The Phar Lap Mystery
Page 15
After the 1930 attempts, no-one made any more attempts on Phar Lap in Australia. He continued his winning streak till the 1931 Melbourne Cup when, weighed down by a handicap of 10 stone 10 (or about 68 kilograms) he came a dismal eighth. It was then that Telford and Davis made the fateful decision to send him to America.
The death of Phar Lap is a subject still hotly debated, even now. Initial reports that he had died of colic or acute indigestion soon gave way to fears he had been poisoned, an opinion borne out by the two vets who had attended him and conducted the first autopsy. Phar Lap’s Australian vet, Dr Nielsen, told Melbourne Herald journalist Bert Wolfe, who wrote under the name of ‘Cardigan’ and who was with Phar Lap in America, that he was sure the horse had died of an irritant poison. He said: ‘I saw the lining of his stomach and I know what it means when it is eaten away. I would like to be able to come to some other conclusion, but it is impossible in face of the evidence of my own eyes.’
A second autopsy by the University of California was less conclusive, suggesting only that some arsenic, an irritant poison, had indeed been found, but surmising it could have come from the toxic lead arsenate insecticide spray that had been used on the Perry farm where Phar Lap died. But as Mr Perry pointed out, lots of other horses on his farm had eaten the grass on which the spray had drifted, and not one had even been sick. Phar Lap’s remaining oat feed was tested but no evidence of poison was found—not surprising if the poison had already been ingested. My idea of the poison coming to him in a sugar lump was not, I think, considered, but I suggested it because arsenic has been used in the past to lace sugar in human murder cases—it is hard to detect because it is a white powder, has almost no taste except a faint sweetness, and does not cause irritation to the throat as it goes down (instead it attacks the stomach and other internal organs). And it does not cause instant death—sometimes it takes as long as 35 to 40 hours.
The police conducted a short investigation of the events of the previous 24 hours and the people who might have been there, but nothing came of it, not surprisingly as literally thousands of people had been on the scene during that time and they could hardly trace them all. In the end nobody seemed to know for sure—though back home in Australia, most people were certain Phar Lap had been cruelly murdered by ‘the Yanks’. American gangsters were notorious for their violence and cruelty, and most people felt it was them who had ‘done in’ the national hero (though of course Australia had more than its share of violent and vicious gangsters—including presumably those who had made the attempts on Phar Lap in 1930).
In the years since 1932 controversy continued to rage about just how Phar Lap died. The deliberate poisoning theory was discarded in favour of illness and then a suggestion of accidental poisoning from a tonic given to Phar Lap by Tommy Woodcock, which contained very small amounts of arsenic (in small doses it was considered beneficial). It was said the arsenic in the tonic could have built up over time or that Woodcock might even have accidentally overdosed the horse (a most unlikely idea, in my opinion, given his great care with the horse).
In 2000 the theory of an acute bacterial infection, which had only been recently identified by vet science, was put forward in another of Geoff Armstrong and Peter Thompson’s books, simply called Phar Lap. This seemed to many people in the racing community, including vets, to be quite plausible. But then in 2006 came a bombshell: tests done by Victorian scientists on a strand of Phar Lap’s hair, using the very latest synchrotron technology (where the hair was bombarded with a beam of intense light) gave an initial finding that supported the deliberate poisoning theory: Phar Lap had ingested a single massive dose of arsenic in the last 35 to 40 hours before his death. This finding was confirmed by further tests in 2008, and so it seems Dr Nielsen’s initial diagnosis back then had been right all along. Phar Lap died of arsenic poisoning, in a massive dose, and in a way that could not possibly be seen as an accident. (Not everyone in the racing community accepts this, however, even now.)
Who poisoned Phar Lap remains a complete mystery. As I’ve mentioned, American gangsters of the time were a fearsome lot, with the Mafia and others controlling illegal alcohol and gambling and fixing horse-races, amongst other things, and they were not reluctant to murder and maim people, let alone horses. In any investigation there’d be no shortage of suspects, but also no real way of identifying the exact culprit or culprits. But in an intriguing interview in 1983, two years before he died, Tommy Woodcock revealed that a man he called only ‘the Brazilian’ (a gangster who was known as a ruthless killer and who was with a band of the most ‘fearsome-looking toughs’ he’d ever seen), had been hanging around both at Agua Caliente and back in San Francisco. In his mind, he said, he felt sure the man had been involved somehow in Phar Lap’s death, but he had no real evidence and he was afraid that if he said anything he’d follow the horse to an early death, so he had kept quiet.
Another theory as to the identity of the poisoner came from Bert Wolfe, who suggested that violent anti-racing cranks opposed to the reintroduction of racing in California were behind it.
In my book I have left the question of the culprit’s identity open, but allowed for the intriguing (fictional) possibility that the same people responsible for the attempts in Melbourne could have been behind the final and successful attempt. Well, it makes a good story!
Note: On the Museum Victoria website, there are some great snippets of information, multimedia presentations and short films where you can see Phar Lap live in action, including film of him winning the 1930 Melbourne Cup and the 1932 Agua Caliente Handicap. Visit http://museum.victoria.com.au/pharlap/story/index.asp.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The photograph on the cover, ‘Phar Lap’ (ai000288), is reproduced with the kind permission of The Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.
The photograph on page 38, ‘Phar Lap wins the Melbourne Cup again’ by Bruce Howard (nla.pic-vn3060136) is reproduced with the kind permission of The Herald and Weekly Times Photographic Collection.
The postcard on page 100, ‘Phar Lap, winner Melbourne Cup, 1930’ (nla.pic-an23181978), is reproduced with the kind permission of the National Library of Australia.
The photograph on page 145, ‘San Francisco’s Famous Chinatown, the largest outside of China itself’ (California Historical Society, FN-31754), is reproduced with the kind permission of the California Historical Society.
About the Author
SOPHIE MASSON born in Indonesia of French parents, Sophie Masson was sent to France to live with her grandmother when she was a baby and came to Australia with her family when she was five. Educated in Sydney, she also spent a good deal of her childhood in France, as the family often went back. A dedicated bookworm as a kid, Sophie also loved writing stories to entertain herself and her younger sisters and brothers.
Now the author of more than fifty novels for young people, Sophie is published in many different countries. She lives in rural New South Wales with her husband, and has three grown-up children.
Sophie is the author of The Hunt for Ned Kelly, also part of the My Australian Story series.
Scholastic Press
345 Pacific Highway Lindfield NSW 2070
An imprint of Scholastic Australia Pty Limited (ABN 11 000 614 577)
PO Box 579 Gosford NSW 2250
www.scholastic.com.au
Part of the Scholastic Group
Sydney • Auckland • New York • Toronto • London • Mexico City • New Delhi • Hong Kong • Buenos Aires • Puerto Rico
First published by Scholastic Australia in 2010.
Text copyright © Sophie Masson, 2010.
Cover copyright © Scholastic Australia, 2010.
Internal photography: paper on pages 67, 68, 69 and 118 copyright © istockphoto/Tomasz Pietryszek.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the te
xt of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
eISBN: 978-1-921-99071-7
* * *
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Masson, Sophie, 1959-
Title: The Phar Lap mystery / Sophie Masson.
Edition: 1st ed.
ISBN: 9781741697278 (pbk.)
Series: My Australian story.
Target Audience: For children.
Subjects: Phar Lap (Race horse)–Juvenile fiction.
Dewey Number: A823.3
* * *