to the many people who supported They Shot Phar Lap, Didn’t They?, especially Colette Vella, Elizabeth Cowell and everyone at Murdoch Books.

  Special thanks to:

  • Steve Eather from the Victoria Police Museum, for his help with all our questions concerning Jack Brophy, Harold Saker and police operations in the 1930s.

  • The staff at the Public Record Office Victoria, the Victoria Police Historical Unit, the NSW and Victorian State Libraries, the National Library of Australia and the Footscray Historical Society.

  • Anne Ryan from the Victorian Police Association, who gave us access to the Association’s archives and especially to the Victorian Police Journal for 1930.

  • Peter Remfrey from the NSW Police Association.

  • Kathy Peters and Joe McGrath from the VRC.

  • Bill Shelton and Michael Gill from the Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia.

  • The people responsible for the Australian War Memorial’s website, which is fantastic.

  Thanks also to Bill Charles, Dr Sally Church, Bart Cummings, Dr Tam Garland, Ian Heads, Sue Hines, Phillip Jennings, Graeme Jones, Murray Lembit, Max Presnell, Ali Orman, Anne Reilly, Sarah Shrubb, Ralph Stavely, Dr John van Veenendaal and Larry Writer, who have answered questions and offered support at various times during this project.

  PREFACE

  WHICHEVER WAY YOU THINK about it, Tommy Woodcock had every right to be dodging shadows on the early morning of Victoria Derby Day, November 1, 1930. Put yourself in his boots. The Melbourne Cup is just three-and-a-half days away, and he’s handling the people’s champion, Phar Lap, the horse he knows affectionately as ‘Bobby’. He is 25 years old but looks younger — a ‘little fella’, as he likes to describe himself, but with the strength and grip of a bushman. He was born and bred on the NSW north coast, at a place called Uralgarra, which is near Kempsey. Tommy has been around horses all his life so he’s entitled to feel perfectly equipped to be with the Cup favourite. Only now he’s on foreign ground, in the backstreets near Caulfield racecourse with all sorts of stories of impending doom buzzing through his head. Melbourne might not be quite the crime capital of the world, as some papers have tried to portray it, but its underworld has a vicious streak that makes Sydney’s razor gangs seem almost charitable. This is a city where the police are at war not only with the ‘crims’ but also with each other, faction against faction, and as major investigations are splashed across newspaper front pages some notable detectives have become quasi-celebrities, as if to counter the crooks’ increasing notoriety.

  ‘Phar Lap has now become a mystery horse,’ the Sydney Morning Herald would write on Cup Day. In the weeks leading up to the big race both the horse and his handlers had become something of a target, with the word out that bookmakers facing colossal payouts might do anything to stop him getting to the start. One scribe compared developments to ‘the deepest plots of American gunmen novels’. Woodcock himself was convinced a car that scraped his arm as he walked Phar Lap home from training one morning was actually trying to run them down, while trainer Harry Telford had received anonymous letters which told of devious plans to kill or maim his horse.

  It’s not surprising then that when a shotgun held by a shadowy figure in a moving Studebaker exploded at them as they walked back to their stables on the morning of the Saturday before the Cup, Woodcock wasn’t hanging around. No bloody way was he going to give the gunman a second chance, or stop to think about just how close he or Phar Lap might have come to being killed. ‘I was off home for my life,’ he explained years later. ‘I was nearly a nervous wreck, truly I was.’ The evidence he gave to police that morning was somewhat muddled. Little wonder.

  As racing folklore has it, the perpetrators of this assault (call it attempted murder, if you like) were not hard to identify, even though the evidence is at best circumstantial. The belief that the culprits were bookmakers, probably working in tandem with some of Melbourne’s most notorious hitmen, took hold and stayed hold. In truth, if you look at the official police reports, dependable and unreliable eyewitness accounts, and the press coverage, what actually happened that Derby Day morning is the greatest Phar Lap mystery of them all, the one part of the champion’s story where we’ll never really know the answer. Certainly, based on the different accounts of the drama Tommy Woodcock gave over the years, he was never sure. Not that this really matters, because at a moment when he thought both he and Phar Lap were about to be assassinated Woodcock showed the most extraordinary cou
rage, putting the champion’s welfare far ahead of his own. For that act alone, he should be remembered fondly.

  The twin objectives of this book are to bring back to life this dramatic story in which Woodcock is a central figure and also to sift through the fact and fiction to get as close as possible to the truth of the matter. The characters, human and equine, were all really there for the 1930 Cup, except for one bookmaker, who we have created so no innocent party might be incriminated.

  Why is it that the guilty verdict against the bookies in this case was never challenged in the years that followed? The most obvious answer is that saying the bad guys did it makes for such a good yarn, so why spoil it. It’s Underbelly at the races. You couldn’t make for a better crime story …

  THERE WAS, AS THE American sports writer Robert Cantwell commented in 1965, a sense of mystery and intrigue about much of Phar Lap’s short life. ‘For many Australians,’ Cantwell wrote that year in Sports Illustrated, ‘the death of Phar Lap was merely the climax of mysteries that began before he was foaled.’ At different times, there was conjecture over who’d buy him, who owned him, who’d train him, who’d ride him, when he’d race, if he’d win, who’d try to shoot him, where was he, would he go to America, would he win in America, why did he die in America? It all added to the legend; eventually, this continuing ‘air of mystery’ (as the papers of the day liked to call it) would take some of the attention away from his extraordinary quality as a racehorse, which is a shame because he was almost certainly the best Australia’s ever seen.

  Phar Lap is one of those few Australian sporting heroes who moved beyond sport to become a national icon. This happened for a number of reasons. There is a genuine parallel with the lives of the great cricketer Don Bradman and famous aviator Charles Kingsford Smith, in that all three were phenomenally good at what they did and they emerged in the late 1920s, when the just-invented wireless and newsreels complete with voice-over, and a louder, more innovative and aggressive newspaper reporting style changed the way events were reported and celebrities were made.

  Simultaneously, the Great Depression created a yearning for heroes and certainty, and Bradman with his hundreds, ‘Smithy’ with his endless flights and Phar Lap with his winning streaks came through time after time. All three were genuine media stars; their names sold papers and wirelesses, lured people to the track, the ground and the picture theatres at a time when money was tight. The newsreels survive, so past generations can be reminded and future generations can see just how good the revered heroes of the early ’30s were. That Bradman and Phar Lap were working class — The Don from the bush and Phar Lap from the stable of a battling trainer, with a brave young strapper always by his side — added extra colour to the story. Then, in 1932, Phar Lap succumbed in America and three years later, Smithy went missing too, over the Bay of Bengal, adding a tragic finale to stories that ended much too soon. Don Bradman might have gone the same way, cut down by England’s bodyline tactics in the summer of 1932–33 or by a combination of acute appendicitis and peritonitis in 1934, but he survived to build such a run-making record that he remains clearly the greatest batsman of all time; perhaps, statistically at least, the greatest sportsman of all time.

  It’s not implausible that Phar Lap might have established himself as the world’s best ever racehorse if only he’d survived his time in California in 1932. Following his remarkable triumph in the rich Agua Caliente Handicap, plans were afoot for him to race against North America’s very best middle-distance horses of that time, such as Mate, Twenty Grand and Equipoise, and after that, it was whispered, he might even go to England to face the cream of Europe.

  The thing about Phar Lap is that he didn’t just win his races, he made, as they liked to say, ‘hacks’ of his rivals. A big chestnut gelding who stood an imposing 17.1 hands and who at full speed galloped with an enormous stride, his name was derived from the Thai word for ‘lightning’. Cynics sometimes say he didn’t beat much, but fact is he had a habit of making excellent horses look second rate. Among his victims were future Australian racing hall-of-famers Amounis and Chatham, but the classic case is Nightmarch, the great New Zealander, winner of the 1929 Melbourne Cup. At Randwick in April 1930, in the AJC Plate, Phar Lap beat Nightmarch by what some seasoned observers thought was 20 lengths (the judge officially said 10), smashing the course record for two-and-a-quarter miles by six-and-a-half seconds and the Australasian record for the distance by a second, even though his jockey, Billy Elliott, slowed him down so much in the final furlong he was cantering as he passed the post. ‘Phar Lap Most Sensational Galloper of All Time’ shouted the headline in the Sydney sporting weekly The Referee. The stewards’ reaction was to call in Nightmarch’s jockey, Roy Reed, to ask him why he’d let Phar Lap win so easily. Then someone pointed out that Nightmarch, in running second, had also broken the old Randwick track record. Case dismissed. The mystery this time was why the inquiry was initiated in the first place.

  IT IS BECAUSE OF his iconic status that whenever a Phar Lap mystery is revisited it makes the news, even 80 years after his Melbourne Cup. Of all the whodunits, though, two stand out. One, the shotgun attack on Derby Day 1930, is the subject of this book. The other is Phar Lap’s death, which we firmly believe is no longer a mystery at all, despite recent suggestions that arsenic killed the champion and cruel theories that Tommy Woodcock might have been to blame. As we explained in 2000 in our book Phar Lap, and as we outline again in the postscript of this book, there is compelling evidence that Phar Lap’s death was caused by a common bacterium, which produced an enterotoxin that caused a disease syndrome known as Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis. However, Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis was not known about until the early 1980s and wasn’t linked to Phar Lap’s demise until nearly 20 years after that, which meant Tommy died in 1985 not knowing what had really transpired when his champion passed away. On different occasions to different people he whispered various theories as to what might have happened; if only he’d known for sure there was nothing he could have done to save his mate.

  In a way, the accusations aimed at Tommy in recent times provide a somewhat insidious parallel between the mystery of the 1930 Melbourne Cup and the long-running saga of Phar Lap’s death. This is one of the reasons we were so keen to see this new edition of this book published — not just to coincide with the eightieth anniversary of Phar Lap’s Cup, but also to highlight what a brave and terrific man Tommy was and what an important and revered figure in the history of Australian sport he remains. Those men in the Studebaker who aimed their weapon at Woodcock as he walked Phar Lap home from Caulfield racecourse didn’t care about him — if he got hurt, scared, humiliated or even killed in the process, so be it. It was the same when the ‘arsenic killed Phar Lap’ story emerged in 2006 and again in 2008 and 2010, when some outrageous stuff was said and written about a gentle bloke and fine horseman who wasn’t around to defend himself.

  We keep thinking back to a story that was once told to us of Tommy walking his favourite horse through the streets near Randwick racecourse, the two of them on the same path to greatness, the young strapper shouting firmly but still kindly, ‘Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!’ as he sought to keep control. Or of Tommy’s great fear that the task of carrying 68 kilograms in the 1931 Melbourne Cup might permanently damage Phar Lap and jockey Jim Pike saying kindly, ‘Don’t worry, son, I won’t knock him around.’ Or Tommy cradling Phar Lap’s head in the minutes before the champion died. Or Tommy gallantly putting himself between Phar Lap and the gun …

  Both times, before the 1930 Melbourne Cup and then when they accused him of killing his horse, it was disgraceful and wrong what they did to Tommy Woodcock. They shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it …

  CHAPTER ONE

  ONE HELL OF A STORY

  TOMMY WOODCOCK WAS SCARED. The whispers had been around all week, but at the track this morning they’d been more like a roar. Your horse’ll be poisoned, he was told, or shot, run over, bombed. It’ll happen today, tomorrow,
maybe even during the running of the Melbourne Cup itself. Be careful, son, be very careful. For the past two weeks, Woodcock’s boss, trainer Harry Telford, had been getting ugly phone calls along the same lines, and there’d been rumours about for months of a doping gang operating on Melbourne’s racetracks.

  So now, as the young horseman sat on a white pony leading his thoroughbred out of Caulfield racecourse and into a city he hardly knew, there was someone behind every fence. Every noise was a footstep, every shadow a gangster.

  Woodcock was in Melbourne for the racing festival all Australia knew as the ‘spring carnival’. This was the dawn of Derby Day, the Saturday before the Cup. It was hardly chilly, but this early in the morning of the first day of November the flared nostrils of a horse could still spit steam into the air. These were sights and sounds that Woodcock had grown up with and he loved them. In many ways where he found himself was glorious — walking the Cup favourite as the sky began to come to life, the air fresh, the day new, the figures on the track and in the on-course stable areas not so much ghostly as grey. But the stories on the track and the crank calls to Mr Telford nagged mightily at him. The poor man’s mind was racing.

  He looked up both sides of Manchester Grove, the street that ran from the back of the course up to Glenhuntly Road, and could make out a variety of houses on either side, market gardens, the odd stable, empty lots. A generation earlier, this was the city’s fringe; even now, it was not quite fully suburbia. Suddenly, a dog barked, and he felt like he jumped a mile.