Hawera harnessing rich history with huge support this weekend

The Hawera Harness Racing Club will once again celebrate another weekend of harness racing as one of the last bastions of the sport in the Taranaki region.

The two day meeting beginning tomorrow (2nd Feb) and culminating on Sunday (4th Feb) has been fabulously supported with 117 runners on the eleven race programme for the club’s opening day which is highlighted by the $20,000 Taranaki Steelformers Stratford Cup.

The support is hardly surprising given the void of grass track harness racing in the North Island racing calendar.

And while it is also unsurprising to see the likes of Canterbury trainer, Michael House, trekking to the lower North Island with a truck full of horses, he has been joined by another Canterbury trainer in Matt Purvis who will line up four runners across the two day meeting.

They aren’t the only license holders that caught the eye when nominations first appeared.

“We are just delighted with the support we have received and to be able to fill the eleven races is something we were hoping to achieve and delighted to pull off. We are hoping to have ten on the second day,” said club secretary and local trainer, Willie Fleming.

“I was speaking to Barry Purdon the other day and I asked him when the last time he came to the Hawera meeting was. He thought long and hard about that and he thinks it must be close to 40 years,” he laughed.

He is joined by another fully fledged legend of the New Zealand harness racing ranks with his brother in law Tony Herlihy’s colours making a rare appearance also.

While he won’t be sitting in the sulky, Herlihy will have fond memories of the Hawera meeting having once driven six winners on a ten race programme which included a hat trick of the last three races. The six victories took Herlihy from 97 to 103 wins for the 1984/5 season (final tally was 112), this surpassed Peter Wolfenden’s former record of 101 victories established in 1974/5 season.

The mixture of support sees a steady influx of pacers and trotters from the Auckland, Waikato and Central Districts regions as well as the aforementioned Canterbury duo attempting their raid on the Hawera meet.

However they will also have to contend with a few of the local lads which includes Fleming himself.

“We’ve been thinning out to be fair, on the course itself there is probably three or four trainers,” he said.

“Fred Mitchell the President has six in tomorrow so he is full steam ahead. I’ve got a couple myself and so does Brendon Towers and Farley Cossey. We have been getting down in numbers over the years that’s for sure, and getting older,” he laughed.

When looking back through the annals, although it may be a club that is severely underutilised for reasons only known to officialdom, it is a club that is steeped in rich history having celebrated it’s centenary back in 2005.

The forerunner to the Hawera Trotting Club was the Waimate Plains Trotting Club which was established on 14 May 1905, their inaugural meeting was run at JD Mitchell’s Burnbank Farm on Wednesday 29 August 1906.

At a meeting held on 28 January 1911, the Waimate Plains TC decided to move racing to the Egmont RC’s, Waihi Road, Hawera racecourse (1800m). The first race meeting held on this course coincided with George V’s Coronation Day on the 22nd June 1911. In a forerunner to the Hawera club’s more recent racing dates & history, the first Easter meeting was held on Easter Monday 1916.

This remained the clubs traditional date (with as many as three race meetings held over Easter between the mid 50’s & late 90’s) up until 2019 when the club was not reissued a license after Covid cancelled the meeting in 2020. Upon its return in 2022, the Hawera Harness Racing Club was reissued a license in line with Waitangi weekend as we see now.

“It was actually getting quite expensive with labour costs over Easter, so Waitangi seems to be quite a sensible fit for us,” said Fleming.

“There has been plenty of talk in that direction about getting some extra meetings with the new dates proposals out. Various ones have said we should be having three two day meetings at Hawera, and we are strongly in favour of that as well. So if we can make this weekend one to remember it will be a start, and we will certainly be outing in a submission to push for more,” he said.

Another moment in time which sees Hawera entrenched in the history books is that fact that it hosted the first ever use of starting gates at a New Zealand race meeting.

One of the local legends of Taranaki harness racing, Alex Corrigan, who had travelled to North America on a self-funded mission to investigate the use of the mobile starting gates saw his own modification host the first ever mobile start seen on a New Zealand track in the Hawera club’s Flying Mile on Easter Monday 1957 (winner Brahman).

Another nugget in the history of the club was when lights were used for night trotting for first time in NZ at a win only equalisator meeting held at A&P Showgrounds at Hawera on the 24th of November 1958. Five races were held before a crowd of 3,000 on this occasion and it saw night trotting become a regular feature of the A&P Association Saturday night programmes until late 1960’s.

In 1967 Hawera Trotting Club joined with Egmont Racing Club and Opunake Racing Club to form Hawera Racecourse Partnership, making it one of the few (if not the only) grass track clubs in the North Island to have an ownership stake in its own facility.

In 1986, the clubs name was changed to what we know it as today, the Hawera Harness Racing Club, which had been previously licensed as the Hawera Trotting Club since 1924.

Given what has happened slightly further south in the Wellington region with the cessation of harness at Hutt Park, it beggars belief that more isn’t being done to protect racing in Taranaki, which is why the above history lesson was a prudent one. However that is a fight for another day.

2023 SRATFORD CUP REPLAY

117 runners at a North Island meeting might well be a record in the early part of 2024, and the eight strong committee of volunteers ought to be commended for the work undertaken in pulling everything together.

“We don’t anticipate a huge crowd on course on Friday, but we focus on a family day on Sunday and have a heap of kids entertainment and the like on Sunday and our theory is that we are trying to develop the next generation really.

“We drew a line in the sound with bouncy castles with Taranaki getting a bit of wind,” laughed Fleming.

“We had one in the past and had a broken arm so we decided to give that a miss for obvious reasons but we have car rides and some of the old fashion games like sack races, egg and spoon, tug of war and that sort of thing. It can sometimes be a bit weather dependant but the forecast is looking super for the weekend.

“The kids carts are on and its very fitting to have a heat of the Revell Douglas Series for the junior drivers with his history back in the Taranaki region,” he said.

The Fleming family has a rich history of its own in the region with many in the family still breeding and racing standardbreds.

“There are plenty of us in Taranaki, and we are all involved in one aspect or another. Just as a matter of interest on Cup Day a lot of us Fleming’s got together and I put on a bunch of easy bets and dropped them on the table and we said if win $1000 we would sponsor a race at the meeting.

“We only won $200, but one of them piped up and said if we chip in $200 each, we can sponsor a race anyway. So that’s what we’ve done and we decided to name the race Ricochet Mobile Pace.

“That was a horse that my father and uncle were in with Don Nyhan, and I have a photo in my stable at what was then Epsom on the grass and I think it was 1955, and my Father is standing on the in-field looking out,” he said with great pride.

Harnesslink would like to congratulate the committee comprising of Michelle Maire, Fred (President) & Penny Mitchell, Brendan Towers, Tania Young, Warren Espin and my cousins Tim, Phil & Willie Fleming on their promotion of the two day meeting and wish them all the best on a successful weekend.

For complete Hawera race fields, click here.

by Brad Reid, for Harnesslink