Won £20,000

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 198, 10 November 1927, Page 1

Won £20,000

AUCKLANDERS’ WINDFALL LUCK IN MELBOURNE CUP SWEEP £20,000! How does it feel like to win it? Two Aucklanders who won a Melbourne Cup sweep for that amount have experienced it, whereas most folk have got no nearer to it than a dream. Mr. S. Adeane and Mr. P. O’Brien, to whom this good fortune came two days ago, are stili going on with the job, Mr. Adeane in his shirt sleeves managing the affairs of his printery in Hobson Street and Mr. P. O’Brien, his partner, out in the country on a

business tour. WHEN the news came through Mr. Adeane says he wasn’t disturbed in the least, and when he wired his partner, Mr. O’Brien, the latter had only a slight shock. “I’ll tell you how it all came about,” said Mr. Adeane, with a quizzical smile. “There is romance in it. We had a little bit of luck, my partner and I, being gamblers in a small way. We won a pound or two over the National meeting, so my partner was keen to have a pot at the sweep, thinking it might be our lucky year, and thinking that we might as well try the big stuff as the small if our luck was going to hold, we sent for two tickets in the pound consultation. DREAMS ENCOURAGED THEM “It was about here that the little romance came in. The morning before I came down my wife told me of a strange dream that I had struck a double for £3,000. Of course, I laughed at the idea. Never in my sane senses would I have backed a double for that amount. But I did make a mental note of it and when I got to work and my partner talked about the sweep I told him what Mrs. Adeane had dreamed, and then nothing would stop him. DIDN’T BELIEVE IT “So we sent to an address and I forgot about everything until one morning about a week after the race. The mail came in, but I was plugging away at a job and too busy to attend to the letter, so I tossed it on the office table for my daughter and went on working. “She opened it and, of course, when she saw our number against Trivalve she made slight noises about it. But I wouldn’t ‘fall’ for it and kept on with my job. I kept on working until she tricked me with the story that she couldn’t get some proofs to agree. So then I came in and there it was. “It didn’t disturb me a bit. I did the Only sane thing. I rang up the bank manager and when I found that there was a mail to Aussie that night I just sent the ticket duly endorsed and everything.” So that is the story of how a Melbourne Cup sweep came to Auckland. FOLLOWER OF RACING Mr. Adeane follows the horses fairly closely. Miss Adeane says that he can tell one “every winner from the year 1.” He follows form and sometimes has the rewards of good judgment, though Trivalve was sheer luck, such as folk dream about rather thau meet in real life. He was the owner of the horse on which “Jimmy” Buchanan had his first win in Gisborne 35 years ago. His next reminiscence of the racing game was when Mahutonga won the Auckland Cup in 1904. In 1914, when his brother went to the war, Mr. Adeane took his place on the totalisator staff. “I got pretty close to the sport then and I have followed it ever since. Then I used to print the ‘Times and Sporting News,’ so I had racing for breakfast, dinner and tea,” said Mr. Adeane. “But I haven’t any wild ideas of buying racehorses, or anything like that. I’m still content to try my luck in a milder .way.” “Luck is lord,” is an old saying. Mr. Adeane, who is a married man with a family of seveD daughters, has, it is said by those who know him, been a toiler who has plodded along in his business for years and this is how fortune has fallen for him. It is the kind of thing that less lucky followers of the horses spend years chasing. But the Hobson Street partnership has found a pot of gold at the end of its rainbow.