Something for the Pain Read Free Page A

followers would organise a so-called plunge. Commission agents well known to leading bookmakers would descend on the ring at a pre-arranged time and would place credit bets of hundreds or even thousands of pounds all at once and before the bookmakers could reduce their odds. In the great days of betting, the chief concern of the connections of a horse was to obtain the highest possible odds on the day when it stood the best chance of winning. Many a horse was ‘set’ for some or another race months in advance. The stewards did their best to ensure that every horse ran always on its merits or ‘tried’, but in most races the also-rans included horses that were ‘cold’ or ‘dead’—their jockeys were under instructions to have them finish in the ruck so that bookmakers would bet lucrative odds against them on the day when the owner, the trainer, and those in the know launched their plunge and the horse was at last allowed to show its true ability.
    F. H. Slamen (Brown, yellow stripes and cap) owned a chain of newsagencies in the 1950s and also numerous racehorses that were spread among several trainers. It was said of Mr Slamen that he wanted his horses either to win or to run last. A typical horse bearing the brown and the yellow might start five or six times over a period of many months, finishing always well back. Then, with no warning, the same horse would one day be backed off the map, as the saying had it. To use another racecourse expression, they jumped out of trees to back the horse (meaning that they had been hiding beforehand in the foliage to avoid being seen by bookmakers who, if they had got wind of a plunge, would have offered much-reduced odds).
    The bookmakers, of course, did not meekly await form reversals and fierce plunges. Leading bookmakers paid for information from track watchers at morning gallops and, according to rumour, from stable spies or disaffected employees. Trainers resorted to counter measures. Ray McLaren (Red, white sash and cap, blue sleeves), an astute trainer from Mentone, needing to give a certain horse one last trial against the clock before a betting tilt, took the horse—Fordell, I think it was—all the way to Pakenham and galloped it at noon on the deserted track.
    My father often assured me that racing was even more noted for its plots and intrigues during his heyday, which ran from the early 1920s until the late 1930s. Small wonder, then, that he sat patiently beside a young drunk one night at the rear of a dance hall in the south-west of Victoria and pieced together the details of an elaborate plan. A certain horse from the Warrnambool district, a jumper with poor form, was going to be taken by rail to Sydney in a few weeks and be backed there at long odds to win a steeplechase. (Jumps races were still run in New South Wales at that time.) The rest of the story is easily told. My father travelled himself to Sydney and won several hundred pounds on the horse. (This was more than he could have earned in a year from the labouring jobs that he then worked at.) Yes, this much is easily told, and my father told it to me often, but I can only guess at the more interesting details. Who was the blabbing drunk? I don’t care to know his name, but I would dearly like to know how a pie-eyed loudmouth was privy to the plotting of a group of masterminds of the turf. Was he blurting out his precious information into the air around him before my father overheard him, or did he single out my father and whisper to him alone? Was he not dancing because he had arrived at the hall already drunk, or had he become drunk to hide his shyness or his incompetence as a dancer?
    I can readily imagine a number of versions of the story, but if I know anything about my father I can state that he would have much preferred to sit and listen to the drunk than to ask some young woman onto the dance floor. Like me, he was hopeless at dancing and ill at ease in female company. Racing was often for him what