The Tommy Woodcock’s ashes to remain in perpetuity in his original resting place

Tommy Woodcock ashes saved at cemetery

• by:Brent Zerafa 
• From:The Daily Telegraph 
• July 20, 2012 12:00am

Tommy Woodcock pictured with Phar Lap in 1932.

A SIMPLE Google search by a Wagga Wagga mother and daughter has saved the ashes of one of Australian sports greatest treasures.

Tommy Woodcock, strapper and then later trainer of the mighty Phar Lap, was set to be dug up and scattered around Melbourne’s Springvale Botanical Cemetery without a trace had it not been for Louise Clayton and her daughter Tegan Ellis.

Woodcock died at Yarrawonga on April 27, 1985 and was cremated three days later.

The tenure on his ashes and memorial plaque expired on December 31 last year.

His wife Emma’s ashes unfortunately could not be saved, with her tenure expiring two years ago. They had no children.

Louise, 53, and Tegan, 21, along with Margaret Benson, who wrote Tommy Woodcock: The Story of Australia’s Most Remarkable Trainer in 1978, collected $465 to pay for Woodcock’s ashes to remain in perpetuity in his original resting place.

“I was basically looking on Google, because Tommy’s real name is Aaron Treve Woodcock, so I was doing a search and I saw that his tenure had expired from December 31 last year,” Ellis said.

“So we rang up the cemetery and they said they have been trying for the past six months to find someone to take it over.

“They put out notices and things but no one had come forward.

“So we asked whether we could do it ourselves and they were fine with that because otherwise, like with his wife, they would have just been taken him to the back of the cemetery and we wouldn’t know what they would do with the plaque.

“We were just hoping nothing had been already done because we found out that they update search engines manually.

“We were just hoping that they hadn’t already thrown him out the back and not updated the listing.

“I found it at about 2am in the morning, so we had to wait until a decent hour to ring them,.

“We were trying to rush it and think how we would get the money together, once we did that we paid for it.

“From what we understand we were just in time because given a few more weeks, or another month and he would have been gone.”

Springvale Botanical Cemetery guidelines indicate that they are “conscious of its community obligations. One such resource is the land available to commemorate deceased individuals.”

As a result, anyone cremated from 1976 only had a 25-year tenure on their memorial. Representative Rebecca Atkins confirmed Woodcock’s ashes and memorial plaque were now in perpetuity thanks to Clayton and Ellis.

“The process for end of tenure is that we first write to the Holder of Right, if they have not already passed away, advising them that the tenure has expired,” Atkins said.

“If the Holder of Right has passed away, we write to the Authorising Person.

“If we do not receive a response within approximately four weeks, we write again to advise them of a disestablishment notice.

“If we still do not hear from them, we spend a considerable amount of time checking a number of sources to locate the Holder of Right or if they are deceased, the Authorising Person and/or anyone potentially connected to them.

“If contact cannot be made or we do not receive instructions after these avenues have been exhausted, then the ashes are scattered within our grounds at an undisclosed location, and we retain the plaque for 12 months.”

So how do a pensioner from country NSW and her daughter stumble across such vital information and save the memorial of an Australian icon?

“For the past few years we had been trying to get a plaque placed at the stables in California where Phar Lap died,” Clayton said.

“After two years of legal negotiations and unrealistic demands placed upon it, we put on hold that project to focus on a book we are writing on A.P Wade, the man we all owe a great debt too.

“For if he did not sell (Phar Lap’s sire) Night Raid to Mr Roberts in New Zealand, there would never have been a Phar Lap.

“We discovered Tommy’s story through the research for the book on A.P Wade, and then we started to delve more into Tommy’s story via book purchases and by far the best book we found was Margaret Benson’s 1978 biography. So we decided to try our luck at contacting those in Tommy’s life at the latter stages to seek more information.”

The mother and daughter, with the blessing of Benson, are set to release a new book on the life of Tommy Woodcock next month in a bid to raise enough money to have a permanent life-size statue of the respected trainer placed on a racetrack yet to be decided.

Artist Wayne Strickland, who made a sculpture of Phar Lap for Woodcock during his early career, has been commissioned to make the sculpture but the project is set to cost roughly $80,000.

“I’m very pleased that someone is taking up the fight in trying to get a permanent memorial to Tommy because, I wrote the book but books go out of print.

“We need something permanent because it is a unique story,” Benson said.

“There are a lot of remarkable trainers but only Tommy had that unique association with Phar Lap, he and the Phar Lap story are intertwined.”

Benson, now in her 80s, is also all-too pleased that her book is being used as the basis of the new project.

“My book is 30 years out of date, Louise and her daughter are collecting a lot of photos that weren’t available to me and are bringing the book up to date, it is not just re-issuing my book, it is an updated book with my blessing,” she said.

Clayton has three of Woodcock’s former apprentices on board including Geoff Lane, Pat Trotter and Greg Cornish.

“I spent seven years and three months with Tommy, I started off on in 1953, I was 13,” Lane said. “He never spoke very much about Phar Lap when I was with him, he never would get in to a deep conversation and talk about him.

“I’m glad that people today are still willing to do something to keep Tommy’s memory alive. “Wayne Strickland is widely known for his art relating to horses and is delighted to get the opportunity to immortalise Woodcock.

“Some years ago, I am talking when I was 22 and I am 62 now, I went over to Tommy’s place and stayed with him in Mordialloc. I spent a long weekend with him and sculptured Phar Lap while I was there,” he said.

“I had built him basically out of wax but we basically went over the finer points of him, it is in the Victorian National Gallery now, the little sculpture.

“While I was there I did a sketch of Tommy and I’ve turned that into a painting. I’ve offered the painting to the Claytons and hopefully they will be able to sell a few prints to raise some funds.

“This project will be something very special to me, I know Black Caviar is a great horse but Phar Lap is the one, there is nothing like him in Australian history and Tommy was such an integral part of his story.”

For information on how to donate to the cause, email trevewood1@bigpond.com