MELBOURNE CUP HOW IT WAS WON IN 1885. A GAY & ANIMATED SCENE.

Te Aroha News, Volume III, Issue 128, 14 November 1885, Page 5

MELBOURNE CUP HOW IT WAS WON IN 1885. A GAY & ANIMATED SCENE.

(By Auckland "Star" Reporter.)

(By Telegraph Via the Bluff.)

I have seen tho Molbourno Cup, and am now qualified to spoak of tho Premier Australian capital in its glory. Enthusiastic nature will allow that Melbourno at any time is a privilege and happiness. lie will discourse on the breadth of well ordered streets, the magnificence of its public buildings, to wit the Free Public Library and Art Gallery, but I never yot met a repre scntativo citizen who did not say, " Oh, you should sco Melbourne in the Cup week." Strange problem in psychology that a sober, solid, and nourishing community should go demented over a horso race, not merely those tight-breeched bcjewolled gents who swagger at tho corner and talk by the hour of asses, but staid church-going folks, leaders in tho temperance cause, and comfortable old people to whom in an English town a tea-meeting would be an excitement not soon to be forgotten. " You don't realize what tho Molbourno Cup is to this country," says a blutl-looking hotel boarder at my elbow. " Why, I have come two thousand miles to sco it. I have been pleading with inexorable landlords to give me a shake down somewhere at thoir own price. " You ought to have written for accommodation a month ago," say 3 one comforter. "I did, though I am often in Melbourne for weeks at a time. You will hardly find six feet. Where I live, away back in the most western district of Queensland there are just 250 people, all told, and we raise a £2000 sweep with ease. It is the excitement of the yoar, and yet I never saw a Cup run for in my life. Don't X know mentally after landing in Melbourne in a pelting rain one Derby day, and making a trembling tour of dining room tables unlet, for shakedowns in any prominent hotel in the city. You must go out into the suburbs." Suflicc it to say that my Mend's prognostications proved unfounded. I did lind a fairly comfortable room in a prominent hotel, and, by paying a little extra, secured it. Hotels have multiplied and extended since the days when money would not buy a shakedown, but I advise visitors from afar not to repeat my experiment, but cither to arrive in Melbourne two or three days bctorc the first of tho carnival week, or secure accommodation ahead. The city is filled with visitors from up-country and from other countries, who select this season in the bloom of spring for visiting the metropolis, and when ono coined to look into the matter fairly, the excitement over racing is not so marvellous in a country where the population is so largely engaged in stpck-ivaring and speculative mining. In putting his low pounds on races a man who fancies he is a good judge of horseflesh not only gratilios the pervading colonial craving for an easy road to i apnl tortuno by speculation rattier than by todiou-s labour but backshis iiidgmcnt. Itislong oddsagainst the latter with tho manipulations of betting stables as well as the ordinary chances againbLhim; but still he just manages to persuade himself that it is almost legitimate, and quite as safe as buying stocks for a rise and making a big "corner "in merchandize. Two or three years ago there were at least 150 people in Melbourne whoso solo business was promoting swoopstakes. For the most part thoso men wore people who could not got credit for a £5 note in an ordinary trade transaction, but a confiding public entrusted them with thousands. They reciprocated the confidence by pocketing the money, and forgetting the change. The great minority of these atrairs were swindles so barefaced that even dupes began to cry out and called upon the law to suppress them. There followed a tussle between powor of authorities and the ingenuity of sharps, whoso rich harvest was jeopardised. Tho law has triumphed. This year not a single public sweepstake in all Melbourne has been got up upon races. The promoters have shrunk back to less lucurative branchoa of seamy industry, and the shopboy who sported his sovereign on the Melbonrno Cup has ono less temptation to lay plundering hands on his master's till. Tho bookmakers had reaped some, but by no means all, of this ungleaned harvest. At Tattersall's, Melbourne, during the excitement of carnival week tho crush this year was overpoworing; tho metallicians, with pencil and notebook, finding their powers taxed to tho utmost to accommodate the eager throng who pressed on them. Barring such frauds, this crowd would be a diminishing but more honest and happier number, if the English system of rcady-monoy betting only were universally established ; but the employer's cash will never be wholly safe, nor excitable mon's families kept from tho pinch of improvidence, so long as a man clovated with beer can pledge his credit by a mere stroke of tho pencil. If a man lawfully possessed of a £10 note chooses to invest in betting on a horserace, ho may do a foolish thing, but thero is a well-defined limit to his folly and its effects. 1 hope the time will come when betting on noto of hand will, like the sweep frauds, pass into the catalogue of untoleratcd ovils of tho racecourse. This, howorer, is slightly digressing from the absorbing thome. To sec Melbourne in Cup week is to sco its emporiums of fashion with all that is most tempting to female minds, to I theatres and amusements in full swing, its streets thronged with gaping strangers, who are storing bulged pockets with choice collections of i'aldedals at holiday prices, to mix in jostling confusion among crowds who put up joyfully with all sorts of inconveniences. So dense was tho throng on Derby night that tho crowd moved from the rooms into the street, and wolshers by the dozen, ever on the alert for greenhorns, made a considorablo riso by masquerading as respectable bookmakers, and pookoted the slakes in roady monoy. Wagors wore confided to their custody by simpletons who will look in vain for their quarry or settling day, and shell out with unwonted liberality under the belief that they are having a "good time." I like Molbourno under more favourable auspices. Life seems better worth living in this wide spreading human hive when it goes at a lower pressure ; lounging along Bourke and Collins streets, feasting chiefly upon the magnificent riches of the shop winows; whiling away an an hour or two in its splondid Art Galleries ; or watching saunterers in the leafy gardens of Fitzroy or Carlton. It is true that these are all positions for those who prefer them during the week, but the thing is impossible. No one can oscapo tlio fever, rush, or excitement, or evade tho infection that is in tho ut » The last odds on Nordcnfoldt, the off chances of First Chester, Dunlop, and Uralla, are of absorbing intoiO3t. They monopolise the conversation at breakfast, are dished at dinner, and accompany the modest supper that oloses a restless day. Melbourne is a city whose attractions are artificial. Naturally its site was unprepossessing. It lacks the glorious adornment of a beautiful over-changing bay, which is the delight of Sydney and. Auckland. The law of compensation worked justly and well when it placed tho people capable of building Melbourne on the shores of Port Phillip, If Sydney, with its noisy narrow streets, its dirty screechy streetrailroads, ruthlessly endangering the? liyge pf citizens and making podestrianal ftnd vehicle traffic a peril and anxiety, wore set down on tho banks or unornamented Yarra, who oould enduro it? But in Sydnoy, all intermediary tilings aro dwarfed into insignificance, in yie W o f that charming bay on whoso bosom the wholQ population with unerring human instinot esoape jrom lowest alleys i»w which ignorant proprle-

vi« tofs have parcelled out tbe city. Every day the year pioniokers by the thousand fly fro T the deformities of unartistio blundering *>> health-giving and Invigorating ozone provide of by bountiful nature, and the children lo th their sense of a crowded city in the expansh • ness and accessibleness of the bay. Port Jac 10 son is to Sydney what the Cup is to the citizei n- of Melbourne. But it is much more than 3d week's delirium. It is a perennial source of jo; The story runs that a steamer of waggfe visitors from a neighbouring colony, knowin 16 the particular weakness of the typical Sydne m man, and anxious to escape repetition, painte }r on a large board, which was hung at the bow ( the vessel as she approached her moorings th ■*' comforting announcement, "w e like youc ha; hour very much." I myself fell fifty per cent. 1 a I tho estimation of a Sydney friend and provoke j a smile of incredulity by venturing to obsery u that, while Sydney harbour was very beautifu. I thought Auckland harbour was even more st i- His love was one that would brook no rival. n But I must not speak in disparagment o \ modern Sydney. If less influenced by the irre a mediable blunders of the founders of the city go-aheadedness of the Sydneyites of to-da; 8 would make their capital architecturally one o I the handsomest in the world. Of the two grea [ " Australian capitals visited at an interval of sb '• years.Sydneyhas decidedlymade great progress 3 The business part of the town is rapidly beins re-built with a wealth of architectural adorn ■* ment to which the rich brown freestone, hewr 6 out of the ground so readily, lends itself. Mel I bourne, however, has not stood still. Thos< frightful streams of foul smelling drainage ' flowing along the principal streets, in which mer have been drowned, have disappeared under f round. The Yarra works have shortened the Stance to sea and broughti2ooo ton steamers up to Melbourne wharves, and they are progressing with an expedition and energy scarcely outdone in Glasgow. The silent cable roads of the tram- | ways, not those insidious screeching monstrosities that would be tolerated in no other city in the world save Sydney, are now in working order. The only emblems of turpitude are the slowly - rising cathedrals. Episcopalian and Roman Catholic, the skeletons of which are growing ancient-looking before they have reached completion. Still there cannot be much stagnation religiously, when nearly £3,000 were raised on the Sunday prceding the Derby, by > voluntary collections in the churches on behalf of the hospitals. Cup day dawned bright and fine, a contrast to tho drizzling wretchedness and mud of the Derby, but as the sun rose in the heavens it also made itself unpleasant to New Zealanders, and tho prospects of the great crush, which is the great bar to the enjoyableness of the Cup, making even Victorians satiated, was not very exhilarating. The Derby is always tiie more em'oyable day of sport. Still the beauty and fashion of Melbourne deem it a religious duty to bravo all inconveniences and risks in honour of the grand celebration. Imagine these spacious highways taxed to the r uttermost to accommodate the holiday-seeking traffic as it flows in carriages, wagonettes, and every species of conveyances, from the equipage of mlilionurc to that of the costermonger. Outwards towards the green postures of Flemington, picture all the broad, well-paved sidewalks, trodden by tens of thousands hurrying towards the railway depot, where the most perfect, order and organisation have robbed even such a crush of its chief terrors. Imagine about 1 0,000 people intent upon a day's enjoyment on the fresh green turf, under the bright sunshine of Australia's day, business promises closed, houses shut up, and their inmates migrating in a body to the scene of attraction. Call up a mental picture of such a spectacle as this, and you will have a faint conception of what Melbourne is on Cup day. But only a faint conception after all, for who can imagine or conjure up even in the vividness of a dream the subdued roar of this human mass, the gay music of their laughter, the magnetic influence of their presence which pervades the air, stirring the pulses of the blood, and affecting the brain like new wine, with an ecstatic exultation. The people of Melbourne do nothing by halves and the best order and case which this vast undisciplined army is transported has been dinned into the cars of blundering railway managers in New Zealand. In a bit of preparation for this year's i event ten thousand pounds have been spent to further relieve the inevitable confusion, and expedite the conveyadce of passengers to and from the ceorse. Among the improvements is a tunnel beneath tho line to carry visitors along tho suspension bridge above it for the spectators making for the hill— a favourite coign of vantago to which an admission charge of three shillings is made by the Club. The new railway platform, the entrance to which is guarded by a Saxby and Palmer's locking" bar, admits of i,OOO passengers being despatched home by rail at one timo. Now gangways have been provided to the grandstand, which cm bo cloavod through Us many avenues o£ its vast, freight m a few minutes. The stand and its arrangements would admit of a column description by themselves. Suffice it to say that there arc handsome suites of apartments richly dcojratoJ i'hr the Governor and suite, and that every interest may claim its own special consideration A drive of threeqmrtcrs of a mile long has just been opened for convenience of mom bur-. Tnea there is the lawn, beautiful, Avith well arranged flowers ; the well appointed booths embowered in floral decorations; ladies' pwilion, rcircshuvnt, and retiring rooms ; and tiie band stand, on which the Australian Military Band, under Sign or Tulman, disco\irsed a choice programme. The sale of gate i, booths, and privileges for four days' meeting, realised this year £2,665. The record of entrances showed that over 10,000 people were present, the largest number on record. Of. course there was much crushing, despite the excellent arrangements. Those who wished to see the races maintained their seats on tho lower grand stand throughout, fearing to vacate on account of the throng, but others pressed up and down the gangway before and after either race, betaking themselves at intervals to the refreshment rooms. A long lawn in front stretches from the gangway to the left; to the right is the saddling paddock, whoro the leather-lunged fraternity were roaring out their "2 to 1, 3 to 1 bar 2" to a willing and appreciative audience. The end of the lawn at tho left side of tho s/and is devoted to the carriages of those holding stand tickets, and here unpacked many a well-stored hamper, while some of the proprietors stuck to the place and made a picnic of it altogether. It would be utterly beyond my capabilities to describe the brilliant ai'ray of beauty and rich colouring displayed on the grand stand, and blending without permeating into a hundred artistic harmonies. The following selected from the description of a local fashion chronicle may serve to stir the feminine imagination :— There is one lady arrayed in a gown of satin of that peculiar steely tint known as Soudan shot ; the back draperies singularly well arranged, tho front and sidos boing completely veiled with an exnuisitoly-fltted front of Soudan shot, tho bodice laced and worn under prettily-shaped Zouave jacket, also of tho jotted Soudan beaded net. Standing near is a lady in a lovely dross, with a skirt of Chartreux green draped with Homo coloured lace, There was a mantle of bronze green Mervilleux, with robed front of rich satin Dora applique with natural tinted roses. Again a wonderfully effective gown— a rich harmony in yellow and gold ; the bodice and draperies of white broca.de, shot with yollow, giving the effeqt of a golden sky seen through a. filmy milk - white ; over this a design of fig leaves in gold and standing out as though raised and the front draped with gold embroidered lace and thickly studded with pendant gold balls which catch tho light, and at every movement or tnrn your eyes towards that lovely gown of rich sapphire blue merveillcux clouded with magnificent French Chantilly lace ; or that ivory coloured Indian muslin silk of the finest quality and trimmed most artistically and liberally with ivory silk and Spanish lace. Thon what could exceed the charm of thq,t petticoat of very palo pinkish lavander brocaded with huge boquots in their natura.l brilliant colours, tho train and bodjep composed of bi-ight but lovely light shadp pr heliotrope, small kiltings of this cqlour finishing tho edgo of the skirt. There ar-p. entrancing studios in blue ottoman.and sicelli white oxeom and printed muslins of delicate colours, sot-off with bewitching pictures; an elegant dress of ruby mervilleux clouded; beautiful cream lace harmonise in black and gold with satin and laco ; beautiful toilets in black satin, on which is painted most exquisitely in oils lovely laburnums with their tender green leaves, and who shall gay how many more ? for the eyes becomes dazzled and bewildered in this blaze of colour, scintillating and blending in a kaleidoscope of harmonies contrasts. But far more interesting than the trappings of fashion is the sea of eager faces straining their eyes towa* ds the spot where the horses are mustering, with their silk-bedizened riders, for the groat struggle. Among tho tightly- wedged mass it is almost impossible to distinguish individuals, but even in suph a crowd one occasionally catches a g^mpse of familiar New Zealand faces,, Thero are tho well-known Auokland snorts Billy Robinson and Miok Gallagher, with Spott of Grisborno. Thcro aro Mr J. M. Froser and Mr Kay, tho builders; Mr Keesing, the young a tist and musician ; and Mr Fisher, exMayor of Wellington. Now Zealand is no unfamiliar sound here. Tho young but dashing colony has only three days befarp not merely snatched off the Derby laupgl§, but placed three of her horses amongst the first four to pass the junge's bpx In tha.t grand race. Two other races on that day have also fallen to the lot of N.Z. Stud Co.'s horsois, two of those victories being reoo ded to that grand and lamented sire Musket, the pride of the enterprising Auokland Stud; and now whpn a succession of oontests leading up to this culminating struggle and gathering thoir light and reflection from' it has weeded out the blood stock of Australia to its worthiest representatives, tho New Zealand ohampions are first in popular favour, and carry the largest share of pubjoo it -• "'

money. There isNodenfeldt in the pink of condition, fresh for the fray, and entrusted t only - because of his peerless merit, with the honour, of his stable, which Mr. White woulds rather have seen borne by Malleor some other horse of his own breeding. There also is Mr. D. O'Brien's Fentonj another worthy type of the Musketstock, and the Hon. W. Robinson's Thunderbolt, well up in publio favour. Many knowing one's name Trenton as the Cup- winner of 1885, aud with his step-brother he attracts fully Wb share of publio attention, The thirty-five horses file out of the saddling paddock and, pass down in a noble cavalcade before the grand stand to take up their positions for toe two-mile run. , A. nobler set of thoroughbreds has never ateppea tee course in company. Lord Exeter brings up the rear, and some one whispers- tuat .it is a good omen for him. Omens in this case, as the event proved, counted for lsttle in position. STordenfeldt, the cynosure of all eyes, carrying with him the largest amount of public money, ocoupied a good position. The start was clean— without a flaw or break ; and before the eye had accustomed itself to the motion the whole team were tearing along the straight in an undulating wave of colored, silk ; the black and gold of Prometheus shewing slightly in front with Lord Exeter, Trenton and Brown and Rose close upon him. The lawn was reached in a flash, and though it was difficult to distinguish in the rapidly-moving mass, i'rometheus first, Chester, Thunderbolt ana Lord Exeter were seen to have the pride of place in the order named. As the turn was reached First Chester led, and forged ahead, with Thunderbolt, Prometheus, Brown and Rose, and Nordenfelt close upon him. First Chester charged the lead at the bridge, by whioh time Nordenfeldt had ohanged places with Thunderbolt, but the crowd was still unbroken, and it was anyone's race. At the bridge, First Chester still had the lead, with Nordenfelt and Thunderb.lt on his quarters, and by the time the back of the course was reached Thunderbolt had got his nose in front, Cerise and Blue had been coming, and passing the sheds the mare was running neck and neck with Mr Robinson's colt The latter's bolt, however, was ahot, and he rapidly fell out of tha running, the pace being much too great for him. A- the aobatoirs were reached onoe more, Sheet Anchor was seen to have forced his way through and taken the lead, with Grace Darling pushing him so hard that it is a disputable point which had the best of every stride. There were still a dozen horses In the race even at that late moment. Vociferous cries went up from the admirers of rival favourites. It was a stirring and brilliant struggle, ending too rapidly either to oreate a feeling of suspense or overburdening excitement. The horses passed the judge's box in a rush, ard then a loud hurrah went up as Sheet Anchor was proclaimed the winner by a neck, with Grace Darling second, Trenton third, and the defeated favourite, Nordenfeldt, fourth— all within an ace of victory —in the fastest time on record— 3min 29£8ec— eolipeing Martin -Henry's record by two sees. And so was won the Melbourne Cup of 1885— a sight to be witnessed at least once in a life time, and never to be forgotten ; but as an enjoyable holiday, not to be compared -with those pleasurable New Zealand race meetingp, where oamfort and ease, and friendly fraternication beguile in easy pleasure the intervals between well-fought contests between horses that would not disgrace the Metropolitan turf of Victoria, even on Cup day.