Scone's veterinary history a tale of its own

Cover image courtesy of the Scone Vet Dynasty

Alongside the name of the late Murray Bain, which runs thick and deep in veterinary circles across the Scone district, there is the name of Bill Howey. Now 78, Howey is a retired veterinarian in downtown Scone, one of the original cast and crew of Bain’s Scone Equine Group.

For over 30 years, Howey devoted his life to horse and cattle care across the Upper Hunter Valley, treating the likes of Star Kingdom (Ire), Bletchingly and Todman. He knew every studmaster, owner and SP bookie, and counted among his old friends some of the greatest racing identities of recent decades.

In 2018, Howey was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his services to veterinary science. Previous to that, he was a recipient of the Hunter McLoughlin Citizen of the Year Award, as well as a Hunter Valley Blood Horse Breeders Association President’s Award.

He is a life member of the Hunter Thoroughbred Breeders Association (HTBA), the Australian Veterinary Association and the Scone Race Club, which he chaired from 1978 to 1984.

Gallery: Bill Howey treated the likes of Star Kingdom (Ire), Bletchingly and Todman when practising

It’s been a decorated and proliferous existence, and, still far from idle, Howey remains part of the furniture in Scone.

“I’m a stickybeak, an absolute shocker,” he said. “I walk up the street, collect the mail and call into the newsagent to have a chat. There’s a guy there called Les Gilmore, who knows what your horse did at Randwick this morning before you do.”

£10 Pom

Howey is an Englishman and, despite 54 years in the Upper Hunter, he has lost none of his accent. He speaks with a quaint, educated brogue that is both delightful and quick.

Howey was born in the northern England township of Hepple, which isn’t far from the Scottish border, and, in 1965, his life changed when he heard Murray Bain speak at the University of Edinburgh.

“I was a young man, no money,” he said. “Desire to travel, wanderlust and all that. While I was still an undergraduate in Scotland, I heard Murray Bain from Scone, New South Wales, speaking at the annual British Veterinary Association conference, and I thought, that sounds interesting. I might like to go there.”

It helped that Howey was a cricket tragic.

“I’d read and heard about the hill at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and I thought that sounded like an interesting place too, that I might also like to go there,” he said.

The young vet was fast-tracked through the ‘£10 Pom’ scheme in 1967. Bain was in a hurry for his new protégé and organised, through his next-door neighbour cum President of the Senate, to have Howey expedited to Sydney.

Via whistle stops in Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Hawaii, Fiji, Auckland, Darwin and Brisbane, Howey arrived in New South Wales on Metropolitan Day at Randwick, 1967, the year the race was won by General Command (NZ) (Agricola {GB}).

“It took almost three days, but I got here,” he said. “It was exciting, but looking back on it, it was horrendous.”

The wide, brown land

Howey’s early impressions of Scone are priceless.

“It was like the other side of the moon to me,” he said. “I arrived in the Hunter Valley, and the Scone township of the time reminded me of something like a Hollywood movie set. Compared to where I’d come from, in rural England with tiny villages and tiny little roads, here it was a broad, wide street and it rather looked like a western movie.”

Bain had something significant already going on in Scone when Howey arrived in 1967, and it took the new vet some time to get used to the vastness of the practice.

“I’d been working in a small town in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where if you travelled more than 20 miles from your base, that was an enormous journey,” Howey said. “The distances in Scone were exponential, in comparison. On my first weekend, I travelled at 10 o’clock at night doing calls from Willow Tree to Woodlands Stud, and I checked my distance. It was 100 miles between calls, and that was like travelling across Ireland to me.”

Howey’s early colleagues in Scone, in addition to Bain, were the likes of James Crouch and Richard Greenwood, both £10 Poms. But they weren’t alone in town. Scone’s first veterinary practice belonged to Frank Williams, in partnership with Angus Cunningham, Norman Judge and Bain, before the latter broke away to go it alone.

“That was established in 1950, and was the inaugural veterinary partnership in Scone,” Howey said.

Same, but different

Howey had a special interest in horses and thoroughbred racing, and these, along with beef cattle, were his speciality in Scone. His memories are sharp of those early years, and he said the main point of difference between Australian and British practise of that era was method.

“The breed was the same, but the ways of doing things were different,” he said. “In England, the mares foaled indoors, and here that was all done outdoors. You’d have one person for each mare and foal over there, leading them into the yards, putting them out, but here, it was very different.”

Howey remembers this on Baramul Stud, in particular.

“Star Kingdom was there, Todman, Biarritz and so on, and there were two people looking after all the horses there in those days,” he said. “It would have been around 150 or 160 mares then, and up to 100 foals. Woodlands was another. That would have been the biggest producer of thoroughbreds, and there was a team there of about six.”

Howey can still reel off the names of the stud staff. Noel Hennessy, John Andrews, George Bowman, Ron Jeffries, aged 94 this year, and Jim Gibson. It’s an extraordinary memory.

He also said the horses of the era weren’t handled as much as they are now, and nor were stallion books as hefty. He said that attention to horses’ feet wasn’t as good as it is today.

They’re valuable memories, not least because the horses Howey tended were the stuff of legend.

“Todman was around, and Biscay was just starting out in his career,” he said. “Marscay was a bit of a handful. Kaoru Star was about that vintage, and the Star Kingdom lineage had taken off at that stage. Sky High, Skyline. These were the horses that I became associated with.”

The company of greatness

One horse, in particular, stood out among the best for Howey, and it was the Widden stallion Bletchingly.

By Biscay from the two-time stakes-producing mare Coogee (GB) (Relic {USA}), Bletchingly was a winner of what is now the G1 The Galaxy.

He was bred at Baramul by Stanley Wootton, and was a three-quarter brother to the Todman-sired stakes winner Beaches and, heading to stud in 1975, he held the bloodstock world in his hands with 61 stakes winners, 176 stakes wins and horses of the like of Best Western, Canny Lad, Canny Lass, Kingstown Town and Emancipation.

“He was trained by Angus Armansco, and he had a lot of issues as a young horse,” Howey said. “He cracked a sesamoid, and he had a discharging sinus on his lower left jaw. He was beaten only once, down the straight six at Flemington, and he won one of the early runnings of The Galaxy. An old friend of mine over the back fence, Archie Shepherd, who has passed away now, said to me it was one of the best performances he remembered for a young sprinting horse.”

Shepherd was an SP bookie, and it was a sound recommendation for Bletchingly. In addition, Stanley Wootton wrote to Howey from England, from where he was training, to say that he thought the horse would be an exceptional sire.

“On those two pieces of information, from Stanley Wootton and SP bookie Archie Shepherd, I bought a share in Bletchingly,” Howey said. “When he came to Widden, he was an affordable price, about $3500 a share, and I went to a bank manager in Scone because I didn’t have any money.”

Howey got the money, and Bletchingly was Champion Sire of Australia from 1979/80 to 1981/82. Howey also believes that he bred the stallion’s first stakes winner, a horse called Bakerman that won the 1981 King George IV S. at Doomben.

Howey retired from active veterinary service in the late 1990s and, since then, he’s been involved in veterinary education and history keeping. He has written numerous books about his life as a Scone vet, which are richly decorated with names, faces and descriptions of people, horses and eras he has known.

“The Star Kingdom era, that was probably the best of them,” he said. “And also knowing George Ryder. He was a great inspiration, from his time at Woodlands to later at Kia Ora, where Gunsynd, Baguette and all these horses stood. Knowing all these people and being involved with them, that’s what I enjoyed the most.”

In jokes, Howey will say he is “so twentieth century”, but with memories like his, it’s hard to imagine he could be anything else.