Family Ties: William Inglis & Son

Cover image: A sale of yearlings at Newmarket, showing the old auction ring, circa 1930 | Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia

Australia’s bloodstock history, from 1905 onwards, is knitted tight to the sale rings of William Inglis & Son. Since the company’s humble roots in Pitt Street, amid the noisy, colonial chaos of the horse bazaars in downtown Sydney, Inglis has been there, trading thoroughbreds and calling bids for 116 years.

But the company goes back even further than that.

In 1867, William Inglis, son of Scottish import Thomas Inglis, founded the business ‘on the sheep’s back’, auctioning livestock and produce through Sydney and surrounding country districts. Eventually there were sale yards in Camperdown and St Mary's, and further west to Homebush.

In Pitt Street, the business moved into horses, alongside old-established bazaars that sold stock the length of Castlereagh and Elizabeth Streets in chaotic, honest times.

But William, astute and seasoned as he was, knew the future of horses wasn’t behind carriages and drays, and he moved the business towards the blood horse. The company’s first catalogue of yearlings in 1905 boasted just over 100 lots, and by 1913 it boasted four times as much.

In 1918, Inglis had outgrown its roots at Pitt Street and moved to Newmarket in Randwick, to the grand old house, barn and surrounds of former trainer Thomas Payten. From there, the modern William Inglis & Son emerged, a sale company that has handled, for over a century, the finest blood horses in Australia.

With it came some of the deftest, most legendary auctioneers in the business.

There was John T. Inglis, eldest son of William who was widely known as ‘Jack’. He was 17 when he joined his father in the company, a man of remarkable foresight, judgement and salesmanship and who was credited with hauling the business to huge proportions from the late 1800s.

There was also Reg Inglis Snr, who was 25 when he assumed the company from his father Jack, and who was a pipe-smoking, golf-playing, six-foot character with little hair and a poor memory for horses' names. Reg was immensely popular at Newmarket through the 1930s and ‘40s, rattling through 220 Easter yearlings in six hours on little more than a sandwich and 50,000 words.

Since then, William Inglis & Son has evolved into its modern shoes.

The Easter Sale is still around but different, and the company is at Warwick Farm instead of Newmarket. There are new legends to add to the fray, like Reg Inglis Jr, who commanded the company as managing director from 1989 to 2006.

By most accounts, Reg was a tactful, inspired leader during difficult years at Inglis, including the collapse of the Cummings empire in the late '80s and the botulism outbreak of 1993. He was a mentor to current bloodstock leaders like Jonathan D'Arcy and Godolphin Australia’s Managing Director Vin Cox.

Today, there are strong names at the company like Mark Webster, current managing director, and Sebastian Hutch, but the fifth generation of Inglises is there too, the sixth since Thomas, in an exceptional and rare feat of family endurance.

Leaving Randwick

Arthur Inglis is the deputy chairman of William Inglis & Son, and he was raised at Newmarket, under the eaves of the old Moreton Bay Fig tree.

When the company moved from Randwick to Riverside Stables in 2017, Arthur was the most qualified of anyone to recall the history of the old complex and to feel overwhelmed by such things as legacy and nostalgia. But he wasn’t.

“It felt to me like it was time,” Arthur said. “The whole area had changed enough. It didn’t have the same magic that it used to have, and Easter was a good example of that. Easter used to be the Easter Show and the routine around Easter Sunday, the sales and the racing. It might seem like a minor thing, but that had all changed, as had the surrounds.”

In the last few years before the move, Newmarket had been gradually swamped by schools, the University of New South Wales and the Prince of Wales Hospital. The landscape was an urban picture where, increasingly, horses were a nuisance.

“There used to be racing stables all around that area,” Arthur said, mentioning Tubby Turner, Tommy Smith and John Drennan. “By the end, it was just the sale complex. But I also felt that we had so long to get our head around it in creating the new premises at Riverside, so it wasn’t just one moment where I had to deal with it.”

Arthur said the recreation of Newmarket into what is now; apartments restaurants and a playground, is bittersweet.

The site, bought and redeveloped by Cbus, is reverent to history, with the old house and barn protected by heritage orders, but it’s silent of horses. The gardens aren’t maintained in the same way, and Arthur hasn’t seen the inside of the big stable for a while.

“Any old building like that needs constant love to be maintained, and I’d hate to think what condition it’s like inside now,” he said.

What is legacy?

Arthur Inglis is the grandson of Reg Inglis. His father was John and, along with his cousin Jamie at Inglis Rural Property, he is the family’s fifth generation in the business.

Arthur has many of the traits that his ancestors were known for across Sydney bloodstock, including good manners, splendid integrity and personal charm, and his aptitude for accounts and figures gave him a useful place within the family business in his early days.

“My parents certainly didn’t steer me towards the business,” he said. “We were well served with people in our family to continue it, and my strengths were in figures, accounts and admin, so I could have gone towards something in banking or accounting if I hadn’t gone this way.”

Arthur said the weight of family legacy isn’t something that he thinks much about.

“To be honest, I don’t even like the word legacy,” he said. “It gets used a lot, and I don’t think it has positive connotations all of the time. Just the fact that something has survived a long time is not the sole reason for celebrating.”

William Inglis & Son is pushing 154 years in constant, family-owned trade, and Arthur’s point is less about celebrating that fact and more about looking ahead to keep things going.

“We’ve got to keep thinking about the future, and always improve,” he said. “What is legacy anyway? I don’t know that that should be our focus.”

Acknowledging the past

In Dubbo, Jamie Inglis is the director of Inglis Rural Property. In a way, he chairs the very roots of the company, which are deep through livestock, land and produce.

In the last financial year, Inglis Rural sold in excess of $100 million in property, which followed a record result the financial year before, and the forecast is similar for the year upcoming.

As a young Inglis, Jamie only wanted to be in the family business, and he lived in awe of his father Dick (son of Reg) who was a lively auctioneer on the rural circuit.

“All I knew, and all I wanted to do, was work in the firm,” Jamie said. “From when I was old enough to be taken to a sale, I was going with my father. And back then he was a livestock boss, predominantly cattle, and we had four sales a week. We serviced the many, many dairies in the Cobbity area, so I was going with my father, sometimes to five sales a week through the school holidays, and I just loved it.”

Jamie was in awe of the people, the stock and the auction life. When the thoroughbred sales were on at Newmarket, he and his father were there too. But when it comes to grasping the generational importance of his family, Jamie said it’s something that settled on him only as an adult.

“A person really starts to cherish and understand the family legacy the older you get,” he said. “You begin to understand, accept and acknowledge the job our forefathers did, in conducting a business, keeping it profitable and moving with the times.”

Like Arthur, Jamie said old businesses still need to move with the times, that legacy alone wasn’t enough.

“Luckily our forefathers did just that, and my great-grandfather (Jack) was a great example,” he said. “He progressed into thoroughbreds because he could see a few motorcars starting to move around.”

Watch: Shannon being sold by Reg Inglis at Newmarket in 1947

Over a century of stories

With five generations of a family business come the heirlooms and surviving items.

Arthur has old catalogues belonging to his father, with scribbles and prices dotted throughout. He also mentions photographs and a delivery wagon. Jamie said there is an old bell that still survives from Pitt Street, which was rung across the bazaar to signal the start of a sale.

However, Jamie also mentions the heirlooms that you can’t put your hands on, like stories and character.

“We learned that we not only had to be perceived to be trying hard, whether we were selling a high-priced yearling or a poddy calf, but we had to be trying our very best, whatever it was,” he said. “That was knocked into us. Whatever we were selling, we had to get market value. If you got market value, you were doing your job.”

Jamie still hears it ringing in his ears today. He remembers his father and uncle John trading in difficult times, and before them the Inglises auctioning through the Depression and the war.

“You’re dealing with people’s livelihoods, be it yearlings or anything else,” Jamie said. “There’s a certain responsibility that comes with that, a responsibility to do your very best.”

It’s a long-standing mantra in the company, and one passed from generation to generation. At 67 years old, Jamie has lately had the opportunity to pass it to the sixth generation, with his son Richie joining him at Inglis Rural Property.

And throughout, few have any complaints about working with family for over 150 years. It's not always perfect, but Arthur said it has largely been a smooth and tractable thing. Jamie said the positives of it have far outweighed any negatives.

In complement, William Inglis & Son has always kept good staff that have stayed for long periods of time.

When Jack Inglis died in 1914, the Sydney Stock and Station Journal described him as having good commercial instincts but also as being old fashioned, ‘in that he kept his employees through the years, some for 20 years, some over 30 years’.

Jamie said the ‘school of Inglis’ is long-standing, and mentions Ossie Roberts and Trevor Lobb, and Bob Murdoch who was in the livestock division. He said there were, and are, people that have been with the company for 40 years or more.

“I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve had longevity,” he said. “We’ve really employed phenomenal people, and the industry today is full of outstanding ex-Inglis employees, like Glenn Burrows (of Willow Park Stud) and Vin Cox.”

In a way, the company is little different to what it was 115 years ago.

The family is the same, even if the buildings are different and the bloodstock more expensive. The attitude is still about progress, which has seen William Inglis & Son migrate from downtown Pitt Street to Young Street in Randwick and now Governor Macquarie Drive in Warwick Farm.

The stories remain, like the one about Jack Inglis waxing so beautifully on a lady vendor’s horse in Pitt Street that she refused an offer significantly above reserve because she had no idea, until Jack’s eulogising, of her horse’s true value. She took the animal home.

There’s also the story of Reg selling Phar Lap (NZ) (Night Raid {GB}) in 1928 at Trentham, New Zealand.

In the 1950s, Clive Inglis, son of Jack, wrote that his father was the best he had ever seen in the business, and that his counsel stayed with him for life, in particular the rule that old age was a terrible thing in man and stock, and one should always buy youth.

“I have always cherished the opinion that my father was the best auctioneer I have ever heard,” Clive wrote in 1950 of Jack Inglis. “I admit that this praise may be prejudiced, but I think such pride is pardonable.”