Maurice McCarten was an expert authority on all matters pertaining to horses, having both ridden and trained champions for five decades

Maurice Thomas Joseph McCarten was a jockey and racehorse-trainer born in 1902 at Hawera, South Taranaki, New Zealand, son of John McCarten, a New Zealand-born groom, drover come horse breaker who died while Maurice was young. Maurice was given trackwork from the age of 9 and apprenticed at 14 to the trainer Fred Tilley.

His first winner was MERRIE GAIN in Wellington. In April 1919 McCarten won the Feilding Cup on PARAROA and in January 1920 the Marton Cup onboard ORATRESS, good races for a 17-year-old boy to be winning. McCarten won the 1920 New Zealand Oaks on ISABEL for Thomas Duncan and a couple of seasons later rode an even better filly for the owner and the stable in ENTHUSIASM. TAMATETE and TAHUA were other gallopers raced by the Duncan family on whom McCarten won major races during the early 1920s and in 1922 he partnered with SCION to victory in the Auckland Cup. In the 1922-23 racing season, Fred Jones began to entice McCarten to ride his horses as well.

In the following years he won almost every major race in New Zealand and headed the jockeys' premiership twice.

Though a big fish in New Zealand, McCarten was small fry on his arrival into NSW racing scene. The Sydney jockeys’ room was competitive and salty, the home of brothers Jim and Darby Munro, of Jim Pike, Andy Knox, Billy Duncan and Billy Cook. Upon settling there in 1926, McCarten swiftly gained a comprehensive understanding of his situation. McCarten was known as ‘the gentleman jockey’, and it stuck with him right up to his retirement from riding in 1942.

In Sydney on 18 August 1923, at his first appearance on an Australian racecourse, McCarten rode three winners at Canterbury; that year he won the first of four Australian Jockey Club Derbys, on the New Zealand horse BALLYMENA. After returning to New Zealand, he came back again to Sydney and married Mary O'Brien in 1925 at Kensington. Next year McCarten settled in Sydney and linked with the trainers Fred Williams and George Price. He would go on to ride more than a thousand winners.

The Melbourne and Caulfield cups eluded him, but his victories included four Brisbane (two on SPEAR CHIEF, 1938, 1939) and two Sydney cups, two Victoria Derbys and two Epsom Handicaps. He was renowned as a master of tactics, especially in the major races, but he did not achieve the Sydney jockey's premiership until 1938-39. His most famous ride was on Spear Chief which beat the 40/1-on favourite AJAX in the 1939 Rawson Stakes. McCarten said the best he’d ridden was the crack Kiwi horse LIMERICK, the fastest AJAX and the most courageous AURIES STAR.

Troubled by weight problems and lured by the opportunity to acquire the ailing Jack Jamieson's stables, horses and wealthy clients, in May 1942 McCarten was granted a trainer's license by the AJC.

He set up at 24 Botany Street, Randwick, in Jamieson’s old yard, bringing with him seven yearlings, a handful of tried horses, and patrons like Ezra Norton, W.J. ‘Knockout’ Smith and Harry Tancred. As he had been riding, McCarten was a success training. His first winner came at the long-gone Ascot Racecourse on May 30, 1942, a horse called BEFORE DARK.

From 1946 Neville Sellwood would be his leading jockey. Among the most successful horses McCarten trained were Adolph Basser's DELTA, Frank Packer's COLUMNIST, Stan Wootton's TODMAN and his brother NOHOLME, and KNAVE, owned by T.C Lowry from New Zealand. As a trainer, McCarten won the 1947 Caulfield Cup with Columnist and the 1951 Melbourne Cup with Delta; he also won many of the AJC's and Victoria Racing Club's classic and weight-for-age races.

The freak sprinter TODMAN won the inaugural Golden Slipper Stakes by eight lengths in 1957 and the tough mare, WENONA GIRL collected the Sires' Produce Stakes in Sydney and Melbourne and the AJC Oaks in 1960. McCarten won the Sydney trainers' premiership four times in succession between 1948-49 and 1951-52, and finished second to the legendary trainer T.J Smith ten times.

His fortunes declined from the mid-1960s. The State government resumed his stables for an still unconstructed section of the Eastern Suburbs railway. Many of his racecourse friends were dead and his clients abandoned him in favour of large-scale establishments. By 1971 McCarten had only two poorly performed horses in his stables. Survived by his wife, daughter and son, he died in June 1971 at his Randwick home overlooking the racecourse and was buried in Botany cemetery.

McCarten and Angus Armanasco were the best trainers of sprinters in the country in their time - outstanding horsemen who received quality two-year-olds from the best breeders in Australia. Maurice McCarten won a lot, both in the saddle and on the ground. He had champions and rough midweekers, and his success made him both rich and respected, like so many of that golden era in Sydney. He was a master horseman, capable - both as a jockey and trainer - of getting the best out of his charges. Despite his outstanding skills, exemplary character and likeable disposition, his later career indicates the fickle nature of the racing industry.