FEATURE STORY
By the following summer, Dunbar was planning a much grander event. The occasion was “Auld Hansel’s Monday”, a traditional Scottish mid-January holiday. There were plenty of precedents for holiday race meetings organised by publicans, such as at seaside Brighton on Boxing Day or St Kilda on New Year’s Day. Dunbar evidently arranged to conduct his meeting not at the Flemington Inn but at the Melbourne Race Course. He commissioned the silver cup as a trophy for the main race. Its stated value of 15 guineas represented several weeks’ wages for the average labourer. Newspaper accounts of the meeting were sparse in detail, but it is now clear that this Flemington Cup 1849 was indeed contested not at the hotel but at the Melbourne Race Course. There are references to specific details of the course such as “the hill” and “the distance”. The race was a mile and a half (2414m) – but run in heats, as was often the custom at that time. To win the Flemington Cup, Belzoni had to defeat his opponents twice in the same afternoon. He won the first heat by several lengths, the second by a nose. Poor Dunbar was left seriously out of pocket when the local magistrates refused his application for a liquor licence at the racecourse: his potential profit evaporated. Indeed his time as a publican was brief. He became insolvent the following year. It fell to others to arrange a second attempt at Auld Hansel’s Monday races in 1850. These were again scheduled for the Melbourne Race Course but, by a twist of fate, heavy rain partly flooded the track. The races were run instead on a course set in the grounds of the Flemington Inn – but this time the “Flemington Cup” was replaced by a “Farmer’s Cup”. Over the next four years, Dunbar’s successors at the Inn ran occasional race meetings at what they specifically called “The Flemington Racecourse” but which wasn’t “The Melbourne Race Course”. Only in the later 1850s did the name migrate. So by a quirk of fate “The Flemington Cup 1849” and its silver trophy turned out to be part of historic Flemington Racecourse story after all.
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