Bendigo was a popular horse in the mid-1880s. As a three-year-old he was a creditable sixth in the Cesarewitch a fortnight before winning the Cambridgeshire, over half the distance, at 50/1 carrying 6 stone 10 pounds. Horses running in both those races was not an unusual event. He started to improve at the age of five, progressing from winning the Lincoln to the Hardwicke. By now he had to carry 9 stone 8 in the Cambridgeshire, in which he finished third. The following year he won the Eclipse and in his final season, 1887, he won Kempton’s first Jubilee Handicap (qv) and later the Champion Stakes.
In the second half of the 19th century a town called Bendigo was one of the centres of the Australian gold mining industry. It grew around Bendigo Creek, where gold was found in 1851. The creek was named after a local shepherd. He in turn had been given that nickname as a result of the fame of a bareknuckle fighter born in Nottingham, William Abednego Thompson (1811-1880). He had become known as Bendigo Thompson due to a combination of his unusual middle name and his athleticism in the ring, bobbing and weaving and bending. In 1880 the city, hithero called Sandhurst, was regarded as the richest in the world due to the quantity of gold being discovered there. The boom was long gone by the 1930s, but the city governors astutely encouraged other industries – with the result that Bendigo is now the fourth largest inland city in Australia.
KEMPTON
In honour of the horse’s success in the inaugural Jubilee Handicap, the Bendigo Stakes began at Kempton in 1926 and continued until 1979. The equivalent race the following year was the Playboy Handicap.
NOTTINGHAM
There was a Bendigo trotting race in the Nottingham Castle grounds in 1889, but the racecourse at Colwick Park didn’t capitalise on the name until a hurdle race run between 1968 and 16 March 1992, its last appearance. Four years later National Hunt racing ceased there.