Tom Willis

Nat Gould's fiercest critic in Australia was his contemporary Tom Willis (1857-1923), the newspaper columnist who wrote under the pseudonym Milroy.

Of Nat Gould’s writing about Bruce Lowe, author of a book on the breeding of racehorses, Willis wrote in 1914:
“Mr. Nat Gould knew less about Bruce Lowe than he did about the Bowen Downs desert, and probably never saw him in his life, or ever heard of him till he (Nat Gould) returned to England --- People who knew both Mr. Gould and Mr. Lowe will be raised to hilarity at Nat’s statement, for it is notorious that he hardly knew one end of a horse from the other – in fact he had the worst ‘horse eye’ of any man I ever met. He came from England as a shipping reporter, and was supposed to know something about ships; but in time he drifted into the turf department of a Sydney paper, and subsequently became a writer of turf stories”(1).

When The Magic of Sport had appeared in Australia in 1909, Milroy alleged that the section on horses included material taken from an earlier author, and that Nat Gould’s writing about his English experiences was dull and uninteresting:

“After many years of work, writing hundreds of sixpenny yellow-backs, our old acquaintance, Mr. Nat Gould, has thrown upon the world something larger in the shape of a big, bulky, and very expensive volume entitled ‘The Magic of Sport’. This he puts forward as his autobiography, with a few racing reminiscences thrown in. Mr. Gould’s account of his ups and downs in England are dully uninteresting, and his ‘Reminiscences’ are indeed remarkable. The Australian part of these is amusingly inaccurate, and the English end is wonderful for the extraordinary number of great people in the racing world whom he knew before he left for Australia. I knew Mr. Gould rather well in Brisbane before he developed into a horse reporter, and would have been surprised to hear that he ever saw a racecourse before he came to the northern capital, but it seems that in England he knew everybody worth knowing on the racecourse, from the great Fred Archer down to a mere ordinary horse-owning duke. He works in numerous anecdotes relating to well-known people, but most of them have seen print before. Sir John Astley, in his charming book ‘Fifty Years of My Life’ told many anecdotes which his friends thought were original, but it would seem that they were not so, for Nat Gould comes in many years later and tells them all over again as part of his own experience”(2).

References

(1)The Sydney Mail 29 July 1914.
(2)The Sydney Mail 23 June 1909.