Mule Racing Gave An Army An Answer

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28013, 6 July 1956, Page 4

Mule Racing Gave An Army An Answer

The gloriously hot summer of 1945 which followed the end of the war in Italy faced the New Zealand Army with an unexpected crisis. Hardly any one was drawing any pay.. Privates, corporals, sergeants, warrant officers, all were keeping the pages in their AB-64s as virginal as the day they were printed. After a short spell of unaccustomed leisure, the Pay Corps became worried. For a wild fugitive moment they had a theory that New Zealand soldiers might have been converted a' last by the precept and example of chaplains and Y.M.C.A. secretaries, mended their ways, and decided that thrift, frugality and general abstenuousness was a soldier’s best course; but that hope was dissipated by a casual glance at New Zealanders on leave. They were spending money like water —but it was not coming out of their pay-books. Without going into the good and sufficient reasons (not unconnected with the black market) why this was so, it was still obvious that, in the Army phrasing of the day, “someone had to get cracking and do something about it.”

And, or so it is popularly believed, that is why the Army started muleracing, or, occasionally, donkey-racing. Wherever sufficient Army mules or donkeys could be asembled, and whenever some harassed junior officer could be browbeaten into taking over the arrangements, “totalisator” race meetings with mules or donkeys were held, and they provided some hilarious moments.

Those who cannot see the connexion between mule races and the fact that soldiers were not drawing any pay underestimate the Army’s ability to get out of awkward situations. The mule races gave every soldier a first-class answer to the question from above: “Why haven’t you been drawing your pay. soldier?” The soldier could now reply: “I don’t need to. Sir, I won a lot at the races.” Everyone was happy—except, perhaps, the 'mules. Mules are not terrifically fast—except in kicking—but they have one advantage in racing. They are quite incorruptible. No-one ever “fixed” a mule. The ones which looked fast and were fast were just as likely to stand on the post as the ones that looked slow. They might go and they might not, they might go half the distance in a frenzied canter and then stop dead out of pure cussedness, they always were on distant terms with their jockeys, and they were quite unresponsive to cheers or boos from the anxious crowd. Tn fact they were completely unpredictable. Nor were the winners at all consistent. There were onlv a few mules available mostly, so they generally all “ran” in all the

races. But because one of them won one race hands down was no reason to assume he would ever leave the post in the next.

Dividends were usually very high, for no-one could really forecast haw a mule would run. In fact, mules tended to depress by their contrariness those with whom they came in contact. (To this day, the occasionally wistful expression which crosses the face of one metropolitan newspaper editor in a southern city is ascribed by his friends to his once having been one of a group of infantrymen assigned to a mule train.)

But the mule races did, provide entertainment when it was sadly needed, and those who attended them may still have vivid memories.

Serving the same incidental purpose of providing a cast-iron excuse for the soldier who drew’ no pay were the various trotting meetings in Italy —especially the famous day at Trieste where drivers from Addington (visiting Trieste by courtesy of the infantry) drove in competition with the Italian reinsmen.

Some New Zealanders made close friends with Italian trotting trainers and drivers, only to make a discovery not uncommon at Addington. The more they knew about the horses and the men who drove them the less money they made betting on the races. The less they knew the more they made.

However, individual shortcomings of m les and trotters on one side, the provision of these meetings can be taken as proof of the ingenuity of the Army in getting out of the awkward problem of explaining just how it was so many soldiers needed so little pay.