This extract comes from Touchstone, by Richard Griffiths and Murray Bird:
On receiving some unsolicited positive responses to the book, Richard and Murray have printed a few more copies for Almanac readers. They are available for $50 (including postage within Australia). Contact: [email protected]
The extract…
Chapter 18 – The Bribe
…. During 1906, he [Sam] was appointed as the handicapper for the Moonee Valley Racing Club (MVRC), which was a privately owned entity at that time; it was owned by the family of the late William Samuel Cox (of WS Cox Plate fame). WS Cox’s son, William Cox Jr, and his son-in-law Arthur Vaughan “AV” Hiskens were to become administrators for the MVRC and they also became mates of Sam’s.
The Sporting and Dramatic News also announced that Sam was undertaking handicapping work for the Yea, Yarra Glen and Hanging Rock turf clubs.
The job of a handicapper is not a simple one, as Sam was to explain. The weights carried by jockeys are an important aspect of racing. Sam’s tales of the turf are littered with the weights that various horses carried in the events that he was describing. The basic premise of “handicapping” is that any weight that a horse carries will naturally slow it down. In order to give every horse an even chance, jockeys are allocated weights that are designed to provide close finishes, adding excitement to races and encouraging punters to potentially wager on any horse in the race.
Perhaps I should leave it to an expert to explain. Sam did so in an article he wrote in the 1930’s titled The Handicapper’s Job.
THE HANDICAPPER’S JOB
by Sam Griffiths
A handicapper is appointed for his general knowledge of horse racing, and for his keenness in the judgement of form … He must estimate the respective merits of the horses to within a pound weight, for he has an alert audience of ten thousand critics all waiting to challenge his judgement.
The handicapper must keep his own private record of every racehorse that runs In Australia, so that he can in a moment put his finger on the complete history of any horse which may come under his notice. Weight, how won, or how finished, the state of the going have to be noted. This detail means a lot of late night work. We cannot trust memory.
Time after time when I have been asked what weight a horse carried to victory in a certain race, and how the race was won, I have been almost certain of the correct answer, but I have always had recourse to my records – ?and they take a lot of keeping.
In framing a handicap, the weight-adjuster looks first for his top weight. This naturally means the best-performed horse entered. This makes the foundation on which to base the handicapping of the other entrants …
Naturally the ideal handicap, and the one which most pleases the handicapper himself, is one in which the race gives a very close finish.
Sam’s new career as a handicapper was to commence in an unlikely and highly controversial manner. On top of his new role, he maintained his training licence and he still prepared a few horses for racing. This was no doubt a conflict of interest if Sam was to run his horses at any of the venues he was handicapping for.
Presumably, he was not nominating his horses for races at Moonee Valley, Yea, Yarra Glen or Hanging Rock!
Parrott was one of Sam’s better performers and the handy steed was engaged to race at a mid-week Epsom (Mordialloc) meeting. It was a quiet, uneventful Wednesday afternoon at the Epsom racecourse and trainer Griffiths was providing final instructions to his jockey for the final race of the day. After he had legged-up his jockey on to Parrott, a well-dressed character approached and made the trainer’s acquaintance.
The dapper and dandy punter who had casually sauntered up was Lawrence Allietti. He asked Sam if his horse could win, and Sam indicated he thought it was a good chance. And that was that, until a few weeks later.
Lawrence Giacomo Allietti was a name that would haunt Sam Griffiths for many years. Allietti was a drifter and a “spiv”; one of those “desperates” who occasionally frequented race tracks. He was described by one journalist as, “a very smart-looking fellow, a real dandy in dress, and by all accounts just as smart as he looks’’.
Allietti was an Australian but he had spent much of his life on the race tracks of Britain. After returning to Australia from England sometime in the mid-1900s, Allietti was calling himself Mr J Farrell. When asked why he changed his name to Farrell, Allietti explained that he was “tired of trying to spell his name” to Australians.
Was he the same J Farrell who owned the 1897 winner (called Buzzi not Buzz) of the Grand National Hurdle? This might explain why Sam let his guard down when he was approached by Allietti aka Farrell. We will probably never know as Sam never mentions the whole sordid affair in his own writings.
The cagey Allietti attempted to entrap Sam via a flimsy blackmail attempt. He tried to convince Sam that the casual pre-race conversation at Epsom was a breach of the racing rules. As a handicapper Sam was not allowed to provide tips on races. Allietti was drawing a long bow, and Sam knew it; he acted swiftly and the matter was soon before the courts.
Newspapers from all corners of Australia reported on what would have been a stressful time for Samuel Griffiths, the chief handicapper at Moonee Valley. Several of the syndicated newspapers stated that, “every inch of the space allotted to the public” in the Melbourne City Court was filled when Detective Macnamanmy read the following charges:
That Allietti did on or about February 14, at Melbourne, falsely, wickedly, and unlawfully solicit and incite, one Samuel Griffiths, a handicapper and servant of the Moonee Valley Racing Club, to enter into a conspiracy with the said Allietti to cheat and defraud certain of His Majesty’s subjects, to wit.
Sydney Sportsman, 3 April 1907
Sam was embroiled in an attempted bribery scandal in the very early days of his career as a handicapper. Allietti was an agent of Ted (not Ned) Kelly, who was a bookmaker and also an owner of a horse called Gelignite. The scandal involved a bribe that would potentially net Kelly and Allietti a windfall. The Gelignite plan was to blow up in their face; thanks to Sam Griffiths.
Kelly and Allietti planned to back Gelignite to win 5,000 pounds in early betting, prior to the public release of the weights for an upcoming race. For the plan to succeed Sam would have needed to fraudulently allocate Gelignite with a lower weight; thus significantly enhancing the horse’s likelihood of winning. The crooked pairing of Kelly and Allietti conspired to ‘set up’ our hero with an elaborate scheme that eventually culminated in Allietti meeting Sam in a Bourke Street hotel. After attempting to blackmail Sam (because he had provided a ‘tip for Parrot), Allietti also offered him 100 pounds to facilitate his plan, Sam politely declined, departed the hotel, and immediately proceeded to Moonee Valley to report the incident to racing authorities. The police were summoned and their investigations commenced.
Ted Kelly escaped criminal charges but was barred from bookmaking. Lawrence Allietti was found guilty and offered a 100-pound fine or twelve months in jail. Allietti chose to pay the fine and immediately returned to England. Sam Griffiths emerged from the scandal with his integrity intact and his reputation as an ethical “straight-shooter” significantly enhanced.
With the Gelignite scandal behind him, Sam’s career as a handicapper blossomed. Within two years of commencing at Moonee Valley, he was providing handicapping services to no less than 35 race clubs (albeit some of them small one-meeting-per-year entities like Hanging Rock) in Victoria and southern and western New South Wales. His work in this sphere was obviously highly regarded, and it appears that he had difficulty in saying no!
His handicapping capabilities were required from places as far-away as the boom western New South Wales mining town of Broken Hill. After his engagement to work at Broken Hill, Sam was to meet Henry Hosier, the long-term secretary of the local racing club.
Sam’s appointment by the Broken Hill club once again placed him in a sticky situation. Upon his arrival in town, he was to learn that he was required to also act as the stipendiary steward at the annual Broken Hill Cup meeting. In 1908, there was to be a pre-Cup sensation in what was then known as the Silver City.
The bookmakers were threatening to strike when the Broken Hill Jockey Club (BHJC) legislated an increase on a moderate license fee for the downtrodden “satchel-swingers”. In later years, at a time of heightened political tensions during World War 1, Sam’s contact in Broken Hill – club secretary Henry Hosier – was affirmed as a staunch anti-unionist.
A spokesperson for the bookies advised that if the old scale of fees did not remain in place they would go on strike with support of the miners. “This is a red-hot unionist town,” Sam reported him as saying. That was enough to trigger Hosier and the committee members of the BHJC. They were ready to dig in their heels.
Broken Hill Jockey Club, circa 1914 (Australian Racing Meseum)
Acting in the role of mediator, Sam Griffiths addressed a rowdy meeting of bookmakers. The street outside the meeting venue was packed with curious onlookers, keen to learn the outcome of the proposed strike action. Cup day in Broken Hill was a major event, as it was in most regional towns of Australia. Many punters were itching to have a punt on the Cup. And the miners of Broken Hill loved a good strike. The unusual occurrence of a bookies’ strike was of interest to most people in town.
During the meeting, Sam stressed the point to the recalcitrant bookies that “whatever the merits of their case they were unquestionably acting in an unsportsmanlike manner” in springing their objection at the last moment. The strikers stood firm. However, the BHJC had not been idle, and the leading lawyer of the town, Tot Hall, volunteered to turn bookmaker on behalf of the club.
Sam noted the outcome with a hint of satisfaction: To the dismay of the strikers there was an excellent attendance on the opening day of the meeting which resulted in them capitulating and wanting to don their satchels on the second day – but they were politely told to go to blazes. It was the best and most profitable meeting the BHJC had ever held.
Touchstone: Racing, Racing Men and Racehorses
The life and times of Samuel Griffiths 1865-1937 – RM Griffiths and MG Bird.
Richard’s great grandfather, Samuel Griffiths, was a significant figure in the machinations of horse racing in Australia in the early twentieth century. After witnessing his first Melbourne Cup in 1877 at the tender age of 11 years, he was to embark on a life in the Turf that saw him become a, bloodstock agent, handicapper, historian, horse trainer, jockey, journalist, newspaper proprietor, newspaper editor, racecourse judge, roustabout, stipendiary steward, writer and more.
He was a devoted husband and father, adventurer, entrepreneur, race-track philosopher, raconteur and truth-seeker.
He was eccentric, humble, humorous, opinionated, and, most importantly, ethical.
Sam wrote two books – Turf and Heath (1906) and A Rolling Stone on the Turf (1933). He was also a cricket enthusiast as the extract which follows shows.
We printed 150 books for family and friends. Upon receiving some unsolicited positive responses we have printed a few more copies for Almanac readers. They are available for $50 (including postage within Australia). Contact: [email protected]
Some comments about Touchstone:
This book is an excellent read: fascinating, comprehensive and, above all, entertaining. An insight into the life of perhaps the foremost racing journalist and administrator of the first third of the twentieth century. Some great anecdotes too, and beautifully presented.
Dr Wayne Peake – Cultural and Racing Historian
What a tome and so detailed! It is a beaut addition to my collection. It has been shared with some of my friends who share a deep interest in horse racing history.
The Hon. Michael McCormick MP – Federal Member for Riverina
‘Touchstone’ is a particularly marvelous addition to my library as are Sam’s two books. What a rich history he wrote about.
Robbie Waterhouse – Leviathan Bookmaker
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