Collingwood
Page 1
For my mother, Margaret Daley, and for her father—my grandfather—William Meskill Bourke, a lifelong supporter and patron of the Collingwood Football Club and top Richmond goal kicker (1908 and 1909).
Foreword
Eddie McGuire
For a country as young as Australia, even more so a city with a relatively short history such as Melbourne, it is amazing that most people have but a cursory, if any, knowledge of what life was like in the boom and bust times before we became the ‘the world’s most liveable city’.
Maybe it is because, like me, so many of the people of Melbourne are first and second generation Australians drawn to this place for a better future, the hope of escaping the past.
Maybe because the first half of last century were times better forgotten.
Two world wars and a Great Depression.
When fortunes and lives were ripped apart forever.
Instead of a rich oral history of the times, sadly it became a time ‘better not spoken about’.
In a city as sports mad as Melbourne it should come as no surprise that while not even for a million dollars could you find anyone who could recount the Premiers of Victoria and the stories of their lives, most pubs can still produce a sporting historian who can rattle off the Premiers of the VFL from that time, with Melbourne Cup winners thrown in for good measure.
It was the time of Federation, street gangs, massive class distinctions, sectarianism, myth making and legend creation in equal doses.
When icons were created from the gloom: Bradman, Phar Lap, Collingwood.
The Anzac legend.
Life being played out in fiercely tribal suburbs or faraway battlefields.
Their loves and hates, pride and shame.
An amazing time for a new big city on the other side of the world from civilisation.
In searching to rebuild my Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, I was drawn to try and rediscover the essence of what Collingwood meant when the club became ‘big’.
Why did this football club mean so much to so many?
How did this club, beset with massive highs and at times seemingly endless lows continue not only to survive, but to prosper?
To me, all roads led back to the early part of last century.
Long before billion dollar media rights and mass coverage, an institution needed to touch the soul of people to grow.
And so the ethos at Collingwood re-emerged: ‘If you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing.’
Back then the football club provided pride and success to the most lowly. It gave food and free entry to the ‘susso’ workers, a bright light in an otherwise bleak life, the stands at Victoria Park built with the skills of the unemployed of the area. Workmates in the boot factories and tanneries would leave the factory floor normal working men at mid-day Saturday and become supermen two hours later, triumphantly striding across Victoria Park.
Collingwood went from being a by-word for poverty and destitution to standing for the black and white of the Mighty Magpies, the most loved and feared (some would say hated) outfit in sport.
In many ways the football club provided the suburb with another black and white conundrum: How could a suburb of such pity provoke such jealousy?
Yes, the Pies were successful, they did things the Collingwood way, but it was the feeling that when you played the Magpies, you not only took on the players, but everyone in the crowd as well. As the song says: ‘Side by side we stick together.’
Doc Seddon is a famous name at Collingwood. Anyone who has looked at the premiership photos in the social club at Victoria Park or the Westpac Centre can’t help but notice a strong, handsome man who is very much to the fore in that period of the club.
When I first discovered his ‘lucky’ horseshoe, sent back from the Somme to give the 1917 team some good cheer, it reminded me not of some mythical figure but of a young Melbourne man of any generation, the type who proudly wears his footy jumper at tourist attractions around the world or goes to extraordinary lengths to watch or listen to a big game back in Melbourne from the other side of the globe.
Only this time the Doc was checking in from one of the worst slaughters in human history.
He was fighting in the khaki in France, but his thoughts were very much with the black and white stripes in Collingwood.
That he mentions his old captain Dan Minogue in his letter, as if he has just seen him outside the Tote in Johnston Street, adds to the innocence and stoicism.
His mateship with Percy Rowe/Paddy Rowan and his passion for Louise form a great love story, its tortuous path a tragedy finally brought to life by a generation trying to find itself and understand where we have all come from.
I once described the Collingwood of today as being representative of a concept, not a suburb.
Indeed as the population of Melbourne has exploded there are many ‘Collingwoods’ these days.
But the ideal that something is more important as a collective—that no matter your socio-economic position, no matter where you are from, if you are Collingwood you are part of something greater—is as relevant today as it was then.
In Collingwood: A Love Story, Paul Daley eloquently pulls together the strands of a romantic boys’ own annual story of what today would salaciously be described as a ‘love triangle’, but digs beyond the clichés to expose the brutal realities of idyllic mateship crossed with war, poverty, tragedy and broken hearts.
It is a unique Collingwood story, for every success at Magpie land has been built on hardship and setback, yet the indomitable Collingwood spirit lives on.
This book provides an insight into the world of innercity Melbourne and what we refer to as a more simple time, when in reality it was a far more brutal and complicated existence.
It is a look back at times and people long forgotten, but whose deeds live on to this day, every time we bow our heads on Anzac Day or when the famous black and white stripes of Collingwood run on to an AFL ground.
Contents
Foreword by Eddie McGuire
Author’s Note
Prologue
1 The Flat
2 Paper Football Dreaming
3 Liverpool Street
4 Birkenhead
5 An Enigmatic Arrival
6 The Collingwood Method
7 When Percy Met Louie
8 The Call to Serve
9 A Pre-match Wedding
10 The Black and Gold
11 The Great Carlton Conspiracy
12 St Arnaud
13 Twenty Rounds in Egypt
14 An Absence of Glory
15 A Death in the Woods
16 Two Men, One Grave
17 Send Him My Love
18 A Talisman or Two
19 Home
20 Between the Cracks
21 Promises Kept
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Index
Author’s Note
The story of Malcolm ‘Doc’ Seddon, Louie Newby and Percy Rowe is true. Their friendships and their loves, their footballing triumphs and bitter defeats, their war-time tribulations, all happened in the space of a few square kilometres around Collingwood from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, and in Egypt and on the European Western Front from late 1915 to 1918.
Much of this story is based on the handed-down oral histories and family tales of their descendants, the Rowes and Seddons, and on newspaper articles, military records and football club histories and archival records. Collingwood: A Love Story is not intended as an official history of the Collingwood Football Club o
r of the units of the Australian Imperial Force to which the Seddon and Rowe belonged. I was drawn to look behind one of the club’s fondest legends, to examine the lives of the trio central to it, and to reconstruct the human story, at once both remarkable and prosaic, that stands at its core.
The resulting story is largely one of non-fiction. I have, however, used some techniques of fiction in four distinct sections of the book—set in a different typeface—because, despite exhaustive research, there was little in the way of correspondence or diary entries that could provide the quotidian detail that brings such stories to life. A fire at the Seddon house in Abbotsford many years ago is believed to have destroyed much of the quotable material. But while the dialogue is fictional, the events did happen as they have been presented—at least according to family legend. And where possible I have made the dialogue faithful to how the characters were said to have spoken, thought, and viewed each other and the things and people around them.
I hope these passages achieve their goal—to enhance the reader’s experience of a narrative that we can believe in, simply because it is true.
Paul Daley
2011
Prologue
A long time ago in Liverpool Street, a small road made of dirt and gravel that is no longer there, in the most downtrodden part of colonial Australia’s wealthiest city, a boy and a girl were born just a few doors apart. Brought into life on the cusp of the 1890s depression, in a disease-ridden slum, the boy and the girl grew into strong and determined children. Together, they explored the fields of inner-city Melbourne, which rolled down to its majestic, murky river. They played cricket and they kicked a paper football and they dreamed.
As kids, Doc and Louie were never far apart. But their bond was always, supposedly, more than just the ordinary kinship that grows between children who live cheek-to-cheek in a close community, where front doors are always open and neighbours are as good as family. They had a kind of childish love for each other from the start. Perhaps they were even made for each other—destined.
Or so it was said. At least, so it was said to be said.
Today, the living have only fleeting memories of Doc and Louie as elderly, doting grandparents approaching the ends of their lives, contentedly rattling about their small weatherboard cottage, in the City of Collingwood still, just a stone’s throw from where each was born. Nobody who knew them as children, as teenagers or even as courting lovers, is still alive.
But their story has floated along with time and been passed down, inevitably embellished along the way, through generations of family and acquaintances. This is all that is left of the extraordinary love between Doc and Louie, and their shared passion for the dynamic and uplifting game of Australian Rules football, and the tribal and proud club that defined so much of their lives together.
A good deal less is known about the pseudonymous ‘Paddy’ who arrived in Collingwood from the Victorian scrub country like a blazing comet. Besides boxing under his assumed name for John Wren—Collingwood’s enigmatic, all-pervasive slum millionaire, community patron and sports promoter—Paddy was also a star footballer whose dash and panache made him one of the most exciting and revered players of his era.
For a few brief years, Paddy became the centre of Doc and Louie’s lives.
Doc and Paddy played together for Collingwood, where they formed a lethally symbiotic partnership as followers around the ruck. When Doc introduced Paddy to Louie, everything changed. She didn’t stand a chance. Neither did Doc. Paddy swept her off her feet. Somehow they all seemed to remain friends.
Or so the story goes.
Then the boys sailed off to war. And everything changed again.
Malcolm ‘Doc’ Seddon, about 1915. Seddon family collection
Searching for Paddy today is like chasing a phantom. The club stat-istics, a few fading photographs and some bits and pieces in his old Army file testify to his vitality, to his on-field brilliance and, not least, to the impetuous, impulsive and pugnacious character that so compelled and attracted Doc and Louie.
Having stood at the foot of the tombstone on the frozen foreign battlefield where he is buried, having walked the trench line where he was fatally injured, and having spoken at length to his descendants, for me, Paddy, who was also known as Percy, remains an ambiguous and elusive character. Just when his real identity seemed beyond question, old stories—again, handed down from one generation of a family to the next—cast new mystery upon it.
Men like Percy and Doc who, each in their own way, gave so much of their lives to their game, are the manna of football club legends. Footy clubs are built on such legends and myths, on stories that just might be true—and might just as easily be false.
But this one is largely true. It also has a rare and important quality: although it is set in the testosterone-driven worlds of football and war, at a time when blokes were blokes and females were too often treated as chattels, a woman, Louie, stands at the heart of it.
In the fast-moving contemporary world of Australian Rules football, in which loyalty and a sense of history too often come a distant second to salary caps, the national draft and lucrative contracts, the story of Doc, Percy and Louie is being evoked around the club that they loved and served.
When Doc was fighting on the Somme in 1917, he sent a horseshoe back to his club to bring it luck for the 1917 VFL Grand Final. It became synonymous with the story of everything that happened to Doc and the two people dearest to him. Today, as a resurgent Collingwood seeks further inspiration in its gritty genesis as a club that served Melbourne’s greatest slum and forged a glorious era of four premierships in a row during the Great Depression, the horseshoe is sometimes taken into the team’s change rooms before a match. While the stretching and warm-ups are completed, while boots are tied and knotted thighs kneaded, the legend behind the horseshoe is yet again summoned in the hope that the players find motivation in their club’s rich lode of sacrifice, mateship and courage.
But while the horseshoe is a prized and sentimental charm down at Collingwood, a tangible relic of a long-gone beloved son, its symbolism is overshadowed by the power of the postwar instalment in the tale of Doc and Louie and Percy.
At the close of World War I, Doc returned to Collingwood—the suburb and the football club—much the worse for wear, having been wounded and, according to family and club legend, repeatedly gassed. When Doc again took to the field, he played commendably—sometimes brilliantly, but characteristically solidly, especially for a veteran. He was the linchpin in Collingwood’s 1919 Premiership team and in its finals squads during the two seasons that followed. Doc went on to be a driving force as chairman of selectors through the club’s glory days of the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the Great Depression that decimated his already poverty-stricken suburb, and as it struggled to recover in the 1930s and 1940s, he was also an exemplar of benevolence. He carted firewood for the poor and later, as the mayor of Collingwood, he sometimes, on behalf of his good friend Wren, put a quid or two into the pockets of the unemployed men who could not feed their families.
The relationship between Doc, Percy and Louie has come to embody the spirit of a club that is simultaneously revered and hated. For some, it is a shorthand anecdote for a club ethos that revolves around a type of utilitarian brotherhood—a tacit understanding that success on the ground stems from sacrifice and philanthropy off it. Some even call this ‘the Collingwood method’. Collingwood haters will disparage this as rubbish; Collingwood insiders know it to be true.
In matters of the human heart, of course, nothing is ever simple or straightforward. Fairytales don’t come true; life has a way of seeing to that. And in any event, those who want the fairytale invariably turn their backs on more complex, human, gritty and sometimes unpalatable truths. And so it is with these three.
Louie and Percy were married, but briefly. Doc and Louie had a long life together. Throughout it, Percy mus
t surely have been with them, too—in their memories, and personified by the son he did not live long enough to meet. This man who burned so brightly for Doc and Louie for such a short time surely endured as a lingering presence, a ghostly stencil, perhaps, that overlaid the sharper detail of their lives.
In her middle age, Louie spoke only occasionally of Percy. Doc mentioned him even less. Doc and Louie had effectively become Collingwood royalty, but they were also intensely private, fiercely protective of what they had made together. Neither was given to sharing introspection, even among family. They never publicly ventured anywhere near the questions that outsiders, friends and family members surely must have wanted answered.
Questions such as, how does a man feel when he is in love with a woman who chooses his best friend instead?
Why did Louie marry a man who stood to die in a war?
How did her love for each man differ?
Did Doc ever resent the child that his best friend effectively bequeathed him? And was he ever beset with jealousy over what his mate had once fleetingly, passionately shared with the woman whom he saw as his lifelong companion?
Like most legends, the tale of Doc, Louie and Percy is defined by its simplicity—by an absence of emotional and human detail. Percy dances around it and the true stories that underpin it just as deftly as he once might have danced upon the canvas at Wren’s boxing stadium in West Melbourne.
That said, despite having been dead for almost a century, he has left clues here and hints there as to the person he was. So, too, have Doc and Louie.
It all began in a street that no longer exists. But Liverpool Street was definitely there, once. And it is where I begin my search for them all.
1
The Flat
Rats flourished and undertakers prospered. But rarely could the same be said for the grimy and often hungry, barefoot children. One of the more telling aspects of life on ‘the Flat’, as Collingwood was referred to—disparagingly throughout the rest of Melbourne but with pride by its own people—was that a place that had grown so rapidly, so monumentally on the back of footwear production for the colony of Victoria, could scarcely afford to shoe its own young.