Something for the Pain (5 page)

5.
Gerald and Geraldo

I WAS NAMED
after a racehorse. I knew this from an early age and considered it a distinction. I asked my father few questions about the equine Gerald. However, I learned from one of my father's brothers after my father had died that my namesake had shown much promise when young but was later such a disappointment that he was sold by his owners. (When my father died in my twenty-first year he was certainly disappointed in me, although he had not gone so far as to disown me.)

My father's name may well have appeared in race books as the owner or part-owner of Gerald (Black, blue sleeves, red band and cap) when he raced in and around Melbourne in the late 1930s. My father was certainly registered as the owner and the trainer of Geraldo (Yellow, black cap), which won a race at Kyneton and another at Cranbourne in 1950 but was later, like Gerald, sold at auction. And yet, my father would have paid not a penny towards the purchase price or the upkeep of either horse—he was a front man or a dummy for a man he sometimes called his best friend but who might be said to have been his evil genius. This was a man named Edward Ettershank, known always as Teddy. I had him in mind while I wrote about the character Lenny Goodchild in
Tamarisk Row
, my first published book. The boy Clement, the chief character of
Tamarisk Row
, has never met Lenny and thinks of him as a mysterious racing mastermind in faraway Melbourne. I met Teddy Ettershank a number of times but never knew what to make of him.

I'll write more about Teddy in due course. Just now, I want to write about another matter altogether. For most of my life, I've railed in vain against an absurd practice followed by race stewards when upholding a protest by connections of a horse finishing third against a horse finishing first. Such a protest is lodged when the first horse past the post has interfered so severely with a rival that the rival finishes not even second but third, having been passed near the post by an innocent bystander, so to speak—a horse not at all involved in the bumping or the crossing of paths. For as long as I can recall, the stewards, if they deem that interference prevented the victim from finishing ahead of the interferer, then go on to award first place to the innocent bystander, as I called the second placegetter. Presumably, the stewards are punishing the interfering horse by placing it behind the victim of the interference. And yet, this goes against common sense. The interfering horse beat the innocent bystander on its merits. If no interference had taken place, then the third horse past the post would have finished first and the innocent bystander would have finished third. This is the situation that the stewards should aim to restore. To put the matter another way: instead of punishing the interferer, the stewards should compensate the victim of interference by putting it ahead of the horse that cost it the race.

All of the above seems blindingly obvious to me, but every few years I seethe with anger and frustration when a protest by a third placegetter is upheld and the second placegetter is awarded the race. Then I seethe even more when I hear some know-all journalist or even one of the stewards trying to explain the crazy decision. The more they talk, the more confused they become. One of their favourite arguments is that the second placegetter must not be punished unjustly. Fair enough, but neither should the second placegetter be
rewarded
unjustly. Never, under any circumstances, was the second placegetter—the innocent bystander, as I have called it—going to win. If the race had been run without interference, the innocent one would have finished
third
, and the victim of interference would have won. I can't put it more simply than that, and yet the so-called experts have been getting it wrong during my seventy years as a follower of racing and probably for much longer.

Luckily, the stupidity that I'm complaining about prevails only once or twice every decade in Victoria. After one instance, about twenty years ago, I wrote a short letter to the editor of the weekly
Winning Post
. The letter was published, and for a few days I hoped that my few simple paragraphs would be read by someone of influence who would talk to someone else of even more influence, and so on, until an ancient wrong would be righted at last. Nothing of the sort happened. I thought at least one other reader might have written to the editor in support of my argument, but no such letter was published.

Perhaps ten years ago, after another of the monstrous injustices had been perpetrated, I found among the letters to the editor of
Winning Post
a letter rather like my earlier one. The writer was Bruno Cannatelli, a well-known photographer who attends every Melbourne race meeting. I had never spoken to Bruno but I did so a few weeks later at Sandown. I felt encouraged to be speaking to someone who shared my own views, but I wondered how we two could ever convince the thick-headed majority.

After I wrote that paragraph above about Teddy Ettershank, I left off writing for a few days. I travelled to Melbourne to see the Caulfield Cup. (I'm writing these pages in 2013, and the Cup was won by Fawkner, carrying Dark blue, white armbands and cap.) On the day before the Cup, I attended the annual dinner of the Thoroughbred Club of Australia. Along with ten others on my table, I was a guest of Kevin O'Brien. Kevin and his wife, Tanith, are proprietors of Lauriston Stud at Corinella (Orange and green quarters and quartered cap). Near me at the table was Bruno Cannatelli. I reminded him that we had met a few years before at Sandown and had shared our views on protests. I told him that I had since left Melbourne and hardly ever mixed with racing folk any more, whereas he was a widely known and well-respected racegoer. I urged him to go on fighting the good fight: to try to persuade anyone who would listen that a better way exists for the settling of protests by third placegetters against winners.

I may have sounded to Bruno as though I had given up the cause, but I'll make this one last effort. I hereby appeal to all fair-minded readers of these pages. Surely you can appreciate the injustice of the present system of amending the placings after a successful protest by the third placegetter against the first horse past the post. And surely, also, you can appreciate the fairness of my suggestion for changing the present system. Well then, fair-minded reader, would you please talk to other racegoers about these matters? Would you use whatever influence you might have to bring forward the day when the stewards use common sense and not quaint rules of their own whenever they amend the placings after a certain sort of protest?

Fawkner's Caulfield Cup is only a memory now, and I'm back at my desk trying to describe Teddy Ettershank. He was small enough to have been a jockey or, at least, a track rider. He must have applied, at some time, for a licence to train; my father told me once that the then chief steward, Alan Bell, had said to Teddy, the hopeful applicant, ‘As long as I'm chairman of the VRC stewards, Ettershank, you'll never be a licensed trainer.' Nowadays, a person in Teddy's position would seek legal advice and would exercise his right of appeal to this and that higher authority. In Teddy's heyday and mine, the issuing or the withdrawal of licences was wholly the province of the stewards. All their hearings and enquiries were carried out behind closed doors. An aggrieved person could appeal against the stewards' decision but only to the committee of the Victoria Racing Club, the employers of the stewards. (I am not at all implying that racing was less ably managed then than now. In fact, I incline to the opposite view.) Anyway, Teddy was never a licensed trainer or even a registered owner, although he certainly owned and trained many a horse, using my father and others as front men or dummies, and I suspect that he enjoyed his reputation as a man of mystery. In Teddy's time racing, as I've explained by now, was much concerned with secret knowledge, and Teddy was widely believed to have an abundance of such knowledge. I never saw him followed by a knot of spectators, as Jim Jenkins and other noted punters were sometimes followed, but if Teddy and his trusted man, Gerald Lavers (another Gerald!), had backed a horse, news of their doing so was soon all through the betting ring.

What seems most remarkable about Teddy as I recall him today, three or four decades after his death, is that he was never observed to engage in any sort of paid employment. Put plainly, he never had a job, a position, a calling. My father said sometimes that Teddy lived by his wits. I wonder how Teddy described his occupation on his taxation returns, assuming that he bothered to submit them. The expression
professional punter
was not much used in the years when Teddy was most active. Persons describing themselves thus in recent decades have mostly turned out to be launderers of money gained from other sources. No such suspicion was ever attached to Teddy. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I'm obliged to report that Teddy Ettershank was the only man I ever met who supported himself wholly by betting on racehorses.

When I first heard of Teddy, he was a widower and aged probably in his forties. He owned a comfortable house in the Travancore estate, in what was then the better part of Ascot Vale and not far from Flemington racecourse. He lived with his mother and Gerald, his only child. Teddy always drove a near-new car. He sent his son to Melbourne Grammar and later to university. When Teddy was in his fifties, so I heard afterwards, he married a much younger woman and became the father of at least two more children. To the best of my knowledge, he financed all this from the proceeds of his betting.

My father, as I wrote earlier, called Teddy his best friend, but even as a boy I saw that the two men were not equals: my father was more like a client or even a hanger-on. My father visited Teddy often and phoned him even more often. I can't recall my father's receiving any phone calls from Teddy, and I suspect that Teddy's one visit to our house, in 1950, when we lived in Pascoe Vale, was for the purpose of taking my father in haste to Geraldo's stable, there to pose as the horse's true owner and so to avert some possible crisis with officialdom. Teddy's information certainly helped my father to collect some lucrative bets. On the evening of Geraldo's win at Cranbourne, I saw my father counting out a share of his winnings to my mother in their bedroom—the bedspread was covered with brick-red ten-pound notes, each of them worth much more than five hundred dollars today. In 1956, after my father had had to sell our house to pay his gambling debts, he won the deposit on another house by backing one of Teddy's tips in a race at Mornington. (The horse was named Valley Vista—Pale-green and purple hoops—and had poor form, and yet it won easily at short odds, causing my father to suspect, and to whisper to me under pain of secrecy, that Teddy had organised, or had at least been privy to, an old-fashioned ring-in.) It may well be true, and my father sometimes ruefully postulated it, that if he had never followed his own opinions when betting but had backed only Teddy's recommended horses, he would have had a successful career as a punter, but this is to suggest that Teddy was more open and more benevolent than he actually was.

Towards the end of
Tamarisk Row
, Augustine Killeaton has one last, desperate bet and loses. As a result, he has to flee from the city of Bassett and the bookmakers that he has no hope of paying. He makes his ruinous bet after receiving some incomplete information from the man that he calls the Master, Lenny Goodchild, in faraway Melbourne. Augustine is too ashamed to contact Goodchild afterwards, and the next week the horse that ruined him lands a massive plunge, as a racing writer would put it. Augustine is more distressed to have been left out of Goodchild's operation than to have missed out on winning enough to settle his debts. Nothing so dramatic ever happened between my father and Teddy. I even recall Teddy's visiting my father in hospital on the day before he died unexpectedly. And yet I had in mind while I invented my fictional goings-on a few occasions when my father seemed on the point of admitting that Teddy sometimes kept from him things that my father deserved to be told and one occasion when my father was telling me about the disappointing career of my namesake in the years before my birth. He recalled a day when Gerald had run unplaced at Moonee Valley. My father had backed the horse heavily and he wondered aloud in my hearing whether Teddy had arranged that day to have the horse beaten and had absentmindedly, or even deliberately, not told my father.

I called this section after two horses linked to me by name. When I planned the section, I intended to end it with the information that both horses, Gerald and Geraldo, were sold in mid-career and afterwards did surprisingly well for their new owners and trainers. Gerald won a number of races in Western Australia and Geraldo in the Wangaratta district of Victoria. I was going to speculate that I was somewhat like my horsey namesakes, in that I performed better after having got away from the influence of my father. Even his early death played into my hands. How could I have written
Tamarisk Row
while he was still alive?

Yes, I named this section after two horses, but it was taken over, you might say, by the man who secretly owned the horses and had such a powerful influence on my father. I don't think often nowadays about my father but, whenever I do, I think also about Teddy Ettershank, who could probably be said to have been my father's hero. Or, rather, I think about a man named Ettershank who might be Teddy himself but is more likely Teddy's father or even grandfather. My father once told me that Teddy's forebears had been racing men from around Flemington for several generations. Ettershank, the image-man in my mind, always appears to me as though he stands in close conversation with another image-man on the day in September when the first north wind blows from the inland across Melbourne and then across the bay and out into Bass Strait. The connotations are obvious to me. Spring and early warm weather in Melbourne are linked with the Spring Racing Carnival, perhaps the greatest racing carnival in the world, as European trainers and owners have only recently learned to their surprise, and the first north wind reminds persons such as myself that another Spring Carnival is in the offing.