By Rhonda Bartle

True Hāwera roots

Ross Corrigan's history goes back a long way, all the way back to when S. Percy Smith first surveyed the land of Hāwera, and marked out the many plots that would become farms after the Taranaki Land Wars.

Ross's grandfather James Randall (JR) Corrigan took up land at The Oaks in 1899, and the family has been there ever since.

James Corrigan was an industrious man, admired for his farming, horse rearing, business and political acumen, as well as an extraordinary ability to do mental arithmetic.

A renowned sheep and cattle breeder - and livestock dealer - he also bred and raced trotting horses and became a notable politician.

Alex Corrigan, Ross's father, was a man of the same breed, who passed his love of horses on to his son. After a trip to the United States of America in March 1956, Alex imported a new trotting innovation to Taranaki, by borrowing an idea and shaping it to New Zealand track conditions.

He did for New Zealand what inventor Steve Phillips did for trotting in North America; he introduced the first mobile starting gate in the southern hemisphere.

An astute man, Alex had thought for a long time that the noticeable increase in popularity of harness racing in the United States, post WWII, was down to three different factors: the advent of night trotting, the launch of a pari-mutuel tote style of betting (a system using an electronic machine that totalled all bets, deducted management charges and taxes, and determined the final odds and payouts, which eliminated bookmakers), and the use of mobile starting barriers.

The new 'flying start' worked well with younger and inexperienced horses and increased spectator interest, as it gave the small time punter - the kind of low-key casual punter who kept the sport going - more of a run for his money.

Launching the flying start

In 1948, Alex Corrigan surrendered his trainer's licence so he could stand for the committee of the Hāwera Trotting Club.

Almost 10 years later, as a member of the Executive of the New Zealand Trotting Conference, he approached other members to see what they thought of implementing the flying start.

Their initial lack of response caused him some disappointment, but this gave way to a dogged determination to prove how well a starting barrier could work in New Zealand.

In 1957, Alex was granted permission to stage the first mobile start at the 'Flying Mile' during the Hāwera Trotting Club's Easter meeting. Ross, who was just 21 at the time, found himself in the driver's seat of a Land Rover with a specially mounted contraption quickly dubbed the Corrigan Gate.

"The first one we built was very primitive," Ross explains. "We'd borrowed the Land Rover from the Brewer brothers. I built the barrier in a little workshop up the road here.

"All I had to go on was two slides my mother had taken in the States. I had to try to think it through. There were to be eight horses at the gate. I had to envisage it."

After deciding to use hydraulic rams to pull the arms of the gate in, he discovered the hydraulic pump drew power off the Land Rover while accelerating away from the horses.

Today compressed air is used instead of drawing power from the vehicle motor.

A new improved version

Later, the Corrigan's improved on the model by building a more sophisticated barrier. Still without the benefit of design plans, Ross constructed hydraulically-operated wings of duralium tubing, and mounted the barrier on an 88-inch wheel base Land Rover fitted with a supercharger to give it enough acceleration.

Pump petrol was then only 73 octane and it was necessary to run the vehicle on No.2 racing fuel of 91 octane.

Ross says that on reflection, there were some things he might have done better, but despite some early scepticism from those in the trotting industry, the Corrigan Gate was a resounding success.

"Some said, 'What are you going to do on a wet course?' But that's why we chose to use a Land Rover, a four-wheeled-drive, because if something had happened, if there had been an accident, they would have said, 'that's it'. It would have killed it."

The American model was usually mounted on a vehicle similar to a modern ute, often a Ford V8 pickup, and didn't operate on wet tracks.

The handicap system of the time meant trotters lined up in rows, and got only one shot at a start. The barrier worked well as horses could gradually be brought up to
speed before being let away.

"It was a far better spectacle than having young horses break. Father could see the advantages," Ross says.

The South Island trainers, in Hāwera for the Easter trots, were quick to seek obvious rewards. "The New Brighton Club said, 'You'd better bring the gate down here', and then the Metropolitan Club couldn't be outdone, and they said we'd better go down there, too."

All for free

Over the next few years the Corrigan Gate travelled throughout New Zealand and launched races with no mishaps and no accidents.

"All up, it cost my father over £2000 to set up," Ross says. "We did not have the time, nor was it realistic for us to consider operating it on a commercial basis and so the 84 race starts - all successful and with no false starts - that we did over the three years up to and including the Hāwera Trotting Club's Easter meeting in 1960, were all done gratis.

 "We couldn't just keep going around country with it. No, we had our farming business and so father said, 'Look. We'll run our own business now. We'll let it be.' He was satisfied that he had demonstrated it worked."

Despite the overwhelming success, the Corrigans didn't patent their design. As Ross sees it, it was hardly worth it: "Well, unless you're going to market them by the thousands… there are probably only four or five operating in New Zealand now."

He says the US model may well have been patented due to the sheer size of the trotting industry there.

Jumping on the same horse
Around 1962, Canterbury Park trotting club in Christchurch, using specifications from America, built their own mobile starting gate, and a Mr Butcher in Palmerston North followed suit the following year.

Though the love of horse racing was definitely something in the Corrigan blood, Ross recounts his own personal journey into trotting.

"Grandfather was very involved in trotting. Up until 1923, he had employed professional trainers. When it all came to grief, after they got badly burnt in the 1921-22s slump, father put a manager on the property and he trained and drove the horses Grandfather bred.

"He did that for 10 years. He would get up at five in the morning, be over at the stables, work the horses. At seven, he'd be off farming all day. He was here, there and everywhere, but trotting was very much part of his life."

It was inevitable that Ross's father Alex would enjoy the same interest. "He never won a New Zealand cup, but he and JR enjoyed themselves.

"But while I grew up with trotting horses, helping my father with the mares and foals, the horses were always my father's and that was that and I respected it.

"It was only a few months before he died that he transferred some of the mares to me. But it was his interest, so I was never involved in the racing industry, except for the starting gate."

Though Ross continued to breed and break young horses he never raced them. "There was nothing much in it, breeding horses, no money to be made; by the time you paid the service fees, registration feeds, you name it.

"And by the mid-eighties, when people could buy horses for a fraction of the cost it would take to breed them, well, that was it, really. But I held an association with a number of the trotting fraternity, those who had been with father."

Ross Corrigan still lives on the piece of property along Surf Highway 45 his grandfather and father owned.

The original villa and veranda homestead still stands behind the stately 1936 house Ross and wife Claire reside in.

Evidence of family tradition is all around, in the boxed hedges, roses and trees planted by his mother, to the paddocks that lean towards the sea where generations of trotting horses roamed and played.