 | | Lot No. | | *** | | Description: | Phar Lap - Harry Telford's Horse-Tonic Recipe Book An 82pp notebook (lacking covers) with manuscript recipes for tonics and ointments for racehorses, with 28 recipes in Harry Telford's hand, and another two added by Ernie Fellows. Ingredients include arsenic, strychnine, belladonna, cocaine and caffeine. Notebook with some wear, and first page has been reinserted after page 12. The legendary Australian race horse, 'Phar Lap' was trained by Harry Telford. He won 37 races from 51 starts, including fourteen wins in a row. His successes included the 1930 Melbourne Cup in which he carried 9 stone 12 lbs. Already the most famous horse in Australia, Phar Lap went to America in 1932, won one race but then died, apparently of poisoning. Conspiracy theories abounded, the most popular being that he had been 'got-at' by American gangsters who stood to lose money if he won. Tommy Woodcock, his trainer/strapper at the time, admitted on his death bed that he thought Phar Lap died as a result of being given too much of a particular tonic which included arsenic. This original notebook gives unequivocal evidence that arsenic and other 'poisons' were used in the management of race-horses under Telford's care. [Provenance: Ernie Fellows, Harry Telford's trackwork jockey, later becoming a successful trainer in Australia and France, with wins including the 1953 Victoria Derby with Prince Morvi and 1964 2000 Guineas at Newmarket UK with Baldric; then by descent] {Telford's secret potion for Phar Lap was first revealed in October 2006 by Lawrence Boyden, whose father Stan Boyden was Phar Lap's minder and float driver during his dramatic 1930 Melbourne Cup win, and who later trained Rimfire to win the 1948 Melbourne Cup. He had a tattered hand-written recipe for the potion}. Harry Telford's horse tonic recipe book is a unique piece, providing a direct association with Phar Lap, and showing the homeopathic remedies commonly used in the 1920s-30s, thus throwing a huge spotlight on the controversy regarding Phar Lap's death. . | | Estimate: | *** | | Price: | *** | | Category: | Printed & Written Material — Historical Documents | |
