THIS WEEK’S STOP ON the PGA Tour is the Dean & DeLuca Invitational at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, a tournament that for much of its life was known as the Colonial National Invitation. In 1960, a 39-year-old professional from Sydney named Kel Nagle almost won the ‘Colonial’: his putt at the final hole hit the cup and bounced away, leaving him a shot behind Julius Boros. That result is in the record book. What is less well known is something else Kel Nagle did at the Colonial Country Club that year — a seemingly unimportant act at the time that actually had a huge influence on the history of golf and how we describe the sport’s biggest tournaments. Nagle had hardly played in America before the 1960 Colonial. He had missed the cut when making his debut at the Masters five weeks earlier. But then he got his hands on some new clubs, a set of Spalding irons, and though he was contracted to PGF, on the urging of his good friend Peter Thomson he sought and gained permission to make the swap. Most significant of all, he bought a new driver at the Colonial. ‘I had been having a lot of trouble with my tee shots,’ he told the Australian golf writer Don Lawrence of his new purchase. ‘But this one has given me terrific confidence.’ Another famous Australian sports scribe, Phil Tresidder, recalled Nagle reminiscing years later: ‘If you had told me to hit to the left or to the right, or down the middle, I could have done it with that driver.’ A little less than two months after Nagle discovered that driver in the Colonial clubhouse, he won the Centenary British Open at St Andrews. It is impossible to underrate the significance of the Centenary Open and Nagle’s victory in the story of golf’s major championships. Without that driver, who knows how the story might have unfolded …. THE TERM ‘MAJOR’ IS as much a part of big-time golf today as ‘Grand Slam’ is synonymous with tennis and ‘Gold Medals’ are won at the Olympics. It was not always so. When Kel Nagle sank his final putt at St Andrews — to beat Arnold Palmer, then the undisputed champion of the golf world — no one talked about this being the popular Australian’s first ‘major’, or the sixth win by an Australian in a ‘major’. When Boros won the Colonial no one referred to him, the 1952 US Open champion, as a former ‘major’ winner. The term wasn’t in golf’s lexicon. Not yet. There had been a ‘grand slam’ of golf: the foursome of championships won by Bobby Jones in 1930. When Jones won the US Open and Amateur and then the British Open and Amateur, it was seen as a phenomenal achievement, something that might never be repeated. Professional golf had nothing to match it; through the 1950s, it was impossible to get any international agreement as to what were the four biggest pro tournaments in the world. Palmer changed that when he made plans to enter the 1960 British Open. In April, he won his second Masters and then during the US Open, which he was favoured to win, he announced he was going for a ‘slam’ — Masters, US and British Opens, and the US PGA Championship — in an article in the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The odds against it must be at least 1000-1,’ Palmer wrote. ‘Yet I feel confident that, with a little luck, it can be done. I want to be the one to do it.’ Palmer then went out and shot a final-round 65 to overcome a seven-shot deficit and win the US Open. Legend has it that Palmer and his long-time friend and ghost writer, Bob Drum of the Pittsburgh Press, invented the concept of the ‘grand slam’ of professional golf on the flight from the US Open to Ireland, where Palmer was going to play in the Canada Cup (now the World Cup) before heading to Scotland. In fact, the press — inspired by that Evening Post story — had jumped on the idea even before they were on the plane. A United Press International (UPI) wire story written straight after the US Open revealed that ‘Arnold Palmer is en route to Europe today in search of the greatest grand slam in golfing history’. The Associated Press’s report of the US Open final round suggested Palmer was chasing ‘the first grand slam in pro history’. Before long, even Gene Sarazen was in the act, talking about Palmer’s potential achievement as the ‘greatest grand slam in golfing history, better than that of Jones in 1930’. This was a concept whose time had come. Palmer and Drum liked to describe the four tournaments that made up their Slam as ‘majors’ and that caught on as well. When the ‘World Series of Golf Champions’ (more popularly known as the ‘World Series of Golf’ ) was introduced in 1962, featuring just the winners of the Masters, US Open, British Open and the PGA, it was promoted as ‘a 36-hole television package designed to match the winners of the four major golf championships’. Palmer used the term as a reflex. ‘I’m going to concentrate on winning the major championships,’ he told reporters in 1964. ‘I still want to win the four major titles in one year and I hope I don’t lose that ambition for a while.’ NOWADAYS, EVERY WINNER OF those four big tournaments, starting with Willie Park senior at the inaugural British Open in 1860, is considered a major champion. Another commonly accepted practice with golf historians is to divide the British Open story into two eras: pre- and post-Palmer. In the years after the second Great War, especially following Ben Hogan famous victory at Carnoustie in 1953 (his only British Open appearance), US interest in the Open declined. In 1958, when Australia’s Peter Thomson won his fourth Open in five years, there were no Americans with a genuine winning chance in the field. A year later, there were no Americans at all. Long-haul flights were expensive and a grind. The prizemoney was less than that on offer at most US tournaments. It was just a quarter that awarded at the Masters. As well, the British Open had stringent qualifying rules — everyone had survive a 36-hole qualifier just to make the final field. Palmer, a genuine golf traditionalist and the rising star of world golf, saw beyond all this. Walter Hagen had told him, ‘Arnie, you ain’t nothin’ ’til you win the British Open.’ Palmer duly entered the 1960 Centenary Open Championship and quickly captured the hearts of UK fans with his aggressive style, unassuming nature and willingness to accept, even embrace, everything that was different about British golf. His presence doubled gate receipts and other American golfers followed him. Jack Nicklaus made his first British Open appearance in 1962; his first victory (of three) came in 1966. Another American, Phil Rodgers, lost a playoff to New Zealand’s Bob Charles in 1963. Tony Lema won in 1964. By the time Nicklaus beat his countryman Doug Sanders in a dramatic playoff in 1970, the Open was as prestigious as any of golf’s four biggest tournaments. In the US papers of July 1960, Palmer’s Open challenge was the biggest story in golf, more important than Art Wall’s win in the richer Canadian Open that took place at the same time. The renowned US golf writer Curt Sampson describes the 1960 Open as ‘the most important Open of the modern era’. His fellow golf historian David Hamilton, recalls ‘the beginning of a golden era for the Open’. ‘The only thing I regret about it,’ Palmer told the Independent’s Brian Viner in 2011, as he recalled the Centenary Open, ‘is that Kel Nagle beat me.’ NAGLE WAS HARDLY A star attraction when he arrived at St Andrews. He was 39 and competing in just his fourth major. Back in 1936, he had landed a job as a trainee professional at the Pymble Golf Club in Sydney, but six years of war meant he didn’t appear in an Australian Open until 1946, when he finished nine shots behind Ozzie Pickworth. He won the Australian PGA Championship in 1949, the NSW Open in 1950 and three straight WA Opens (1950–1952), but didn’t announce himself as a true top-liner until 1953, when he dominated the $15,000 McWilliams Wines tournament at The Australian course in Sydney, winning by seven shots from Argentina’s Robert de Vicenzo. More than once, de Vicenzo was seen shaking his head as Nagle sank another long-range birdie putt. ‘I would like to play the American circuit, but the expenses are far too high,’ Nagle said, when asked if he wanted to compete overseas. To this point, his only experience in a big foreign tournament was the 1951 British Open, when he finished in a tie for 19th, 14 strokes behind Max Faulkner. In 1954, Nagle and Thomson won the Canada Cup (now the World Cup) in Montreal. Twelve months later, using the round-the-world ticket the Canada Cup organisers had awarded him, Nagle ventured on from defending that title with Thomson in Washington DC (they finished third) to St Andrews for the Open, where he finished in a tie for 19th, 11 strokes behind Thomson. That was it for Nagle and majors until 1960. Again armed with a round-the-world ticket after he and Thomson won their second Canada Cup title at Royal Melbourne in 1959, Nagle played at Augusta for the first time and recorded his second-place finish at the Colonial. But neither he nor Thomson stayed in America for the US Open, preferring to head across the Atlantic to prepare for the Canada Cup at Portmarnock in Ireland and then the British Open. Legend has it he was 100–1 going into the Open, though that seems an extravagant price for the reigning Australian Open champion, a man who’d won more than 30 times in Australia and New Zealand, had combined with Thomson to win two Canada Cups, and who just seven weeks earlier had almost claimed the Colonial. Perhaps his disappointing effort in qualifying, when he shot 74-71 to finish 10 strokes behind the leading qualifier, defending champion Gary Player of South Africa, swayed the bookies. Or maybe they listened to Don Lawrence, who dismissed Nagle’s chances, writing in the Melbourne Age on tournament eve that Thomson was Australia’s only hope. Sydney’s Bill Fitter, golf columnist for the Sun-Herald, was more optimistic, arguing that St Andrews would suit Nagle, whom he described as ‘Australia’s second string’. In America, the Pittsburgh Press had Palmer as the 7–2 favourite, ahead of Thomson and Player. Will Grimsley from the Associated Press reported things slightly differently. He described Palmer as the ‘underdog’ and reckoned Thomson was favourite, ahead of Player and the American. The Glasgow Herald’s Cyril Horne was another who believed the Open was a three-horse race. ‘Palmer, Player and PW Thomson (Australia), who apart from last year at Muirfield has been winning or almost winning the Open since 1952, who won here in 1955 and who was second here in 1957, and who loves the Old Course as much as some of his contemporaries and rivals hate it, form a group from which nine out of 10 people here think the centenary champion is bound to come,’ Horne wrote. THE BOOKIES MIGHTN’T HAVE noticed that Nagle was hitting the ball nice and straight with his new clubs, but Thomson certainly liked his friend’s chances. He showed Nagle how to keep out of the infamous St Andrews bunkers and where he had to aim his approach shots away from the flags. ‘It was like signposting the course for me.’ Nagle told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Stone in 2010. The field was quite strong, the best in years. Belgium’s Flory Van Donck, who just a fortnight earlier had won the Canada Cup’s individual event at Portmarnock, failed to qualify. So too did Dave Thomas, the man Thomson had beaten in a playoff at Royal Lytham in 1958, and Max Faulkner, the 1951 champion. Left among the entries were not just the four-time Open winner Thomson and the defending champion (Player), but also the reigning Open champions of Australia (Nagle), USA (Palmer), South Africa (Player), Spain (Sebastian Miguel) and Argentina (Leopoldo Ruiz). As well, there was de Vicenzo, a future Open champion (in 1967), Dai Rees of Wales, captain of the British Ryder Cup team that had stunned the Americans in 1957, and the Englishmen, Harry Weetman and Eric Brown, two more Ryder Cup stalwarts. What only those closest to Nagle knew was that he was battling an annoying ache in the little finger of his right hand. Throughout the week of the Open he’d apply ointment to the finger, bathe it in hot and cold water to try to loosen it up, and shake hands with his left hand. But he wouldn’t worry about seeing a specialist until after the Open, when he returned to Sydney. IN ASSESSING THE 1960 British Open’s place in history, a crucial factor emerges: it was a fantastic tournament. The crowds were substantial; the golf was often magnificent; the tension was palpable. The first round, played on a Wednesday, belonged to De Vicenzo, who fired a 67 to lead by two from Nagle and another Argentinian, Fidel de Luca. Nagle and de Luca were both out in 38, back in 31, comebacks that impressed Cyril Horne. ‘St Andrains were dumbfounded that anyone should treat the inward half of their great pride so scurvily,’ Horne wrote. ‘Nagle went daft on the greens on the inward half, holing putts of 10 feet at the 10th, 12 feet at the 14th, 12 yards at the 15th, 4 yards at the 16th, and one of 30 yards from off the green at the Road Hole [the 17th].’ In doing all this, Nagle set the tone for his tournament. Throughout, except for two hiccups during the final round, his putting was superb. Horne described him as ‘uncannily accurate’ from two to six yards, concluding: ‘Nagle won the championship with his putter.’ This was perhaps most evident on day three, when Nagle clearly out-putted de Vicenzo. ‘If Roberto had putted at all over the first nine on that third round he would surely have won,’ Nagle recalled for The Scotsman in 2005. ‘He missed about four or five putts of less than four feet for birdies. Had he made them, he’d have had a big lead.’ The two had both shot 67s in the second round. Nagle’s 71 to de Vicenzo’s 75 gave the Australian a two-shot lead after 54 holes. Palmer — who’d started 70-71 — was lurking, a further two shots back, and he would have been even closer had he not three-putted each of the last two holes. Reporters wondered if he’d been distracted by the storm that swept over St Andrews as he completed his round. Player was eight off the lead, seemingly out of contention, while Thomson’s challenge was over after a disappointing third-round 75. In normal circumstances, the final 36 holes would have been completed on this third day. The 1960 Open was originally scheduled to take place over three days: 18 holes on the Wednesday and the Thursday; 36 holes on the Friday. But the tempest dumped a flood upon the St Andrews fairways, and a river surged cross the 18th green. The final round was delayed until the Saturday. This hadn’t happened since 1910, when 40-year-old James Braid won the ‘Jubilee’ Open. THOSE WHO HAD TIME to scan the Glasgow Herald’s preview of the final round would have observed the paper’s suspicion that De Vicenzo was more fearful of the threat posed by Palmer than of Nagle, even though the Australian led the field by two. Golf World magazine would later write that most observers at this point believed a Palmer victory was a formality. As if to prove the point, the American promptly birdied the first two holes, to get within two of the lead. But things then calmed down, and all three leaders went out in 34. De Vicenzo dropped a shot at 11, Palmer gained one at 13, but the mood didn’t really change until the 15th, when Nagle, to general astonishment, three putted. At the Road Hole, Palmer risked all by going for the pin and almost played the perfect shot: the ball teetered on the back of the green, which would have left him a three-metre putt for a three, but then … slowly … cruelly … it slipped down and away towards the road beyond the putting surface. The next 15 minutes were full of drama. Palmer’s playing partner, Sebastian Miguel, had finished in similar territory and tried to lob his ball onto the green’s edge, so it could trickle down to the hole. But it came up short. Palmer grabbed for his putter, and produced a remarkable, impeccably judged shot, which left him just half a yard for his four. From the fairway, Nagle watched the American sink his putt and then played the hole conventionally, as Thomson had shown him, leaving his approach on the front edge of the green. He putted up to about eight feet. Palmer then produced a wonderful wedge to the 72nd flag, inducing a roar as loud as anything ever heard on the British golf course. He had three feet left for a three. Nagle was by nature a quick player. He could have rushed and putted before Palmer. Instead, he waited … and saw in the distance Palmer make the birdie that equalled Bobby Locke’s record low four-round score for an Open Championship at St Andrews. There was a buzz across the old course, and gasps and animated chatter around the 17th green, which only slowly faded to a whisper. Now came the moment when Kel Nagle confirmed what Australian and New Zealand golf fans had known for a number of years, the moment he proved he was an exceptional, not just a very good player … ‘If ever a brave shot was played by anyone in the history of the game of golf, it was by Nagle on the 71st green,’ reported Golfing magazine. ‘Here indeed was a test of nerves,’ wrote Cyril Horne. ‘But he maintained his reputation ...’ ‘It was the best putt I ever hit,’ Nagle told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Rod Humphries in 1976. ‘It had a right-to-left burrow. It never looked like missing.’ Over the four days, Nagle had gone 3–3–4–4 on this tough-as-they-come hole, sinking long or awkward putts every time. Palmer went 5–5–5–4, three putting on all but the final day. ‘There’s no question about it, that 17th sure is a bad one,’ Palmer lamented later, when he was asked what he thought of the Road Hole. As Nagle walked to the 18th tee, he saw a clearly excited Don Lawrence. ‘You need a four to win,’ Lawrence advised. ‘Yeah,’ Nagle replied flatly. ‘I just heard.’ He proceeded to play the final hole perfectly … almost. His drive was typically smooth to the left of the fairway and he then lobbed a nine iron to just three feet. But he mucked up the putt that would have left him on 277, an Open record. His final putt, just a few inches, was made without a flourish. Palmer was one shot back; de Vicenzo, England’s Bernard Hunt and South Africa’s Harold Henning were tied for third on 282. It was, by all accounts, a hugely popular victory. ‘Nagle was rarely off the correct line in his long game,’ Horne wrote. ‘He merely completed with his putter what he had started with his driver and his irons.’ Pat Ward-Thomas, the Guardian’s long-time golf correspondent, argued Nagle’s performance was ‘as fine an example of golfing character as any I have known’. NAGLE ALWAYS MADE A point of highlighting Peter Thomson’s role in guiding him to victory. The then four-time champion (he would win again in 1965) had one more contribution. ‘When he finished, he had no way of making it through the crowd to this hotel, but he needed a jacket for the presentation,’ Thomson wrote in his 2005 book, Lessons I Have Learned. ‘I’d finished some time earlier so I took off my jacket and gave it to him. In the picture taken of him, holding the trophy, he is wearing my jacket.’ After the presentation, with trophies still in hand, Nagle was confronted by a large group of autograph seekers, most of them children. ‘Just wait till I put these inside, kids,’ he said, looking down at the prized trophy nestled on his forearm. ‘Then I’ll be right out.’ Which is exactly what happened. Despite his aching finger and with two policemen controlling the queue, the new champion signed for half an hour, until the last book and scrap of paper were signed. It was the same in Sydney, when he arrived home four days later and was given a reception at the Sydney Town Hall. In August, he headed to Perth, to Lake Karrinyap, to defend his Australian Open crown, and finished in a tie for fourth, the only professional in the top nine, four strokes behind 22-year-old Bruce Devlin. Only then could he finally give that damn little finger the rest it had needed all along. IT WAS PALMER, BY venturing to St Andrews and then returning to claim the next two championships, who revived the British Open. However, by defeating the world’s best and most charismatic golfer on the sport’s most famous course, and doing so in such a dignified, nerveless manner, Nagle provided the championship with a sense of quality it might not have had if the iconic American had won comfortably in 1960. Because of what happened at the Centenary Open, there was no suggestion Palmer’s wins at Birkdale (in 1961) and Troon (1962) were soft or easy. At the same time, the concept of the Grand Slam refused to go away. But with every year it becomes clearer that the Slam is a desperately hard thing to complete. Since 1960, only Jack Nicklaus (1972), Tiger Woods (2002) and Jordan Spieth (2015) have won the Masters and the US Open in the same calendar year. Only five men in history — Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Nicklaus and Woods — have won all of the Masters, US and British Opens, and PGA during their careers. ‘Winning majors happens one at a time,’ Tom Watson said in 1982. Victory at the PGA Championship was the one he was never able to achieve. Kel Nagle didn’t win another major. He did, though, compile a superb Open record through the 1960s: second in 1962, fourth in 1963 and 1966, fifth in 1961 and 1965, ninth in 1969. He won the French and Swiss Opens in 1961 and the Canadian Open in 1964, edging Palmer once again, lost an 18-hole playoff at the 1965 US Open to Player, and continued to stockpile tournaments in Australia and New Zealand until 1977, when he won the Western Australian PGA Championship four months after his 56th birthday. In total, Nagle won more than 60 times in Australia. He also recorded another runner-up finish at the Colonial, missing out by a shot to Doug Sanders in 1961. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2007. He died in January 2015, aged 94, and was lauded across the world of golf. ‘We had some exciting times together, especially at my first Open Championship when he won and I finished second,’ Arnold Palmer said fondly. Understandably, no one remembered the 1960 Colonial, but maybe they should have — not so much for Kel Nagle’s near miss at the 72nd hole that year but rather for the driver he bought while he was there. The Centenary Open might have been very different but for that transaction. Whenever we hear the terms ‘major’ and ‘grand slam’, we should think of Palmer, Nagle and their thrilling encounter of 56 years ago. This week, we should also think a little of Colonial and its part in the drama. And of what it all meant to the story of the game these two remarkable men played so very well. PHAR LAP DIED AT around 8.30am (Australian Eastern Standard Time) on April 6, 1932. This was around 2.30pm on April 5 in San Francisco, where the death occurred. For the next 68 years there was much conjecture as to the cause of the great horse’s death, until Peter Thompson and I released our biography, Phar Lap, in which we demonstrated that the cause of death was almost certainly a bacterial infection known as Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis. In 2006, a new argument was put that Phar Lap had succumbed to arsenic poisoning. This theory received much coverage, even though Phar Lap did not show the signs of a horse suffering from arsenic poisoning in the last 24 hours of his life and the champion’s post-mortem specifically ruled out arsenic as a possible cause of death. Since then, there have many claims made that Tommy Woodcock was to blame for the wonder horse’s death. This is wrong ... THE VRC HANDICAPPER GAVE Phar Lap 10.10 (68kg) for the 1931 Melbourne Cup, which meant he would have smashed Carbine’s weight-carrying record had he won. However, he finished eighth as a 3-1 favourite. It was the first time the champion had started at odds that generous since September 1929, and the first time since February 1930 he’d finished worse than second in a race. By Cup Day 1931, Phar Lap was a tired horse. Soon after, however, he was on a boat to New Zealand, on to California, and then down the long road to the Agua Caliente racetrack situated just on the southern side of the US–Mexican border. There, in the rich Agua Caliente Handicap, Phar Lap produced one of his greatest performances, sitting four or five wide until he took off five furlongs from home to win by two lengths. That one win was enough for some US racing historians to rate Phar Lap one of the greatest horses to race in North America. Sixteen days later, Phar Lap was dead, in what many thought to be sinister circumstances. For 68 years, from 1932 to 2000, one of Australia’s enduring legends was that the great champion had been poisoned. He had lived a heroic life and Australians wanted to believe that he was extraordinary. When the famous racecaller Bill Collins described the finish of the 1986 Cox Plate with that wonderful phrase, ‘Bonecrusher races into equine immortality,’ he eloquently captured how we feel about our best-loved stars of the turf. Thus, when Phar Lap’s mortality was so tragically confirmed and remained unexplained, we had to believe that something sinister had occurred. Ignorance of bacteria and how they worked made it easy to blame the dark forces of evil that we knew ran amok in that crime-ridden society of North America. In 2000, when Peter Thompson and I published our findings about the actual cause of death — a humble bacterial infection whose existence was unknown until 1982 — it was widely acclaimed as the solution to the mystery. Six years later, when scientists discovered two forms of arsenic in some hair from Phar Lap’s mane, sensationalists in the media and opportunists in politics resuscitated the prejudices of the past. ‘Australia’s greatest racehorse, the mighty Phar Lap, may solve the mystery of his own death,’ was how the then Minister for Innovation in Victoria, former premier John Brumby, began a media release in October 2006, ignoring the fact that in our book we had put forward a compelling case that the cause of death was a common bacteria, which produced an enterotoxin that caused a disease syndrome known as Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis. Mr Brumby was alluding to analysis that was being undertaken using synchrotron technology, which had revealed traces of arsenic in hairs from the stuffed hide of Phar Lap — the famous exhibit at the Melbourne Museum. In June 2008 further analysis allegedly ‘proved’ Phar Lap died of arsenic poisoning, a contention that was again argued in an article published in the journal Angewandte Chemie in April 2010. However, in that article the authors conceded that ‘many complexities in the analysis (and interpretation of results) of arsenic in hair exist’. They also contended that Phar Lap’s symptoms and autopsy results ‘are consistent with ingestion of a large dose of arsenic just prior death’. THE SYNCHROTRON ANALYSIS DETERMINED that arsenic found in the shaft of the hairs from Phar Lap’s mane had not been used in the taxidermy process. By making assumptions about the rate of growth of the hair, estimations were made that the horse ingested this arsenic anywhere between 10 and 40 hours before his death. From this came the superficial and hysterical reaction: ‘Arsenic is bad, there was arsenic in his system, so arsenic killed him.’ But there are alternative explanations for the arsenic found in Phar Lap’s hide, none of which carry a sinister undertone. It is true, for example, that hair absorbs substances via the blood supply to the follicle, but as research on other taxidermied museum specimens shows hair can also absorb arsenic from the environment. Dunnett and Lees, in a paper published in Research in Veterinary Science in 2003, proved that external contamination can cause the incorporation of drugs into all parts of the hair, including the follicle. The original theories about arsenic poisoning being the cause of Phar Lap’s death came about because trees adjoining the paddock in which he had been grazing were sprayed with a pesticide containing lead arsenate; there were fears that Phar Lap had eaten grass onto which the pesticide had fallen, and that this was his undoing. The autopsy refuted this notion, but it is still possible some or even most of the arsenic in Phar Lap’s hair came from the pesticide spray landing on Phar Lap’s skin and being absorbed into his hair, without causing him harm. Several other animals in the same paddock with Phar Lap were unaffected by that ‘contaminated’ grass. It is also well recognised that the nature of hair, even its colour, can affect the amount of arsenic taken up from the blood supply and from the environment. Other variables include the rate of take-up from the blood and the pace of growth of the hair. So conclusions about how much arsenic Phar Lap had ingested, or when he had ingested it, must remain vague at best. But for those so easily convinced arsenic was the culprit, the next question was obvious: ‘How was the great horse poisoned?’ And the most popular answer in the media was that Tommy Woodcock did it. For example, on June 19, 2008, the Melbourne Age reported: ‘It was probably strapper Tommy Woodcock who may have mistakenly put too much arsenic in one of his tonics for his beloved Phar Lap.’ Similarly, Agence France-Presse stated: ‘The latest theory surrounding Phar Lap’s demise was that the strapper that accompanied the gelding to the United States, Tommy Woodcock, used too much arsenic while making up a batch of tonic and accidentally killed his charge.’ At the same time, an old notebook, which once belonged to Harry Telford and contained a series of recipes for tonics, some of which included arsenic, was found (and then purchased by Museum Victoria for a reported $37,000). This was used as more evidence of Woodcock’s guilt, even though it is common knowledge that most trainers of the 1930s safely used arsenic-based tonics; some trainers were still doing so as recently as the early 1980s. To compare the amount of arsenic in such tonics against that needed to kill a thoroughbred is akin to comparing a test tube to a bucket. CRUELLY, THE PEOPLE ACCUSING Tommy Woodcock of making a colossal, grievous and stupid error never stopped to think there are alternative explanations for the synchrotron’s findings. Much worse, they did not consider the known and unchallenged facts: that at the time of Phar Lap’s death, university experts specifically searched for evidence of arsenic poisoning and could only find small amounts, more likely to be beneficial than detrimental to the horse; and that the clinical signs and progress of Phar Lap’s rapidly deteriorating condition were a text book presentation of Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis and entirely inconsistent with arsenic poisoning. First, the clinical signs. In 2001, Dr Stan Casteel, Professor in Research Toxicology at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the United States, published a paper entitled Metal Toxicosis in Horses in which he wrote, ‘Clinical signs of acute inorganic arsenic toxicosis in horses include drooling, trembling, ataxia, depression, colic, recumbency and green-to-black watery diarrhoea.’ Six years later, Dr Sally Church, a senior lecturer in equine medicine and surgery at the University of Melbourne, told Graeme Putt, co-author with Pat McCord of the 2009 book Phar Lap: the Untold Story, that acute severe arsenic poisoning in horses is reported to cause severe haemorrhagic diarrhoea. It is a natural reflex, when a horse is sick, for a veterinary surgeon to examine the horse’s droppings. According to Tommy Woodcock’s account, in the hours before Phar Lap died, the champion’s vet, Bill Nielsen, did so and then stated, ‘Gee, he don’t seem bad.’ This strongly suggests Phar Lap was not suffering from any form of diarrhoea. Even more importantly, all reported cases of arsenic poisoning in horses are consistent on one critical point: the time from the appearance of clinical signs to death is always a minimum of 24 hours. Woodcock slept in the stall opposite Phar Lap. When he went to sleep on the night of April 4 1932, the horse was okay. The next morning, Phar Lap’s breath was hot, he was sweating and he wouldn’t accept the sugar cube Woodcock offered him first thing every sunrise. Not long after 2 pm, just nine hours later, the great horse was gone. This would not have been enough time for arsenic poisoning to have killed the champion. Four days after his death, Phar Lap’s organs were examined by chemists from the University of California, who tested for a number of poisons. They specifically analysed samples of liver, lung, spleen, stomach and kidney, searching for ‘common volatile poisons, alkaloidal poisons, arsenic and mercury’, and claimed afterwards that they found nothing untoward. In Phar Lap, The Story of the Big Horse, published in 1964, Isobel Carter reports the findings of R.U. Bonnar, a chemist with the United States Food and Drug Administration. Bonnar examined Phar Lap’s organs in advance of the post-mortem and found the concentration of arsenic trioxide in Phar Lap’s liver was 1.143 parts per million, less than one-eighth of the concentration required to diagnose arsenic poisoning of a horse. On the basis of what he had seen as Phar Lap died and then during the autopsy, Bill Nielsen initially suspected that the cause of death was acute gastric enteritis (inflammation of the intestines), brought about by a toxic substance, but because he and others couldn’t identify what that toxin was, in the years that followed observers and gossip merchants were left to concoct their own poisons. For our book Phar Lap, we sought the advice of Dr John van Veenendaal, one of Australia’s leading equine surgeons. Dr van Veenendaal, a man who has worked for many of the country’s leading trainers and who treated some horses trained by Tommy Woodcock in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was shown the post-mortem reports of Phar Lap’s death. In response, he stated: ‘Phar Lap did die of poisoning but not a poison that was given maliciously or intentionally. The poison was an enterotoxin that caused Anterior Enteritis or more correctly Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis. The clinical features that Tommy described to me and the reports you have supplied me with indicate that this was the most probable cause of death ... The disease syndrome now known as Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis was not described in the literature until the early 1980s. Nielsen would not have been aware of this disease but his summation of the cause of death was correct.’ In 2008, after the synchrotron analysis made the papers, we sent copies of all the information we had on Phar Lap’s death, including the post mortem and the published reports from the team behind the synchrotron analysis, to Dr Tam Garland from Texas A&M University and the American Board of Veterinary Toxicology. Her response in part reads: ‘I do not believe arsenic was involved. There may be a background level or a very low level from some solutions in use then. I am convinced the cause of death was Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis …’ Veterinary surgeons today know that horses can be quickly killed by Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis. Bacteria in the gut of the horse produce a toxin that attacks the lining of the small intestine close to the stomach, causing a functional obstruction. The walls of the small intestine are severely damaged and acutely inflamed. The intestine is blocked, not by a physical barrier but by a length of intestine that refuses to function The textbook description of Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis is a list of the signs Phar Lap exhibited before his death: elevated temperature, increased pulse rate, acute colic, distention of the small intestine, a build-up of fluid in the stomach leading to perforation and rapid death. In almost all cases of Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis, the horse has travelled significant distances in the preceding weeks. The fact that the disease was not identified until 50 years after Phar Lap’s died is important. Those performing the autopsy in 1932 would have looked first for a physical blockage in the intestine, and were probably astonished when they did not find one. Only then would they have joined others in thinking seriously about less logical causes of death. IT’S A GOOD YARN, the story of William Webb Ellis — of the young English rebel taking the ball in his arms at Rugby School one day in 1823 and running with it. With one precocious dash, so the legend goes, a new style of football was born. That most researchers concede that Webb Ellis’ run never happened is now largely irrelevant; world rugby has its ‘founder’, and the winners of the Rugby World Cup now receive the ‘Webb Ellis Trophy’. Football codes need father figures. The AFL has Tom Wills, who came up with the idea of a distinctly ‘Australian’ game for the citizens of Melbourne in the late 1850s, and Henry Harrison, a key figure in the drafting in 1866 of the code of rules that set the basis for what many know today as Aussie Rules. Australian rugby league has James J. Giltinan, the gallant entrepreneur who took the first Kangaroos to England in 1908. Australian rugby union, in contrast, has been something of an orphan, having apparently evolved at its own pace with no one man its initial driving force. This, surely, can only be half right at best. So having chanced upon a critical snippet of information written in 1919, a few years ago I set off on what proved to be a productive search for rugby’s No. 1 man, a ‘Webb Ellis’ of our own if you like. Inevitably, given we’re going back to the 1860s, the evidence is a little ragged in parts, but with the help of his grandson I was able to build a strong picture of the bloke who kick-started rugby in New South Wales more than 150 years ago. Others who came later may have been more influential in terms of how rugby evolved in Australia, but he was the first. Strangely, the game is still to officially recognise this man’s contribution; hence the retelling of his story here. He was a pioneer of the bush as well as of football, a man of courage, persistence and pride, a fellow who might have stepped out of a Banjo Paterson poem. His family home became the residence of the Governor-General— a tangible link between his sport and his country’s head of state. If Australian rugby was able to select its own father, it could hardly have made a better choice. THE EARLY DAYS OF football in Sydney have been well scrutinised, most notably by Thomas Hickie in They Ran With The Ball: How Rugby Football Began in Australia (Longman Cheshire, 1993) and by the extraordinary work of league and union historian Sean Fagan. The first record of any football taking place in Australia most likely appeared in the Sydney newspaper, The Australian, on 24 July 1829: The privates and others of the garrison have lately been amusing themselves more than usual in the ordinary practice of foot-ball, in the Barrack Square, and a healthful exercise is foot-ball. The Sydney Monitor of the following day added that the sport the soldiers were playing was ‘a healthy amusement, and much played in Leicestershire’. But it wasn’t until 1865 that reports of organised football being staged in the city appeared in the Sydney press. Whatever was played in the years in between was hardly rugby, most likely kicking and catching and ball-dribbling contests with rules that varied from field to field in the way impromptu contests in school playgrounds often develop minds of their own. The reports of 1865 were of matches involving the ‘Sydney Football Club’ (most likely, an offshoot of the Albert Cricket Club), a team featuring members of the Australian Cricket Club and then Sydney University. It appears that the Sydney and Australian clubs were experimenting with something like Tom Wills’ style of football (which was originally conceived at least in part to give Melbourne’s cricketers a game to play in winter), but if there was a push to bring Melbourne rules to Sydney, a small group of undergraduates at the University was having none of it. Three young men decided to form a club on campus that played football under the rules set down by Rugby School in England, a move remembered by one of them, Richard Teece, when he was profiled by the Sydney Mail more than half a century later, on 11 June 1919: While Mr Teece was at the University there was a man named Campbell and another, George Deas Thomson (son of Sir Edward Deas Thomson), in his third year, who had played rugby football in England. These two combined with Teece to form a team among the undergraduates to play the game in Sydney. For some time their efforts were confined to scratch matches among themselves, as there were no other teams to play against. They were the first games of Rugby in Sydney ... Twelve years earlier, at a time when Teece was chairman of the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust, the Sydney Mail recalled that he ‘took part in the formation of the first Rugby club in Sydney in 1865’. During the same season, at a New South Wales Rugby Union event organised to welcome the Queensland team to Sydney, Teece described himself as ‘certainly the oldest Australian footballer present’; he had, after all, ‘watched the progress of the game since he had taken part in the formation of the first football club in Sydney 42 years ago’ As his twin administrative careers in sport (mainly cricket) and insurance reveal, Teece was an enthusiastic beaver when it came to making things happen. But it was his two comrades from Sydney University in 1865 who were the young men with rugby experience. By the time of that Sydney Mail profile in 1919, Teece was a director of the Australian Mutual Provident Society, having been the AMP’s driving force for almost 30 years. Poor Deas Thomson was long dead. And ‘a man named Campbell’ was in the latter stages of an extraordinary life on the Australian land. From 1837 to 1856, Edward Deas Thomson, later Sir Edward, was New South Wales’ Colonial Secretary, the colony’s leading public servant. In 1854 he took his family to England, and according to press reports left his three sons to enjoy a Public Schools education. But where George boarded is not known. University of Sydney records suggest he was privately tutored. After gaining his degree in 1865, George worked as an associate for two Chief Justices until his passing, in March 1877, aged just 31. Frederick Campbell was a grandson of Robert Campbell, Sydney’s first great shipping merchant, after whom ‘Campbell’s Cove’ at Circular Quay is named. Frederick, or Fred as he was known, was born 170 years ago, on 26 February, 1846, on his grandfather’s property, ‘Duntroon’, in southern New South Wales. He had been taken to England by his parents in 1854, where he was enrolled at the Cholmeley School in London. A classmate was Marcus Clarke, later to write For the Term of His Natural Life. Since 1860, the school has been known as Highgate. Campbell remained there until July 1863. Across Britain at that time, the football young men were playing was a matter of dispute. Many schools of the early 1860s preferred what were known as ‘Eton’ rules, what would evolve into ‘Association’ rules or ‘soccer’. However, a few, including Highgate, took to the game as played at Rugby School. Emails with the school confirmed that Frederick was in the school’s football team in 1863, and that the football he was playing ‘must have been rugger’ (the school’s words). ‘Highgate changed from Rugby to Soccer under the headmastership of the Rev C. McDowall in 1878,’ explained the School’s Foundation Office. Returning to Australia, Fred Campbell headed for Sydney University, where he studied in 1865 — not long enough to gain a degree, but ample time to inspire a rugby club. George Deas Thomson had been at the University since 1863, but as the first formal rugby games between students didn’t take place until August 1865, more likely it was Campbell — a more ‘seasoned’ footballer given his first-team experience at Highgate — who provided the catalyst for the football revolution on campus, with Deas Thomson and Teece alongside him as enthusiastic accomplices. If any one man deserves the title of ‘Father’ of Australian rugby, it is Fred Campbell. In a strange way, the records at Sydney University add some weight to this claim. Campbell resided at the St Paul’s College for at least some of his university days, and the college’s archives suggest that prior to becoming an undergraduate he had been educated at Rugby School in England. This is not true, but how could such an error have been made? Perhaps someone saw Campbell’s enthusiasm for rugby football and assumed he had some link with the game’s birthplace. The story of Sydney rugby between 1866 to 1869 further suggests Campbell was an influential figure in the game’s evolution. Deciding an Arts degree was of little use to him, at the end of 1865 Campbell went looking for experience on the land, first at the North Goonambil station at Urana in southern NSW and then at cattle and sheep stations near Rockhampton in Queensland. Briefly back in Sydney in 1866, he found time to lead a team that lost a rugby contest on the University Ground to a team of undergraduates, and the fact he was captain suggests he was the most experienced rugby man. He might also have been the chief organiser of the side, the best player, perhaps all of the above. Soon after that game, Campbell went bush again, and rugby’s rise at the University and in Sydney stuttered. Documented games in the big city for the next three years were few and far between. Season 1870 was the year of rugby’s revival in Australia. This was the winter in which the soon-to-be-renowned Wallaroo club was formed in Sydney. Among the five hardy individuals who came to the inaugural meeting that led to Wallaroo’s birth was one George Deas Thomson. When it came to electing office bearers, Fred Campbell — having been cajoled back to Sydney to learn the family business — became Wallaroo’s treasurer. The duo’s influence in the football community continued through the early 1870s, until Deas Thomson began to succumb to the disease that would claim his life, and Fred again headed bush, this time for good. First, he rode to the Bundabarena Station on the Barwon River in north-western NSW, then in 1877 to the ‘limestone plains’ as the area around Queanbeyan in southern New South Wales was known, to manage Duntroon. Under the stars, Campbell could ponder the fact that his game was here to stay. Such was the game’s rising popularity, a central governing body, the Southern Rugby Football Union, had been established as early as 1874. For the next 35 years, until rugby league took over, rugby was Sydney’s No. 1 winter sport. SO WHO IS THIS man named Campbell? He was born into a wealthy and highly respected family, but with a cleft palate and a harelip. As a boy, he ran a long second in his father Charles’ eye to his elder brother Walter. To overcome his speech difficulty young Fred focused on the written word, which he made his main method of communication, and it was only the tragic death of Walter in a boating accident at Cambridge in 1860 that boosted his standing within the family. After his mother Catherine died, shattered by the loss of her first-born son, the decision was made for the rest of the family to return to Sydney. For the next few years, Fred’s father travelled between a home in Scotland and properties in NSW and Victoria, while for many days through 1864 and 1865 Fred lived with his uncle John at Wharf House, on Circular Quay. During this period, Fred mixed with members of the upper echelons of Sydney society, including notable figures in sporting circles. Two prominent members of the Albert Cricket Club, Captain Edward Ward and Septimus Stephen, were married to cousins of Fred, as was a sister of George Deas Thomson. Like Fred’s grandfather, father and two of his uncles, Captain Ward was a member of the NSW Parliament. However, the restless young footballer’s decision to forsake the city to pursue the pleasures that townsfolk never know meant he lost contact with this influential group. In 1881, Fred left Duntroon after purchasing an adjoining property, Yarralumla, and began putting into practice the skills and feel for the land that he had developed over the previous decade and a half. He was much more than just a pastoralist; he became a pivotal figure in most of what happened in the Queanbeyan district. While he did have the occasional quarrel with neighbours, the men and women who worked for him were fiercely loyal, and served him well. A New Year’s Eve dinner dance and New Year’s Day celebrations involving the Campbell family and their friends and employees were a much anticipated annual event, a feature of which was the cricket match between a Yarralumla XI and a Queanbeyan combination. The property grew to 40,000 acres (16,400 hectares). Fred became president of the board and chief benefactor to the Queanbeyan District Hospital, a part-time magistrate, president of the local branch of the ‘Farmers’ and Settlers’ Association’, church elder, founder or patron of several sporting clubs, including the Queanbeyan Rugby Union and the Queanbeyan Rifle Club. In 1900, he was elected chairman of the ‘Queanbeyan Federal Capital League’, which helped argue the case for the region to become the site of the new national capital. In this last instance, Fred was too effective for his own good. Canberra won the day, but the committee chairman had never envisaged the authorities compulsorily acquiring his property. When his daughter visited Canberra in the 1960s, she said to her son, ‘Father would have been heartbroken to see the best pasture land in Australia permanently drowned by a man-made lake.’ Fred attended some of the ceremonies staged in early 1913 to mark the birth of Canberra, but he did so begrudgingly. By this time he had been booted from his home, having received considerably less in compensation than what he believed his grand property was worth, and the Queanbeyan Age reported that many locals were aghast at the way he had been treated. He never really resettled until well into his seventies, when he began living at his Cooinbil Station in the Riverina, which he had originally purchased in the 1890s and then expanded through a series of shrewd land purchases. In one awful week during the Great War, he lost two children: Charles, missing in action over France; and John, the youngest, at home to epilepsy. Fred himself died at Narrandera in 1928, aged 82. After leaving Yarralumla, Fred’s first stop had been ‘Bishopthorpe’, once the official residence of the Bishop of Goulburn. However, within eight months the mansion caught fire and most of its contents were destroyed, including reams of Campbell family documents. For a man who had lived by the written word, this must have been a catastrophe; one of the great Australian memoirs of the 19th century may well have been lost. SUCH WAS THE GREAT divide between the city and the bush at this time, it is perhaps understandable that Richard Teece, one of Sydney’s most prominent businessmen and sporting identities, could remember his one-time university friend only as ‘a man named Campbell’ when he was interviewed in 1919. In an article that appeared in Old Times in July 1903 that is often quoted by rugby historians, WM ‘Monty’ Arnold, one of the founders of the Wallaroo Club in 1870, refers to Fred in a single sentence: ‘Amongst our first players, in addition to the original five who started the (Wallaroo) club, (was) Fred Campbell, a descendant of Campbell of the Wharf …’ Accompanying that Old Times article is a photo of ‘the Old Wallaroo Football team’, with Fred Campbell sitting at the far left of the middle row, a bushy moustache disguising his disability. Moustache aside, there was a definite facial resemblance between Fred and his grandson, Mr Sandy Newman, whom I met when I was researching Fred’s life. Sandy was researching his grandfather’s life in much greater depth than I had been, walking around The Rocks to the Mitchell Library in Sydney, to Canberra, the National Library, Yarralumla, the Riverina, Highgate School, Cambridge, everywhere, patiently and diligently writing and refining Fred’s story. In 2007, some of Sandy’s research was published by the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, in an article titled ‘Frederick Campbell of Yarralumla: a forgotten pioneer pastoralist’. Perhaps Sandy’s greatest frustration was that for most Canberra historians the story of the city seems to begin around 1913, the year his grandfather left the district. It is as if the pain and distress felt by landowners deprived of their land and homes without fair recompense is best left unmentioned. Consequently, Fred’s vision and innovation in building Yarralumla into a model station have been largely ignored, even though his land extended across what are now many of Canberra’s southern to north-western suburbs, on which ran a Merino wool clip that was regarded as one of the most valuable in the country. Forests had been efficiently cleared into prime grazing paddocks; marshy country shrewdly drained; so effective were his fences the entire property was as good as rabbit proof. Fred never fell into the trap of trying to replicate the lush grasses of England. Instead, he retained the native grasses, and the Yarralumla paddocks remained brown and productive for much of the year. In the 1960s, Sandy Newman was a director of Cooinbil Limited, the company formed by Fred to manage his second major pastoral enterprise. ‘During those years, I had full access to all the company records,’ he explained to me, ‘and I discovered that many of the “tried and true” practices still in use had been initiated by Fred.’ Sandy believed Fred’s life was driven by two things: to overcome his speech disability and to demonstrate to his father and his peers that he had the ability and the pioneering spirit to develop and improve his pastoral business as well or better than they could have. That he did so is a source of enormous family pride. BACK IN OCTOBER 1913, at Ryan’s Hotel in Queanbeyan, Fred found himself surrounded by family and friends for his ‘farewell’ from the district. The event was reported in extraordinary detail by the Queanbeyan Age, and it reveals much of the great man’s character, with humour and humility shining through. Crucially for me in my search for the father of rugby, it also offers unqualified confirmation of Fred Campbell’s place in the history of rugby football. The Queanbeyan Age’s correspondent at one point writes this way of Fred’s speech … Leaving his old home at Yarralumla had been a terrible wrench, for he had never expected to have to part from it (here the speaker became visibly affected). Had he seen what was coming, he would have endeavoured to induce the Commonwealth Government to fix their choice on Dalgety — or for the matter of that, Mount Kosciusko (laughter) — rather than Canberra … Dalgety is in Man From Snowy River country, well south of Queanbeyan. The story continues … There were two little matters he took particular pride in. The first was that he started rugby football in New South Wales at the University of Sydney. Football was a manly game and one he thoroughly enjoyed. It taught a person to govern his temper and play the game of life cleanly and honestly, and to otherwise behave as a true man always should ... The second ‘little matter’ was that with a bloke named John Gale, Fred was responsible for introducing trout into New South Wales. The trick here was that he and Gale brought 300 yearling trout all the way from Ballarat in Victoria, and despite it being a ‘bitterly cold and tedious job’ they lost only three fish along the way. He described this as a ‘successful national enterprise’, and was clearly chuffed, 30 years on, that they’d had the smarts and the determination to pull off the venture. WORK HAD BEEN COMPLETED on a new homestead at Yarralumla back in 1891, and for the next 22 years this impressive building was the Campbell’s family home. After it was decided that Canberra would become the federal capital of Australia, the first property in the district to be resumed was Duntroon, the home of three generations of Campbells, to become the site of the Royal Military College. The building in which Fred was born became the officers’ mess. The homestead at Yarralumla became ‘Government House’, the official residence of the Governor-General. While there have been numerous additions and renovations to the Yarralumla homestead, it is still in essence the house that Fred built. Every night, if they choose, His Excellency General Sir Peter Cosgrove and his wife can acknowledge the Campbell family crest that remains on the gables. And if, on a misty moonlit evening, they hear a ghostly game of footy being played out on the lawns, they need not be alarmed. It’ll just be Fred Campbell and his university mates George Deas Thomson and Richard Teece, a few Wallaroos, maybe Captain Ward and ‘Seppi’ Stephen, and some of the lads from old Yarralumla, playing the game cleanly and honestly, behaving as true men always should. WHEN THE THREE-YEAR-OLD Phar Lap landed in Sydney in the autumn of 1930, it was the first time the harbour city’s racing fans had seen the rising star of Australian racing since the previous October. On his first look at him, Vedette, the racing columnist for The Referee, wrote: ‘Since he was here in the spring Phar Lap has furnished into a much more impressive type of horse. Never an oil painting, he is not the pretty type, but he fills the eye with his bigness, his undoubted physical fitness and his general air of contentedness and well-being.’ Musket, in The Sydney Mail, added: ‘Were it not for his wonderful deeds few would take a second look at him; but now that he has become famous his rangy frame of greyhound proportions has many admirers.’ The Sydney press had a field day building up the Chipping Norton Stakes, over a mile and a quarter at Warwick Farm on April 12, in which Phar Lap would meet the best two older horses then racing in Australia, Amounis and Nightmarch, and another outstanding Kiwi, Chide. But what was expected in many quarters to be a close contest turned into a one act affair. Musket: Five furlongs from home, Nightmarch appeared to be catching the three-year-old, but it was only on sufferance, for the gap became wider at the three furlongs, where Amounis began to close on Nightmarch. ‘Amounis will win yet!’ was shouted by his admirers as the old warrior began his famous finishing run, but though he caught Nightmarch he could not threaten danger to the three-year-old, who simply outclassed the placegetters. ‘That settles which horse should’ve won the Melbourne Cup!’ yelled a voice from the crowd. The previous November, Nightmarch had prevailed on the first Tuesday in November, with Phar Lap, the dual Derby winner, back in third place. Now racing had a new hero, and he couldn’t have come at a better time, with thousands losing their jobs due to the onset of the Great Depression and the papers filling with awful stories of hardship and misfortune. For trainer Harry Telford, the irony of his new-found wealth could not have been lost of him. Circumstances had changed drastically for both Telford and the world around him. Men who only a year previously had been calling in long-time battler’s debts were now seeking a handout. Phar Lap enjoyed further easy wins in the AJC St Leger and the weight-for-age Cumberland Stakes, leading critics to rate him the equal of any of the great three-year-olds of the previous 30 years, such as Abundance, Poseidon, Mountain King, Prince Foote, Artilleryman, Manfred and Strephon. Similarly, it was now being suggested that young Don Bradman, who three months before had broken the record for the highest score ever made first-class cricket, was now on a par with the most celebrated of Australian batsmen, such as Charles Bannerman, Clem Hill and Charlie Macartney. Perhaps only Victor Trumper remained beyond the 21-year-old. During the next four months, Bradman would smash a succession of Test batting records as Australia climbed quickly back to the top of the cricket tree, and rich and poor Australians alike would begin to rate ‘Our Don’ the best of all time, beyond even than the immortal Vic. In doing so, he joined Phar Lap, who had reached the same lofty status on the racetrack. The hardest markers reckoned only Carbine, the legendary winner of the 1890 Melbourne Cup, might be his equal. The reason for Phar Lap’s rapid ascension to true greatness was, simply, the AJC Plate. If you talked to anyone in Sydney who saw most of Phar Lap races, the one performance they all raved about was the 1930 AJC Plate, run at Randwick over two-and-a-quarter miles on April 26. The headlines are astonishingly exuberant: ‘GREATEST HORSE EVER,’ roared the Truth. ‘PHAR LAP MOST SENSATIONAL GALLOPER OF ALL TIME,’ shouted The Referee. ‘AN EXTRAORDINARY WIN’ was The Australasian’s verdict. ‘PHAR LAP A SUPERLATIVE GALLOPER,’ reckoned The Sydney Mail. What Phar Lap did was take hold of Billy Elliott, up from Melbourne for the ride because regular jockey Jim Pike couldn’t make the three-year-old’s weight-for-age of 7lb 13 (50.5kg), and take off. The pace was suicidal for a normal horse, but Phar Lap just kept going, and going, until Elliott finally managed to ease him up over the last furlong. Before the race — which involved only three horses, Phar Lap, Nightmarch and the solid stayer Donald — some critics thought Nightmarch might be a chance. After all, he’d beaten Phar Lap easily in the Melbourne Cup and their only subsequent meeting had been over a mile and a quarter in the Chipping Norton. There was talk about, too, according to the Truth, that Phar Lap ‘was going to be raced right into the ground’. Consequently, the three-year-old came up only 2–1 on in the ring, but the big gamblers were on to that in a flash, with Sydney’s most prominent female punter, Maude Vandenburg, quickly taking £2000 to £1000 from rails operator Jack Molloy. The renowned Eric Connolly, however, was spotted supporting Nightmarch. At the jump, the favourite was 5–2 on. Chiron (The Australasian): Evidently the people who backed Nightmarch took the view that Phar Lap is really not a genuine stayer and that Nightmarch would be able to get the last run on him and outstay him at the finish. It did not work out that way at all, as Nightmarch could never get near enough to Phar Lap to find out whether he can stay or not. Vedette (The Referee): Phar Lap went fast from the beginning and some of his intermediate times from a mile and a half on, according to private watches, were better than world figures for those distances. He full time of 3:49.5 was a second better than the previous Australasian record and he beat Nightmarch by 10 lengths, with Donald three-quarters of a length away third. He clipped the previous Randwick record by 6½ seconds. An English writer a few weeks ago mentioned that Walter Lindrum [the champion Australian billiards exponent] was the only man in any branch of sport he would be prepared to back against the world. Sydney sportsmen who saw Phar Lap’s performance in the AJC Plate are convinced he is the Lindrum of the turf. It is difficult to make comparisons between Australian and overseas horses, but when a galloper arises who can make really good performers such as Nightmarch look like novices, there is no question of his class. The first half mile was run in 49 seconds. In a two-and-a-quarter mile race! Along the back Phar Lap was ticking over the furlongs, 12 seconds at a time, as he opened up a lead of at least a furlong, perhaps longer. Vedette’s stopwatch suggested he ran the first seven furlongs in better than the Randwick track record, equal to the Australasian record, for THAT distance. In a two-and-a-quarter mile race!! Jim Pike: Phar Lap is faster than Strephon. Much faster. Windbag could win a six-furlongs race and the Melbourne Cup. Gothic won two VRC Newmarket Handicaps and could stay a mile and a half, but I have no hesitation in saying that up to a mile and a half Phar Lap is better and could outpace either of them from anything up to that distance. I feel sure he could win a Newmarket, and win it easily. And I would not hesitate to back him, fit and at his best, to run a mile and a half in 2.27. That’s how good I think he is. Pike’s comments came straight after the race. Phar Lap had run the first mile and a half of the AJC Plate in 2:28.5, nearly three seconds faster than the race-record time he ran to win the AJC Derby seven months before. Two miles were passed in 3:20.5, which would have won every Sydney Cup until 1971, and every Melbourne Cup until 1950, at which point Elliott was finally able to get a grip, and he slowed the champion down to a canter in the straight, while Nightmarch and Donald were ridden hard, chasing the second prizemoney. So slow was Phar Lap going at the finish, he was walking, ready to enter the mounting yard, only 25 metres after the passing the post. Jim Marsh (later a rails bookmaker in Sydney): He could’ve won by a furlong. Roy Reed rode Nightmarch and afterwards the stewards got him up before them on a charge of not riding his mount out. He’d got beat a furlong! The judge didn’t say that was the margin, but that’s what it looked like to me. What Reed did was get half a length in front of Donald, then he just looked at him and stayed there. He didn’t try to run after Phar Lap, that was true, and he explained that to the stewards. ‘I could have run him to about 50 lengths,’ he said. All he wanted to do was beat Donald. A. McAulay (trainer of Nightmarch): It is hard to say what would have been the result if Phar Lap had been asked to do his best: Nightmarch would hardly have been at the home turn when the crack finished. Phar Lap would win another 25 races before succumbing to the disease syndrome Duodenitis-Proximal jejunitis in April 1932. Some of these victories were remarkable, not least his triumphs in the 1930 Melbourne Cup, the 1931 Futurity Stakes, and the 1932 Agua Caliente Handicap in North America. But as phenomenal as these performances undoubtedly were, they might not have been as purely breathtaking as what he did at Royal Randwick on April 26, 1930. That was the day, an important day in the history of Australian racing, when racegoers and non-racegoers alike started talking of Phar Lap as the best we’ve ever seen. We’ve been doing it ever since. Edward Rennix Larkin (‘Rennix’ was his mother’s maiden name) achieved much in his short life. He was born, the son of a miner, at Lambton, near Newcastle, in the first week of January 1880. After his family moved to Sydney, he earned a scholarship to St Joseph’s College at Hunters Hill. He was briefly a railway worker, joined the staff of the Yearbook of Australia and became a policeman. He was a keen debater, swimmer, boxer and a rugby footballer good enough to play for Australia. He was the first full-time secretary of the NSW Rugby League and member of state parliament, a workers’ representative in a conservative electorate. He died a hero’s death at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. Known to his friends and admirers as ‘Ted’ or ‘Teddy’, Larkin was initially a halfback who at age 18 played a few rugby matches with the great cricketer Victor Trumper for Newtown juniors. He had been an excellent and successful student at St Joseph’s and, before that, at St Benedict’s, Chippendale, which was located in one of the most congested parts of the inner city, amid narrow laneways and tiny terrace houses, close to Tooth’s Kent Brewery. He was a star of the St Joseph’s first XV. His relationship with the Sydney Cricket Ground went back to at least 1899, when he was in the Sydney club side that lost the first-grade final to Wallaroo. Four years later, on the night before his wedding to May Yates, the NSW selectors surprised by naming Larkin —now a 5ft 11 (180cm), 13-stone (83kg) hooker and captain of Newtown’s first-grade side — in the line-up to play the touring New Zealanders on the coming Saturday. One imagines few were more stunned by this development than the bride. The first day of the new Mrs Larkin’s honeymoon was spent at the SCG, watching her husband mixing it with the All Blacks on a field so flooded the Sydney Morning Herald’s correspondent thought the cricket-pitch area resembled a ‘miniature lake’. A second-half penalty goal kicked by the visitors’ fullback Billy Wallace was the only score of the game. Larkin was also in a Metropolitan XV that lost to the tourists on the following Wednesday at Sydney University. Ten days later, back at the SCG, Larkin played what would prove to be his only Test match. It was the All Blacks’ first Test, home or away: an emphatic 22–3 victory. Finally, the newlyweds could begin settling in to their new home at Milson’s Point, a move that meant — because of the residential rules then in place — Larkin had to play for North Sydney in 1904. He joined the police force and the responsibilities of that role convinced him to retire from football at the end of the season. He was only 24. With his prematurely grey hair, he looked older than that. He liked to tell a story against himself from that final season, of he and another constable on foot patrol near North Sydney Oval one day as the first-grade team trained. Ted had not been able to get time off to join them. ‘Who are they?’ Ted’s colleague asked. ‘That’s the district football team,’ Ted replied. ‘Oh yes!’ said the questioner. ‘I saw them playing last Saturday. Not a bad side, but they’ve got one old beggar amongst them.’ ‘I was the old beggar,’ Ted would say, with half a grin. He was a good and reliable footballer, a born leader and a wily diplomat. In the opening game of the All Blacks’ 1903 tour, one of the Kiwi forwards, Reuben Cooke, was sent off after a clash with Larkin’s club-mate Harold Judd. Afterwards, there was scuttlebutt about that the two combatants had taken the matter further when their paths crossed after the game. To quell the conjecture, the tourists were invited to a ‘smoko’ organised by the Newtown club two days before the Test. A three-round bout between Cooke and Larkin was widely advertised. Ted, it was said, was going to avenge his cobber’s honour. It might not have been until the two men approached the ring that it became clear that blood was not going to flow. Judd was in the New Zealander’s corner, from where he laughingly waved a white towel of surrender throughout the ‘contest’. Hardly a blow was landed, but reputations were restored. The patrons went home happy too, for the main event was a stirring three-round exhibition between a rising star, ‘Snowy’ Baker, who would build a reputation as one of Australia’s greatest ever all-round sportsmen, and ‘Paddy Martin’, one of Sydney’s most popular welterweights. Paddy Martin was actually Martin Larkin, Ted’s older brother. They would sign up for the Great War at the same time. They would head for Europe on the same ship. Ted Larkin became the NSW Rugby League’s first salaried official in June 1909. The League was in turmoil, its very survival in question. Formed in 1907 as a breakaway from rugby union, the fledgling body’s original hon. secretary, James Giltinan, and hon. treasurer, Victor Trumper, had been driven from office amid allegations of corruption and secret bank accounts. The League was substantially in debt, but Larkin and his new cohorts — some of whom he knew from his days in rugby — found the game a wealthy benefactor in the entrepreneurial James Joynton Smith, some of the Wallabies’ best players were lured to the ‘professional’ code and troublemakers were ruthlessly shown the door. Great Britain toured Australia in 1910, drawing huge crowds, far bigger than anything rugby union was now attracting. Within two years of his appointment, Larkin’s league was the biggest game in town. Never content, over the next three years, Larkin shrewdly negotiated deals with all the major grounds in Sydney, including the SCG, built league as the primary football code throughout country NSW and in Queensland, developed the concept of pre-game entertainment to boost attendances and established a Catholic Schools competition in Sydney that became a bedrock for future development. One of the foundation teams in this competition was Larkin’s old school: St Benedict’s, Chippendale. His integrity was his calling card. In Bathurst in 1913, as league and union fought for supremacy, one union official commented glumly that the problem with Larkin was that he always kept his word. A year earlier, Larkin had played a pivotal role in the introduction of league in the blossoming country town of Orange and its surrounds, which quickly led to league becoming the principal winter sport across western NSW. His modus operandi was calculated. He was smart enough to realise he couldn’t just plant his sport on the region; he needed the locals to lead the revolution. Once keen interest had been expressed, they all went to work. Keith McClymont, a hooker who had played representative rugby, became the main spokesman for the local league enthusiasts. McClymont recalled: We organised a meeting of the players, and Mr E. Larkin came along and spoke, telling us what his League had done for other country branches, and telling us what they would do for us. He made several promises, all of which were honoured. He promised us a cup for competition among western clubs and we received a cup valued at 50 guineas. He promised to send along two teams to play an exhibition match. Glebe and Eastern Suburbs came along, and the whole of the gate receipts — £50 — was given to our League for a nest egg. He stated that metropolitan teams would visit us during the season. Nine came along. He promised that our team would be taken to Sydney. Our team went to Sydney and the members and the manager received all expenses and 10/ per day loss of time ... Larkin, as shrewd as they come, knew that what would most effectively sell his sport to a new audience was the best of the best. The Glebe and Easts teams that ran out in front of a big crowd at Wade Park, Orange, on April 27, 1912, were at full strength. Glebe were led by Chris McKivat, a former star of Orange rugby who had gone to captain his country in union and league, while Easts’ skipper was the one and only Dally Messenger. Alongside them were men who would become legends of the new code: Dan Frawley, Frank Burge, Sandy Pearce and ‘Pony’ Halloway. Tom McMahon, Australian league’s first great referee, was in charge. A rugby league competition in Orange began soon after and similar leagues were established within 12 months at Bathurst and Dubbo (the Bathurst evolution causing a ‘split’ in the Chifley household, with Ben continuing as a member of the Bathurst rugby club while younger brother Patrick joined the nearby Kelso rugby league team). By October 1915, the Orange Leader noted that many former union strongholds, such as Wellington, Forbes, Parkes, Molong, Mudgee and Gulgong, would all be playing league in the following season. Larkin’s role in all this cannot be understated. Yet it was just one of a series of major developments for a football code that just a few years earlier had been on the brink. Given all that was achieved in such a short period of time and how the Sydney sporting landscape changed under his watch — and especially considering the way rugby league became entrenched for all time as the primary winter sport in NSW and Queensland — Larkin must be ranked among the most influential administrators in the history of Australian sport. A writer for The Australian Worker once noted that Larkin was ‘a keen student of social problems and seldom without a socialist book or pamphlet in his pocket’. At the 1913 state election, he claimed the seat of Willoughby for the Labor Party after conducting a smart and relentless campaign. Never before had the conservatives lost a metropolitan seat on the north side of the harbour. It was, the new MP told a trembling crowd at Crows Nest, his life’s ambition to be elected to parliament. ‘There was a scene of the wildest enthusiasm,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported. ‘Men and women embraced the victorious candidate and carried him shoulder high to a waiting car. Here a torchlight procession was formed and some brass instruments played See the Conquering Hero Comes ...’ Larkin tried to resign immediately as League secretary, but he was asked to stay on until the end of 1914. In August, however, as soon it was announced Australia was at war, he made plans to enlist. He also relinquished his role as president of the Federal Cycling Council of Australasia, ending a formal association with the sport that went back to 1911, when he’d organised some cycling and athletic events. He stayed on the board of the Royal North Shore hospital (a position that would be passed on to his widow). He was the father of two sons, aged six and two. ‘I cannot engage in the work of recruiting and urge others to enlist unless I do so myself,’ he said. As the member for Willoughby, Larkin could have sought rank. Instead, he entered the army as a private. Within 48 hours, he was promoted to sergeant. Within weeks, he might have been second guessing what he had done. ‘We have been silly enough to think that the Australian Army had been democratised,’ he wrote from Egypt. ‘There was never a greater delusion. Class is everything for advancement … Suffice it to say that there would be very few here if the men were free to leave or had anticipated how they were to be treated.’ Larkin contracted a virus so severe he was reputedly offered the chance to be invalided home. He declined. In another letter home, he derided the politicians who had not followed him into battle, calling them ‘rotters who think only of themselves’. He was a member of the 1st Battalion, which was not among the first to land at Gallipoli but was soon rushed into the fray. He didn’t survive long; slaughtered as he led his men over Plateau 400 towards an area that would become known as ‘Lone Pine’. For a while, there was much conjecture about exactly what happened to him. It will never be known for absolutely sure. What is beyond doubt is that, as is documented in official records, he displayed ‘conspicuous gallantry’. Private Harold Cavill, a bugler in the 2nd battalion, recorded what he’d heard of Larkin’s demise in his diary, which was reproduced for public consumption in 1916: Wounded and dying he lay, yet when the stretcher-bearers came to carry him in, he waved them on, saying, ‘There’s plenty worse than me out there.’ Later, they found him — dead. This story was echoed in dramatic fashion by Father Dowling during the Requiem Mass for Larkin at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral on June 27, 1915. Suddenly the well-known figure of Sergeant Larkin is stricken down; yet as he falls he still cries, ‘On men, on.’ In spirit we see him on the sand which is being reddened by his blood. The ambulance comes. It is almost full. Our hero insists on some of his more severely wounded comrades being taken first. But, alas!, when the ambulance returns, it is found that the Turks had wrought their deadly vengeance. He was dead … Corporal Charles Lawler, who smashed an index finger so badly he was invalided out of the war within a week of the landing, told the Newcastle Morning Herald in an interview published on August 12, 1915, that he was only ‘five yards’ from Larkin and ‘well up in front’ when the sergeant died: ‘It must have been shrapnel that got him. We were charging under bursts of shrapnel and there was very little rifle fire.’ Sergeant Harry Sparks, who was in the 1st Battalion, provided his version of events in a missive from the trenches to Charlie Ford, a prominent official with the North Sydney Rugby League Football and the chairman of the NSW Rugby League’s management committee. Sparks recalled that ‘the night before we left the ship to commence operations Ted and I had a long talk, and amongst other things he remarked that there would surely be a great scramble for his constituency of Willoughby if he went under’. He also described how Larkin had an early ‘narrow escape’ when, shortly after landing, ‘the pannikin hanging to his gear got in the way of a bullet’ … I was with Ted in a hot corner, and as he was in charge, he gave the order to advance, which was done rapidly with bayonets fixed. We got amongst the enemy's trenches which had been evacuated owing to our hurried visit. We stayed there until shelled out ... According to Sparks’ account, he was leading one section of soldiers; Larkin was commanding another team. Eventually, they were separated. Ted fell with his lads right in front of the argument. His brother Martin and my brother Mervyn went at the same time … Larkin’s remains were not recovered until the armistice of May 24, near ground the Anzacs had named the ‘Pimple’. So severe were his wounds erroneous rumours spread from Gallipoli to the streets of Sydney that the Turks had mutilated his body; so toxic were these rumours, the army felt it necessary to issue an official denial from Captain Charles Bean, their press officer on the frontline. Bean’s cable, in which he described Larkin as ‘a fine man and a brave soldier’, was published on the front page of Sydney’s Evening News of June 29. The previous day, the same paper had been the first publication to report the death of Victor Trumper at age 37, a victim of Bright’s disease. In his official history of Australia in the Great War, Bean concluded Larkin had been cut down by ‘machine-gun bullets’. The rumours his corpse had been attacked by Turkish bayonets might have come from traumatised soldiers unfamiliar with the carnage modern ammunition could cause when fired relentlessly from close range. Most likely, when the stretcher-bearer offered to help the stricken former Test forward, they both must have known he was done for. Larkin’s casualty form held at the National Archives in Canberra states his remains were buried by the revered Salvation Army padre, William McKenzie, in or close to the ‘Valley of Death’, now more commonly known as ‘Shrapnel Valley’ or ‘Shrapnel Gully’. This contention is supported by a letter from Brigadier-General Glanville Ryrie, an arch conservative, the federal member for North Sydney, to Fred Fleming, the Liberal candidate defeated by Larkin at the 1913 election, which was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Brigadier-General Ryrie, commander of the 2nd Light Horse Brigade, had arrived in Gallipoli on May 19. One paragraph of the letter includes the following: During an armistice on Monday we buried 200 of our men and about 3000 Turks. We found poor Larkin’s body that day. I can assure you that the tales about the mutilation in his case are lies. I had a talk with the clergyman who read the prayers and the men who were at the burial. The legislator-soldier must have been killed instantly … I have written a comforting, note to Mrs Larkin, which I hope she will get. We had a church parade yesterday [May 30] on the side of the mountain. I shall never forget the solemnity of the scene. The sun was setting, and an aeroplane was circling over us. Down in the valley shells were bursting. Apart from the terrors of war, that sunset was magnificent. Soldiers who arrived later in the campaign would write home to say they had stopped by the grave. But the cross planted to mark his resting place did not survive and Larkin’s ultimate sacrifice is now remembered at the Lone Pine Memorial, as one of the almost 5000 Australian or New Zealand Gallipoli victims who either have no known resting place or who were buried at sea. In November 1915, a grand plaque was unveiled in the Legislative Assembly chamber at NSW Parliament House, to honour Ted Larkin and another member of the Assembly who died at Gallipoli. Lieutenant-Colonel George Braund, commander of the 2nd Battalion and the member for Armidale, lost his life early on May 4. It was the first permanent memorial to be placed on the walls of the chamber and much was made of the fact it was prominently located between portraits of William Charles Wentworth and Sir Henry Parkes. Sadly, they inscribed the wrong date of death. Braund was killed ‘in the month of May’. Larkin was not. In an obituary for the Saturday Referee and Arrow of June 19, 1915, the great sportswriter JC Davis rued the fact that Larkin’s ‘life’s work had only just begun’. Four days later, in a much longer piece, he placed the late sergeant alongside some of the giants of the Labor Party and pondered what fate had taken away: In the early manhood of the present premier of NSW, in the ante-Labor days of Australian politics — Mr WA Holman, then a young Englishman, a cabinet-maker, was one of a group of men who won no little distinction as debaters on social and political subjects in Sydney. They moved in a restricted sphere, but were developing for the wider work in front of them. One night — a Sunday night, too — after he had given a most brilliant address on socialism, I remarked to the youth from whom magnetic eloquence flowed as though he were an Edmund Burke, that he would enter Parliament and that if he were to supplant some of the idealism which permeated his mind by a more practical view of life’s problems and a keener recognition of the frailties to which human nature is heir, he would become premier of NSW. It was a precocious prophecy. But there was not a great deal in that peep into the future, for the WA Holman of that period possessed oratorical powers and a memory that made his contemporaries, some of whom have risen as high as he has, marvel. Among those contemporaries who had not tasted of the nectar of the life political were Mr WM Hughes, Mr George Black, Mr F. Flowers, Mr JD Fitzgerald and Mr JC Watson. I have gone out of the way somewhat, but what I desire to say is that Mr Larkin in later years struck me also as possessing qualities which, while differing from those of Mr Holman and Mr Hughes, would have made him a force of no uncertain strength in the political atmosphere into which he had advanced so soon as he had felt his way. But, alas, the Kaiser and the Turk have intervened and this man of promise and performance has gone. The Life and Death of Lieutenant Clyde Pearce, first Australian-born winner of the Australian Open4/26/2016 A SMALL BOAT LANDED at Gallipoli at noon on November 13, 1915. On board was Lord Kitchener, the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief, a legendary figure said to have the best-known face in the British Empire next to King George. Kitchener wanted to see for himself what had become a military stalemate. After he stepped off the boat, he was surrounded by soldiers who, though sick and weary, cheered him keenly. Army records suggest that Private Clyde Pearce of the 10th Light Horse also landed at Gallipoli on this day. He may have witnessed Kitchener’s arrival and may even have seen some irony in his low-key landing compared to the hero’s welcome the Field Marshal received. Clyde had once been a celebrity himself, in sporting circles at least, back in the days when he was the best golfer in Australia. He knew what it was like to be cheered by a crowd; it was just seven years since he became the first native-born Australian Open champion. That mattered for nothing now. Kitchener stayed for just a couple of hours, during which time he saw enough, it is said, to recommend a withdrawal. Clyde was there for a month. He missed the worst of the ghastly clashes that had cost so many lives, but he still froze through some of the worst of the Gallipoli winter and at different times survived — according to the 10th Light Horse’s diary: Heavy bombing and machine-gun fire … Turkish attacks … Heavy shelling … Continuous bombardment ... In between, there was the ‘silence’. Through late November and December, to set the scene for their departure, the troops were ordered to be quiet, that ‘no form or any sign of life was to be visible’. You couldn’t fire a rifle or curse the snow. The evacuation became one of the most notable triumphs of the entire campaign. Not a man was lost. Clyde and his comrades left Gallipoli on December 16. His war had just begun. CLYDE WAS THE SECOND son of Edward and Emmeline Pearce, respected Tasmanians, stalwarts of Hobart’s golfing community. He first came to sporting prominence in 1903, aged 15, playing off scratch in interclub golf matches and finishing 19th at the Australian Amateur Championship. He had what a Launceston Daily Telegraph story from that year described as a ‘very orthodox style’. ‘[Pearce] does not waste much time in addressing his ball, times well and has a most correct follow through,’ the paper continued. Wiry, strong and athletic, Clyde was fortunate as a boy to receive individual tuition from two Scottish professionals, James Hunter and Edgar Martin, who worked at the fledgling Hobart Golf Club in the early years of the 20th century. From 1904 to 1910, his name was prominent at Australia’s major golf carnival, which featured the Open and the Amateur Championship. He reached four straight Amateur finals between 1906 and 1909, and claimed the Open/Amateur double in 1908. Galleries were amazed at how far and straight Clyde — a man of medium height (his enlistment papers record him as 5ft 9½in, or 177cm) — could send the ball with seemingly little effort. A writer using the pseudonym ‘Mid Iron’ analysed his swing for the Australasian and concluded, ‘There is no “hit” in any sense of that word … it is a pure swing that simply sweeps the ball away, but a very firm crisp sweep indeed.’ An Evening News reporter at the 1908 Australian Open described Clyde’s golf as ‘drive, approach, long putt, short putt; nothing ever seems to get out of order’. He was in superb touch one day while playing at Albury in country NSW, his round including a hole-in-one at the 197-yard first hole. Afterwards, his vanquished opponent admitted forlornly, ‘I got so wrapped up watching Pearce play I couldn’t concentrate on the darned game.’ Clyde was, though, a mediocre putter. Photographs show him crouching low over the ball, hands gripping the club well down the handle. The New Zealand Herald reckoned ‘four comparatively easy (missed) putts’ cost Clyde his first Australian Amateur final, against Ernest Gill in 1906. He began the 1908 Open at The Australian with a course-record 75 and shot the same score in the second round, but then missed ten putts he should have made during the first 18 of 36 holes on the final day. Mid Iron wrote that Clyde’s ‘long game and approaching had been just as fine as ever [but] three on the green at many of the holes completely neutralised the real excellence of the Tasmanian’s play’. So upset and confused did Clyde appear during lunch, some observers assumed he was out of contention. But he regrouped to shoot another 75 — a performance so brave and precise it probably remained the finest final round in Open history until Norman Von Nida’s last-day 65 at Royal Melbourne in 1953 (which itself was never challenged as best ever until Jordan Spieth conquered The Australian in 2014). Clyde then beat Michael Scott 6-and-5 in the semi-final of the Amateur Championship and NF Christoe 10-and-8 in the final to do the ‘double’. It was an impressive feat for one so young. What was most remarkable, the Sydney Morning Herald explained, was that Clyde had been so busy on his brother’s farm he had not picked up a club all year until he arrived in Sydney three weeks before the Open. IT HAD BEEN CLEAR since his 18th birthday that Clyde was not just a golfer. In 1906, he had left Hobart for Corowa, on the Murray River in the Riverina region of southern NSW, to work on the sheep farm his older brother Roy was managing. Both men joined the Corowa Golf Club and played when they could; the farm would remain Clyde’s base for his annual sorties to Australian golf’s championship week until 1910. In 1911, Clyde enjoyed an extended tour of Britain and Ireland. He was accompanied by his parents and his younger brother Bruce, an accomplished left-hander and three-time Tasmanian Amateur champion. At the British Amateur Championships, Clyde was knocked out by Bernard Darwin, destined to become one of golf’s finest writers, in the fourth round. His one tournament victory came at Peterhead, and he also impressed in Ireland, most notably during the stroke competition at the Irish Amateur Open Championship, when he was second in a ‘blizzard’ so dire many of the refreshment tents at Portmarnock were blown far away. Immediately after the 1911 British Amateur, Darwin wrote in the London Sunday Times about the ‘desperate struggle’ he and Clyde had enjoyed. ‘He is a beautifully accurate hitter with all his clubs,’ Darwin commented. ‘If he ever does hit a tee shot crooked, it seems only to occur by the merest accident.’ Seventeen years later, the respected Scottish golf historian Donald Grant recalled Harold Hilton’s victory in this Championship, and how a key factor in Hilton’s triumph was his ability to put enough backspin on the ball so his approach shots stayed on the small, true greens. ‘[Only] one other player had that shot,’ Grant wrote. ‘Clyde Pearce, Australia, a fine golfer.’ On his return to Australia in November, Clyde was interviewed by the Hobart Mercury. All of 23 years old, he reveals himself as a traditionalist. His greatest respect was for ‘old school’ players, as he called them, who’d learned the game using the gutta-percha ball that went out of fashion around the turn of the century. ‘They have the better swings,’ Clyde said. ‘The young fellows “hit” more and are therefore not nearly so certain of their game.’ ‘ALONG THE GREAT SOUTHERN [railway line] there are a great number of settlers who came from South Australia and Victoria,’ Perth’s Western Mail reported in August 1911. ‘They are progressive men, full of grit and enterprise.’ Clyde and another young golfer, the left-handed 1909 Australian Open champion Claude Felstead, were cut from this cloth. The golf community was stunned to learn in January 1912 that the pair had purchased the Chybarlis farm, 2500 acres of sheep and wheat country located between the townships of Pingelly and Mooterdine in Western Australia, about 160km south east of Perth. Both men signed up as members of the fledgling Pingelly GC, with Clyde joining the handicapping committee and offering advice on the layout of the new course. But the Australasian confirmed in August that Clyde and Claude were ‘too busily engaged in their business in the West’ to contemplate playing in any big tournaments. Twelve months later, Clyde did enter the Western Australian Amateur Championship and the inaugural WA Open, after showing he was in good form by breaking the course record at the Fremantle and Perth clubs, the latter by six shots. In the Open, Clyde found a worthy rival in the English-born Norman Fowlie, but a superb final round gave him a decisive win. ‘Up to his second shot at the 17th,’ the West Australian said of this performance, ‘[he] made no mistakes.’ His 4 and 2 defeat of Fowlie in the Amateur final two days later was similarly clear-cut. OF COURSE, WE CAN never be certain what truly motivated his decision to sign up for the War. The fact he did so just days after the initial landing at Gallipoli suggests it was more about patriotic duty that any quest for adventure. A number of Pingelly GC members had enlisted, and one, Private Harvey Rae, had been wounded in action, his left arm amputated. Private Rae, from the 11th Battalion, was one of the first to come ashore on April 25, around 4.30am. He was hit by an ‘explosive bullet’ in the early afternoon. On May 13, Clyde participated in a stroke competition at Pingelly. Except for a couple of rounds he managed to sneak in when on leave from camp, this was his last game of competitive golf. On November 12, Claude Felstead got married in West Perth, though the mood at the wedding was tempered when the groom revealed he was about to enlist. The next day, Clyde Pearce and Lord Kitchener arrived at Anzac Cove. FOR MOST OF 1916, Clyde served in the Middle East. He was quickly promoted to Lance-Corporal, but spent time in hospital, at first irritated by an ingrown toenail, then laid so low by cholera. A recommendation for further promotion arrived soon after he returned to duty and on November 13 he was ordered to proceed to Alexandria, from where he would sail on the Minnewaska to England, to accept a commission as a second lieutenant, 52nd Battalion. Unfortunately, his journey was interrupted when the Minnewaska hit a mine laid by a German U-boat off Souda Bay, Crete, and was fortunate to make it to shore. No lives were lost but the one-time ocean liner was ruined. On May 10, 1917, the West Australian revealed that Clyde was in France. ‘Whilst in Britain [at officer training] he had some golf at Glasgow with some old friends and spent some days of his leave there,’ the paper reported. ‘He has had a month in the front line.’ During that month, Clyde was involved in the great struggles at Lagincourt, Noreuil and Bullecourt. ‘No one could have failed to realise what a magnificent officer your son was,’ Lt Col Harold Pope, the 52nd’s commanding officer, would recall of these conflicts in a letter to Clyde’s father. Soon after, the members of the 52nd were dodging shells and machine-gun fire during the epic Battle of Messines in Belgium, fighting for strategically important high ground south of the town of Ypres, not far from the French border. The 52nd Battalion’s chaplain, Rev Donald Blackwood remembered how Clyde ‘led his men on so splendidly and bravely in the first great charge of June 7’ and how ‘he did splendid work in organising the new line and repelling counterattacks’. But Rev Blackwood continued: He brought his men out safely from the Messines Ridge on the Sunday morning [June 10], had a good rest, and then led them in again to a more difficult bit of work — a more strenuous charge. In this he fell, right in the enemy’s barbed wire. He was there among the first at the head of his men ... The Australians believed the German wire had been cleared, but this was not always so. Clyde, at the head of his platoon, became trapped, a sitting duck. His Australian Red Cross ‘Wounded and Missing Enquiry’ file contains the following accounts: Corporal Henry Butler: ‘He was my platoon officer. I saw him killed by machine-gun fire, on the right of Messines. We were on our way over and he got caught in the wire; he was killed outright — 6 or so bullets right through him. We went on and gained the objective. We lost a terrible lot then, owing to the wire not being properly cut.’ Corporal George Jones: ‘I saw Lt Pearce lying dead in the field on the 2nd advance in the Messines stunt. He was within 150 yards of the German trenches, shot through the centre of the forehead. Mears, another stretcher bearer in A Company and Falkner in C Company buried him where he was lying.’ CLYDE PEARCE’S DEATH IS commemorated at the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres, which bears the names of more than 54,000 men whose final resting places are now unknown. His grieving parents built a memorial to their lost son, by helping to fund the relocation of the historic Mariners Church — which had been situated on the Hobart waterfront — to a new site at Sandy Bay, on part of what was, until 1914, the course of the Hobart Golf Club. A plaque at the ‘new’ Church of St Peter’s, which still stands, remembers Mr and Mrs Pearce’s noble gesture. The tree planted in 1918 in Clyde’s memory on Hobart’s Soldiers Memorial Avenue survived and is now well maintained. In the west, Claude Felstead returned from his stint with the Australian Flying Corps. In 1938, owing to illness, he put his two properties — Chybarlis and the nearby 1300-acre Glen Erne — on the market and eventually retired to the city. He died in Perth in 1964. The clubs with which Felstead won the 1909 Australian Open are on display at Pingelly GC and due recognition is made of his ‘business partner Mr Clyde Pearce’. Elsewhere, as is sport’s way, new heroes emerged and memories began to fade. From the 1930s, Clyde’s name appeared occasionally in golf columns but mostly as a statistical footnote, rarely with any reference to his rare ability and unique back-story. His enormous courage, exceptional poise for one so young and remarkable ability to win big tournaments on a limited preparation were largely forgotten. His was one of almost 7000 Australian lives lost at the Battle of Messines, a struggle the British ‘won’. Afterwards, Corporal Arthur Dowling met a soldier who had tried to carry Clyde out, before realising there was no use. According to Dowling, the great golfer’s last words were succinct, brave and heart-rending: ‘I’m all right ...’ PRIVATE ROBERT RICHARDSON TIDYMAN of the 19th Battalion was 24 years old when he joined the AIF on December 6, 1915. Earlier in the year he had played for a Metropolis XIII, a standout personal effort in a disappointing premiership year for his club that saw them finish fifth on the ladder, with just six wins from 14 games. In all, he’d played 30 top-grade matches for Easts since his debut in 1913, to go with his two Test caps. A short man, but quick, thickset and strong in the hips, he had come into the Australian team for the second Test of 1914, one of six changes, and quickly announced himself to Test rugby league with a smothering tackle of Harold Wagstaff that saved a try. Straight after, he made a long run down the left wing after receiving a pass from five-eighth ‘Chook’ Fraser, beat three men and then cross-kicked for his captain, Sid Deane, who was tackled near the posts. The move thrilled the crowd, and though it didn’t lead to a try it set the mood for the game. ‘Tidyman is cut out for representative football,’ wrote one critic in his report. ‘The best Australian back,’ enthused another. Fourteen years later, Harry Sunderland, one of rugby league’s most dynamic administrators, recalled the try that he believed generated the greatest enthusiasm he ever saw from an Australian crowd: ‘That was the touchdown which the late Bobby Tidyman and Chook Fraser effected for Australia on the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1914, when it enabled Australia to win against Wagstaff’s men in one Test by 12 to 7.’ In the main, the Australian selectors stuck with the old guard for this series, so young Tidyman’s exciting play was especially noteworthy. The third Test — known famously today as the ‘The Rorke’s Drift Test’ because of the way an undermanned British side refused to give ground — was fought out on a mud-patch that restricted opportunities for the two backlines, but The Referee noted that a Tidyman dash from one 25 to the other was ‘the trickiest and cleverest run by an Australian in the match’. ‘The advent of young ones of the type of H. Horder, R. Tidyman and W. Messenger indicates that the star players are still coming along,’ JC Davis wrote in The Referee at season’s end. Nothing that happened on the football field in 1915, not even a broken arm that cost Tidyman a number of weeks on the sideline and a slightly tentative return when he recovered, refuted that assessment. For the second year in a row, Easts came good after the premiership had been decided, and thrashed Glebe 22–3 in the City Cup final, with Davis noting that ‘R. Tidyman also played a fine game, getting into it more than usual.’ Bob Tidyman was one of the few players from the Australian Test team of 1914 with many years of top football ahead of him. Yet he was the first of them to die. One cannot be sure what motivated him to enlist; the romantic would like to think that the hurt of leaving his parents, Robert and Elizabeth, and a flourishing football career was outweighed by the family ties that compelled him to follow his two younger brothers, William and Christopher, who were due to depart for the War in a fortnight’s time. He had been born in Townsville in North Queensland, but the family had moved south soon after, and were now living in working-class Woollahra. When Bob Tidyman enlisted, he was 19 days away from his last Christmas. He left for Europe on April 9, 1916. On September 25 — six week after Easts won their third straight City Cup by defeating Glebe 18–15 in the final — he found himself in the ghastly mud-filled trenches of the Somme, a God-forsaken place where so many soldiers on both sides of the conflict perished. The battlegrounds stunk of death and disease, and by November there was a stigma about the place that had engulfed all sides: this was hell and there seemed no way out. One soldier described being up to his waist in slush as he manned the frontline, before adding: ‘The dead lay everywhere.’ The 19th Battalion, of whom Tidyman was now a member, had been involved in the appalling battles at Pozieres in July and August, and with their reinforcements they were now being asked to attack again at Flers, trying to win a semblance of advantage before the worst of the winter set in. An assault took place on November 5, for no gain and many casualties. A repeat was ordered for two days later, but an arctic tempest prevented that. There was a further postponement on November 9, but then on November 14, despite the cold and the bog, the infantry was sent over the parapets. Apparently, Bob Tidyman was the first man running, and with his pace he would have been among the first to the opposition trenches, too. Within 24 hours, he was gone. The Australian Red Cross’ missing persons file for Tidyman provides conflicting reports of his death. For almost 12 months, he was listed as ‘missing’ rather than ‘killed’ in action, a distinction that appalled his parents — to be classified as ‘missing’ for so long carried a possible implication of desertion. The family wondered whether an incident in England, when he was charged with being late for a 6.30am parade and confined to camp for four days, might have worked against him. He would not be the last good footballer to be late for training. The most accepted version of his death was that his platoon had been surprisingly successful, though at great cost, and Tidyman was told to look after 50 prisoners while back-up was sought. He was never seen alive again. The presumption is that he was overpowered by the German captives. However, there were other stories, which add to the mystery. One private from the 19th Battalion wrote, ‘I knew him well. He came from Sydney and used to play for the Eastern Suburbs FC. I saw him wounded on November 14th. This was on the Ancre-Thiepval side, I think. He was taken away by our own stretcher bearers and that is all I can say about him.’ Another, who was not an eyewitness: ‘I am certain Tidyman was taken prisoner at Flers, Nov. 15/16. It was known throughout the Battalion.’ A third version: ‘I knew Tidyman quite well — he was a great footballer. He was a short man, about 5ft 5in, about 26. He was wounded in Nov. at Flers, then he went to England, returning to France again, and I saw him at the base at Etaples in Jan. He was going back to the Batt.’ And a fourth: ‘I saw him on the 14th Nov. 1916. He was sent back with prisoners and that was the last I saw of him. He was a very popular chap and a champion football player in Sydney, New South Wales.’ Another informant claimed that he saw Tidyman fall. But he did not know what became of him afterwards, adding, ‘He was a great footballer, and a favourite with all.’ Private John Cleary, also from the 19th Battalion, a former plumber from Balmain whose mother lived at Darlinghurst and who’d sailed to Europe with Tidyman on the HMAT Nestor, seemed to offer the most succinct account: ‘Tidyman was in D Co. and he was killed at Flers on November 14th, after the stunt was over, while coming back with prisoners. I saw this myself.’ It may not have been exactly 50 prisoners, but it was definitely plenty — a dreadful ask for an inexperienced soldier in such a ghastly theatre of war. His body may well have been out there in the mud, but as with so many of his comrades there was no chance for a search or time for ceremony. The battle moved on. A sequel to this tale of anguish came in the June 20, 1917, edition of The Referee, when the following story appeared: Private R.B. Fitzpatrick of the 4th Battalion writes to Mr Claude Corbett, General Manager of the Sunday Times Newspaper Company, from France (14/4/17) as follows: ‘Noticing the remarks re Bob Tidyman, Eastern Suburbs footballer, in the Referee, dated January 3, it is with regret that I forward the following: two months ago, while going over some ground which had just been taken, I picked up an old Rugby Football League membership ticket, with the name R. Tidyman on it. Another man and myself then looked around a bit and we discovered the body of one of our boys, and lying around near him were some letters with the name R. Tidyman just discernable on the envelope. There was nothing else to help in identification, so we buried him and marked the spot. Unfortunately, censorship prevents the name of the place being given. Of course, we could not do much for the poor chap at the time, as we were under direct observation and fire of the enemy, but should I get down that way again I shall have a tablet erected. I thought, of course, it was poor old Bob, but was hoping against hope that I might be wrong, but knowing if he was at the front or not. If it were he, then his relatives and friends may know that he died ‘following on’ and forfeited his life for his country in one of those game rushes for which our boys are famous. I can quite understand that this will be hard news to bear for his relatives, for my own brother lost his life in somewhat similar circumstances.’ It was sad news, indeed. The writer of the letter was a rugby league referee in the lower grades, and his brother to whose death he refers was Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, the well-known Centennial Park cricketer and cricket official. Mr John Quinlan informs me that this news is not regarded as conclusive, inasmuch as Robert Tidyman did not possess a Rugby League ticket, as he did not need one. He thinks there is still hope. The ticket might have belonged to one of Tidyman’s brothers, two of whom are at the front, one having been wounded. But there was no hope. When Private Fitzpatrick saw Johnny Quinlan’s response to his letter, he wrote again, to explain that the ticket was actually a NSW Leagues Club honorary membership ticket, ‘marked Mr R. Tidyman, member, H.R. Miller, secretary, available till October 21, 1915.’ Quinlan had thought he meant a season ticket, the kind that got holders into matches. Not that it mattered, for the War Office had finally confirmed his death. No one ever managed to give the dead footballer a proper burial, or to plant a cross or erect a tablet; there is no known grave, but his fate is recognised, with 11,000 other brave Aussies, at the Australian National Memorial at Villers Bretonneux. It is almost quaint that Tidyman chose to carry a souvenir of his rugby league days into battle. And there is a certain trivial irony in an Australian player from the Rorke’s Drift Test being beaten in this much more important fight because he was outnumbered, and on a mudheap, too. But very seriously, with no evidence to the contrary, we can safely presume, as some of his comrades asserted, that Bob Tidyman died a hero’s death. Strangely, neither the NSW Rugby League nor the Eastern Suburbs club ever recognised his service in any significant way. It is a shame that his gallantry was never truly commemorated by the game he graced for far too short a time. IT'S AMAZING WHAT YOU can find in ‘junk’ shops. Just recently, on a visit to such a store at Avalon, on Sydney’s northern beaches, there for sale among a pile of old magazines was the July 1952 issue of Sporting Life. Originally published by Associated Newspapers in Sydney, Sporting Life was one of the country’s best and most innovative sports publications from 1947 to 1957. It was edited in its early years by AG ‘Johnnie’ Moyes, one of the most celebrated figures in Australian cricket from the 1920s to the 1960s. Its star writer was Keith Miller, the great allrounder. On the cover of this issue is a photograph of Samuela Domoni, a member of the touring Fijian rugby union team. The lead story is a profile of champion sprinter Marjorie Jackson, written on the eve of her departure for the Helsinki Olympics. ‘It is not generally realised that if Marjorie wins an Olympic title, she will be the first Australian to have won an Olympic track event since 1896,’ wrote journalist Geoff Allen. There are tales of Clive Churchill and Vic Patrick, a review of the recent Collingwood v Richmond ‘Australian Rules experiment’ at the Sydney Cricket Ground and a preview of the British Open, a tournament no Australian golfer had ever won (Peter Thomson’s first victory was still two years away). Sporting Life sold for a shilling and three pence in 1952; two dollars at Avalon in 2016. Money well spent. It wasn’t until later, when the magazine was being thumbed from front to back, that a hidden jewel was discovered. The story on page 42 is headlined: Australia’s Best Baseballer: Uncanny Merv Deigan is the only baseballer chosen in every All Australian team since 1946. Merv Deigan was a prodigious sporting talent, a prolific hitter for Petersham-Leichhardt in Sydney grade baseball and an excellent batsman for Petersham in Sydney grade cricket. He would be inducted into Australian baseball’s official Hall of Fame in 2006. The story’s author wrote that ‘Petersham fans are unanimous that Deigan is the best third baseman in Australia — a view shared by several prominent ex-players and officials to whom I spoke’. That author is Richie Benaud. At this time, Richie had played one cricket Test match for Australia. He was 21 years old, working in Associated Newspapers’ accounts department and a regular visitor to the busy Sporting Life office. In the years to come Richie would, of course, become a unique figure in the sporting media and the greatest TV commentator cricket has known. It has been generally accepted that Richie media career began in 1956, at Associated Newspaper’s afternoon daily, The Sun, when he was given a chance on police rounds. He had written a few stories for sports magazines in the three years before, including three for Sporting Life, but always on a freelance, one-off basis. This article from July 1952 pre-dates all that. A trawl through earlier editions of Sporting Life failed to find another contribution by Richie Benaud. Given his age and lack of experience (as a writer and cricketer), it seems unlikely his work would have appeared elsewhere. The Merv Deigan profile is almost certainly the first story by Richie published in a major newspaper or magazine. THAT THE STORY IS about baseball should not be a surprise. Richie as a sportsman is remembered today almost totally as a cricketer, but in the early 1950s he was also known for his work on the diamond. He made his debut as a shortstop for Western Suburbs in Sydney’s first-grade baseball competition during the autumn of 1951, a year in which he scored his maiden first-class century (against South Australia at the Adelaide Oval) and was included in a NSW Colts baseball team that also included the future Test cricket opener Billy Watson. Richie knew Merv Deigan well. Their relationship went back to at least October 1947, when they were both members of a squad of junior cricketers that trained at the SCG nets on Wednesday afternoons. Also in that squad were future Test cricket stars Graeme Hole and Jimmy Burke. ‘Petersham Oval, Sydney, is a busy baseball centre in the winter months,’ Richie’s story begins. ‘Crowds of up to 5000 people go there each weekend to watch their clubs play the game that is steadily gaining popularity in Australia. ‘The idol of these crowds is a solid, wavy haired young man playing third base for Petersham-Leichhardt …’ AS RICHIE TOLD it, he started his working life at age 16 as a clerk in a city accountant’s office. ‘I was never sure I was cut out for accountancy, but at Parramatta High School, in keeping with all other secondary schools, they provided tests for pupils to see for what they would be best suited, he wrote in Anything But … An Autobiography, which was published in 1998. ‘I loved English but the testers said I was outstanding at mental arithmetic, so accountancy it was.’ In 1950, Richie was, in his own words, ‘put off’ from the position that had been paying him £3 a week. He soon found a similar job, on double the money, at Associated Newspapers. The appeal of this opportunity, it seems, apart from the pay rise, was that his new boss, Bert Scotford, was a ‘cricket fan who had heard of me’. Richie, still a teenager, had just made his first-class debut for NSW. Getting time off for practice and interstate tours was not going to be a problem. At school, Richie achieved what was known as a ‘sportsman’s pass’. He did his schoolwork while devouring his sport. The local Parramatta papers wrote of him as a future champion, and as legends such as Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting would do after him, his focus as a young man was very much on his sport. He made his Test debut at age 21 and his first Ashes tour at 22, by which time he was being spoken of as a future captain. In the recently published Richie: The Man Behind the Legend, one of Richie’s old teammates at the Cumberland grade club, Bruce Ritchie, who first met the Benaud family before the war, recalled: When Richie left school, a rising star in cricket by then, just about everyone was surprised when he took a job with a chartered accountancy firm. We all thought he would head into something to do with sport. At the time, I think that deep down he was wondering about how successful he could be at cricket and whether he could make a living out of it, so he took the accountancy option to give him a solid ‘back up’ if his sporting ambitions backfired. Bruce Ritchie was another member of that junior cricket squad, alongside Richie and Merv Deigan, that trained at the SCG on Wednesday afternoons in 1947. The picture he paints of his mate from that time is of a young man who didn’t quite know what to with his working life. Richie had no formal qualifications, but gradually the realisation would come that he really could be a journalist. What part did his debut article play in that process? In Benaud On Reflection (1984), Richie remembered that during the three years prior to the 1956 Ashes tour he had been repeatedly requesting a transfer from Accounts to Editorial. ‘My hope was to follow Keith Miller into the media world,’ he wrote. ‘But I wanted to learn about journalism in the different areas of the newspaper, not purely in Sport.’ Before the team departed for England in 1956, Lindsay Clinch, the Executive Editor of The Sun, told Richie that when he returned there might be an opportunity in the sports department. ‘I’d rather be on News if possible,’ was the cricketer’s response. That Richie was now resolutely serious about a career in the media is clear, best shown by his decision at the end of the Ashes tour to take part in a three-week training course with BBC-TV. In part, this might also have been motivated by the continued desire to follow Miller, who had agreed a deal to work in front of the cameras for Frank Packer’s fledgling Nine Network in Australia. But that training course was an investment in the future. For now, Richie’s ambitions were in print. ‘I wasted no time getting back into The Sun newspaper office the day after arriving home [and] went into see Lindsay Clinch by appointment, anxious to know if there was any chance now of moving out of the Counting House and into Editorial. ‘We want you to write a column for the sports department each week; they’ll get someone to ghost you if necessary,’ Clinch said. ‘I’d like to work on Police Rounds and News,’ Richie responded. ‘He looked at me for what seemed like minutes but was only seconds,’ Richie continued in Benaud On Reflection. ‘Okay, go and see Jack Toohey [the News Editor],’ Clinch said. An excited, smiling Richie turned for the door. And then Clinch added quietly, importantly: ‘He’s expecting you.’ The rest, as they say, is history. Richie was given the chance to work under the ace crime reporter Noel Bailey. In the 1960s, while still Australian captain, he became a respected cricket writer for The Sun in Australia and News of the World in England, always maintaining that the experience he earned while working with Bailey was a key to his success. His television commentary career began in England in 1963; in 1977, he became the ‘voice’ of World Series Cricket, and soon the TV voice of all Australian cricket. On his death in April 2015 — 12 months ago this week — he was recognised across cricket as an exceptional allrounder, a great captain and the greatest TV commentator. RICHIE DID OCCASIONALLY RECALL his link to Sporting Life, but never suggested that the magazine played a significant role in the evolution of his working life. After he moved to Associated Newspapers in 1950, he immediately discovered that the building in Elizabeth Street in which he was now employed also produced the best-selling magazine. ‘It was a wonderful privilege to be able to slip up to the Sporting Life offices occasionally and listen to some of the opinions on the game and its various players,’ Richie wrote in Anything But … An Autobiography. These opinions would have come from some of Australian cricket’s most renowned and influential figures, including Miller, Moyes, the best-selling author Ray Robinson and the former NSW captain Ginty Lush. Another regular contributor was the former Sheffield Shield and Australian Services XI opening batsman RS ‘Dick’ Whitington, The Sun’s cricket correspondent. In his biography of Miller, The Golden Nugget (1981), Whitington recalled: In 1950, Moyes’ magazine Sporting Life was rising towards a monthly circulation of 250,000 … Moyes applied for additional staff and was told he could seek a junior assistant. It so happened there was a blue-eyed blond named Richie Benaud working in the Accounts Department of Australian Associated Newspapers Limited at that time. The boss of that department was a cricket fanatic named Bert Scotford and Richie, then 19, was showing considerable promise as a hard-hitting batsman and googly bowler. With Scotford’s consent, Richie joined Moyes and Miller on the staff of Sporting Life. Richie’s time on the Sporting Life payroll was short-lived. His transfer back to Accounts probably occurred in 1951, after Moyes departed as editor; the fact Richie never mentioned he was on the staff certainly suggests it was a brief arrangement. But he did continue to visit the magazine’s offices and, as his status as a cricketer grew, he would have felt more and more comfortable doing so. This would have been especially true after July 1952, given that he was now a published contributor. He would have more stories appear in the magazine — ‘So You Want to be a Big Hitter’ (March 1954), ‘Age is Kind to Spinners’ (October 1955) and ‘How to Beat the Batsman’ (December 1955) — but his first commitment through this period remained to his sport. All the stories and profiles of Richie at this time — including one by Miller that appeared in Sporting Life in October 1951 — are of a young man who couldn’t get to the practice nets quick enough. It is intriguing that Richie never made mention of his debut contribution to Sporting Life in his memoirs. Perhaps he just forgot about it, but the first published story is always a major moment in a journalist’s life. The tens of thousands of people who remain interested in, even inspired by his life’s work, will see this debut story as genuinely historic. But in the most recent issue of the cricket journal Between Wickets, Rodney Cavalier recalls an evening where he witnessed Richie being approached by a potential biographer. Richie politely declined. ‘I have written all anyone needs to know about me,’ he said. The guess is that in July 1952 — even though he now had a byline — Richie still wasn’t sure where his working life was heading. It was not until at least a year later, perhaps after experiencing his first Ashes tour, that he knew in his heart that he wanted to be a journalist and not until 1956 that his great media adventure truly began. To include the Merv Deigan profile in his life story would have been to give the article more prominence than he felt it deserved, to create a false impression. That was never Richie’s way. IT'S BEEN A VERY good year for sports books. Yet when Australia’s independent booksellers recently revealed the long lists for their annual book-of-the-year awards, not one sports book was included. None. Zilch. Zero. At the time, there were five sports books among the top 16 best-selling Australian books (with a recommended retail price of $25 or more). The public, it seems, enjoy and appreciate Australian sports books more than the industry does. In one way, perhaps the weirdest omission was the winner of this year’s Walkley Book Award and the William Hill Australian Sports Book of the Year: Chip Le Grand’s superb and well-balanced study of the Essendon drug saga, The Straight Dope. If those awards rated Le Grand research and writing so highly, who are the Indies to think otherwise? Or maybe Something for the Pain, Gerald Murnane’s unique and wonderful horse-racing memoir, is a stranger oversight, because Murnane is a name we don’t usually find on the back pages. (I read Murnane’s treasure-trove in one glorious sitting, and found a bit of myself in many of his tales of the turf. I bet a lot of other punters — but my guess is unfortunately not many Indie Award judges — would feel the same.) In my view, there are at least two of three other sport books that are equally as good as the work of Le Grand and Murnane, maybe even better. As I said, it’s been a good year for sports books. I must stress that this is not a criticism of the works that have been nominated for the Indie Awards. I’m sure they are all terrific. I’m equally sure the people organising the Indie Awards are good people. But it is a pity the publishing industry is so reluctant to give due credit when good sports books come along. It happens every year. Of course, we in the sports publishing industry don’t always help ourselves. Take, for example, a review that appeared last weekend of two of the four Richie Benaud books that have been released in 2015. I presume the reviewer likes his sport, and I wonder why Richie: The Man Behind the Legend wasn’t mentioned, especially given how well the book has been received. I was also a bit peculiar that the reviewer didn’t acknowledge Rob Smyth’s impressive Benaud in Wisden. But what really grated was the reviewer’s easy dismissal of modern sports books, the sweeping suggestion that controversy has become the ‘stock-in-trade’ of today’s sports books and the reference to ‘the chummy informality favoured by too many sporting autobiographies’. Sports books — like beauty and commentators — are often in the eye of the beholder. It is true that not all sports books published are excellent. Some need more care; some are published for the wrong reasons. I imagine this is true across all genre. It is also true that many sports books cater for an audience of all ages. I was always aware, for example, that when helping Steve Waugh with his cricket diaries that they were read by kids as well as adults, and while this didn’t mean we had to dumb the books down, it would have been equally wrong to turn Steve into Tolstoy. The diaries kept selling in good numbers, and then Steve’s autobiography, Out of my Comfort Zone, sold more than 200,000 copies, which suggests we were doing something right. For some reviewers, bagging sports books is a habit. If only the Richie reviewer from a couple of paragraphs back had read ‘Inside’, the autobiography of Chris Judd, he’d have found a best-selling sports book that is neither controversial for its own sake nor informal to a fault. Arguably the best footballer of his generation made the wise decision to ask Greg Baum, arguably the best sports writer in Australia, to help him, and the result is a book that I, predominantly a league fan, found compelling and revealing. Baum, like all good ghosts, is clever enough to let Judd tell his own story, which doesn’t make the book chummy. It makes it true. Far different to ‘Inside’, but just as good in its own way, is Dangerous Games: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics, by Larry Writer. The late Basil Dickinson, who competed in the triple jump at Berlin and who died at age 98 in October 2013, is just about my sports hero of the year. He was interviewed at length by Writer; his recollections provide the basis for a compelling study of the most controversial Olympics of them all. I am impressed that Allen & Unwin took a chance with Dangerous Games. There are many editors and publishers in Australia who want sports books to stay in a certain ‘comfort zone’, fit a particular mould. More than once, I have had editors insist on sports books being strictly chronological, as if there is no other way, to the point of putting dates at the start of each chapter. The editors’ desire was to ‘help’ the reader (who they clearly thought was not very bright); the truth was they wanted to help themselves, because they know nothing of sport. I can’t imagine Gerald Murnane copping dates at the start of each chapter of his memoir; nor would Paul Kent, the author of what I reckon is the Australian sports book of the year: Sonny Ball: The Legend of Sonny Bill Williams. It’s some trick producing a book better than those of Le Grand, Murnane, Judd and Writer. Kent took on his project knowing he’d get no co-operation from the man himself, but this actually adds to the book’s appeal. Sonny Ball is not a conventional biography. The unusual cover and the absence of photos tell a story in itself. The overall result is as much a saga of 21st century sport in Australia and the relationship between heroes, fans and media as it is a book about Sonny Bill. I love the way it ends (the book, I mean; Sonny Bill’s journey is far from over). Kent knows his subject, is appropriately cynical, sceptical and sympathetic, and is an outstanding scribe. He’s written a page-turner of the highest order. The best cricket book I’ve read this year (apart from Richie, of course) was Test Cricket: The Unauthorised Biography by Jarrod Kimber. If an author’s enthusiasm for his or her subject matter was the only criteria, I would have included That Night: A Decade on, the Story of Australian Football’s Greatest Night, by Adam Peacock. Just about everyone who matters is interviewed, including Lucky Guus. But if depth of research is the key, David Middleton’s ‘Official Rugby League Annual’ wins every time. The second-best book from overseas I read in 2015 was Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty (Simon & Schuster, New York), by Charles Leerhsen, a brilliantly researched story that dispels many of the myths that have tarnished Cobb’s reputation. A legend like the Georgia Peach deserves a biographer like Leershen. The absolute No. 1 sports book of 2015 from overseas, in my view, is Professor Tony Collins’ tour de force, The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby (Bloomsbury, London), which is staggering in its detail, but rich in anecdote, too. If I’m showing my league bias by advocating Sonny Ball and The Oval World, please forgive me. I don’t think I am. There was a time, about 30 years ago, when many people in the Australian publishing industry honestly thought league fans couldn’t read. Thankfully, those times are gone. Next step is to convince those same publishing types that some of the sports books they release each year are more than just money-spinners; they are actually very good. It’ll happen one day. Probably. (This story was originally published on December 18, 2015) |
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