26/06/2021
The Story of Rocky Ned
The plain chestnut gelding Rocky Ned was a grand old star of the early buck jump shows.
Born on Bingara Station, Bingara in Northern NSW, (it sounds like in the 1920s) he was unrideable from the start. The nearest they got to taming him was to hitch him in with a team of horses pulling a harvester. He disorganised the whole team and injured himself.
Mrs Lennon first bought Ned and used him as her star buckjumper; after the death of her husband and her subsequent retirement from the show business, she sold Ned to a 'grand rider' Tom Handley and he became Tom's star bucking attraction. Handley was offering the sum of 100 pounds to anyone who could stay on for 10 seconds with one hand in the air.
In 1934 Handley sold Rocky Ned and 10 more of his best buckjumpers to another rider and showman, Thorpe McConville. McConville decided to repeat Handley's 100 pound challenges. Rather sadly, Rocky Ned at the age of 22 was introduced to the flank rope. In one memorable day Rocky Ned was challenged 22 times and gave two exhibitions - making it 24 rides for the day. Bear in mind, each ride only lasted a few seconds but it was still a great effort. Just something you couldn't - and shouldn't - get way with these days.
In his career, Ned was only ridden once by a rider from outside the show, and only a handful of times by riders within the show team (thought to be Fred Yeomans, Mick Burnell and Jimmy Jones).
The lucky outsider who stayed on, Gordon Atwater, used his own saddle, a big Wieneke Breaker with two big 'monkey holds'. He might have ridden the horse, but the story goes he had to be helped from the saddle and spent the next two weeks in Grafton Hospital.
Apparently McConville offered Atwater 200 pounds to have another go on the grand old horse, but Atwater would not accept the challenge.
McConville retired Rocky Ned to his property on the banks of the Murrumbidgee at Narrandera, where he lived to the age of 32. Rocky Ned was blind in one eye - possibly done, we wonder, in that first bust up with the harvester team?
His full brother Red Ned was just a good a bucker and was used as the star horse in the Lennon Brothers Show for many years. There was also an unrideable sister which Frank Maynard of Canberra tried to purchase, but the breeder wanted 100 pounds for her - and this was the 1930s! Maynard thinks she never left Bingara Station.
Photo: Hoofs and Horns 1959, recollections by Frank Maynard.
