Archer's Melbourne Cup

by Vashti Farrer

  Tom said later that Mr de Mestre stands to make a pile from the bookmakers as well. He laid out some large bets and at 6–1 would be raking it in.

  Mr de Mestre said he walked into the Victoria Turf Club feeling like he owned it. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘they say the best horse doesn’t always win the race, but I think you’ll agree that this time he has.’ He said he so enjoyed seeing the looks on their faces—especially the bookies.

  There was no prize for second or third, so there must have been a lot of people backed Archer at the last minute, because the bookies were moaning about how hard they’d been hit.

  Then before we left the course Tom went off and bought pies and potatoes for us for supper. He said we deserved a bit of a nosh-up, because today had been special.

  Now I think I’ll sleep, so I’ll stop here.

  Friday 8th November

  It’s after supper. Mr de Mestre went to a Cup party last night, since everyone wanted to meet him and hear about Archer.

  But today he was at the course again to see Archy win once more—this time in the Melbourne Town Plate with a prize of 100 sovereigns. Out stepped Archy, best foreleg forward like he was pointing his toe almost, easy as you please to beat Secundus—only after yesterday’s win, he was short-priced favourite today at 2–1.

  It was warmer than yesterday, but the crowd was much smaller. Far fewer people were in the stand and not nearly so many ladies.

  It was Exeter’s first race today, the Victoria Stakes over a mile-and-a-half. He was priced at 6–4, but he came nowhere, even though Johnny rode him really hard, hoping to break through and take the lead. I don’t think Exeter likes racing that much. He’s not a stayer and all that shouting from the crowd makes him uneasy.

  Then it was Inheritor’s turn in the Betting-Room Stakes, again with Johnny Cutts, but he came fourth.

  But the sad news today was the mares Dispatch and Medora have been put down. Medora broke both cannon bones and her off hind leg. Dispatch broke her back, leaving her hindquarters paralysed.

  Henderson staggered off the field with a dislocated shoulder, but Joe Morrison on Dispatch had his arm and collarbone broken and he was hurt down his side. Badly bruised. He was taken to hospital and is lucky to be alive.

  Mr de Mestre was really cut up when he told us, said Medora was a three-year-old filly. Far too young for a race like that. ‘And they’ve got to do something about that first sharp turn,’ he said. ‘It’s downright dangerous!’

  All three horses are racing tomorrow.

  Saturday 9th November

  Archer ran in the All Age Stakes today, Inheritor in the Victorian Turf Club Great Handicap and Exeter in the Melbourne Stakes.

  But all Exeter wanted was to do was go home. His neck was sweating and his eyes were wild even before we pushed him out of his stall. Then he started walking sideways. Archy was shaking his head, as Exeter stuck one ear forward, one back and took no notice. I think he’s turning out to be a bit of a Bessy Bedlam.

  We leave for home in a few days and the horses are due for a long spell. I realise I’ll never be able to ride like Johnny Cutts, not even as well as Barney. They’re both like a half-man half-horse. And what with the damper and bread and pies and potatoes, I’ll most probably end up bigger than both of them.

  But it doesn’t mean I can’t ride at country meetings like Tom and Mr de Mestre and go on working with horses. Some day I might even get to train them. I’d like to. Tom says I’ve learnt a lot this year and it’s all here in my diary.

  Today Mr de Mestre gave me a copy of Great Expectations. He says it’s a present for Ma and since he’s so pleased with Barney and me and all our hard work as stablehands, he’s giving us each a bonus. So I figure if Pa needs £80 deposit, then with my bonus and Ma’s egg money he might just have enough. I can’t wait to tell him!

  BUT if he tries to make me leave Terara and Archy and work for him instead, then Mr de Mestre’s promised to tell him that I’m INDISPENSIBLE!

  Mr de Mestre plans to take Archy to Flemington next year to try for another Melbourne Cup. And if he does he’ll be taking me with him!

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  There’s a story that an English couple who had just emigrated to Australia wondered why Melbourne was such a quiet city, because there seemed to be nobody on the streets. They had arrived during the running of the Cup. This is probably just a good yarn, but there is some truth to it. Ever since the running of the first Cup, the race has been popular with the public. Melbourne gives itself a holiday on Cup Day (as hardly anyone is likely to turn up to work) and a strange, eerie quiet settles over the city while the race is being run.

  The Melbourne Cup is rare among famous horse races for being a handicap event. This means that the best horses must carry not only their jockey, but extra weight in the form of lead bars in their saddle bags. Horses with a lesser chance of winning carry only their jockey. This has always been part of the Cup’s popularity because it means, in theory, every horse has an equal chance, so it’s possible for an unknown horse with a lightweight jockey to streak past the post and beat the favourite. It sits well with our national philosophy of giving the ‘little Aussie battler’ a ‘fair go’.

  Captain Frederick Charles Standish came to Australia as Assistant Commissioner to the goldfields in 1852. He later became Chief Commissioner of Police (1858–1880). It was thought Standish came up with the idea for a Melbourne Cup. If that’s true then he was involved in three significant events in Australia’s history: the Eureka Stockade, the first Melbourne Cup and the arrest of Ned Kelly.

  The first Melbourne Cup was run on a Thursday, not a Tuesday as it is now. In 1861, fifty-seven entrants were reduced to seventeen starters. The horses waited for the starter to drop a flag, which was the signal to start racing. A fixed barrier, where horses line up at the start, was introduced in 1924. Today’s ‘cage’ system came later.

  No trophy was awarded for that first Cup. Etienne de Mestre was presented with a hand-beaten gold watch and a cheque for £930. The second- and third-placegetters received nothing.

  The following day, Archer won another race of over two miles, the Melbourne Town Plate. Then in 1862 he returned to win a second Melbourne Cup, carrying 10 st 2 lb (64.4 kg), but this time he was a short-priced favourite at 2–1. He again beat Mormon, by 10 lengths, in the faster time of 3 mins 47 secs. The record of the same two horses coming first and second two years in a row has never been broken.

  The record of the same horse winning two Cups in a row was unbroken until Rain Lover won in 1968 and 1969. In 2005, Makybe Diva broke the record by winning her third Melbourne Cup in a row (2003, 2004 and 2005). Who knows? If Archer had been allowed to run a third Cup, he might have made it three in a row. But then, he would have had to carry (with lead bars) a massive 11 st 4 lb (71 kg). Thankfully horses no longer have to carry such weights and Makybe Diva carried only 58 kg.

  Victoria had separated from New South Wales in 1851. The annual public holiday marking the event, Separation, or Secession Day, prevented Archer from running a third Melbourne Cup in 1863. When the telegram entering him arrived, the Victoria Turf Club’s offices were closed for the holiday, so his application was rejected as ‘too late’.

  Etienne de Mestre was understandably furious. He claimed it was ‘sour grapes’ on the part of Melbourne and refused to attend. Other Sydney trainers boycotted the Cup in support, so that year only seven horses raced, all Victorian. A mediocre horse, Banker, won.

  When Archer was prevented from running a third Cup, de Mestre vowed never again to enter a horse in the race. He later relented, however, and won with Tim Whiffler in 1867, Chester in 1877, and Calamia in 1878. His record of five wins by one trainer was broken only by Bart Cummings with his amazing string of eleven Cups that started in 1965.

  As a result of the tragic fall in the 1861 Cup, the Victoria Turf Club moved the starting post back to allow horses a straight run of four furlongs before they came to the sharp river turn.


  Horses that have won the Cup include 60 bays, 37 browns, 34 chestnuts, 5 greys, 5 bay/browns, 3 blacks and 2 brown/blacks.

  A horse named Old Rowley won the Cup in 1940. I ‘borrowed’ the name for the farm horse that Sam rides.

  Racehorses come from all over the world to race in the Cup. Overseas entrants travel by plane in luxurious quarters. It was far more risky taking them by ship to Melbourne. In September 1867, the City of Melbourne was hit by a gale, almost a cyclone, off Jervis Bay. On board were eleven racehorses travelling to the Cup; nine died. Five of those eleven horses had been trained by de Mestre.

  In 1972, the Melbourne Cup went metric. Before that it was measured by Imperial standards. In Imperial measures, 3 feet equalled 1 yard, 220 yards equalled a furlong, and 8 furlongs equalled a mile. The Melbourne Cup was 2 miles (or 3520 yards) long. In metric terms, this equals 3218.7 metres. However, the modern Cup has been ‘rounded back’ to 3200 metres, so it is now 18.7 metres shorter than the race Archer ran.

  Archer was foaled in 1856. He was a bay horse by William Tell out of Maid of Oaks. William Tell was sired by an English St Leger winner, Touchstone, out of Miss Bowe. Maid of Oaks was by Vagabond from a Zorab Mare. Touchstone was also an ancestor of the champion Carbine. Carbine won the Melbourne Cup of 1890 from the largest field ever, thirty-nine starters. Any more than twenty-four starters is now considered too dangerous. Carbine also carried the heaviest weight on record, 10 st 5 lb (65.7 kg).

  The story that Archer walked from Nowra, New South Wales, to Melbourne and then won the Cup is only a story. It seems to have started as a good pub yarn, but was later picked up by a Melbourne newspaper, probably in the Cup’s centenary year. It has been reprinted many times since in books and newspapers and there was even a full-length feature film based on the tale.

  He is said to have walked because there was no rail link from Nowra to Melbourne at the time. In fact, there was no link from Sydney to Melbourne until a railway bridge across the Murray was opened in June 1883.

  Had Archer walked, he would have had to trek through the snow-covered Snowy Mountains in mid-winter. There is proof, too, that he and his stablemates Inheritor and Exeter travelled to Melbourne on the steamer City of Sydney. The trainer Etienne de Mestre and the jockey John Cutts were listed among the First Class passengers.

  In researching this book, the more details I discovered the more myths appeared. According to the story, the stable foreman who was supposed to have ‘walked’ Archer the more than 500 miles to Melbourne was named Dave Power. However, no-one with that name ever worked in de Mestre’s stables. That said, there were people of that name at the time and one of these could have worked as foreman in the Halfway House Hotel stables where Archer and de Mestre stayed in Sydney. Archer did cover many miles on foot walking to country race meetings, since walking was part of de Mestre’s training program.

  In 1859, two years before the first Cup, the SS Admella was wrecked off the South Australian–Victorian border. Her cargo included seven horses, four of them racehorses. One, The Barber, swam ashore, was recaptured and was made to walk to Geelong, where he was put on a train for Melbourne. He ran his race but was unplaced. This may have helped give rise to the Archer walking myth.

  Archer kept on racing, sometimes two or three times a day (which was common practice then) until August 1864, when he was injured in a fall during training. He was retired to stud on Exeter Farm, Braidwood, where he’d been foaled, and died on 22 December 1872 from inflammation of the lungs caused by eating green barley. He was sixteen years old. Archer is buried on Exeter Farm and has a racetrack and a bridge named after him.

  Basic methods of training horses haven’t changed greatly. It’s still a mixture of walking, track work and swimming, although some horses now use fancy walking machines that look like merry-go-rounds. They swim in special plunge pools doing a horsey version of dog paddle, but the beach still remains popular and they love sand pits. For a long time jockeys rode sitting bolt upright, not crouching forward over the saddle as they do today.

  John Robertson’s Free Selection Act was passed in October 1861, and came into effect the following year. It enabled land seekers to secure holdings of 320 acres, as long as they paid a deposit of one quarter the land’s value. If they made improvements then the land became theirs. The ‘flip-side’ was that by opening up Crown lands for this purpose, many more Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their land.

  Prior to 1883 and the Victorian Married Women’s Property Act, any land, houses, or livestock (such as horses) that a woman owned when she married, or remarried, automatically became the property of her husband.

  In August 1861, an official search party set out from Adelaide to discover what had happened to the explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. Burke had left Melbourne the year before, leading an expedition from south to north, searching for possible pastoral land and perhaps a trade route to Asia. On 15 September, another search party set out from Melbourne to find them. The sole survivor of Burke’s last desperate push north, John King, was saved by Aborigines, so he was able to show the search party where Wills was buried. Soon after, they found the body of Burke. The explorers had died at the end of June.

  Wills’s diary of the expedition was published on 7 November, the same day that the first Melbourne Cup was run. I moved the diary forward a day so as not to ‘interfere’ with the running of the Cup.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My sincere acknowledgements and thanks to the following.

  • Especially to Keith R. Binney, author of Horsemen of the First Frontier (1788–1900) and The Serpent’s Legacy (Volcanic Productions, 2005) for his help, advice and support.

  • Keith Paterson, historian, for his invaluable insights into Etienne de Mestre and Archer from his book The Master’s Touch: Racing with Etienne de Mestre—Winner of Five Melbourne Cups.

  • Veterinary Surgeon Ian Scott and his wife Pip, of Nowra, for extra research.

  • Kevin and Jenny Moses and foreman Brad Widdup of Kevin Moses Racing Stables, Kensington, for allowing me to meet their racehorses.

  • Alan Clark and Keith Paterson of Shoalhaven Historical Society Inc.

  • Joanne Burgess, Librarian, Australian Jockey Club, Randwick.

  • Meyer Eidelson of St Kilda Historical Society.

  • Margarita Adam, Susie McKenzie and Mal Holmes, equine enthusiasts.

  • And authors Goldie Alexander, Allan Baillie, Natalie Scott and Mary Small.

  About the Author

  VASHTI FARRER

  Vashti first went to the races at age three, when her grandmother took her by steam train to Kembla Grange, near Wollongong. She was captivated by the beautiful creatures on the track and later, when told she’d been born in Randwick, she was convinced it was on Randwick Racecourse! Her mother had said that from her hospital bed she could hear the horses clip-clopping along the road on their way to early morning training. Vashti grew up hearing the names Archer, Carbine and Phar Lap, and has seen champions like Bernborough, Tulloch and Kingston Town race.

  Vashti writes for all ages and has had over sixty adult short stories published, as well as articles and book reviews. She has also written plays, poetry and stories for children and young adults.

  Her favourite hobbies are acting, watching films and plays, and reading.

  Vashti’s love of racing and history drew her to the topic of Archer and the first Melbourne Cup. Having written Plagues and Federation: The Diary of Kitty Barnes for the My Australian Story series, she was keen to write another diary by a child ‘who was there’.

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  First published by Scholastic in 2007

  This electronic edition published in 2014

  E-PUB/MOBI eISBN: 978-1-925063-89-9

  Text copyright © Vashti Farrer

  Cover copyright © Scholastic Australia

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