Bart Cummings: Cups King defied the odds

It was the destiny of James Bartholomew Cummings to become Australia’s greatest trainer of thoroughbreds.

Trainer Bart Cummings has trained 12 winning Melbourne Cup horses.

James Bartholomew Cummings. Born Adelaide, South Australia, November 14, 1927. Died Castlereagh, NSW, August 30, aged 87.

It wasn’t so much the diagnosis as the extent of the fee that put a frown on the boy’s face as he and his father left the reception room of the ear, nose and throat specialist.

The 14 guineas covered the doctor’s fee for a consultation and a series of skin tests to determine what brought the boy to almost daily bouts of coughing, wheezing and watering eyes.

The specialist diagnosed him as having an asthmatic-type condition, his attacks brought on by allergies to horse hair and certain grains. But the doctor was fully confident his patient would ­quickly get on top of the condition by staying away from horses, oats, chaff and the like, and stable life in general.

Outside, on North Terrace in central Adelaide, the indignant youth expressed his concern: “I think we’ve done our dough, Dad!”

After all, James Bartholomew Cummings was born into a life with horses and his destiny was to become the greatest trainer of thoroughbreds Australia has known.

As young Cummings made his way with his father, Jim, to their home and stable complex in suburban Glenelg, the dark clouds of WWII were looming on the horizon. It was 1938 and Bart Cummings, a schoolboy at Adelaide’s Marist Brothers Sacred Heart College, was 11.

Now, 76 years down the track, the stable door has closed on Bart Cummings’s life, silencing the hoofbeat of the Australian racing industry.

Bart. On its own, Bart is a name that strikes instant recognition with sports-minded Australians — which is almost the entire nation, even if their knowledge of horse racing is limited.

Bart talked to his horses long before horse whisperers were ever heard of.Indeed, Bart is the only single name with merit to stand alongside that of Bradman in the sporting galaxy of this nation. Bradman, with his Test average a fraction off 100, was perfection at the crease. Bart talked to his horses long before horse whisperers were ever heard of.

In building their pillars of greatness, the character of Bart and Bradman came through with common links: both were softly spoken, humble in deference of their achievements and public admiration, and both looked with disdain on those with bad manners and loud voices.

Bart had a huge respect for his father. Indeed, those who managed to get close to Bart saw that he adored Jim; what he was doing and how he was doing those things with the horses he so cared for.

Cummings Sr was a dedicated, hardworking, devoted family man who came out of central Australia to set himself up in the racing game in Adelaide, from the mid-1920s into the early 50s. He was an outstanding trainer of his time, with a career highlight coming in the 1950 Melbourne Cup, when Comic Court blazed his way to a runaway, Australian-record victory.

Comic Court’s strapper was Bart, a couple of weeks before his 23rd birthday, and with the ambition now fired in him as he held the sweating, triumphant winner. Winning the Cup was a bit of a buzz and he wanted to try it out for himself.

When Bart’s parents decided, in 1953, to take six months off to travel to Ireland, their ancestral home, for their first holiday in a lifetime, the running of the stable was turned over to Bart, securing his licence to train from the South Australian Jockey Club.

“I was confident enough to give it a try because I had the best of teachers … my Dad had a lot of experience behind him and I picked up from him by watching, listening, and keeping my mouth shut,” he said in 1998, by which time he’d won 10 Melbourne Cups.

Over the years, others have watched and listened to Bart, and some have gone from roles as foremen under him to becoming trainers in their own right; many making quite a success of the highly competitive profession.

Generous in many ways, Bart was indeed protective — selfish, if you like — of the truly finer points of training the thoroughbred.Not least his son, Anthony, who on being granted a licence to train quipped: “I reckon I can be a better trainer than my Dad — because I had a better teacher than he did.”

Later on, Anthony would add an important rider to that claim: “Dad showed and told me everything I know … but he didn’t show and tell me everything he knows.”

Generous in many ways, Bart was indeed protective — selfish, if you like — of the truly finer points of training the thoroughbred. He had learned them watching and listening to his father, a master from the old school of trainers who were famous for saying nothing, and combining their knowledge with the instincts he identified as key to having the contented racehorse.

Bart was not about to pass secrets of this gift around, even to his son, whom he saw as a racetrack competitor.

The life of Bart Cummings

The honours and accolades achieved by Bart, in a training career spanning more than 60 years, run longer than the home straight at Royal Randwick.

Foremost among his feature-race wins are his 12 victories in the Melbourne Cup, the nation’s most glamorous and richest horse race. The next most successful trainer, after 150-plus runnings of the race, is Etienne de Mestre, who won the first two Cups, in 1861-62, and a further three to 1878.

But Bart is also the record holder by number of wins in a number of other prestigious races, notably the Australian Cup (13), the Caulfield Cup (seven), Newmarket Handicap (eight) and VRC Oaks (nine).

Treated as royalty on any Australian racetrack, Bart had the distinction of meeting members of the British royal family at trophy presentations for races won by his horses: the Queen for Beau Zam, winning a Canberra race named in her honour; Princess Anne, when Gay Poss won The Oaks at Randwick; Princess Margaret, when Holiday Waggon won the Moonee Valley Gold Cup; and the Queen Mother, when Galilee won the Birthday Cup in Adelaide.

And, when the first list of Australia’s 100 Living Treasures was made up for the National Trust of Australia, in 1997, Bart’s name was there, with Bradman’s, along with luminaries from the arts, medicine, the law, politics, business, social activists and philanthropists.

Bart closed the 1980s, the decade in which he failed to train a Melbourne Cup winner, with an unprecedented feat of leading the trainers’ premiership for 1989-90 in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney (he had transplanted himself and family from his native Adelaide to live in Sydney in the mid-70s).

Bart once described the three cities with his characteristic wit: “Adelaide people wanted to know what religion you were … Melbourne folk wanted to know which school you went to and Sydney, well, in Sydney they just wanted to know how much money you had!”

Bart was brought up on the idea that a person’s word and a handshake counted for everything.There were three incidents in Bart’s long career he would rather not have on his record: in 1961, stewards revoked his licence for 12 months following an inquiry into a sharp form reversal by one of his horses, Cildarra; the Lloyd Boy feed mix-up in 1979, for which he was stood down for three months; and the Cups King Syndicate, which brought him to within a short half-head of bankruptcy.

With his profile as high and so remarkably successful heading into the 90s, Bart stepped away from his expertise of training horses and into a minefield of big money, big greed and big risks involving the volatile sharemarket and the high end of town.

Bart was brought up on the idea that a person’s word and a handshake counted for everything. As he outlined in a 1998 ­special ­edition book, The 10 Best Things That Happened To Me: “I became involved in a tax-driven proposal with expensive yearlings that I would buy and train for three (investment) packages. (Cups King Syndicate I, II and III) would be marketed and sold down to investor clients of two of our biggest accounting firms (Coopers & Lybrand and Peat Marwick). The economy started to crack. ­Investors became nervous. The market crashed and the whole thing failed.

“When the going got tough, the accounting firms bolted and left me holding an empty bridle. The bottom line was I owed around $8 million, but I never let it get me down … it was always business as usual.”

Bart avoided bankruptcy with a generous deal from the bloodstock auction houses, which had allowed him extensive credit to open his shoulders to the scheme and rack up a bill of some $22m — famously raising one bushy eyebrow to catch a bid-spotter’s eye to claim another of some 75 yearlings altogether.

Credit had been extended to June 30, 1989, with repayment to be made when the syndicate shares were fully subscribed at that time. The scheme, in racing terms, turned out to be a non-goer. Many of the yearlings were taken back by their sellers and the remainder auctioned off to bring less than half their original price. Bart was left with the $8m debt to be paid back in a plan whereby the auction houses would receive 10 per cent of all his training percentages over the next five years.

There was a lot of pain for Bart in that period, but the Melbourne Cup triumphs of Let’s Elope (1991) and Saintly (1996) meant there was also a lot of gain. Saintly, referred to by the public as “the horse from heaven”, is a standout among Bart’s Cup successes — he bred Saintly, he trained the sleek chestnut gelding and he retained an ownership share when selling a majority stake to his wealthy Malaysian client and longtime friend Dato Tan Chin Nam.

Resolutely supportive of Bart in his dark Cups King Syndicate era, Dato Tan became the most successful owner in Melbourne Cup history when Viewed won in 2008, taking the owner’s haul to four after Think Big (1974-75) and Saintly.

Viewed was Bart’s 12th Cup winner, the astonishing feat typically welcomed with humility by the maestro, who was less than two weeks from his 81st birthday.

There were tears welling in his eyes … but, with a rather sheepish look, he put that down to an asthmatic condition he first became aware of at a specialist’s surgery in Adelaide 70 years earlier.

Cummings is survived by his wife of 61 years, Valmae, son and fellow trainer Anthony, and daughters Anne-Marie, Sharon and Margaret, and 14 grandchildren.

Career milestones

1950 Strapper of Melbourne Cup winner Comic Court, trained by his father Jim Cummings

1953 Licensed to train by South Australian Jockey Club

1958 Stormy Passage wins South Australian Derby, first major winner

1965 Wins first Melbourne Cup with Light Fingers

1974 First trainer to win $1 million in prizemoney in the one season; ABC Sportsman of the Year

1982 Order of Australia for services to racing

1990 Unprecedented treble of topping trainers’ premiership for Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney

1991 Inaugural inductee Australian Racing Hall of Fame

1997 Named in National Trusts 100 Australian Living Legends

2004 First licensed person to be made Lifetime member of Victoria Racing Club

Bart’s Melbourne Cups

2008: VIEWED won by a nose, 22 ran. First prize: $3.3m

1999: ROGAN JOSH won by length, 24 ran. First prize: $1.8m

1996: SAINTLY won by 2 lengths, 22 ran. First prize: $1.43m

1991: LET’S ELOPE won by 2 lengths, 24 ran. First Prize: $1.3m

1991: KINGSTON RULE won by 1 length, 24 ran. First prize: $1.3m

1979: HYPERNO won by short hd, 22 ran. First prize: $195,500

1977: GOLD AND BLACK won by 1 length, 24 ran. First prize: $156,700

1975: THINK BIG won by 1 length, 20 ran. First prize: $105,000

1974: THINK BIG won by 1 length, 22 ran. First prize: $105,000

1967: RED HANDED won by neck, 22 ran. First prize: $41,300

1966: GALILEE won by 2 lengths, 22 ran. First prize: $41,300

1965: LIGHT FINGERS won by short head, 26 ran. First prize: $41,300