PIGSKIN TO PULPIT

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 146, 17 March 1934, Page 18

PIGSKIN TO PULPIT

Jockey’s Conversion

“Alfie” Reid, formerly well-known in Victoria as a jockey, especially in the Wimmera and Western districts for 20 years, gave his testimony at a Melbourne Baptist Church recently regarding his sudden conversion to Christianity 18 months ago, and the consequential benefits which be has since enjoyed. Mr. Reid, who gave up race-riding three years ago, lives at Fitzroy, Melbourne. His room there is the converted bar of a delicensed hotel diagonally opposite the Fitzroy Town Hall. He is employed at the factory of the Globe Millinery Company. He said the other day that he had never wanted for anything since his conversion to Christianity. Conversion had healed all his ills and provided a solution of all his troubles.

Inviting a recent interviewer into his room, where the bar-counter still stands. Mr. Reid lighted a candle, and, talking first of his racing days, he mentioned that he won his first race at his first start on Marroplane at Rainbow, in 1911. He won the last race in which he rode, on Amover, at Goroke, in 1930. Never, Mr. Reid said, had he a black mark against his name as a jockey. He rode, too, in Tasmania and in South Australia, and for a time after . a nervous breakdown he trained a string of horses at Mordialloc. A second breakdown ensued. Down and out at last, he went to the country again to ride, and won two of his last five races. Then his nerves once more went to

pieces, and never again could he figure as a “knight of the pigskin.” “I was up against it after that,” Mr. Reid said, “driven to cadging shillings from my racing friends to buy a meal or a bed. I suffered from insomnia for months. One night I wandered into Mr. Betts’s Methodist Mission at Fitzroy. There was a Christian Endeavour meeting on, and a girl was reading the message. It was the nintli chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews. ■ “There was nothing emotional about the meeting. I was not wrought up—only hungry and tired. Suddenly, while the girl was reading, I felt a new man. I fe’t as if my troubles were over. My nerves quietened, and I was happy. I do not know what it was, and I have no words to describe it. I suppose it was an act of God. “It was a wonderful experience. The man who has not had it cannot understand it. I had heard of ‘being born again.’ I thought that was all Salvation Army talk. But that is what happened to me. From then my insomnia was gone. I found a job in the factory, where lam working now. It was not through Christian people I found it. It was made easy for me, but not by men.

“I have never wanted for a halfpenny since. And it was not that Christian people put things in my way. I have never had a penny from a Christian, save 2/- that Mr. Betts's assistant, Mr. Jones, brought mo. once. He said a Christian lady at the Endeavour had asked him to give it to ‘Brother Reid’—that’s what they call me there.”