Australian Dictionary of Biography

Tommy Smith, with his racehorse Tulloch, by Ern McQuillan, 1960

National Library of Australia, 26890820

Thomas John Smith (1916–1998), racehorse owner and trainer, was born on 3 September 1916 at Jembaicumbene, New South Wales, second of eight children of New South Wales-born parents Neil Alfred Smith, labourer, and his wife Hilda Mabel Constance, née Spencer. The family subsequently moved to the railway siding and soldier settlement town of Goolgowi. Tommy—or T. J., as he would become known—received little formal schooling because his father required assistance in his jobs as wool and timber carter, tank sinker, and operator of ‘a little butchering business’ (Painter and Waterhouse 1992, 177). Despite his father’s efforts the family was poor, subsisting in a house without electricity or wooden floors. Attending local race meetings gave him an appetite for horse racing and at the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to the trainer Bill McLaughlin at Mordialloc, Melbourne. Life here was even harder because his boss had no money and there were few horses in the stable for him to ride.

After a brief stint as an apprentice at Mildura, Smith moved to Sydney, where he was indentured to the Moorefield racecourse trainer R. W. ‘Son’ Mackinnon. Underpaid and undernourished, he welcomed the opportunity for employment in the stables of the Newmarket owner-trainer Mac Sawyer as both an apprentice jockey and stablehand. But he lacked natural talent as a rider, and although he competed both on the flat and over the hurdles, he never managed to ride a city winner. In 1938, after breaking his right thigh when his horse fell on him in a hurdle trial, he decided that future success required a change in direction. His connection to the Sawyer family became critical to his new aspiration to become a trainer. Mac’s father, Matt, was a wealthy and well-known grazier, horse owner, and trainer who lived near Bethungra in southern New South Wales. On Mac’s recommendation, Smith took over the Sawyers’s stables at Cootamundra, where, by his own account, he earned a reputation for training winners. Returning to Sydney, he brought with him a horse the family gave him as a reward for his services after Matt’s death in early 1941. He later mistakenly claimed he was required to pay £100 for it.

Named Bragger, the horse proved so intractable that, although Smith was sufficiently experienced to be granted an owner-trainer licence in 1941, it took him until the following year to get it ready for racing. After an unpromising start, the horse won several races in a row. Initially, Bragger was Smith’s main source of income, which was derived both from prize money and successful stable betting plunges on the horse. An injury to Bragger that forced the horse into a prolonged spell in late 1942 halted Smith’s new-found proclivity for expensive clothes, high-class restaurants, heavy drinking, and compulsive gambling. It also taught him to be careful with spending even in the years of prosperity that followed.

Bragger returned to racing in 1943, although by then Smith was earning a reputation as a shrewd judge of horseflesh and a man who got the best out of racehorses. Owners, most notably the wealthy store owner E. R. Williams, commissioned him to buy yearlings. To allow him to train for owners other than himself he applied for and was granted by the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) a Number 2 Training Licence in 1942 and a Number 1 Licence in 1943. Austerity marked the postwar years and, despite his success and his reputation, his stable still held only thirteen horses in the 1952–53 racing season. Remarkably, the stable was the most successful in Sydney that year, winning the first of what were to be thirty-three consecutive premierships.

There was one other foundational development that was critical to Smith’s successful postwar career. After a lengthy courtship, he married Valerie Lilian Finlayson on 4 November 1951 at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Sandringham, Victoria. They were both Catholics but appeared to have little else in common, for she was shy and sheltered while he was ‘flamboyant’ and aggressively ‘streetwise’ (Stephens 2008, 48). She taught him manners, blunted his gruffness, and fiercely supported and defended him against individuals and organisations that were critical of his training methods or that failed to properly acknowledge his contribution to racing.

As a trainer Smith’s record was unmatched. Among his more than seven thousand winners were 246 victories at Group 1 level, including two Melbourne and four Caulfield cups, seven W. S. Cox Plates, six Golden Slippers, and thirty-five Derbies. In 1949 the Smith-owned and -trained maiden performer Playboy (one of his own nicknames) won the AJC Derby at long odds giving his owner-trainer what he considered his greatest pleasure in racing. The Smith-trained three-year-old Tulloch scored two major Group 1 victories in 1957, but then colon scouring forced him out of racing. Under the guidance of Smith and the stable vet, Percy Sykes, Tulloch returned triumphantly to the track in 1960 to win fifteen races and demonstrate Smith’s knack for training winners. Unwanted at the yearling sales, Kingston Town was welcomed into the stables and won fourteen Group 1 races, including three consecutive W. S. Cox Plates. Bounding Away—bred, owned, and trained by Smith—won six Group 1 races, including a Golden Slipper, and was regarded by him as the best mare or filly he had ever trained.

Smith’s success was grounded in his astuteness in picking quality thoroughbreds and his innovative methods of training and racing. His horses were fed nutritional supplements, especially protein, and they were trained harder and given shorter spells than those in rival stables. He insisted that his horses be ridden on the pace, a strategy made possible by their high levels of fitness. While he was never convicted of malpractice, life did not always go smoothly in his stables. His horses were occasionally doped, the cases of Sunshine Express (1950) and Tarien (1953) drawing the most public attention. However, on both occasions, the racing authorities blamed others rather than Smith. He had a confrontational personality, which sometimes led him into heated public arguments, especially with the stable jockey George Moore. The Smith stables remained known for betting plunges by its connections but Smith gave up the punt and relied principally on prize money for his income. These financial benefits were not spread evenly through his enterprise. In 1960 he was ordered to improve living conditions for his staff at the Kensington stables and in 1981 his stable at Rosehill was penalised for underpaying stablehands.

It was a sign of Smith’s status not only in racing but also in society more generally, that he was appointed both MBE (1982) and AM (1987). Eventually, illness forced him to retire in 1994, with his daughter Gai replacing him at the head of the stables. Survived by his wife and their daughter, he died on 2 September 1998 at Darlinghurst, and was cremated after a funeral service at St Mary’s Cathedral; among the assets he left was a large real estate portfolio that included office buildings and shops as well as residential properties. By then the images of him as a bragger and a playboy had been replaced by a reputation as a family man and the dominant figure in Australian horse-racing in the second half of the twentieth century. He was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Australian Racing Museum Hall of Fame in 2001, and in 1999 the Endeavour Stakes were renamed the T. J. Smith Stakes.