by Daley, Paul
These days, few people around Collingwood could tell you where Liverpool Street was, but Park Street is still there. And so, too, is the neat little house that Louie Newby shared with each of her two husbands, both of them Collingwood players.
4
Birkenhead
Tragedy touched William Seddon’s family soon after he moved them from the old family home to Hoddle Street.
In deference to his Mersey-side beginnings, William had proudly named the new family home ‘Birkenhead’, perhaps as a material reminder of how far he had come. As he approached his mid-sixties, he could content himself with the fact that all of his children had been raised in accordance with the laws of his church. All had been baptised and confirmed, and as a family they were a significant presence at the religious services at St Philip’s, which was just a short walk from their Hoddle Street home. All of the younger children attended Sunday school after church; the eldest girls, Ruth and Catherine, both taught Sunday school classes.
William had also provided very well for his expansive family. He had struggled to feed and clothe them at times, to be sure, but having raised his family at a time when Collingwood had the highest child mortality rate in Victoria, he must have constantly given thanks that his children had safely journeyed through the mortal perils of infancy and that many were now healthy adults. He would have been right to feel blessed that none of his children had died.
And then, in a matter of just two months, he lost two daughters: Jane Anne and the family’s eldest child, Ruth, a teacher who had recently become engaged. Of Jane Anne, the St Philip’s Church Record of October 1901 recounts the following:
She was 19 years and 10 months old, and had been a scholar at St Philip’s Sunday school ever since she was able to attend school. She was a member of the Vicar’s Confirmation Class and looked forward with the greatest earnestness and joy to the day of confirmation. But God willed it otherwise and she fell asleep in Christ four days before Confirmation Day. She was buried in the Kew Cemetery … Her confirmation dress was her shroud.
The next edition of the church newsletter carried the grave news that the Seddon family’s grief had been compounded by the unexpected death of Ruth, who, at twenty-six, was like a second, de-facto mother to the younger children, including Doc.
We have again to express our heartfelt sympathy with them in the further loss they have had in the death of their eldest daughter … She had gone away to the country for a rest, which was felt to be needed after the great shock of the death of her sister a few weeks previously. To the great surprise of her relations and friends she became ill, serious symptoms ensued and she died, after bearing great pain patiently and cheerfully. The greatest sympathy is felt with the family and with Mr WA Kidson to whom she had been betrothed not quite a year ago, and to whom she was to be married during the early part of next year … Her Christian life was manifested in the home by the ready and cheerful help and obedience she rendered to her parents.
Doc was busy working in the boot trade of Collingwood, loading footwear from the factories onto wagons attached to dray teams for transportation to shops around Melbourne, but he also found time to focus on his football. He played several seasons for one of Northcote’s junior teams, considered a feeder club for the Collingwood senior list. It was there that Doc was fortunate enough to come under the tutelage of one of the Collingwood greats, Jack Monohan.
There were few tougher or more skilful players during the pioneering days of the Magpies than Jack Monohan. Physically huge by the standards of his day, Monohan, who played for Collingwood from its first match in 1892 until 1907, was regarded as one of the finest marks in the VFA, as well as in the league competition in which he later played. It was said that he had hands like bread plates and long thick fingers. He was also renowned for his long and accurate kick, and he was very fast around the packs, especially for a big man. A hip and shoulder from Monohan, who played in defence, could be a bruising, bloody, bone-crushing experience. There is a famous photograph of Monohan that testifies to his daunting physicality. Taken in Collingwood’s simple dressing rooms, where there was a hook for each player’s towel and a bench for his bag, the image depicts the legendary trainer Wal Lee giving the naked Monohan a post-training rub-down, the player’s giant hips, thighs and feet on display. Monohan looks nonplussed, even angry at being photographed in such a vulnerable state.
As Doc climbed through the ranks at Northcote and later up the list of the Collingwood District team, he was constantly compared with Monohan, particularly in regard to his occasionally inelegant but brutally efficient style of play, his long and accurate kick, and his capacity for taking a strong, high mark. And physically, they were not dissimilar. Monohan, at his peak, stood well over 6 feet, while Doc was a genuine Collingwood six-footer—that is, his height was closer to 5 feet 11 inches, but, as was the club practice at the time regarding its shorter players, Collingwood overstated his height to make him seem bigger (and, by implication, stronger) than he actually was.
It remains a curiosity that, despite their similarities as players and the skills that Monohan helped the young Seddon to hone while he was coaching the junior teams, Doc spent a lifetime expressing his personal disquiet about Monohan and his family. But then this is a story with many curiosities at its heart, including the fact that Doc’s daughter Shirley would one day marry a Monohan. (Doc would make an exception for his son-in-law, Jim. The pair got on famously.)
At eighteen, Doc began working at the Williamstown depot of the British Imperial Oil Company; born when the Shell Transport Company and Royal Dutch Petroleum merged, British Imperial quickly became the backbone of the transport industry in the newly federated Australia, supplying fuel to farmers and so making the long-haul road transportation of their produce economically viable. Now a young man, Doc was broad-shouldered, tall and square-jawed, with a crop of straight dark hair and deep-set eyes. But while certainly physically striking, perhaps even imposing, his slightly protruding lower lip prevented him from being conventionally handsome. As a child, his steely gaze had often been interpreted as a sign of arrogance, but as a young man it spoke more of social inhibition.
Meanwhile, as a young woman, Louie exuded a stop-them-in-the-street radiance and beauty. Her cheekbones were set high beneath her mother’s brown, almond-shaped eyes in an angular face, which also featured a strong, aquiline nose and was framed with a mane of chestnut hair. She was tall, small around the waist but broad-shouldered and full-bosomed, a frame that served her well on the cricket pitch at Mayor’s Park in Hoddle Street—she would later represent Victoria in the Combined Churches Women’s Cricket Team. Louie and her younger sister May were always immaculately dressed, turned out in the latest fashions, as they made their way between the boutiques and dressmakers at the Paris end of Collins Street.
‘Louisa was tall and a very smart lady. She was very elegant and dressed really well always,’ recalls her daughter-in-law, Dorothy Seddon. ‘Not so much if she was working in the kitchen, but if she went up Smith Street shopping she’d have her gloves and her hat and be very very well dressed.’
Although less enthusiastic about going to church than their old neighbours the Seddons, the Newbys still had a very firm view concerning where they fitted into Collingwood society. They considered themselves to be slightly superior, socially and economically, to many of the predominantly big Catholic families of the Flat. There is every indication that this was a characterisation that Louie, as a glamorous young woman, happily applied to herself. And it would certainly go some way to defining her personality as well as her approach to life as she aged.
Louisa and May Newby were raised to be ladies, in the fervent hope that they would transcend Collingwood’s narrow borders and attain a high level of the Melbourne society beyond. As such, the thoroughly decent and dependable but poor and perhaps even a little lacklustre Doc may not quite have seemed Louie’s equal as she neared her twenties. The
pair did not seem a match made in heaven—certainly not as far as Louie’s parents, Fred and Frances, were concerned.
May Newby. Seddon family collection
But then again, from the time she was a tomboy in Liverpool Street, Louie had always had a taste for adven-ture. And she may not always have been the perfect lady that Fred and Frances worked so very hard to bring her up to be. If the Doc Seddon whom she had known since childhood represented a dependable, steady and safe—albeit predictable and rather prosaic—romantic option, then the man who was about to enter her life must have seemed utterly exotic and compellingly mysterious.
That man was Percy Rowe, also known as Paddy Rowan—though perhaps he was someone else altogether. To this day, nobody is really too sure.
One thing is certain: both Doc and Louie were inexorably drawn to him. So much so, it seems, that Doc all but pushed the girl whom he had been sweet on his entire life—though often, to himself, indefinably so—into this stranger’s arms.
5
An Enigmatic Arrival
Nobody knows for sure when Paddy Rowan/Percy Rowe alighted at Melbourne’s Spencer Street Station after catching the train down from his childhood home in St Arnaud, near Bendigo in central Victoria. It seems likely that he arrived in the bustling, rapidly growing city some time in late 1909, after the end of the Bendigo Football League season. He had played with distinction for some years for South Bendigo and, like most young bush blokes with any football talent, he would have been aiming to make the list at one of the big city clubs.
The tall and athletically built 21-year-old had intense dark eyes, wavy black hair and something of the magnetic aura of an early screen idol. He would not have escaped attention on the streets of Melbourne for too long, which must have suited him perfectly. Besides intending to make a success of himself on the footy field, he also sought fame on the local boxing circuit, which had just entered its heyday after the opening in Richmond a couple of years earlier of John Wren’s Athletic Pavilion.
After the forced closure of his illegal Johnston Street tote in 1908, Wren had shifted his focus to sports promotion, especially boxing and horseracing. At the Pavilion he showcased the very best of Australian professional boxers and even managed to lure some international stars to Melbourne. But he also wanted to give aspiring amateurs the opportunity to show what they were made of. So Wren established a district boxing championship that was based on the VFL club model—each young man, ideally followed by a legion of fans, represented a given suburb in the ring in a fight against another boxer from a rival district. Wren, by then a multimillionaire who had moved from Collingwood across the river to Kew, put up modest purses for the winners and staged the matches in-between professional ‘main event’ bouts.
Hundreds of boys from the bush, like Percy, came to Melbourne to join the fight circuit as the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close. The city was bursting with fight venues at the time. Many hotels hosted boxing matches out the back if they had the room, while town halls drew hundreds of spectators to their fights. Boxing opportunities were there for the courageous and the foolhardy to take.
It was not unusual for a boxer to fight under an assumed name; some even fought under three or four names. The reason for this was simple: boxers would often bet on themselves. If a boxer had a fearsome reputation under one name, he would sometimes box under another so that he could win longer odds.
There is no doubt that Percy was a formidable boxer; his prowess in the ring as a soldier would prove that. But there is no record of him having won any major professional or amateur titles under either of his two names—Percy Rowe or Paddy Rowan—in civilian life. Because the VFL scouts had already noticed him, the young forward from South Bendigo might have safely assumed it would only be a matter of time until he was asked to train with one of the big clubs. In the meantime, he had the security of a full-time position with one of the country’s most reputable and quickly growing companies to underwrite his ambitions and dreams—besides his reputation as one of the most talented players in the Bendigo League, and his chutzpah and ambition in the boxing ring, Percy had stepped off the train with the promise of a labourer’s job at the Williamstown depot of the British Imperial Oil Company.
Percy certainly had every reason to feel as if the stars were beginning to align for him. The stark reality was that his talent and drive had represented a ticket out of a terrible rural poverty trap that had ensnared two generations of his family since his peasant forebears had migrated from rural England and Ireland in the 1850s.
Percy Rowe was the eldest of fourteen children who would eventually be born to Charlotte Dobson. Charlotte, the daughter of a local farmer from the hamlet of Kooreh, was barely nineteen when her first boy was born. She was alone in a tiny, ramshackle, dirt-floored farmhouse at Kooreh when she bore the little boy, and she could not have foreseen a bright future for either herself or the child. Hers was already shaping as a life of deprivation and intense physical hardship; terrible sadness would also stalk Charlotte as she later endured the premature deaths of half of her children, to disease borne of hunger, to mishap and to war.
Her eldest child would shine, though all too briefly, as the star in the otherwise joyless, disappointing and mundane struggle of her life. She named him Percy Edward. It was six weeks before Charlotte’s grandmother saw fit to inform the authorities in nearby St Arnaud of the boy’s arrival.
Melbourne, then, presented the adult Percy with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape the terrible predicament bequeathed to him at birth. If anything can propel a poor man to success, it is the fear of returning to the place from which he has escaped. And so Percy—in the guise of Paddy Rowan—set about making every post a winner.
There was a very obvious element of mystery about Percy, not least in relation to his name. Despite being known to his family since birth as Percy Edward, or just plain Percy, and to those who claimed to know his true identity as Percy Rowe, he chose Paddy Rowan as his Melbourne nom de plume. It was the name that he would use as he tried to make it as a boxer and by which he would be known in his far more successful career as a champion professional footballer. Later, as a soldier, he was known by a combination of the two names.
But why did he first change his name?
Around the Collingwood Football Club, legend has always had it that Percy Rowe arrived in Melbourne in 1911 and played under the assumed name of Paddy Rowan because he hadn’t yet received the clearance from South Bendigo to play for the Magpies. However, Percy spent at least one full football season living and working in Melbourne before he made the senior list at Collingwood early in the 1911 season. Legend also has it that Percy fought for Wren under the name Paddy because he did not want his mother to know that he was a boxer. But it is most unlikely that, with so many other children to care for, Charlotte would have worried unduly about her son entering the ring—especially if it enabled him to help support her ever-growing family.
One of the most prized possessions in Charlotte’s humble rural household, which took pride of place there for the best part of twenty years, was a silver tea and coffee service. The silverware, representing the prize for the Phillip’s Trophy for the ‘Most Popular Collingwood Player’, was awarded to her son in 1913, during his short but meteoric career with the Magpies. It was inscribed with the name ‘P E Rowan’. Had Percy really wanted to hide any evidence of his boxing from his mother, then surely he would not have presented her with a trophy awarded in the assumed name under which he both fought and played football. And in any event, by late 1911, when he played in the VFL Grand Final, the name PE Rowan was prominent in press write-ups and on a football player card that featured a photograph of the young man.
The idea that the Paddy Rowan identity was created specifically by the Collingwood Football Club, or by the mysterious young man himself, simply to fool his mother and the club officials at South Bendigo, just isn’t credible. The nom de
plume is, however, absolutely central to this story. For our names and our parentage are at the core of who we are. Perhaps no factor is more critical to each of us—to our very humanity—than our ability to identify precisely who we are and where we came from.
An early football card of ‘Paddy Rowan’. Rowe family collection
The fact that Percy took to the oval under an assumed name has become central to the mythology surrounding one of the Magpies’ most profoundly talented early players. That he was willing to forego receiving on-ground accolades under his real name indicates that he was a supremely driven and self-confident character, and that success, to him, was reward in itself.
Today, almost a century after his death, some of his grandchildren refer whimsically and affectionately to the man they never knew as, simply, Percy Edward. For none are more mindful than them that the Percy Edward Rowe who played for Collingwood as Paddy Rowan may, in fact, have been someone else entirely. The lingering doubts about his true identity have poignant implications for their own. For who are they, if Paddy Rowan was not in fact Percy Edward Rowe?
6
The Collingwood Method
Doc and Percy first met in the bustling bayside yards of the British Imperial Oil Company, where lorries chugged through the gates to be loaded with barrels of fuel oil and then dispatched across the state. As a man of twenty-two, Doc was now familiar with the mechanics of the vehicles that transported the fuel to farms and to petrol stations, where it powered the cars that were quickly proliferating on the state’s roads.