The war was over and there were jobs for all. By September 1946, Prime Minister Ben Chifley could boast that, despite 10,000 servicemen being discharged from the forces every week, unemployment had remained below one half of one per cent. With rationing limiting consumer choices, that meant a lot of money burning holes in a lot of pockets. So where could a man dispose of a discretionary shilling or two? That summer, one place as good as any other was Foley’s Lane in the northern Melbourne suburb of Coburg.
There, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, Cole Robertson, Jack Attwater and partners Phil Samson and Jim Elliott stood willing to offer fair odds on the nag of your choice—at the prices chalked on the boards they hung on the fence or at the starting price. Being an SP bookie was a lucrative business. There were four lanes working in Coburg alone, and dozens more across the city. At least one registered racecourse bookie gave up his licence to work in the lane. The SP men would hold five hundred pounds on a race day, at a time when three blocks of land a little further out of town, next to Fawkner cemetery, could be picked up for one hundred the lot and a nice little house in Rosebud was a snip at three thousand. So giving five pounds each race day to the 14-year-old boy who kept nit—looking out for the police—was a minor business expense.
To that boy, Arthur Bell, five pounds was a passport to freedom. ‘My dad was getting that working at Millers Ropeworks.’ Being one of the four nit-keepers in Foley’s Lane twice a week, plus cannily playing the odds at two-up, brought his weekly income to a king’s ransom of 15 pounds. ‘I owned a horse and cart which mum and dad didn’t know about. I used to play up a little bit! When I had to go to work at Gilmours Smallgoods as an apprentice I was getting just seven shillings and sixpence a week.’
Arthur didn’t have far to go to ‘work’. Foley’s Lane, behind the Buffalo lodge and alongside a wood yard, has long since been covered up by the Coles supermarket carpark. Arthur’s 1946 bedroom is now an aisle in the neighbouring Liquorland bottle shop. Keeping nit meant strolling around the corner into Victoria Street and keeping a sharp eye out for the cops—and for his