BOOMERDAY’S INJURY

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 304, 15 March 1928, Page 1

BOOMERDAY’S INJURY

APPEAL COURT HEARING ACTION AGAINST TAKAPUNA JOCKEY CLUB (From Our Resident Reporter.) WELLINGTON, To-day. There is a curious fitness of the date for litigation in the Supreme Court to-day when four Judges are considering an action involving the Takapuna Jockey Club on a Wellington race day. The case was William Wackrow’s appeal from the refusal of Mr. Justice Stringer to allow him damages for injuries suffered by his horse Boomerday at Takapuna in December, 1926. Part of the new ground in the alterations to the course required by the Minister of Internal Affairs had been unsafe and a deviation from the track had been pegged out and marked with flags. Some of the stakes were broken and splintered, and Boomerday was struck in the eye by one. Wackrow had claimed that this running of horses on a track which had not been approved was in contravention of the rules of racing, but Mr. Justice Stringer held that there was nothing in the rules to say that racing should not take place on a track unapproved by the Racing Conference, and that the club had taken every possible step to meet the emergency. Mr. M. H. Hampson, for Wackrow, said that, according to the rules a racing club could not use a track which is insufficiently railed, and this was insufficiently railed. Mr. E. H. Northcroft and Mr. L. Alderton appeared for the club. Decision was reserved.