St Aubins Stud Dispersal Sale 1956
Mr W J Smith had diminished his stock by dispersing 61 highly bred brood mares, 12 yearlings and 5 two-year-olds at his reduction sale on the property in May 1951. This led five years later to the complete dispersal of remaining bloodstock on Monday 14th May 1956. 43 mares with foals at foot and 24 dry mares were featured in the catalogue. Foals-at-foot were by resident stallions Near Way*, Hua, Beau Sun or Video. The same stallions had covered all the mares on offer between them. Three stallions; Hua, Near Way* and Video were offered for sale. In addition 14 yearlings were included and five racehorses; making a grand total of 89 lots
A supplementary catalogue of bloodstock comprising nine lots in total was also offered at the sale on Scone Race Course on Tuesday 15 May 1956.
Smith, William John (Bill) (1882–1972)
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/smith-william-john-bill-8492
This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography. Volume 11, (MUP), 1988
William John (Bill) Smith (1882-1972), industrialist, was born on 28 May 1882 at Walton, Liverpool, England, sixth surviving child of David Smith, engineer from Belfast, and his Lancashire-born wife, Elizabeth, née Bernard. With his mother and siblings he reached Melbourne on 2 November 1885 to join his father; they settled at Spotswood in 1887. Endowed with a powerful physique and a reputation as a fighter, Bill left school at 12 and began work as a ‘water boy’ at the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works, owned by Alfred Felton and Frederick Grimwade. On 28 September 1897 he was indentured as an apprentice glassblower and, as assistant secretary and secretary, helped to form the Melbourne Glassblowers’ Union. Believing himself a marked man, he took ship to Sydney in 1902 and on arrival found himself blacklisted. Unable to enlist for military service in the South African War, he worked for a small firm where he earned eighteen shillings a day blowing a hundred dozen bottles. Nine months later he returned to Melbourne where he was employed by the Caledonian Glass-Bottle Works, whereupon M.G.B.W.’s general manager William James McNeilage successfully sued him for breaking his indentures.
In the protected national market created by Federation, M.G.B.W.’s operations expanded and when it acquired the Caledonian works in 1904 Smith, at McNeilage’s instigation, became its manager. After restoring the profitability of this plant, Smith was sent to South Australia in 1907 to manage M.G.B.W.’s latest acquisition, G. Hinrichsen’s Adelaide glassworks. He arranged mergers with the three existing glass-bottle manufacturers in Adelaide, erected a modern factory at Kilkenny, effectively controlled the South Australian market, and protected customers’ property rights by producing ‘named’ bottles. On 12 December 1908 he married Anna Gertrud Hoff (d.1924) at Flinders Street Baptist Church; they had three sons and a daughter.
Appointed manager of the rundown Sydney Glass Bottle Works in 1915, Smith in July became assistant general manager of the Australian Glass Manufacturers Co. Ltd, formed in July 1915 with issued capital of £276,005 by a merger with (Sir) Mark Sheldon‘s Waterloo Glass Bottle Works Ltd. Based in Sydney, Smith negotiated a large overdraft to re-equip the Dowling Street factory with American semi-automatic bottling machinery, manned by skilled glass-gatherers recruited in America; the Waterloo works was closed; and Vance & Ross Pty Ltd was bought out for £40,000 and shut down. He soon managed to allay considerable strife and unrest within the industry and from 1917 had no serious strikes. By the end of the war, A.G.M., profiting from reduced imports at a time of rising demand, dominated the State’s bottle trade with its lower cost-structure.
When McNeilage began to groom his son as his replacement, Smith, who had expected to succeed as general manager, accepted the position of managing director of the Zetland Glass Bottle Works Ltd in 1920. Within eighteen months, A.G.M. invited Smith back and the two firms merged in October 1921 when A.G.M. was re-registered with an issued capital of £950,695. As general manager and a director for the next thirty-five years, Smith presided over the spectacular development of one of Australia’s largest industrial empires. With thick wavy hair, small glittering eyes, ‘a chest like a barrel, his massive head set on a thick neck … and muscular of every limb’, he dominated policy-making through his forceful personality. Self-made, a prodigious toiler and extensive traveller, Smith was a tough, cantankerous autocrat with a swashbuckling style. Nicknamed ‘Knockout’ and ‘Gunboat’, he thrived on risks and brooked no opposition. With abundant resources at his disposal, mergers formed the basis for growth. Wherever possible he internalized transactions through vertical integration and diversified the company’s product range whenever the government protected the domestic market.
In the mid-1920s Smith embarked upon other types of glass manufacture, such as flintware, with the acquisition of the Crown Crystal Glass Co. Ltd in 1924. Australian Window Glass Pty Ltd began to produce sheet glass by the Fourcoult process in 1932. Three years later, after difficulties with the quality of Tarzan safety glass, Smith, with Pilkington Bros Ltd of St Helen’s, England, invested in and became a director of Pilkington Bros (Australia) Pty Ltd, established to make toughened sheet glass for motor vehicles. By the mid-1930s A.G.M.’s glass-manufacturing activities were as comprehensive as local conditions permitted. The company had diversified its activities both directly and through subsidiaries into producing cast-iron, coal, containers, tools, machine parts, structural steel for the fabrication of producer goods, and into real estate. In January 1939 Smith’s diverse, far-flung industrial empire was reorganized as Australian Consolidated Industries Ltd with an issued capital of £2½ million and Smith as managing director. A large part of the company’s profits now came from activities other than glass-making.
Early in 1940 Smith reluctantly made a controversial agreement with the Menzies government which gave him a virtual monopoly to manufacture motor cars under the protection of the Motor Vehicles Engines Bounty Act (1939). The minister for trade and customs, John Lawson, who had organized the deal, resigned in February 1940 after his arrangements for leasing a racehorse from Smith were made public. Thereafter repeated allegations were made in Federal and State parliament and by the press that ‘Knockout Smith’ exercised ‘such influence in Governmental quarters that he can buy members of Parliament’.
Appointed director of gun ammunition in the Department of Munitions in June 1940, Smith efficiently organized the manufacture of shell bodies, ‘pressing into service the resources of all the State railway workshops, the steel industry, and other private engineering firms’. When he stepped down in August 1942 (after constant friction with the Labor government) production had ‘leaped to astronomical levels’. He remained a focus of public controversy. He was at least twice sued and acquitted of improper business practices: in a breach of contract case in 1940, it was alleged that he was of German descent. In October 1941 he unsuccessfully demanded a public inquiry into charges against him made under privilege in State parliament, against which he had no means of redress: ‘I have been shot at, and sniped from ambush, and, as a British citizen, most despitefully used’. Although such repeated allegations were proved unfounded, the publicity tarnished his reputation and rumours continued to circulate. In 1945 he survived extortion and death threats.
In 1944 Smith took on the Curtin government, when it paradoxically denied the existence of his car-manufacturing agreement and repealed the relevant Acts. Eventually, after arbitration A.C.I. was awarded £56,000 compensation. The company grew rapidly post-war, venturing into manufacturing fibre glass and starting production in Asia with a factory in Singapore in 1948. Smith was appointed C.B.E. in 1956. When he retired next year shareholders’ funds exceeded £18 million.
‘Aussie and American icons had Bing singing’
Brian Russell writes:
Besides stirring the world for over fifty years crooning songs such as White Christmas and Going My Way, 1977 deceased Hollywood entertainer Bing Crosby sung the praises of racing and breeding and was actively involved in both. He was one of the founding owners in 1937 of the Del Mar racecourse in California and raced some good horses, including Lingaroti, a performer who was narrowly beaten in a match race with the immortal galloper Seabiscuit.
Lingaroti was owned by Binglin Stables, a partnership of Crosby and Lin Howard, a son of Charles S. Howard, the owner of Del Mar trained Seabiscuit, a winner of 33 of 89 starts, many of them by big margins. He was American Horse of the Year for 1938. Binglin had horse farms in California and Argentina, and although Crosby had no share in the ownership of Seabiscuit, he was a great friend of Charles Howard as well as his son and no doubt shared the joy at the stallion’s deeds.
The Seabiscuit association gave Crosby the distinction of being involved with racing icons in both hemispheres, the other being Australian Ajax, a son of Heroic bred at the Widden Stud in the Widden Valley in 1934, who appeared a huge loss when sold to America at 14 for about $27,000. He had been a first class sire in Australia standing alternately at Widden and WJ Smith’s St Aubins, Scone, but achieved little from his use in California. He probably did not get much opportunity.
Ajax was one of two of the greatest Australian racehorses of last century sold to California in a space of 12 months,1946 and 1947, by Smith, an industrialist tycoon nicknamed ‘Gunboat’ or alternatively ‘Knockout’, the owner of the St Aubins Stud, one of the most historical properties at Scone in the Hunter Valley.
The other was the great Midstream (GB) miler Shannon (bred on the Kia Ora Stud, Scone) and his sale, that of Ajax and back in 1941 out of their stallion yards of champion Australasian sire Beau Pere (GB), also to California (to movie maker Louis B Mayer), are recalled following the sale in late 2018 of St Aubins following over 80 years of ownership by the Smith family. After Smith’s death in the early 1970s, it was continued on under management of his descendents. The last thirty plus years has seen his grandaughter Kate Fraser, wife of Scone veterinary surgeon Nairn Fraser, use the homestead block for a small number of broodmares.
During his racing career, the iconic Australian racehorse Ajax went to the post 46 times for 36 wins (1000m – 2400m), seven seconds and two thirds. From November 4 1937 to March 11 1939 he won 18 races in succession, at least ten of at Group1 level.
The last two of these races, the King’s Plate and CM Lloyd Stakes, saw him sent out at 16-1 on and 20-1 on. Back in Sydney two weeks after the CM Lloyd, the winning sequence came of an end when, in one of the biggest upsets in world racing history, he was beaten into second place at 40-1 on in a three runner Rawson Stakes at Rosehill. The good stayer Spear Chief won by half a length.
After he finished racing at five, Ajax went to stud in partnership of Widden Stud and St Aubins Stud, alternating year about between the two. He was very quickly established as a high quality sire, one who later proved valuable in pedigrees. In 1947 the Ajax partnership was broken up and, auctioned in Sydney, he was purchased outright by Smith for $27,300. He resold him to Crosby – Howard.
A year after the Ajax sale, Smith sold the great Australian miler Shannon to California, a region in which he starred on the racetrack, setting track records and sharing the national champion of the year title.
Both Shannon, despite his death at only 14, and the earlier shipped out Beau Pere, sired high class American performers. Prior going to America Beau Pere after two seasons of brief use in England – half a dozen foals, moved to New Zealand and immediately became a big success. Tragically for New Zealand, the stud which he called home, Westmere, dispersed in 1937 and Smith outbid the Kiwis.
Beau Pere spent four seasons at St Aubins prior to his acquisition by Louis B Mayer in 1941 for a big price of reportedly $100,000. Deceased in Kentucky in August 1947, a few weeks before the death of America’s awesome stallion Man o’War, Beau Pere was recognised as champion New Zealand sire twice, 1938-39 (oldest 3) and1939-1940 and the leading Australian sire, principally through contributions from NZ bred stock in three successive years,1939-40, 1940-41 and 1941-42.d
St Aubins stood two champion Australian sires, the other being Manitoba (GB) (1930 – 1951), a good English 2yo acquired by Smith for $8,400 after five seasons at The Nook at Nagambie in Victoria. He was leading sire in 1943-44 and 1944-45 and runner up in 1942-43.
A fearless investor in bloodstock, in 1948 Smith had five sires at St Aubins, Manitoba, Hua (1934, by Heroic, beat Ajax in winning the 1937 Victoria Derby), Beau Son (1938, St Aubins bred son of Beau Pere who placed in the Rosehill Guineas and Canterbury Guineas), The Jeep (1941, home bred unraced son of Manitoba) and Calabar (GB) (1940, by Phalaris sire Caerleon).
The greatest racehorse bred at St Aubins was probably the Hua gelded sprinter San Domenico (1945), a winner of 21 races and at one time Australia’s record money earning sprinter.
The history of St Aubins, the property acquired by Smith in the early 1930s, began when land grants along the Kingdon Ponds, the home for the then fledgling town of Scone, made in 1829 to former army officer William Dumaresq and his wife Christinia. At one time their St Aubins holdings added up to 13,000 acres