It was prolific English writer W Somerset Maugham who once described his view of the Cote d’Azur as “a sunny place for shady people.”
Max Presnell, from Sydney’s Eastern suburbs likes words too, but he’s more Doncaster Hotel, Anzac Parade, Kensington than the French Riviera and it has been the racetrack that has been his sunny place for some 67 years alongside a cavalcade of characters and ripping yarns.
News broke Max - he describes himself as a 39 foal (that’s 1939, but never “aged” as form guides once used to carry) - won’t have his columns carried any more in the Sydney Morning Herald.
But this is not an obituary. Far from it. “Society Max”, let it be known that retirement is one word eschewed from his vocabulary.
“I’ve never worked a day in my life, it must be terrible to have to go to work to do what you do, when all I have ever done is gone to the track,” says Max.
“Society” seems an odd moniker to add to Max who grew up in the working class “Donnie”, the sounds of horses nearby at Randwick lighting a young passion while the patrons his father Roy served and observed, casting house Runyon, were fertile fodder to young Max.
Society Max?
Well He first started in the Runyon’s “A Nice Price”, where after stealing Sam The Gonoph (“a ticket speculator’s) doll Sonia, suddenly bobs up with a few G’s, before a gambling match on a real boat race (Harvard/Yale) with all the usual Runyon twists and characters play out, as they did in the movie Guys And Dolls - Sinatra as Nathan Detroit, Brando as Sky Masterson, George E Scott as Society Max.
Which may slot into a quip that the Doncaster in those days was sometimes known as “Little Tokyo” – “where everyone nipped” (or snipped) everyone else for a dollar.
Presnell, who called his book “Good Losers Die Broke”, a nod to Runyon’s Unser Fritz’s must read “All Horse Players Die Broke” doesn’t need Damon when he can regale you of Dave The Dasher, Clarence The Clocker, Hard Luck Hal, Hangdog and let’s start with Two Bob Tommy.
“Two Bob Tommy, well he was nothing but a pest in the pub,” said Presnell.
“But my father was in awe of him. How could a man with so little to offer go so far?
“He wasn’t a drunk or a fighter, just a pest. He’d sell raffle tickets with no prizes, run SP bets and probably held most of them and look where he ended up.”
He ended up being T J Smith MBE did Two Bob Tommy – a game changer, one of the greatest trainers in Australian Turf History and of course sire of the indomitable Gai.
“When he came into money, he hung onto it, did something with it, and that’s when a million was a million,” Presnell said.
“Tommy was barely literate, then there was “Melbourne” Mick Bartley, he never went to school, but was brilliant on numbers and figures, they both ended up driving Rolls and with harbourside mansions.
“There’s a lot to be said for common sense and street smarts, that’s what that era was about, today, we might be better educated and informed, more intelligent perhaps but put those people out on the street and get them to earn a real quid, they aren’t up to it.”
Like Dave The Dasher and Clarence The Clocker, real characters from Presnell’s playgroups, and the track was where they played.
“Dave died on the wrong side of 90 with his reputation, credit rating and code of silence intact,” wrote Max once.
“A colourful racing identity, in the best meaning of the term.”
“He never did a day’s work in his life but was good at what he did,” not that you could put down turf advisor, commission agent, racehorse owner, raconteur on your tax returns perhaps.
The Dasher bit came from his alleged foot speed around betting rings, not from the alleged play at a Stawell Gift where after making a book he found the well backed dark horse was a liability of some proportions and a little knock in the shins was allegedly organised. Allegedly.
Presnell also recalls one of Dave’s dolls (let use Runyonesque), Clarissa Kaye, a famous Australian actress of the era, also a “bowler” getting the cash on at the track, when cash was all you could get on.
Clarissa would leave The Dasher, and find James Mason, move to Switzerland, and marry him. Despite Dave’s savoir faire, Mason a British actor come Hollywood superstar -North By Northwest, Lolita, A Star is Born - you may have seen them. Well, he got Clarissa. Dave kept dashing until 2002.
Clarence, well Max described him as “a defrocked milkman”. What’s that Max I asked incredulously.
“He was a defrocked milkman,” as if I hadn’t firstly understood.
“Got found watering the milk,” he said clearing things up. Something to do with depression years apparently.
Well Clarence (Arthur Davies), merely five feet tall with the stature of a jockey but without the ability to become one, was “a Redfern boy with no polish but he was street cunning, as good a tipper as any of today’s so-called experts with all their technology and data,” said Presnell.
“He was always at the track, clocking horse for Tommy Smith, brilliant at getting a tip, a fringe player, but when Channel 9 were looking for a personality. Clarence was their man, he lasted 25 years.”
Arthur took “Clarence” from Bing Crosby’s “The Horse Told Me song: “the owner told Clarence the Clocker and the clocker told jockey Magee” - etc but Max recalls a short suspension incurred by Clarence from the popular television show that Sir Frank Packer loved.
Asked where he thought a promising filly would finish, Clarence quipped: “She’ll be further out in front than Sabrina.” Sabrina, from Britain, was a buxom blonde actor. Got it?
Hard Luck Hal and Hangdog though were always on racing’s wrong side of the ledger, but esteemed characters in Presnell’s rich memory.
“Hal, everything he touched turned to clay, if he was selling swimming pools, there were the greatest floods of all time."
“I remember he had New Atlantis going for a huge result in the Golden Slipper, somehow got maybe 150-1 for XYZ thousands, but the bookies, who might not have been registered, said they wouldn’t pay, take them to court they said, he never even was going to get his stake back.”
“That was Hal, the horse got beaten but he had no chance of winning anyway.”
An association with” Break Even” Bill Mordey gets a mention and the Punt-Drunks Protective Association (PDPA for short), which was early schooling in “how to teach to ride the punches of misfortune”, especially before the “toe-cutters” came in (to settle a few outstanding matters).
Hangdog, well he used to sit alongside Max at The Sun, where he started as a copy boy, where one of the jobs was an early morning ginger beer for the scribe who might have over imbibed the night before.
“I’d answer Hangdog’s phone, he was a top journalist, and there might be a threatening voice about some settling. He was just a loser, and he went into hiding in some hippie commune up Byron Bay way I think it was,” Presnell said.
“Anyway, he got his life back in order, re-married and she eventually left him, taking all the furniture, even the bed.”
Hangdog could have been a pre-cursor to The Cooler, playing euchre for decent money, it was said his face “oozed defeat”, which inevitably came. He ended up starting a suburban newspaper on the Gold Coast, but halcyon days on Sydney tracks were long gone.
“The racetrack is devoid of characters today,” says Max, to little push back here after hearing of those as an early opener.
“It’s the same as in the media. We used to live and die off competition, four to five mornings a week at the track, all chasing the story, morning papers, afternoon papers, it as intense and then we’d all end up on the juice afterwards.
“Going to work back in the early days, the smell of newspapers coming of the press, on Broadway, and the brewery across the road, what an aroma to stimulate the senses.”
You can sense the track, its people, its stories still stimulate Society Max. It does.
“Sadly, today the racetracks are more ghost towns than sunny places. But every day I learn something knew and walk away says that’s better than the alternative.”
Max laments modern racing journalism, of you can call any of it that, not because he’s one of because it was the past it’s always better than the present.
“We lived off out wits, our hunches, our associations, and hard work. Remember we came up in an era without social media, no mobile phones, where people, trainers didn’t want to talk and those who did might throw you a dummy, you’d learn quickly, gauge everyone and do your best."
“It was a fabulous time, you got burnt a lot but always learnt a lot. And you never stop learning.
“I still love it, much of the vitality may have gone, its more about a good time at the races and having a drink than the horses the people and the stories, but I can still get the same excitement driving into Derby Day at Flemington, or the Cox Plate or Easter at Randwick and think this is special, something very special.”
Best let Society Max keep telling us so, his way. His website is coming soon (www.maxpresnell.com), not sure he will take us back to his copy boy days, which he will agree was a real job, not just ginger beer to help the journalists in need, but it was “copy, then “boy” yelled across the newsroom and young Max running stories it to the sub-editors (once described to as “journalists who don’t make the grade.”)
Papers were hot metal, subbed stories sent in chutes by the copy boys to the compositor and then into a frame to make the newspaper page.
“One of my early jobs was in sport where I learned not to cut corners for a man named Con. Norm Provan, the magnificent Saints forward, once said “Con by name and Con by nature” of Con Simons, one of the best sporting editors,” Presnell wrote in his book
.
“Simons had a taste for Sargents pies and in the early days at Broadway commissioned me to get one. Alas it entailed a journey to Railway Square, and I found an outlet closer to the office selling what looked like the genuine item but at first bite Simons reacted like it was filled with dog droppings. He ordered me to get “a Sargents and pay for it yourself”.
Max was 15, starting in 1954 with Fairfax before a telegram, “please phone me urgently” – on April 11, 1957, said he’d been offered a treasured and hard-earned cadetship.
“After failing to shine in anything other than lottery results – taking the numbers of prize winners – I was moved to racing, always my target.”
“I’d done the police rounds, all the things you had to do back then, stock exchange, television guides, I think they felt sorry for me and ended up putting me in sport and I’ve been there ever since (well despite short sojourn to the UK financed by a successful punt, before Max learned he wasn’t that successful a punter and returned to bread and butter work that allowed him to punt – that was the Sydney Morning Herald, 1961.)
John Benaud, brother of Richie, was his first Sports Editor, Jack “The Fat Man” Charles his first turf editor, and he remembers his first story. Well, most of it, it involved a girl he walked in the Broadway office – “I think there was some link to Maurice McCarten – but she had a crow on her shoulder, and she said she wanted to become a jockey or get into journalism,” Presnell said.
Women weren’t favoured in either vocation, so Presnell wondered how he’d write the story. “The Fat Man (that’s Jack Charles of course) suggested Max take the bird angle, the crow that is, and he did.
But Presnell proudly has championed the cause of females in racing ever since, let’s start with Margaret de Gonneville. A track rider for Two Bob Tommy, won the first registered race for females in Australia (1977), trained My Mate Zero to win a Breeder’s Plate and beat that year’s Slipper winner Inspired (1983).
“She was a rarity, like Betty Lane, trailblazers before Gai. Betty, I think only died last year, lived in a caravan at Gowrie (outside of Tamworth), had no money but became a great trainer,” Presnell said.
Linda Jones? (“I went to New Zealand to see this super girl ride; she showed the first time she was as good as the men as a jockey”.)
Recognizing all of them, Max remains in awe of Gai. “Those ladies never had the glory of Gai, she was an actress first, in the media, on Turf Time with Ian Craig, she had the polish of her mother and the drive of her father.
“But even to get her licence I remember she offered to take less a percentage of the prizemoney; she’s been racing’s best marketer ever since.”
Look at racing, where women now compete in the saddle alongside their male counterparts. It’s perhaps racing’s best “selling points.” Level playing fields, age indiscriminate.
“It’s one of the most dangerous sports in the world, do you see them at Formula I or Moto GP, it’s quite extraordinary stuff,” says a proud Max.
Naturally the big headline grabbing stories have all come across Max’s purview Jockey Tapes, Fine Cotton since, from newspaper proprietors like Packer and Ezra Norton standing toe-to-toe on the track, no point revisiting those, Max thriving on the challenges of finding the next one.
“I’m not sure there are racing writers today, there are people who write about racing, but the whole theatre is gone, like the track,” Presnell said.
“Racetracks today are like ghost towns, they used to be riddled with character, the betting rings have lost that vitality.”
“But it hasn’t lost its appeal. Racing may promote itself now as more drinks and entertainment and having a good time, than the horses and the characters but it still stimulates me every Saturday.”
The modern trainer?
“Those hands-on trainers like Bob Hoysted or George Hanlon, they hand tailored horses, now you see Waller, Maher, hundreds of horses running it like a big business, have to marvel at what they do.
“But I still get as big a buzz as seeing Les Bridge set one to win a race (like Celestial Legend) in a Doncaster,” he said.
Not surprisingly. Les is 85, a rusted on a South Sydney Rabbitohs fan like Max (who now takes in the Swans at the AFL for fun).
Which gives him times for a swim and a walk and a feed around Sydney’s glorious eastern suburbs, with wife Colleena at Bronte.
Which means Max is still living the sunny days, and won’t have it any other way, the shady characters may be gone but not Max.
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