Passing of Popular Queensland Jockey

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 414, 24 July 1928, Page 10

Passing of Popular Queensland Jockey

PREMONITION OF DEATH

FIVE HORSES FALL IN FIRST RACE

The electrician who, according to a Sydney paper’s story, feared his fate, and eventually met with voltage injuries that caused his death, was in the same plight as Queensland’s crack jockey, Arthur Davis. Davis had a premonition of evil befalling him at a certain course, and on Saturday week received injuries there from which he died a week later. Davis’s clairvoyant warning that trouble awaited him at Albion Park, Brisbane, occurred years ago. AN AWFUL COURSE The Park is a peculiar little track, less than six furlongs round, and instead of the running ground being smooth stretches of lawn, it is of sand, with not a blade of grass on it. This is the American idea. They call them their “dirt tracks.” The condition-s suit some horses. Others cannot gallop as fast as a hack on the sand. Davis feared the course for two reasons—the possibility of a fall, and the risk of disqualification through reversals of form by horses that could win on other courses but couldn’t gallop in the dirt. So he resolved not to ride there, and he kept his word for a couple of years. PREJUDICE WEAKENED But recently his prejudice weakened. He told a friend that if Fate had a fall in store for him, it was no use trying to dodge it. So he resumed riding at Albion Park, and in the very first race five horses fell.

Davis’s mount. Rivoli Rose, was one of them, and the jockeys received three broken ribs. The breaks were thought harmless, however, and it was hoped that they would mend and he would soon be riding again. But as the ghost of Banjo Patterson’s Rio Grande rode beside the old steeplechase jockey who had sworn to give up race-riding, and brought him to his death, so the wraith of Premonition had ridden beside Arthur Davis when he bestrode Rivoli Rose at Albion Park, and jostling him to his doom, would be content with nothing less than the supreme sacrifice. Complications developed, and within a week he was dead. Davis was Queensland’s popular and best horseman.