Cover image courtesy of Racing and Wagering Western Australia
Perhaps out of necessity, racing in Western Australia has a long history of extraordinary administrators. Perth, after all, is the most isolated city on Earth, over 2100km from its nearest city neighbour.
As such, it’s had to do things the hard way, and racing has cut its cloth from a robust domestic product that has never really relied on an east-coast presence. Is that why its racing administrators have been so good, or was it the administrators that made the local sport so good?
A number of years ago, what was then Perth Racing (and is now Racing and Wagering Western Australia) published its ‘50 People Who Made The WATC’, and while the members took top billing, Ernest Henry Lee-Steere was second.
Sir Ernest Henry Lee-Steere | Image courtesy of Racing and Wagering Western Australia
However, third was the bespectacled go-getter Harry Bolton, who was the managing secretary of the Western Australian Turf Club (WATC) from 1958 until his death exactly 20 years later.
H.G. Bolton was born in South Australia in 1914, so he had lived through two wars by the time he took office at the WATC.
He was an engaging leader immediately, which was useful because the story goes that he was handed a bank statement on his first day in the office, with a club balance that would barely buy the groceries (£1 13s 4d, or one pound, 13 shillings and four pence).
From that, Bolton worked hard to haul Perth racing into the 20th century by modernising and energising it. He is credited with the construction of the Belmont grandstand and the renovation of the racecourse itself. At the time, the facelift was considered state-of-the-art and the track ‘one of the ‘best all-weather circuits in Australia’.
Harry Bolton | Image courtesy of Racing and Wagering Western Australia
During Bolton’s tenure, in came the electronic starting gates, the movable running rail, CCTV cameras and the first totalisator machine. It was written that he was a key figure in the establishment of the TAB. He set up the first International Stipendiary Stewards’ Conference, and it was because of him that the Australian Derby was planted in Perth in 1972 as a successor to the Challenge S.
With Bolton’s clever use of General Motors Holden as a sponsor, the Australian Derby quickly became an eastern-state target. Denise’s Joy (Seventh Hussar {Fr}) won it in 1975, and Family Of Man the year after, and during the race’s 20-year lifespan, it walked hand-in-hand with today’s destination race meetings in terms of glamour, fashion and pop-idol racehorses.
“He was the foremost administrator of racing in Australia, and transformed racing in this state so far as administration is concerned, more than any other man,” said Sir Charles Court, who was premier of Western Australia from 1974 until 1982.
Denise's Joy | Image courtesy of Sportpix
However, as much as Bolton could claim credit for all these things, he was an astute recruiter, hiring Marjorie Charleson in 1967. Their professional alliance was one of the best in Australian racing, and Bolton enabled Charleson on so many of her breathtaking ambitions for the WATC.
In 1978, at the age of 64 and while leading a WATC tour around England, Harry Bolton died suddenly. Sir Ernest Lee-Steere, who had been so critical to those ‘golden days’ in Perth, died in 2011 at the age of 98, while Charleson out-lasted them all until 2020.
Western Australian racing has been feverish in continuing to honour its important administrators with races named in their honour, and the H.G. Bolton S. was initiated in the year of its namesake’s death. It is now one of the premier winter sprints on the Perth calendar.
