Desert Gold – Laurie McCallum

Barbara Brookfield: [Our speaker to]night is Laurie McCallum, and Laurie’s come all the way from Christchurch; so welcome, Laurie …

[Applause]

Laurie McCallum: Thank you.

… and Laurie’s wife, Cherry, and your friends and relations that are in the audience tonight as well … thanks so much for coming. I’m going to be very brief in my introduction because Laurie will cover what needs to be covered, but Laurie grew up in Palmerston North and now lives in Christchurch. He had a career for forty years in town planning and resource management, and did his Bachelors and Masters degree[s] through Canterbury University. Laurie’s already published five books, and he’s just told me he’s got more on the way, or another one ’bout a third of the way through. His books [are] available for sale here – ‘Tinkers Gully, Desert Gold and Other [Stories]’. It’s about the lives of Laurie’s family, of Jessie Patience and Lawrence ‘Brusher’ Gray, Laurie’s grandfather. Lawrence was a jockey, then became a trainer, working with the trainer of the famous mare, Desert Gold; and I presume, Laurie, you are named after your grandfather.

Oh yeah, yeah – named after the grandfathers.

So Laurie, welcome, we’ll get underway.

Thank you very much, Barbara. Haere mai, haere mai, [continues in Maori]. Welcome to this talk by the Landmarks History Group, and a special welcome to my cousins and my wife and my friends, and to the rest of you for coming along here tonight.

Last year I published a book, as Barbara’s outlined, on my maternal grandparents; printed fifty copies, and copies have gone to public libraries round New Zealand, and to the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Australia. So they’re all reading about the Hawke’s Bay, and it’s the Hawke’s Bay parts of the book that I’ll focus on tonight. I’ll talk about the champion mare Desert Gold, and then the life of the Gray family at 804 Gordon Road in the twenties, thirties and forties, and that period after the war.

So the two main characters from Gordon Road – Jessie Patience from the wee fishing village Avoch, way up near Inverness, the highland Scotswoman who came to New Zealand in 1908 and ended up working at Karamu in the homestead there, and that’s where she met Lawrence ‘Brusher’ Gray, who was of course working on the horses. Her first husband up in Avoch had died, and she came out to New Zealand, with her son, Don. [Showing slides] There’s a bit more about Jessie, and there’s young Don; bit of a shock for them, coming to New Zealand compared to Scotland, but they loved it, and they loved Hawke’s Bay.

The other main character of course is Lawrence ‘Brusher’ Gray; I assume he’s called ‘Brusher’ from brushing the horses. So he was born down in Tinkers Gully as it was called, Matakanui, down in Central Otago. His father, Timothy Gray, had come from Sunderland with the gold rushes … firstly to Australia and then across to Central Otago. His mother was Mary McLeod, and he had nine brothers and sisters.

Down in Central Otago you either became a miner, so you wielded a pick; or you worked on one of the sheep stations chasing sheep. Or the alternative way for Lawrence was to become a jockey. And so he became a jockey on what they called the ‘Goldfields Circuit’ … there was all these little villages like Matakanui, Naseby, Alexandra, Cromwell; they all had a racecourse. And they all had the TAB, [Totalisator Agency Board] the totalisator going, and they had a merry old time learning to be a jockey, racing horses, going to Dunedin, winning a bigger race, getting noted by Stewart Waddell who had become the trainer for J D Ormond at Karamu. And Stewart Waddell arranged for Lawrence to come up to Hawke’s Bay, and so ultimately he became the Head lad at Karamu.

So it was a pretty hard life on the goldfields – alluvial gold; and oh, it was a bit traumatic for the family because when there’s no water there’s no gold mining, there’s no income. It did all get a bit much for Lawrence’s father, and he ended up dying at Seacliff in the mental asylum. Whether the stress of trying to deal for [with] a big family and be a gold miner at the same time was part of it we’ll never know.

Right – firstly I’ll talk about Desert Gold, and we’ve got another photograph being brought in by the Lowry family [which] you can look at later. But I don’t know, I find this quite fascinating. I’m not really a racehorse person; I know if you’re looking at the tail you’re looking at the back end of a horse. But I have had Dave McCarthy, who was the racing correspondent for the Christchurch Press, go over what I’ve written, and he’s given it a big tick and said, “You’ve done a pretty good job.” So while I’m not a racehorse expert, I think I am a bit of an expert now on Desert Gold, who was a true Hawke’s Bay champion … foaled in Hawke’s Bay, owned in Hawke’s Bay, bred and raced and trained in Hawke’s Bay; and you’ll see, you know, created a record which can only be regarded as a championship record.

So here she is – she looks a champion with her bay coat. And here’s a photograph from the Australasian paper in 1918, and at that time you’d have to say she was not just a champion for New Zealand, but for the whole of Australasia. So there’s her race record; £23,000 was her earnings, and that in itself was a record which was not reached [again] until after the Second World War – she raced really in the period 1914-1919, so it was over that period of the First World War.

But the other key record she created in Australasia was winning nineteen races in a row, and that was only beaten by ‘Black Caviar’ in 2012, so it’s a record she had along with ‘Gloaming’; ‘Gloaming’ equalled it, but they both held that record for a long, long time. So between 1st of May 1915 to 10th April 1917 she just won race after race … public loved her; she was a winner. She died in 1941 at Okawa, so she was quite long-lived for a horse.

So you use the word ‘champion’ – what is it that makes a true champion? You know, Mohammed Ali, or Peter Snell, or … you name it; a racehorse is not dissimilar. The genetic background, the environment within which they grow up, the training that goes into the training of the horse, and the temperament. If it’s temperament, well Desert Gold really had poise, and you can see, she looked like a champion; those ears pricked up and the intelligent face – it wasn’t just made for the cigarette cards, you know, that’s what she had.

The genetic background – you have to, you know, give it to Tom Lowry for importing the stallion ‘All Black’ from England, and for importing this mare, ‘Aurarius’ that he bought from Australia. They both link back to horses which were top in both Australia and England. So she had the genetics, but then she also had the environment at Okawa where the Lowrys had a large acreage of land; they had a big station. Tom Lowry was a very wealthy man in his day, and he had this interest in horse racing and he could provide the environment for a good racehorse. But not every one of those horses that came out of Okawa Stud ended up like Desert Gold, so there was something special about Desert Gold.

The training – you’ll see in a minute he had a top trainer in Fred Davis; I’ll talk about him in a minute. Desert Gold had what I think is really classy, which I probably don’t have. She had poise. For example, she could be taken over to Australia – in those days you went by train down to Wellington, you lugged up onto a ship, you sailed to Sydney – and then you came all the way down again on the train to get to Melbourne, to Flemington and Caulfield. And the Australian reporters are observing Desert Gold coming out of her carriage onto the station; and while the other thoroughbreds are, you know, snorting and carrying on in the usual temperamental way that thoroughbreds do, the doors opened and Desert Gold walked out onto the platform in front of all the reporters and looked around, and her ears pricked up and she just … ‘I’m a champion. I don’t have to kick my horsebox to bits.’ [Chuckles]

Another incident after she came back from Australia after the first trip – and it happened in that lovely little town of Palmerston North, at Awapuni. And they jacked up this race between Biplane, who was the top Australian horse in 1917, and Desert Gold, who was on the peak of her form. This race between these two horses was to happen at Awapuni. The night before the race Biplane was scratched … basically because I think the owner knew that Desert Gold was going to trash … you know. I must emphasise that Desert Gold is a mare, so it’s a lady horse; Desert Gold was going to trash Biplane; and there’s an uproar about this whole thing, ‘cause people had come from all over Australia, New Zealand, to Palmerston North to see this race. There’re apparently carloads of people driving round Palmerston North trying to find accommodation on the night of the race, and the place was full – where could they go?

Anyway, the race ran, and the crowd was apparently ecstatic! They roared before the race, they roared during the race; and when Desert Gold won the race and was brought back to receive the Awapuni Gold Cup, Tom Lowry was up on the shoulders of people, and there was a ring of policemen holding back the crowd around Desert Gold. And Desert Gold just walked along again with her ears up, and looked around. She wasn’t distracted or worried about all this racket that was going on. And the newspaper reporters said, “The air was electric”; almost a sort of mystical thing about Desert Gold – that was the popularity that was behind this horse. And that’s what I think is part of what makes a champion.

So who were the four men in the life of Desert Gold? Well … had to be Tom Lowry, of course, he was the owner. He had a long-term strategy of bringing these horses in from overseas; he had the wealth to create something like Desert Gold … give her the environment up at Okawa that made her flourish. But life can be tricky for a racehorse; Desert Golds’ sister was there at the same time. She walked into a fence and wrapped the fence around her and had to be put down – that was the end of her. Desert Gold never did that.

The second key person was Fred Davis; he’d been a jockey at Karamu at the same time as Brusher’d been Head lad, so they knew each other. Fred Davis knew how to get his way to the finish line – he was a top jockey. I was expecting to find more in the newspapers about my grandfather, Lawrence Gray, when Fred Davis took charge of Desert Gold, but all I found was Desert Gold. And the Aussie reporters reckoned that ‘Fred Davis was as tight as an oyster when you spoke to him [chuckles] – tight as an oyster.’ Basically you didn’t get very much out of Fred Davis, and therefore there’s nothing there about Lawrence or Brusher Gray, but of course there’s swags about Desert Gold, so you track Desert Gold and that’s where you know these people are.

The next person is Brusher Gray, and he left Karamu [and] went and worked for Fred Davis who had stables out at Greenmeadows and was the trainer for Tom Lowry. So right from 1913, soon after Desert Gold was foaled, to the very end – nearly to 1919 – Brusher was the man who looked after Desert Gold and washed her down and brushed her down, looked after her training, he was left with Desert Gold in Australia. Sometimes there’d be so many horses Fred Davis’d be down in Riccarton, and Brusher’d be up at Ellerslie. So although he’s not the trainer, he had a huge amount of responsibility keeping an eye on that very valuable horse.

The other key person is the jockey that [who] rode most of the races for a win – Jack O’Shea, a little man, a mild mannered man who unfortunately got pneumonia in 1925 at the races at Dannevirke and died. But he was the top jockey who, if you look at that record [of nineteen wins], he was the key man in that.

We go back to Desert Gold herself; she was a racehorse that liked to go to the front and boom! It was her race. She wasn’t one of these horses that, you know, rolled along behind the rest of the pack and then at the very last minute tried to win. She liked to be there right from [at] the front the whole way, and that’s how she won most of her races. [Of] course we’re talking about an era when going to the races was, you know, what half the population of New Zealand did.

[Slides shown] One of her first races that she won – she won her first race down in Riccarton – was the one up in Ellerslie on Boxing Day in 1914, and the newspapers even then were able to put photographs of these races into the papers. And you can see the crowds there at the racecourse.

Down at Riccarton where the ribbon is being tied round Desert Gold; this is back in 1919 when they had the racing up in Taranaki, and again you can see the crowds of people going to the races.

I talked about the popularity of Desert Gold with the public … well, when that happens commercial businesses soon jump on the bandwagon. And so from the National Tobacco Company at Ahuriri – good old Napier – we have Desert Gold tobacco. We had Desert Gold tea – I think it started off in Wanganui, but it started off a bit before Desert Gold became truly popular with the public; and I think the Camel thing … it was a sort of … if Desert Gold and the sort of efficiency of the tea. But the moment Desert Gold became a public item, they changed their advertising and jumped onto things like ‘Queen of Teas’ and so on. And then we had the cigarettes which came a bit later, and I think photographs like down below there … you showed the tobacco company that you’d bought several thousand cigarettes by showing them the cigarette packets and so on, and you could get a free print of Desert Gold.

In 1918-1919, the second trip to Australia which wasn’t such a roaring success, which I’ll come to later, Desert Gold and Brusher Gray were literally trapped over in Sydney in Australia because we had the 1918 influenza epidemic and a flu outbreak. It was rampant in New Zealand; in Australia it wasn’t so rampant because they implemented a quarantine system on the shipping. Remember too, you’re at the end of the First World War, and they’re trying to bring all the troops home from Europe. And of course, First World War, [a] lot of ships went to the bottom. So there’s a big shortage of shipping, accentuated by these events.

Grandad was trapped at Randwick, and along comes this guy, Beaumont Smith – what an entrepreneur he was! He made a silent movie called ‘Desert Gold’. Now Beaumont Smith had made previous Aussie silent movies with things like ‘The Man from the Snowy River’; ‘While the Billy Boils’; [chuckle] … real captivating items. But Beaumont Smith was an absolute whirlwind personality. He could direct, produce, write the script, do the marketing … probably do some of the acting, or operate [chuckle] – he did everything, and within two or three months he could crank out a movie. He sometimes had a number of movies, and then he would go round regional Australia and New Zealand and, you know, promote these and advertise them and so on. So ‘Desert Gold’ had a plane zooming in; it had the goodie, the baddie, the woman, the romance, the outback scenes which were filmed on some scraggy bit of land in Sydney. The lady actress actually fell off her horse and broke her arm, but that didn’t stop Beaumont Smith; she was back on the horse with her arm in a sling, and he just got the camera at the right angle to avoid that, and so it went on. Unfortunately, there was a big fire in Melbourne in 1925, and like a lot of silent movies the movie was lost; but you can get the sort of guts of the plot of the movie by reading the advertising, and there’s a few stills from the thing. Now Tom Lowry wasn’t prepared to let the actors ride his valuable racehorse, Desert Gold, ‘cause the movie ends with a horse race down the track. So the jockeys like Jack O’Shea and Mitch McLaughlin from Australia rode the horse in the movie, and Brusher Gray had to hold the horse and look after the horse in the movie.

So all good things do come to an end, and the second trip to Australia in 1918 … oh! This has been described as one of the closest, best horse races that has ever happened in Australia, where you can see four horses all jammed in close together, and for the first time in her life Desert Gold was unplaced. She came fourth, but you can see how close the rest of them were, and so only by a head or a nose, poor old Desert Gold, a five year old racing in a weight-for-age admittedly, but usually by now carrying the heaviest weight, was racing against younger horses but only losing by a nose. But the headlines go from ‘Desert Gold, Champion’ to ‘Desert Gold Defeated’, and that was the beginning of the end for Desert Gold.

I’ll move on to talking about the Gray family, and basically what happened in Hastings, 804 Gordon Road, in the twenties, thirties and forties … that is, basically the Great Depression of the 1930s … the same for everyone, not just the Grays … the 1931 earthquake of course, which I’m sure you all have stories about, and then the Second World War.

So in 1919 Jessie and Brusher bought this old house at 804 Gordon Road for about £400, I think I’ve written in the book, and it’d been built by George [?Etwell?] who had a shop and a house next door. Down the back they had stables and horse paddocks, and this is where Brusher operated for the rest of his life. And Gordon Road was quite a little centre because it was just up the road from the racecourse at Hastings; you had half a dozen other racehorse trainers down Gordon Road, so at four o’clock in the morning my mother remembers the clip-clop of the racehorses down the road, waking everyone up. The jockeys were off doing their training.

So this is the Gray family; that’s Brusher Gray with his children, so he’s got Brightie [Bridella] and Bub [Laurie], Mary and Alec on the right in front of the stables. There we have the more formal photograph a little bit later, where Jessie tries to be the homemaker. She worked in the big houses in Glasgow as a housekeeper, and so she modelled herself a bit, I think, on some of those ideas she got from there; the magazine on the lap [cough] to show that the Gray family was quite intellectual really [chuckle] … even though the father was just a horse trainer [coughing] we were quite a seriously intellectual family, especially with Don with his sort of, you know, Grecian pose or whatever he’s doing, and Alec wearing his tie and so on.

When Brusher went out to be a private trainer he was no longer with the wealth of the Ormonds or the Lowrys; he wasn’t dealing with horses like Desert Gold and Bobrikov or Balboa, you know, real champion race-winning horses. Being a private trainer you’re suddenly dealing with people who don’t have anywhere near that amount of money; their horses are either third-rate or fourth-rate, and they’re expecting Brusher to work a miracle on them. So money was slow, so Jessie’s idea was to bring boarders into the house … into 804 Gordon Road, or as my Uncle Alec referred to 804, “It became a doss-house”. [Chuckles] When it was race day you might have up to thirty jockeys and trainers living in the house; the kids were shifted out into the stables. The old coal range with the big pot and the chookies and everything – all the vegies – were being cooked up, and she made money that way as her contribution to the family.

Brusher still kept going with his horses; one person he did work for for quite a long time was a guy called Tony White, who was a stock buyer for the Tomoana Freezing Works; but he had enough money to have a few horses on the side. He had two horses that he gave to Brusher – this one was Kinross, which was absolutely useless. At one race meeting it bolted three times and never even, you know, got into the race. The fact that the sire of this horse was called Psychology, perhaps [laughter] gives you an idea – this horse was a bit mental.

But the other horse, which I think came from a similar stock, was High Court, and that was one of the best horses that Brusher had over this 1920-1930 period. High Court won the Dannevirke Cup and then it won the Hawke’s Bay Cup. And Brusher said to his wife, Jessie, “Look, I think it’s worth going along and putting a bob on the totalisator, because I think today my horse is going to win”, and Mum reckoned that Grandad never said that. So they all went along, the barrier goes up and High court is left standing, looking in the opposite direction [chuckles] to which he’s supposed to be going. And the rest of the field take off and they’re fifty yards down the field; at this stage Granny Gray – Jessie – sits down, and … “Oh, what a waste of money!” Anyway, Mum apparently had the glasses on and she was watching; “Look Mum! No, no, it’s okay – looks like High Court’s catching up!” And High Court did catch up, and won the Hawke’s Bay Cup. [Chuckles]

In this old photograph here it went down to Feilding, and although Grandad was put in Room 13 in the hotel, that didn’t worry him – he said he was born on the devil’s day, or the devil’s month. And High Court won the Feilding Cup, but after that – Tony White must’ve needed the money – poor old High Court got sold down into the South Island, so there disappeared Grandad’s best horse.

The next big event of course was the Hawke’s Bay earthquake. Brightie was at school, first day of Hastings High School; they were out in the playground. She said it was like swimming on the ocean wave when they were yelled at to lie down on the ground. Jessie was in the house; [the] chimney came crashing down, she crawled out the back door. I think Alec was at Karamu, Don and Bub were in Palmerston North, and Brusher was at the bookie for some reason. Mum reckoned the bookies in the Depression were the only people that [who] had any money, so maybe Brusher was trying to get some money off him. But anyway, they all had to shift out of the house obviously, and they lived in the stable. And for Mum it was a great adventure, for [but] of course Hastings [and] Napier, with the deaths and injury [injuries] – it was a serious tragedy, and the devastation which occurred was a tragedy. But they survived it, and they did things like chopping firewood and cooking over a fire in the back yard; and other families joined together just like they did after Cyclone Gabrielle, I’ve heard today; families joined together and cooperated and survived the Hawke’s Bay earthquake.

And eventually, at least Mum had to go back to school; others were out working. Hastings High School for Mum … she loved it. It was a great place to go to. She had her sister Mary’s dress – the year before she’d had to stay at home – now she had a dress that she could wear to school. And she did pretty well at school in the Commercial class.

One thing at Hastings High School I’d love to talk about is ‘[A] Midsummer Night’s Dream’. The principal – and he called himself the principal back in 1931 – Mr W A G Penlington. Right, you know about Mr Penlington? Well, what a hero he was; he’d been a Company Commander in the Rifle Brigade in the First World War. He was involved with Hastings High School from 1922 to 1949. You had a government that was trying to reduce the education budget by £1 million; this is the idea of how you deal with a depression … have we heard that somewhere before? [Chuckles] They were trying to drag the education budget back to what it was in 1920; I think Mr Penlington was trying to show the government by doing ‘[A] Midsummer Night’s Dream’, by having it run for two nights in the Municipal Theatre in Hastings; Mum was a nymph or something, or a fairy [chuckles] dancing around. But the theatre critic from the Hawke’s Bay Tribune said it was just so wonderful to hear the voices of the children, and the audience, not just the parents I guess, they really were in raptures about it.

Mum went on … after Newbigin’s Brewery, the Leopard Brewery, she went and joined Rainbow & Hobbs. And there she was teaching the men how to do the book keeping and how to do things in the accountants’ office; the young blokes. And then she found the young blokes were doing exams on the pathway to become qualified accountant[s], and so Mum said, “Well, can I do that too?” And she was told in no uncertain terms she didn’t have University Entrance, and so ‘just get back to your place and don’t you worry about that’. And Mum being Mum, she went and got the ex-teacher, Jonah, from Hastings High School, and in his spare time after work he taught her the syllabus for University Entrance. And so she passed University Entrance and then step by step she became a qualified accountant. So there’s her accountancy qualifications that she finally got in 1948; she was admitted at the same time as Hamish Hay, the later mayor of Christchurch, and fifty years later the Accountants Society in Christchurch gave them both a certificate. There she is with her bicycle [and] Doreen Swain, her good friend. Mum said in those days you could cycle round for miles and you never ever seemed to get a puncture, whereas today … [Chuckles]

Anyway, I’ll just quickly run through what the other members of the family did, because the other big event in that era of course was the Second World War. The eldest, the son that came out with Jessie from Scotland, Donald Patience, who was born in 1902, [and] who of course by 1940, 1941, has reached forty, so he put his age down to get into the army rather than [what] is normal; you put your age up. And he’d been working down on building the hangars down at Ohakea as a steel worker, but he ended up joining the 7th Anti-Tank [Regiment] over in Egypt; went up to Syria, came down with the New Zealand Division when Rommel was charging into Egypt and got surrounded at Minqar Qaim by the Germans, and broke out from that; went across North Africa, got wounded in Tunisia; came back and was patched up in Egypt, and then went all the way up through Italy. So there’s his medals and … it was quite a war for Don. Don had this little diary that he kept, and we’ve got a couple of years; so there he is, I think talking about being surrounded at Minqar Qaim – really all he does is write in his diary, ‘Hell of a night.’ [Chuckle] Hell of a night, all right!

The next child is the eldest member of the Gray family, Alexander George Gray, and he became a bomber pilot with 75 Squadron with the Lancaster bombers, and did thirty-four operational raids over Germany and over France. So there was a huge period of training, both in New Zealand and then sailing across to the UK [United Kingdom] and further training before joining 75 Squadron. Being a bomber pilot was really … I don’t want to make it too gruesome, but you were surrounded by death. There were a hundred and twenty-five thousand members of Bomber Command, and fifty-five thousand of those died, two thousand of them being New Zealanders. So you’re surrounded by death, with your mates disappearing, with the bombs you’re dropping, and the death below. But that was the war, and we had to take the war to Nazi Germany in order to defeat them. So the Gray family certainly did their bit.

And the last brother was Lawrence … well, he was called ‘Bub’ back in those days, and he was sometimes called Lawrence Junior; then latterly he called himself Laurie rather than being called Bub. [Chuckle] But Bub joined up, and ended up with the New Zealand Division up through Italy at the end part of the war, so 1944, to try to push the Germans up towards Trieste; and he was part of that. You’re freezing to death in the winter, and you’re boiling in the summer. So he never got back to New Zealand until January 1946, after the war had ended. So here he is, no doubt of course on leave in Florence, taking in [a] bit of culture, and looking at the sights.

And then you come to the period after the war. With Brusher Gray it’s no longer the horses any more, though he does go to the TAB, and I’m sure he went down to the Hastings racecourse. It was really the bowls club that kept him busy. Jessie’s there looking after the house and looking after the grandchildren when they come along. And it was a happy life in Hawke’s Bay for the Gray family, as it has been for so many families. It’s just a little example of that era.

Donald lived in 804 Gordon Road right through until he died in 1993. The old house is no longer there, so what were horse paddocks are now flats and houses, and intensification of Hastings. But that’s a little sort of window into Hawke’s Bay, into the champion horse that romped around Australia and New Zealand, and the Gray family that is sort of illustrative of what so many other families did in Hastings and in the Bay, dealing with the Depression, the earthquake and the war.

Any questions or any comments?

Question: Did Desert Gold have any progeny?

Lawrence: Yes, she did, but none of them were ever as good as Desert Gold. Tom Lowry, after she stopped racing in 1919, did put her out to stud at Okawa, and yes, she has six or seven or more children. Some of those became racehorses and won a few races, but nothing in the order of Desert Gold.

Barbara: Desert Gold’s sire was a magnificent black horse. You’d think … I don’t know much about horse breeding, but I thought a black gene would be fairly dominant, but he produced this beautiful golden daughter. Can you throw any light on her mother?

Lawrence: The mother of Desert Gold was Aurarius. It’s all in the book somewhere. I don’t know exactly what colour she was; the father was All Black, who came from England. Neither All Black nor Aurarius were particularly brilliant racehorse themselves, they were relatively mediocre. I don’t think they won races or anything like that that prompted Tom Lowry to buy them and therefore breed from them. But, their sires were top Australian, top England, and therefore those genetics came through to Desert Gold.

Barbara: Shows what a lottery horse breeding is.

Lawrence: Yeah, well I think Tom Lowry had been in the racehorse game long enough to know what he was doing, and in bringing those genetics together he knew he was producing a pretty good horse.

Barbara: Oh, and his Okawa Stud was renowned for the quality of the horses.

Question: So did any of the family go on and have a strong interest in horse racing?

Lawrence: Oh, I’d have to say Lawrence Junior – yeah, Uncle Bub. Lawrence Junior was taken on by Brusher as a trainee jockey. So he became a jockey, and then he became a trainer of horses himself. So he had a strong interest in … the TAB. [Chuckle] My mother had a strong interest in horses; but my mother became a strong Christian Scientist, where you don’t gamble or drink or smoke, so the racecourse scene wasn’t quite her, you know, environment. But she had a strong interest in racehorses, so that she would sit at home in her little unit in Christchurch with the race [racing] channel, you know, chugging along. Yeah. And she was quite good at picking winners in her day, and so people would come to her with that, but beyond that I don’t think there has been a great interest in racing … got onto rather more steady pursuits, you know, like working in local government, or teaching.

Barbara: So your mother … how long did she carry on working as an accountant?

Lawrence: For a few years … she shifted down to Palmerston North, and that’s where in 1948 she became a member of the Accountancy Society. She worked as an accountant down there, but more working in charge of an office, rather than really giving the true benefit of the qualifications that she had. Then when she married the next year, had three boys – one, two, three in a row – she thought, ‘Better to become a school teacher’, so she became a school teacher at Queen Elizabeth Technical College, teaching typing, book keeping, shorthand, English. Then she shifted into the Technical Institute, and so she worked at that right through to the 1970s, but she still did things like the church books. But in retrospect, she looked back and what she should’ve done was gone to Australia … gone to Melbourne and waved her qualifications around. She didn’t quite realise, you know, the worth of what she had. Yeah – which was a bit of a shame, but she had us, which was … [Chuckles]

Question: Down the railway line a bit there is a Davis Road, and I wondered if your trainer, Mr Davis, had perhaps a little farmlet or something down there. Do you know?

Lawrence: I know that Fred had a couple of places out in Greenmeadows, but then in 1918 he shifted his whole establishment to Woodville. Times were so tough in 1918 that he dismantled the horse boxes in Greenmeadows and carted them down to Woodville; supply shortages, so they shifted the horse boxes down. So I don’t think it is our Fred Davis.

Question: Just wondering if the connections of Desert Gold ever got any royalties from the sale of the cigarettes?

Lawrence: Firstly I’d say, well I don’t really know; but then I’d say I don’t think Tom Lowry had the copyright on the term Desert Gold. Well, photograph of the horse, yeah … it’s his horse, yeah. So he should’ve had the copyright for that. Maybe this is something the Lowry estate might wish to pursue. [Chuckles] But you see, I think at the time Tom Lowry named Desert Gold, Zane Grey had written the book, ‘Desert Gold’ in America, and it was quite popular throughout. So I sense that in picking a name – it’s a great name – but to pick a name for a horse … I don’t really know, but perhaps the name came from Zane Grey’s ‘Desert Gold’.

Barbara: Well, Laurie, that was fantastic; highly entertaining. Thank you so much for bringing that slice of history to our talk tonight … little snippets of the Gray family, and also the Lowry family, that you’ve shared with us tonight. We’re very privileged to have you here, and thank you for coming all the way.

[Applause]