60th Anniversary: Bill Howard’s First Stawell Gift Victory

Date: 17th February 2026

Sixty years on from that Easter Monday in 1966, Bill Howard can still see it all. “I can remember every detail of that race as if it were yesterday,” he says. “The race and the noise of the crowd are still very clear in my mind.”

William (Bill) Howard was not yet 21 when he won his first Stawell Gift. Born on April 24, 1945, the young man from Wodonga had taken an unlikely path into professional running, and he would go on to become part of Stawell folklore.

His journey began not on a track, but behind a bank counter.

“I found myself in professional running as a result of meeting Jack King, known as ‘Boss’ in late 1964,” Bill recalls. “I was a teller at the CBC Bank in Rutherglen and he was a customer. He had seen me play football the weekend before and when he came into the bank, he suggested that I might make a runner and invited me to train with his team.”

It was an invitation into a world steeped in history. The King brothers had a lifelong association with Stawell stretching back to the turn of the 20th century. “Chris King won the race and brother Jack ran in the final around that time,” Bill says. “There was a deep connection with Stawell in that family.”

Bill trained alongside seasoned performers such as Ken Eales, “a very handy sprinter”, and Arthur Carson, who had run third at both Bendigo and Stawell. Later, after a bank transfer to Seymour and a return to Wodonga, he joined Pat Kennedy’s group. Kennedy had trained Howard’s distant relative Lance Mann to win the Gift in 1952. The King team and Kennedy worked closely, sharing trials and information in a tight professional circuit.

But Bill’s emergence was anything but straightforward.

“In the early part of the ’64/’65 season I went to two different meetings. The stewards had the opinion that I could run better than I showed, and so I did not go to another meeting until Stawell 1966. I kept entering but not turning up to run.”

The handicapper, Bill Preen, eventually asked Kennedy what was going on. “Pat told him I drank too much and was unreliable,” Howard says with a laugh. “Fact: I did not drink at all and never missed a training session.”

He was set for Stawell in 1965, but a sore hamstring ended that campaign before it began. So, the careful plotting continued. “When the 1965/66 season came around, I continued to enter and not show up. The King Brothers had a cinder track on their farm out of Rutherglen, which was an exact replica of Stawell’s uphill track. A week before Easter 1966 we were there for our final trial, when a dust cloud came down the track into the farm. Such was the secrecy surrounding these things that I was sent to hide in a horse box until it was determined who was coming. It turned out that the visitor was John Haynes who had been trained to win the Gift in 1954 by the Kings. There was no trial for me that evening and I spent close to two hours in the horse box while the other members of the Team did their work, and my existence continued as a secret. I heard later that John was not happy when he found out what had happened.

“Somehow I found myself on eight and three-quarter yards for Stawell in ’66,” Bill tells us.

It was a mark that would change his life.

Even then, the lead-up was far from smooth. “A week before Stawell I had a sore foot and we thought it was bruising,” he says.

On Easter Saturday, he won his heat “in a fast time, after breaking”. There was more at stake than pride. “We had a significant investment with the bookies, and Pat always believed that another runner had been paid to make me break.”

Bill shrugs at the memory. “Not sure if my time was the fastest, but Pat’s attitude was that I should only run as fast as I needed to win.” He did, however, clock the fastest time in the heats of the 75-yard Arthur Postle sprint.

Then came the revelation that would have stopped many runners.

“On Monday in the semi-final what we thought was a bruise turned out to be a broken metatarsal bone in my left foot,” he says. “The money was on and the mark was gone so we had to run on.”

What followed remains one of the grittiest performances in Gift history.

“I have never seen a tape of that final, but I think Tony Polinelli, who had won Bendigo a few weeks before, actually put his nose in front. But first over the line gets the chocolates.”

Bill Howard crossed that line first.

He spent a month in plaster and missed half a football season with Albury in the Ovens and Murray League. “But my foot did come good,” he says matter-of-factly.

The win, as history records, would set the stage for something even bigger the following year. But for now, Bill sits with the memory of the first and how winning the Stawell Gift impacted his life.

“I came from a modest family, grew up and went to school in Wodonga,” he says. 

He had met Cheryl Weidner in October 1964, “she was almost eighteen and I was almost twenty” and they married in 1968. “Because of professional running we did not need to struggle to set ourselves up in important things like a house.”

The confidence gained from Stawell, particularly as his career unfolded, helped shape decisions that took them far beyond their hometown.

“The exposure that came with winning Stawell gave me, and Cheryl, the courage to think outside the square,” he says.

Career opportunities followed, with Dunlop in Newcastle, later Visy and Amcor, and Bill is convinced the Gift played a role.

“I am sure those job offers came because sporting people were seen as knowing how to work hard, and they recognised me. A tick for the Stawell Gift.”

Now retired for two decades, Bill plays golf twice a week and reflects often on that Easter in 1966.

“I have been heard many times saying that the Stawell Athletic Club, and its blue-ribbon race, have had an enormous impact on my own and my family’s life,” he says. “To some extent, I feel indebted. So many doors have opened for me over the years simply because of this race, which would not be there if it were not for the great club which has nourished it over the years.”

Sixty years later, the young man on eight and three-quarter yards still stands at the centre of one of Stawell’s enduring stories – a broken foot, a fearless run, and a moment in the sun that never really faded.

Bill Howard was inducted into the Stawell Gift Hall of Fame and has been awarded legend status by the Stawell Athletic Club.

 

Comments are closed.