“As a yearling, Phar Lap seemed clumsy and used to trip, but although he was not the best walker, no one could deny he was a great galloper.” John McDonald, Manager Seadown Stud (Evening Post 12 April 1932 )
Alec Roberts matched his new imported stallion with Entreaty eight times. The previous season, this match of Night Raid and Entreaty produced the mare Fortune’s Wheel. And six progeny from this pairing after Phar Lap. Apart from Fortune’s Wheel later showing up in the bloodline of the magnificent Hall of Fame mare, Sunline, these full siblings of Phar Lap hardly won a race, nevermind coming up with any superstars. Most in the racing game are sooner or later lured into the mysterious world of bloodstock research with varying degrees of success. Sometimes, what looks good on paper does not develop into a champion racehorse.
There have been many quotes and stories of pastoralist Alec Roberts deliberately going about trying to breed a champion racehorse. No breeder in the history of horse racing has ever claimed their ambition was to be number one contributor to a dog food factory with their misguided breeding choices. If the exorbitant costs of breeding horses were not enough, what breeder in their right mind would not be trying to breed Melbourne Cup winners or Triple Crown champions? It is like a songwriter harbouring the hope of a number one hit except for the fact writing a song is a hell of a lot cheaper than breeding racehorses. Even despite the increased use of science and technology, it still does not guarantee success.
Over the years there are many breeding failures littering the world of bloodstock and breeding choices. What should be successful, is not. Many breeders do tend to buy the best, breed with the best, and then pray to their God of Horses for the best, only to feel incredibly disappointed. Not to mention, poorer for the experience. If you were to pinpoint moments in thoroughbred breeding that became essential to the development or direction future breeding would take, the most important sire lines come through the influence exerted by Darley Arabian - Eclipse - Pot8os- Waxy all the way down to Stockwell - Bend Or – Phalaris – Nearco – Northern Dancer sire lines. Northern Dancer’s blood saturates modern breeding like few others with his sire lines.
While there are millions of examples among humans where full siblings are chalk and cheese to one another, the same applies in the high stakes world of horse breeding. After Hugh Denison cleaned up Sol Green to the tune of £100,000 when his horse Poseidon won the 1907 Melbourne Cup, Denison was determined to purchase Poseidon’s full brother Orcus. He forked out 3,050 guineas, setting a yearling record in the process that lasted for years. It proved to be an awful investment as Orcus achieved nothing on the racetrack and even less at stud.* Two of the most startling examples, which create nightmares for bloodstock agents, include legends Affirmed and Man o’War. During the 1980’s Silent Fox never won a major race from its 17 starts while his full brother Affirmed won $2,500,000. In 1978 Affirmed became the last horse to win the American Triple Crown until American Pharaoh galloped into the record books 37 years later. Affirmed then went on to become a very successful sire. Not many racing historians would recognise My Play and Playfellow yet they were full brothers to Man o’ War. A horse often touted as the greatest racehorse of all, especially in North America.
*Sporting Globe, 15 March 1941 - Jack Anwin, jockey of the 1889 Melbourne Cup winner, Bravo described Orcus as a “complete duffer”
For great bloodstock agents and breeders there is an enormous amount of research and skill involved just to be somewhere in the ballpark to create a brilliant horse. Equally, each and every one of these experts would be the first to admit there is also a colossal amount of luck at play. Many breeders and owners of this period expressed mixed feelings about Bruce Lowe’s numbering system, categorising the strength of horse families and bloodlines and concentrating on the strength of the dam rather than the sire. Some established breeders and bloodstock agents viewed Lowe’s work in a similar condescending manner as a brilliant artist would view a colour by numbers book. For others, Lowe’s system provided a useful guide. Still, a breeder required a fundamental knowledge of bloodstock and breeding matches and, more importantly, horses.* You could pick up Donald Bradman’s, "The Art of Cricket" and still not have a hope of batting like Bradman. In Phar Lap’s case, Lowe’s numbering system came up trumps with five strains coming through Family No. 1, a couple through No. 2 and one through No. 3. These are the exact same family numbers of course running through Phar Lap’s seven full siblings which ranged in ability from barely paying the feed bill to giving one the impression of galloping through molasses. Having bred Phar Lap, Alex Roberts is viewed as something of a bloodstock whizz, as is Harry Telford for having picked Phar Lap out of an auction catalogue on just his bloodlines. Neither claim holds up under close scrutiny.
*From TB Heritage “The Family Numbers commonly used to designate the various Thoroughbred female families were popularized by Bruce Lowe, an Australian pedigree researcher at the end of the nineteenth century. Lowe's work, Breeding Horses by the Figure System was published posthumously in 1895 by his friend and editor, William Allison. He had traced back the pedigrees of the complete list of winners of the oldest English classics, the St. Leger Stakes, Epsom Derby Stakes and Epsom Oaks, grouping them by direct lines of tail female descent, from dam to grandam and on back until the family was no longer traceable in the General Stud Book. He then tallied the number of classic winners produced by each family and listed them in declining order. The family with the most classic winners, the one descending from Tregonwell's Natural Barb Mare, was designated Family #1, the Burton Barb Mare second, designated Family #2, and so on. The resulting forty-three numbered families became the core of his study, and while few actually adhere to Lowe's resulting theory, many still use his family numbers as a convenient way to categorize Thoroughbred families. Herman Goos, who had first published a comprehensive collection of pedigree tables in 1885, expanded the number of Lowe families to fifty. Lowe's theory went far beyond identifying female strains. Of these families, he found that nine, in particular, appeared to be indispensable in the breeding of top racehorses, and he divided these into two classes, running(family #s 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) and sire (family #s 3, 8, 11, 12, and 14) or as Lowe perceived them, feminine and masculine. His theory, too complex to relate here, was based on balancing the "feminine and masculine factors" by using these two classes of families as core to good matings”. http://www.tbheritage.com/HistoricDams/FamilyNumbers.html
Race historians are forever looking back with 20/20 hindsight. In doing so, they are quick to damn Paddy Wade for selling Night Raid to Roberts, while labeling his replacement, Top Gallant, an unmitigated failure at stud. In fairness to Wade, in 1926, the swapping out of Night Raid for Top Gallant appeared a smart move. You would have to be Master of the Runes to see what was to come with Nightmarch and Phar Lap's success coupled with Top Gallant's tragic premature death in 1930. At the 1928 Trentham sale, including Phar Lap, Roberts’s yearlings sold for an average of just over 119 guineas.* Across the Tasman, Paddy Wade sold his three Top Gallant yearlings for an average of 850 guineas each at Randwick.** In 1928, Paddy Wade certainly thought his decision to sell Night Raid and import Top Gallant a good one. This is not to say, Wade did not want to kick over the dust bin watching Nightmarch and Phar Lap in action for he even attempted to vainly buyback Night Raid five years later for 12,000 guineas in 1929.***
*Auckland Star, 25 January 1928
**Referee, 18 April 1928
***The Referee 16 October 1929
Paddy Wade knew Top Gallant a far more likely sire to be successful than Night Raid only to be skittled by the potluck of genetics. One of Top Gallant’s yearlings would need to have been offered at a sale with three legs to sell for five guineas. In the case of Night Raid’s five-year-old mare Loot out of Currency, changing hands for only five guineas, one fears Loot, may have been making more money back as packets of sausages at that price. We would all love to have the third eye of an oracle and none more so than bloodstock agents and breeders. As a foal, Phar Lap was not looking much of a prospect. A tangle of legs, clumsy and certainly no looker, he remained that way until he went to Trentham sale in 1928. And it must never be forgotten, Harry Telford was never present at that auction. The first time Telford saw what he had purchased was at Sydney docks with his initial reaction being one of total horror.
Besides Phar Lap, Alec Roberts took three other colts and three fillies to Trentham with three colts and a filly selling between 100 to 120 guineas each.* Looking over their yearlings at Seadown Stud, Alec Roberts, his wife Ethel, his trainer Laurel Doyle** and farm manager John McDonald kept what they considered to be the two best, Ma Belle Polly and Dollar Raid, and sent their remaining Night Raid progeny, including Phar Lap, to Trentham. This moment screams volumes on how Phar Lap was viewed by his breeder. Among only nine horses, this group still did not consider Phar Lap to be even second best of the bunch. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and say what you like after the event, none of these people picked Phar Lap as anything more than a particularly awkward yearling going to sale with a very low reserve. By the time Phar Lap won nearly every major race in Australia, in December 1931, Ma Belle Polly did win the Winchmore Hack Handicap at Ashburton for 90 sovereigns. Dollar Raid never won a race and sold at Robert’s dispersal sale in April 1932 for five guineas.
*Press, 25 January 1928
**After Granny McDonald of Catalogue fame, the second licenced female trainer in New Zealand was Laurel Campbell who trained under the non de course “Mrs. J. Campbell”. On the turn of a dime, racing history could have had an even more astonishing story than that of Phar Lap and his battling trainer Harry Telford. Inadvertently, Phar Lap could have advanced women in racing by decades. Campbell was the private trainer of Alec Roberts.
Born Laurel Doyle in 1902 in Doyleston (named after her grandfather), 35 kilometres south west of Canterbury, her grandfather and father were horse breeders, trainers and thoroughbred dealers. Raised around horses, Laurel Doyle, assisted her father in his stables until taking out a licence in 1927. Doyle trained Phar Lap’s older full sister Fortune’s Wheel. Laurel Doyle fell pregnant to jockey James Campbell who for most of the time was a drunken mess. A shotgun wedding which turned into a disastrous marriage, made more so when their six year old daughter Janny was run down and killed by a truck. By the time of their daughter’s death, due to his drinking James Campbell had lost his jockey licence and fallen even deeper into alcoholism until finally being committed to a mental hospital. Along with Hedwick Maher (Granny McDonald), both women regularly featured among the top trainers in New Zealand during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Her 1933 New Zealand Grand National Steeplechase champion Thurina and Willie Win that came second to Darcy Eccle’s The Trump were probably her two best horses.
Laurel Campbell later went into partnership with English born trainer Jack Jefferd and collectively topped the trainer’s table in 1947-48. Their partnership extended to a personal one when Campbell divorced her husband and Jefferd left his wife. They won the Grand National again with Bandmaster in 1951. Suffering from depression, Laurel Campbell was institutionalised for the last six years of her life and died in 1971. Not as outspoken as Granny McDonald but for a couple of twists of fate could well have been one of New Zealand’s most celebrated trainers.
Willie Wins' close second in the 1937 Melbourne Cup would have produced the same chauvinist farce with Laurel Campbell not being allowed at the presentation and barred from holding a training licence in Victoria due to the VRC not granting training or jockey licences to women. It would have been a fascinating decade for advancing women in racing if Campbell trained Phar Lap and Willie Win to victories in a Melbourne Cup and then Granny McDonald with Catalogue in 1938.
At Phar Lap’s Trentham Sale, Vivian Riddiford purchased Roberts’ Night Raid colt Push* for 100 guineas. Secretary of the Otago Hunt Club, Henry Divers purchased Stealth** for 115 guineas.* Both Push and Stealth ended up in Western Australia achieving very little. In fact, none of these Night Raid horses won any significant races or really bothered the studbook and like Phar Lap they all went to Trentham with equally low reserves. In other words, Alec Roberts could not distinguish in value his Night Raid-Entreaty colt from any of his other “ordinary” Night Raid yearlings going under the hammer. In sharp contrast to Phar Lap’s low reserve and price, at this particular pre-Depression yearling sale in 1928, very high prices were reached. The Limond-Homage colt Honour, which later won 1929 AJC Sire Stakes and CJC New Zealand Derby, sold for a then New Zealand yearling record of 2,300 guineas to Amberley sheep farmer and very successful racehorse owner, George Greenwood. Previous to Amounis and Phar Lap becoming the highest stake earners in Australian racing, the title was held by New Zealand and Australian Hall of Fame gelding Gloaming, owned by Greenwood. High prices were also paid for the dam of 1935 South Australian Derby winner Beamish Boy, Rose Glow (1,075 guineas) and for many others during this sale. For the 85 yearlings sold at Trentham in 1928, the average price was 244 guineas.
* out of Formosan sired mare Boutade
** out of Bendown
*Evening Post, 5 December 1931 & Evening Post, 8 May 1931
These low reserves set by Alec Roberts tend to fly in the face of race historians attributing some breeding genius to Alec Roberts. Phar Lap's mere 75 guineas reserve, would indicate he had absolutely no idea what he had really bred. This reserve, for what turns out to be one of the greatest racehorses ever foaled, is glaring proof that Alec Roberts did not believe Phar Lap to be successfully bred. Nor would Roberts have believed in his wildest dreams, Phar Lap to morph into a champion of champions. Later, Roberts chimed in with always believing Phar Lap to be a great horse. Possibly take that statement with a silo of salt. He could have also said, "I always believed that Mona Lisa painting to be worth something. In hindsight, that guy down at the pub was lucky to get it off me for ten bucks." Roberts may have done all he could to breed a champion racehorse but ultimately was clueless to the fact he was so successful. On the other hand, let us not be too damning, for there have been many a breeder through the years who have sold their future champion yearling cheaply.
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