Gentlemen, I give you Kerry Freer...
He made himself a legend just doing his own thing. Known to all, but not by name or anything other than playing his bugle or trumpet at Warwick Farm and Catalina Park.
Kerry Freer, it turns out, came from Newcastle. Today he runs a busy Thrifty Link Hardware store in the Lake Macquarie suburb of Boolaroo, which keeps him occupied six days a week. And, after 40 years of motor racing anonymity, that's where Max Stahl found him three years ago.
Back in the sixties, Kerry and his friends, principally Chris Green, Brian Russell, Anthony Hurt and John White, used to get up early on race mornings and drive down the old Pacific Highway to enjoy their motor racing.
When the Creek Corner enclosure was opened up for spectators (for the 1963 Australian Grand Prix), the setting was in place for the legend to arise.
"We would sometimes take our instruments with us," Kerry recalls, "we were musicians and we always had some kind of instruments with us."
The picture of these people turning up at the race meetings in Kerry's early model Vauxhall Viva (all 1057cc of raw power!) is unimaginable today. A very pedestrian car, absolutely basic, but with that stripe around the back of it like so many 'boy racers' of the day might have. And musical instruments in the boot.
Setting out to occupy themselves between races, the boys would often get out their instruments and play for the crowd. Warwick Farm often had some long waits - anything up to 40 minutes between races while CAMS Stewards conducted their endless inspections - so these interludes were appreciated by those present.
"One day a Mini rolled and someone down the front was trying to play
The Last Post," says Kerry. "He had a piece of rubber hose and a funnel and it was very hard to get it to work properly like that. Then one of the guys told me to get my bugle out of the car."
The bugle was in the car, Kerry remembers, because it had been in use just a few days earlier when he played it at an Anzac Day service. So the Mini driver got a proper rendition of the famous tune and a tradition was born.
From that time on, anyone retiring at the corner or in the first part of the esses, would hear the bugle call. Soon, though, this genuine WW1 bugle was replaced with a more regular trumpet.
This made a huge impact on regular spectators, and on the commentators in the commentary box at Creek. Very soon there were imitators all around the circuit, and between races they would play the appropriate tunes of the day.
"It was the time of the
Tijuana Brass, so we would play tunes that they played, like
The Lonely Bull. You could hear it going right around the circuit between races!"
When Kerry went to Catalina Park he and his friends would be encamped at the popular Craven A Corner at the top of the circuit. There he once trumpeted the retirement of Max Stahl as he rolled his Holden.
And at Oran Park they'd be at Robin Orlando Corner, at the beginning of the spectator straight. But they never took the trumpet to Bathurst, "Bathurst was sacred!"
Today Kerry has a hard time reconciling to the fact that all of this took place forty and more years ago. We caught up with him at the Boolaroo store and found he was still full of enthusiasm for the times we remember so fondly, and he still follows the racing on TV today.
Anthony Hurt is no longer with us, Kerry's hair is all but gone, time has cast its shadow over all things.
But nothing so badly as Warwick Farm. "We should have fought to keep that place," he says. "It was fabulous, it was the best we had, it should never have been allowed to die."
Edited by Ray Bell, 20 December 2010 - 12:58.
