MY SPORTING EX-PARSON 



I daresay several old Australians will remember him 

 — Jack Austin. Old Joe Silberberg would have been 

 over a hundred had he been alive to-day. I knew him 

 when he had spent his best days ; he had some good 

 horses in training at one time. Alf Joseph was quite 

 a stately figure ; he was Mayor of Sandhurst, as I have 

 already explained ; he quite gave a stamp of ultra- 

 respectability to the ring. Then in Melbourne there 

 were the Barnards and S. G. Cook, who trained and 

 owned horses. In Sydney there was " Glass-Eye " 

 White, who never made much money, but looked quite 

 a dandy. He was the husband of an Australian 

 actress, Miss Emma Wangenheim, whose father kept 

 an hotel in Sydney. Many on English racecourses 

 know H. Oxenham. Five and twenty years ago, and 

 even more recently, he succeeded Ned Jones as the 

 biggest layer in New South Wales. He did business 

 with everyone and then came over here, where the 

 luck varied with him, but he won another big packet 

 two or three years ago over a horse of his own. Up 

 in Brisbane Billy Mooney had a very nice cigar shop 

 with a little parlour behind, as usual, to play cards in ; he 

 had the only real book in the place. Nesbit, who played 

 a very fine game of billiards, also established himself 

 in Brisbane and laid horses, but on a lesser scale. 



It was a strange experience in some of those early 

 days to go to a small up-country meeting. There was 

 one very minor affair I can remember quite distinctly. 

 I happened to fall in with a man who had one or 

 two horses ; he had formerly been a Nonconformist 

 minister. He spotted me at the principal hotel and 

 asked me if I would smoke a cigar out in the bush with 

 him, as he wanted to tell me somthing. He told me 

 that he owned a horse named Hesitation, who could 

 win the treble that day. At all events it was a certainty 



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