GARRISON'S DIVIDEND

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 593, 20 February 1929, Page 12

GARRISON'S DIVIDEND

BIG AS WAIROA BELLE TOOK THE WRONG TICKET The last mail from China, via Siberia, brought me two interesting letters from readers in Shanghai, says a writer in a London weekly. The writers were Mrs. W. R. Mcßain and my friend, Mr. H. E. Morriss, who won the Derby in 1925 with Manna. They both send me particulars p£ what is regarded as the world’s record dividend from the pari-mutuel. The dividend was 10,841.70 dollars for a five-dollar investment. The value of the dollar, roughly, is two shillings. An aged Chinese invested the wager on the pony Garrison, which, ridden by one named S. C. Chang, won the Hoo Loo Island Plate at the Ying Ziang Hsiang racecourse. The fiVe dollars was the only bet on the pony. “I feel sure.” observes Mrs. Mcßain, “that no bookie in England has ever offered such odds as £I,OBO to 10s.” She is right. Go on to a racecourse in these days and listen to them open betting on every race with the parrot cry of 6 to 4 the field. Ask them the price of an outsider, and 5 to 1 may be offered with supreme caution until you are walking away and the offer is magnanimously extended to 6 to 1. Improved by the Race The pony Garrison has certainly made a little bit of history. Mr. Morriss mentioned in his welcome note that Garrison had been out in a two-mile race the previous day on a neighbouring course and finished second. “Evidently," is the sage comment of my correspondent, ‘‘the gallop brought him on a lot.” The joke is—it would have seemed such a dull incident had ther£ not been a joke attached to it —that the old Chinese, \vho took the solitary ticket, did so by mistake as he thought he was backing the one at the next booth! And someone once said you do not need to have luck in racing, only brains! That same day at the racecourse with the strange name a dividend of 679.80 dollars for a win to the fivedollar stake was also paid over the win of the pony Wellington. This “Fairway” of the East secured the C.J.C. Grand .National Champion Sweepstakes. I suppose there are cases on record of what might be called freak dividends, but I certainly have not heard of one to compete with the case of Shanghai, of which the old Chinese was the hero. What he did was to ‘‘scoop the pool,” less, of course, the deduction for the authorities. What if he had not made that delightful mistake of investing his five dollars at the wrong booth? There would have been tio winner. 1 am not quite sure what would have happened in that case, but I assume there would be a rule to meet such a contingency. The win might go to the second (as in New Zealand) or be cut up into place-money for the first three. In the case oi Garrison there was no place bet on the puny.