Andrew Rule: A day to honour heroes and their horses

BILL Gibbins’ dream to honour World War I’s Light Horsemen and their mounts will be realised in spectacular fashion in December, writes Andrew Rule.

THEY came from all over Australia to go to the Great War, the thousands of men and horses in the Light Horse who made their name at the Charge of Beersheba and the other desert battles. Only one horse came home.

Now horses and people are gathering all over the land again to commemorate Australia’s wartime mounted regiments with a unique race meeting on December 2 at Warrnambool’s famous Grand Annual course.

At 4600 metres, the Jericho Cup is the longest flat race in Australia by a long way — the Melbourne Cup is only 3200 metres. It is inspired by a “three mile” race that Australian mounted troopers staged in Palestine as a diversion to hide the fact they were preparing to attack.

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The Australians also staged a Desert Olympics against the British cavalry. A dashing Australian horseman, Guy Haydon, and his black thoroughbred mare Midnight dominated — winning the “quarter-mile” sprint, an obstacle race and a formal “equitation” test.

Young Haydon had been allowed to bring Midnight from the family property in the upper Hunter Valley, where the Haydons still breed performance horses for stock work and polo. His parents hoped that an agile mount like Midnight would give their boy a better chance of survival. They were right.

Australian soldier Lieutenant Guy Haydon and horse ‘Midnight’, who charged the Turkish guns at Beersheba in 1917.

Midnight was fast and brave and among the first in her group to leap the Turkish trenches when the Australians charged the wells of Beersheba on October 31, 1917. As she jumped, a Turk fired his rifle upwards, the bullet tearing through her stomach and killing her — but losing velocity so that when it went through the saddle it wounded Guy Haydon but did not kill him.

A century on, the Haydon family still have that bullet and still breed horses related to Midnight. If the drought doesn’t stop them, they plan to be at Warrnambool on the first weekend of December to cheer the runners in the Midnight Madness sprint for mares and fillies, one of a nine-race program dedicated to the memory of the Light Horse.

All this is the brainchild of Bill Gibbins, a former transport tycoon who is a philanthropist and patriot as well as a punter. Bill, now 71, was 12 when he went to his first Melbourne Cup with his mother in 1959. He backed Macdougal as 12-1 and won. It was the start of a lifetime passion for racing, but that is not his only one.

After selling his business for plenty in 2007, Bill heard that the “Rats of Tobruk” were being forced to sell the Albert Park clubhouse they have used for reunions since World War II. He quietly turned up to the auction, outbid a Sydney property developer at $1.73 million — which went to a childhood cancer charity — and told the old soldiers they could keep using Tobruk House as long as they liked.

“I thought I’d buy it and let you keep it going, because we owe you a debt that can’t possibly be repaid,” he said that day.

Bill Gibbins got to like doing good deeds. Later, he read a factionalised book about the real and imagined exploits of a famous Light Horse mount known as Bill the Bastard and it inspired him to combine his interest in racing with commemorating Australian soldiers — and the horses that served with them.

Bill the Bastard was a notorious rogue, bucking off riders until a Major Michael Shanahan finally mastered him in Palestine. Bill was huge and strong and tough and redeemed himself in the Battle of Romani in August 1916, when Shanahan rode him up and down the line under fire for hours.

The story goes that he found four soldiers stranded next to their dead horses. He yelled at them to jump up — two behind the saddle and one on each stirrup.

The big horse carried the five to safety. Shanahan later lost a leg and went home to Queensland with a bravery medal and the war story of a lifetime that turned into the legend of Bill the Bastard saving five men. Meanwhile, in another regiment, Midnight and Lieut. Guy Haydon were making a reputation that still lives on.

Bill Gibbins and Bernie Dingle (in WWI Lighthorseman uniform) and Drifter the 30-year-old Clydesdale X Thoroughbred at the Lighthorse Museum in Nar Nar Goon. Picture: Jay Town

Both horses will be remembered at Warrnambool — and so will Shanahan and other names linked to the Light Horse: among them Banjo Paterson, the horseman poet who served as a remount officer and Sir Harry Chauvel, who commanded the mounted Anzacs.

Peter and Alison Haydon keep photos of all their home-bred champions from 185 years of horse-breeding over seven generations. But what they cherish most are sepia pictures of great-uncle Guy and Midnight, the mare who died saving him.

Nearly everyone is connected in the horse world. The late and well-liked Sydney horse trainer Guy Walter is descended from the Haydons and named after his war hero forebear. One of his former track riders, Lucy Longmire, now trains in partnership with her identical twin sister Emma — and they have taken aim at the $300,000 Jericho Cup.

Wild horses couldn’t stop the twins from towing their unlikely stayer Thunder Road all the way from Goulburn, together with their respective partners, five children — and a dozen of the horse’s owners who have rented a house in Warrnambool for the race weekend.

At 420kg, Thunder Road is one of the smallest racehorses in training, but that hasn’t stopped him winning long races at even longer prices for the twins. But he won’t start favourite in the Jericho Cup because some shrewd professional trainers have their eyes on it.

In August, top Melbourne trainer Anthony Freedman went to the trouble of sending a stayer named High Mode to Wagga Wagga to win the Riverina Cup over 3800 metres. Last year, High Mode ran third in the venerable staying race, the St Leger at Flemington, so he seems the one to beat. The Freedman brothers, of course, trained five Melbourne Cup winners and Anthony is having an outstanding season.

But local knowledge will mean plenty on the sprawling Warrnambool Grand Annual track that winds in a figure of eight in the Brierly Paddock next to the course proper. It means that an eight-year-old mare sent to Warrnambool trainer Jarrod McLean 18 months ago — and hasn’t raced in public since — is an intriguing entrant.

Her name is Bayanova and some speculate she could be the biggest “smoky” since Robbie Laing won the 2009 Grand Annual steeplechase with Sir Pentire at his first start in two years. Bayanova doesn’t have to worry about jumping fences, as long as she can hang on for 4600 metres.

But the locals won’t have it all their own way. Farmer and hobby trainer Julie Pratten is bringing her mare I’ll Miss You all the way from Ballina near the Queensland border.

Then there’s Grant Young, who trains Spur On Gold around the roads near Murray Bridge, plotting a cross-border raid.

The meeting commemorates well-known names and events and rightly so. But the first race is named for Trooper Harold Thomas Bell, who died on November 1, 1917.

He was 16.