‘Shall we have a cheeky pint?” Pru said.
As ideas went, this was a good one. With a bolshie nor’wester whipping yet more sand into our faces, we’d had enough of our day at the races.
The Castlepoint Racing Club’s annual picnic meeting held on the sands of its beach has been one of the highlights of the Wairarapa calendar for yonks. In fact, it’s been longer than yonks: after wet weather cancelled the event last year, this year’s apparently marked the 150th anniversary of horse racing on the beach.
Pru had suggested all three of us gallop out to Castlepoint to join the celebrations. But after Michele pulled up lame, it was just me and Prudence in harness for the trot out to the coast.
Historically, country races can be wild, memorable affairs, especially in these parts. In his wonderfully titled Wairarapa: An Historical Excursion, local historian AG Bagnall wrote that one of the first meetings held in Wairarapa, in 1877, was such a “drunken debauch” that a letter writer to a local paper suggested perhaps future race meetings be organised by members of the public to avoid the suspicion such events were “being held principally for the benefit of the local publican”.
A few years later, a two-day meeting held at Tīnui, a tiny village on the Castlepoint road, proved to be an equally unforgettable knees-up. Attended by some 200, the races were run on the flat beside the Whareama River “that had been cleared of flax and toetoe for the occasion”, and featured all manner of entertainments, including a Punch and Judy show, “the usual shooting galleries”, a “refreshment tent” and “two or three seedy individuals” running a dodgy game of chance called a “Buck at the Old Man” (if you know what this is, let me know).
However, it was after the gallops were over – and somehow this seems inevitable with the refreshment tent – that “things really warmed up”. The “talented gentleman” who’d been running the Punch and Judy show took to playing the tin whistle, which he did well enough to encourage a dozen dancers – all male. That was the least of it.
By then, Bagnall reports, “The drunks were numerous and, in addition to songs, there were the usual fights. Four men asleep in a coach were dowsed and a fruit seller had his brake [a horse-drawn wagon] unharnessed, which set off down the hill.”
Come the end of the second day of the meeting, Bagnall drolly observes, a good time could be said to have been enjoyed by all “for some of it”.
By comparison, the rescheduled 150th anniversary of the Castlepoint beach races were a bit of a tame affair, though only if you didn’t count the wind. As Pru and I struggled to set up our folding chairs and hunkered down to watch the second race of the day, the gallopers were being outpaced by blown sand and it was pretty clear that the horses, particularly the one some ancient, sun-beaten bloke told me was 20 years old, were getting considerable assistance from the nor’wester. At one point, it gusted to 122km/h.
I found some relief from the wind when Pru, who can be quite undemocratic when she wants to be, dispatched me to buy her a cold drink and to put some money on the next race for us both.
You don’t really go to the Castlepoint races to punt. They are run as “equalisator” betting — you buy tickets with a letter on it for $2 a go, pretty much making it a lottery — though we both had a win each in the third and fourth races. By then, though, the gusts had driven enough sand into my left ear that I was thinking a camel might move in, so I was glad when Pru suggested the “cheeky pint” at the Castlepoint Hotel, a few kilometres towards town.
We’d seen no Punch and Judy man, drunken fights or out-of-control fruit-sellers’ wagons. But sitting out of the wind in the garden bar, I made a quiet toast: even if the wind had been the winner on the day, a good time had been enjoyed by all at the 150th Castlepoint races, at least for some of it.
