Sixty-one years is a long time to be involved with racing for someone who considers himself completely non-horsey.
Jack McLeod is more of a people man, as his decades of work at the Otago Racing Club underlines. It’s Jack who runs the jockeys between the airport and racecourse at Wingatui, makes sure all the saddle blankets are clean and ready to go each race day and – perhaps one of the most important jobs – makes sure the Otago flag flies high in the breeze.
Jack, who turns 90 next year, has lived most of his life in St Clair in Dunedin. Back in the early days he had a taxi and when his colleague Jim was leaving town, he suggested Jack take up his job with the racing club.
“He said I was a country lad at heart and would fit in fine,” remembers Jack.
When Jack took his friend’s advice, he ended up driving the stewards around the race tracks in the region – for both the trots and gallops – and picking up a number of other jobs that seem to have stuck. Not that he wld have it any other way.
He helped out at Forbury Park for a decade before moving on. “It was always cold at the night trots,” he says. “When I sold my [taxi] licence I thought I would have to give up helping at the Otago Racing Club but they said just stay on and use the official car. So I just carried on.”
It was a circuit – Tapanui, Omakau, Cromwell, Kurow, Wingatui, Waikouaiti and more.
While he had given up his taxi job, Jack was still working, first picking up where his dad left off as caretaker of the local cemetery for the Dunedin City Corporation. It was a difficult time for employment. “It was usually a job for two or three men, but they had me doing it on my own and it just didn’t work.”
Five years later he moved to the blacksmith’s shop at the Hillside Railway Workshops in Dunedin. ”It was some good times. We lived near the railways when I was a kid so I had a bit of an affinity with it,” says Jack. “We could make anything at Hillside. It was a team of real tradesmen.”
Jack always said when he turned 60 he would “get the hell out” and he did just that, with his wife Doreen retiring from the Post Office three months later.
Jack has seen plenty of changes in the racing world. “I have worked with five secretaries and four track managers. Some of them were really great, like Lindsay de la Perrell [secretary of the Dunedin Jockey Club for 30 years from 1941]. He was a very intelligent man and well liked throughout New Zealand. He had a marvellous mind and knew the rule book inside and out.”
Jack, who has never been a betting man, has fond memories of Farmers Day at the Beaumont meetings. “There were two big ones a year – all the farmers would turn up for those. Back then we had to take all the money to the course before the gates opened. We would be the first there and the last away.”
Jack worked alongside the secretary, driving him around and ferrying the money to and fro. He also used to hold the red flag for the false starts.
“This season is 61 years that I have been doing this,” says Jack. “Things have gone fast for me. When you have something to do, the time just goes. I said when I retired I would do this and that, but I haven’t had time for a lot of it. I guess there is always tomorrow.”
He particularly loves chatting to the owners, trainers and jockeys. “They talk about all sorts of things, and I do enjoy that.”
Then there was the year [1970] when Stuart Falconer’s horse Baghdad Note won the Melbourne Cup. “He brought the cup to show it off at the next Wingatui meeting. He had a function in Dunedin that evening and hurried away, taking an empty box and leaving the cup behind.
“I noticed this and as I only lived a block away I took it home with me, and there it was sitting on our kitchen table,” Jack said. “I rang Mr Falconer and he duly arrived in his silver Rolls Royce and took the children for a ride – which they still remember to this day.
“The next day he came back around with a large cardboard box of cream cakes. I think he was the owner, or perhaps, a shareholder in the well known Dunedin cake shop Jays.”
When Jack is not involved with racing he pursues his other loves – shooting at the Waikouaiti Gun Club, playing the bass drum for the Pipes and Drums of Dunedin band, and helping the Caledonian Society and the Burns Club. He is a life member of all four organisations.
The local pipe bands take turns farewelling the cruise ships from the port. “It is all the clans around Dunedin and I like anything to do with Scotland and our early ancestors.”
Jack and Doreen have three children – Sandra, Stephen and Christopher – and five grandchildren.
“I have had a good life really.”
For now, Jack is happy with his work at the Otago Racing Club, where he was made a life member in 2011, and looks forward to each race day when he catches up with old friends.
Article source: Love Racing