Tulloch Done This: SP bookmaking in a country town

 

‘Tulloch Done This’ – SP bookmaking in a country town.

 

Up until I was eleven, I lived in a western NSW village, on the Main Street, with a dry cleaning shop next door. I worked in that shop after school, doing dry cleaning.

They left town, those dry cleaners, and a bootmaker and his friend and her kids moved into the shop and residence. I worked for him then, painting show cages for display budgies, and that paint was made of gold apparently, because if you dropped a drop it cost you a shilling. He sold budgies he bred too.

He was an SP bookmaker that bootmaker, saddler, leatherworker man. He had an office set up in the pressing room, with a chair, a table, a fridge, a telephone with an ear and mouth piece attached. I would be painting, in that room, and I would hear him talking, like, “Sydney 4, Horse 4, say the name, that’s right, a pound, yes I’ll take that, thank you.” Something was said to him and he wrote in a daybook, seven-column, then opened up a very large ledger, two foot by eighteen inches, with quarter inch thick covers, found a corresponding page, and wrote on that, then hung up the phone, which would generally ring again, repeatedly. The telephone exchange was manual, plug and call, and if they were hoping for a quiet afternoon it wasn’t to be I reckon. 40 calls an afternoon I would estimate, 15 in a row, a break when he didn’t answer, another 10, another 10, a quiet time when 5 or so calls came in and he stopped at the time of the 6^th race and did not write business after that. Time to check on his budgie collection. Time for me to go and hit a tennis ball. There was no swimming pool, and hardly any kids in town, the shops were shut, the three pubs were crowded.

Apart from the business he wrote on the telephone there was a lot of front counter business before the racing began, Saturday and Wednesday and other days, Cup on a Tuesday, Bank Holiday, Easter, racing after Christmas Day. Then, at the front counter I mean, he wrote the bet details on raffle tickets Syd R4 H4 (1), on both halves, and transferred the details to 3 or 4 sheets, one to a City, Sydney had its own, as did Melbourne, like that. A bet placement took 30 seconds at most, and the bet was paid for then. You could have a 5 shilling bet, winnings capped at a pound, no matter what.

This SP business may have been the big cash raker on a Saturday afternoon in our town, pubs excepted. If it was a Sunday, no racing on Sunday back then, the keep would have given the plate collection at Mass a fright, I kid you nought.

Winners got paid on Monday, up until 8.00pm, some cash and the balance by cheque which the pub cashed for you if you bought some of theirs. Getting results from races may have been a problem. The winners and other results were in the Sunday papers, but those papers didn’t come into our town until Monday, on the 2pm plane. The SP had a telex, installed later, and that would clatter on periodically during the afternoon, and a summary would arrive after tea. It printed a rolling sheet and cut a paper tape for keepsake also and was very descriptive, with race number, race names, place names, horse names, who did what and ‘fluctuations’ with dividends for win and place. He typed outgoing messages on this telex too. These were bet requests outgoing to a ‘firm’ in Broken Hill. The telex printout results were on a lever arch file under the front counter.

Now I don’t profess to know then what was happening. Dad told me what a SP was. Mr Galvers, the Police Sergeant knew, he said. It might not have been approved, that SP, but Dad said society needed it, our town needed it, actually them, because there were three SP. Our man bought flags for the Catholic school, and later the Central School because they felt left out, and re-installed the flag pole there too, or made it happen.

 

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After a fight, a rarity, Miss Gordon over the road from us told Mum that betting was going on, and that’s wholly wrong, and the result was I ceased working there. It was 10 shillings a week gone and me unemployed, for the first and only time. Thanks Mum, saved from the Devil.  He kept at it but.

One Sunday evening, after golf away, we came back to find the SP man and his friend and family gone, packed up and left with their stuff on a lorry and his big FE wagon with a double axle trailer. The birds, budgies, were still there in their aviary and a bird club member had been contracted to catch and sell off those. I helped at that. Dad and me, and Mum, went into the residence and up the front to the shop, and the room where the SP did what SP do. It seemed like all of that, SP stuff, except his ledger were still there. About half the budgies escaped somehow!

Next day Mr Galvers came in with me and Dad  and looked at  all the leather and shoes, it was a working bootmaker shop too you know. Mr Galvers looked over all of it and declared in that senator-like voice of his ‘Tulloch done this’ then set about tracking down the owners of who owned what.

The SP man had not done this aspect of his working life for several weekends before he left, he was not a SP I mean. I know, although I wasn’t in the place, but the shop door was closed at 12.00pm Saturday and he was not in the room where the telephone is, I was hitting tennis balls against the garage wall and he, the SP, would have spoken to me at some time, he tapped the window glass where he was and always asked ‘ow are ya’. It was quiet, just  quiet. If the favourite placed or won before there was noise, shouts, cheers and clapping, and now, nothing. Not good.

I presume everybody got everything back, their shoes and boots, saddles and bridles and there was a big, long and wide bullock set he had repaired for the museum display but that was still there at the end. Did his clients pay their bills? I hope so, nobody bet on credit, he held money from winnings when asked and deducted the bet stake from that. That was the usage of the big, really big, ledger I mentioned. Nobody complained to the Police, nothing about boots, bridles or whips or winnings.

Golden budgies flocked at the railway turntable for several months, quite distinct from the natural greens which were always there. Blue pieds and purple and whites homed themselves at the velodrome, which was busted now, and set alight soon after this. The flocks thinned over some months, perhaps the kites and hawks swooped on them, the greens are hidden in the low scrub thereabouts.

I saw that SP at a town some distance away. Dad and  Mr Galvers and I went there, them for bowls and me, the pool. I came back to the hotel to change before going to tea at the Club with Dad and he, the SP, was in the bar, talking to a woman and a man. He had his day book and raffle tickets with him. He acknowledged me, with a wave and a nod, but we didn’t talk, no kids allowed in the bar you know, although the place was awash with them local kids, asking the drunks for durries.

In the car on the way home from bowls I told Dad, and Mr Galvers, that I had seen the SP. They had a conversation about him. The possibility of working for a good wage in a gold mine was the reason they left.  Besides, a SP shop next to a Bank (Dad) was not a look to be promoted, said Dad. There was an undertaker on the other side of us, Dad.

Mr Galvers  walked the Main Street footpath in the  afternoons, and cleared the drunks out of the pubs. He said allowing people to drink past sobriety was an offence, almost like allowing them to hurt themselves. Dad was his lieutenant during the war. Dad, most, never spoke about the war.

That was good about Tulloch, true. We talked about him at school, and other things, of course.

 

 

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