by Daley, Paul
However, this was also the season during which the combination of Seddon and Rowe around the ruck would become a mainstay of the Collingwood game and render them two of the club’s toughest, most exciting and most popular players. The shorter Percy would play second ruck, while the taller and more physically formidable Seddon would shepherd his mate—that is, run quickly alongside him and use his body as a shield to keep opposing players away.
Doc was an early master of the ‘hip and shoulder’, which, as its name suggests, was not so much a tackle as it was a move designed, by virtue of speed and the exponent’s body mass, to flatten an opponent. Seddon, it is said, had a particularly short fuse when it came to ‘pretty boy players’ from rival clubs, and he would always seek to exact swift revenge if an opponent picked on or harmed one of the Magpies’ smaller men.
Doc’s full-frontal, physically robust approach to the game won him a reputation among other clubs as a hard man to be reckoned with. It also earned him the occasional disapproval of the more righteous football writers of the day, despite the fact that then, as today, they probably enjoyed nothing more than a match that descended into a wild melee.
‘Seddon did much that was good for his side, and a great many things that were unquestionably neither good nor fair,’ a Melbourne newspaper observed of one of his games. ‘He was the lucky one of the 36 in so frequently escaping the umpire’s notice.’ It was a somewhat prescient observation in light of the fact that, many years later, Doc’s career would effectively end on the eve of a grand final when a tribunal decided to suspend him for striking a Carlton man behind play.
A caricature of Doc, the on-field hard man. Seddon family collection
There can be little doubt that Doc’s tough reputation preceded him onto the ground. Melbourne cartoonists fre-quently depicted a black-and-white caricature of him routinely sharpening his elbows before a match. But while his rough play was grist to his critics, down at Collingwood it was seen as testimony to his commitment to the team and to winning.
Towards the end of Doc’s football career, the Herald reflected:
In acting as a shield for the tip ruckman, Seddon had to be fit enough to cover a lot of ground and strong enough to take a physical battering … Seddon has always been one of the followers of the team and when ‘resting’ on the half forward line, and the strong points of his game are skilful high marking and long kicking. For years he and Pat Rowan formed Collingwood’s second ruck, and it was then the usual practice of a follower to run the full quarter.
Standing 6ft high, weighing 12st 10lbs, and with plenty of stamina, he can best be described as a ‘nuisance’ to an opposing follower. Physical fitness with him is a fetish. He glories in his training work and does not know the taste of strong drink. On the other hand he is a heavy smoker and is, therefore, a living disclaimer of the oft-repeated medical opinion that cigarettes wreck an athlete by injuring his wind.
If Doc was the tempestuous on-field enforcer or hit man, then Percy was the flamboyant workhorse, if not the occasional show pony, whose leaps in the ruck and light-footed, weaving runs on the ball drew gasps from a crowd.
The 1913 season was a better one than the previous year’s for Collingwood, which finished fifth on the league ladder—Percy was awarded the coveted Phillip’s Trophy for the ‘Most Popular Collingwood Footballer’. The team’s resurgence continued the following year, when it managed to finish third despite losing badly to Fitzroy in a semi-final. By now, Doc and Percy had, along with the omnipotent Dick Lee, the courageous centre half-back Dan Minogue and a few others, proven themselves central to the team’s method. Both men were spoken of as potential future captains.
Then, in a match against Carlton on 25 April 1914, exactly a year before the Gallipoli landings, Lee took what was probably the first speccie, or spectacular mark, to be recorded on camera. He is nowhere to be seen in the photographer’s earlier frames as Collingwood’s number 26 lines up for a mark. But suddenly there is Lee, airborne, his knees level with the heads of the players around him after catapulting off the back of number 26, who clearly thought the ball was about to fall into his hands. Doc—Collingwood’s number 26—would talk about that mark for the rest of his life, about how he had been immortalised in a less than flattering fashion in a photograph of one of the greatest Australian Rules marks of all time.
Doc’s grandson, Allan Monohan, says, ‘It’s one of the only photographs of him I’ve seen where he didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth, that one where he “slipped” and Dicky Lee took that amazing mark. Yeah, slipped! That’s what he reckoned.’
Dick Lee was renowned for his speed and agility, which were manifest in his startling ability to stop suddenly when in possession of the ball and then turn quickly to blindside his opponents. His career was plagued by serious injury and he often played in terrible pain, but for eighteen seasons he remained a tremendous high mark who could kick a goal from almost any angle.
The 1914 VFL finals were played in the shadow of World War I, which Australia had entered through its joint declaration of war with Britain against the Axis powers on 4 August. Amid increasing talk of conscription, and with thousands of men, including many football players, volunteering for service in the First Australian Imperial Force, to fight in a war that everyone believed would be done within a year, the VFL’s ten clubs pondered how it would all impact upon the next season.
Doc and Percy would be among a handful of Collingwood players wearing khaki by the time the 1915 finals series began. But they would still manage to play in what turned out to be one of Collingwood’s more memorable grand finals against Carlton. It was a game that would add another bitter dimension to the increasingly hateful rivalry between the Magpies and the Blues. Even today, some Collingwood officials and fans still talk about the premiership that Carlton stole from the Magpies.
As young and single men, life for Doc and Percy revolved around training and match days. All of the Collingwood players were paid equally for their services: £1 a match, with boots and guernseys supplied. But other incentives were steadily introduced to reward the more committed members of the team, and to lessen the temptation to move to the wealthier clubs that could—and often did—offer Magpies players significant inducements to defect. And so, in 1911 Percy and Doc were each given financial bonuses for regularly attending training; the following year, Percy was paid a further £1 1s in acknowledgement of his commitment.
When the football season finished, both men maintained their fitness by playing for the Collingwood Football Players’ Cricket Team. Doc was the better cricketer. Just as he was renowned for his physicality on the football ground, he used his size and his speed with maximum efficiency against his opponents on the pitch. He quickly drew the attention of cricket writers during his very first season in 1911 and was apparently also noticed by the Victorian selectors because of his pace-bowling prowess.
‘Good fast bowlers are scarce, and one is badly needed for the Victorian eleven,’ the Herald commented in 1912. The paper went on to say that it believed that
Collingwood has at last discovered in M. Seddon the man for the position … Though 24 years of age, Seddon had never played cricket before last season, when he went into a Collingwood junior team. He at once began to develop as a fast bowler, and as he had not previously made any study of or had any experience in the game the idea was formed that he must be a true natural bowler. However, he was permitted to peg away with the junior team. This season Seddon has gone on improving, and so far he has secured 47 wickets for 264, which gives an average of 5.60.
It was an enormously impressive bowling average that, had Doc seriously pursued the game of cricket, could have paved the way for state and possibly even Test contention. So impressive was Doc that the Herald compared him, at this early stage, to the revered Jack Ryder, the astoundingly talented Collingwood cricketer who would go on to play state cricket for Victoria and Test matches for Australia:
Seddon is about the same height as his club mate, Jack Ryder, but he is more solidly built, and he bowls faster than Ryder. Of course Seddon still has much to learn, but it does seem likely that Collingwood has unearthed a bowler of more than ordinary possibilities.
The burley Doc’s prowess on the cricket pitch in 1911 and 1912 was once compared to that of the Collingwood—and Australian Test—great, Jack Ryder. Seddon family collection
However, Doc, it is said, never put quite the same energy into his cricket as he did his football. He viewed the game simply as a good way of staying fit over summer and, not least, as a way of maintaining contact with his footy teammates during the off-season. Besides, if Percy played, then so, too, would he.
Doc and Percy’s social lives relied on their status as footballers, including at the dances held at the Collingwood Town Hall, which were the usual venues for courtship between the suburb’s young men and women. From its earliest days, the Collingwood Football Club had encouraged women to attend Victoria Park matches. The men who pulled on the black-and-white guernsey for the Magpies inevitably became their idols, and then, as today, women sought to meet them in a social context. And so it was that Doc and Percy were stars on the streets of their suburb.
Louie Newby, who still lived at her parents’ house in Park Street and worked in the local boot trade, would not have had to try at all had meeting Collingwood players been her desire. A regular as a child and then as a teenager at football training and Victoria Park matches, she had known a number of the local players since she was a girl. Of course, she knew none better than Doc. But while Louie and Doc had remained close as teenagers, they had drifted slightly apart upon reaching their twenties, becoming more tentative about each other.
They still socialised together, almost certainly at football club functions and at the famed town hall dances. But most of Doc’s non-working hours were monopolised by football and, after 1911, cricket. And shyness marred Doc socially, especially with women, whereas Louie seems to have been more emotionally and socially forward. Doc was also a devoted non-drinker at a time when alcohol lubricated Collingwood’s social engine room. Most people drank at club functions (often way too much), and the players did, too, when they got together. Percy enjoyed a drink. So, too, did Louie.
There is a sense among many of her surviving relatives that Louie was not, as a woman in her early twenties, content with all that Collingwood offered her—that she had social ambitions that extended beyond Smith Street. Nobody who had been raised in Collingwood could truly be criticised for that. It is understandable, then, that Percy Rowe might have proved irresistible. While Louie’s childhood boyfriend, Doc, was certainly famous in Johnston Street, the handsome, the popular and the dashing Percy Rowe, the winner of the Phillip’s Trophy, was really a star of his day. There was also the fact that Louie and Percy, with their exceptionally athletic physiques and their perfect features, were both striking examples of their respective genders. Both exuded physical confidence and style. Today, their descendants will tell you that their physical and emotional attraction was deep and immediate. It is easy to believe.
Human instinct tells us that only one thing stood between the would-be lovers: Doc. But his stoicism, humility and shyness made him difficult to read in the face of the very obvious magnetism between the two people who were central to his world.
It is said that, while Doc had loved Louie and she had loved him too from an early age, and that there was a certain fatefulness about their relationship, sometimes it is the best and most enduring friendships that are built upon such prosaic familiarity, whereas the most passionate love is sparked by exoticism and a desire for the new.
It can’t have been easy for Doc. He had always loved Louie. And he loved his mate Percy, too. But he must have known that he couldn’t possibly compete with Percy for Louie’s affections.
In the end, it seems that he did what he thought was the best thing to do under the circumstances: he actively drew Louie and Percy together. Not that they needed much encouragement.
8
The Call to Serve
Few people who lived in Collingwood, or who played for the football team that represented it, rushed to serve the Empire by volunteering for the First Australian Imperial Force after their country went to war in August 1914. Collingwood was certainly strongly, though not predominantly, Irish Catholic and working class at the outbreak of the war, filled with first-, second- and third-generation Irish migrants whose depth of feeling about independence in the old country for the most part outweighed their loyalties to England. But while sectarianism, especially at its interface with federal politics, was a major factor in how the City of Collingwood—and the rest of Melbourne—responded to the recruitment effort, and to the later, even more-divisive question of conscription, religion was probably far less important when it came to determining the stance of the Collingwood Football Club.
The rather humdrum truth is that sectarianism was always far less of a reality within the club itself—and certainly among the players on the list—than it was among the team’s vocal supporters. Down at Victoria Park, the Magpies supporters might have ostracised and parodied the posh Protestant ‘wowsers’ of Essendon and St Kilda. But a Collingwood man was a Collingwood man if he wore the black-and-white guernsey, and it made no difference to the coach, to the president (fewer club presidents have been Catholic than not), to the selectors or, indeed, to most of the team if a player was a Catholic, a Protestant or a Baptist.
In all, about 3000 men from the City of Collingwood joined up during the four years of the Great War. One in every ten of them died in the trenches of Gallipoli, amid the heat and the flies and the terrible dust of the Middle East, or in the miserable quagmire of the Somme or Flanders. Only three of the twenty-seven players on the Magpies’ senior list volunteered in the last few months of 1914. The following year, the Collingwood Football Club’s contribution to the war effort was only slightly more impressive, with eight men deciding to sign up—among them, Percy and Doc.
The 1915 VFL season began on Saturday 24 April, the day before the terrible botched landings by Australian troops on a lonely stretch of peninsula off Turkey’s Dardanelles. It was a place that few in Collingwood or elsewhere in Australia would have known much about, if anything at all, but its name—Gallipoli—would soon become seared into the collective antipodean consciousness as a synonym for tragic military misadventure and the criminal ineptitude of British command. It would be some weeks before news made its way to Australia of the fatal mishap at Gallipoli, and the horror that continued to unfold upon its no-man’s-land of sharp ridges, trenches, narrow plateaus and isolated shoreline. When word of the Australian losses at Gallipoli did finally reach home, the psychological impact and practical implications were profound: it was now clear that the war would not be over quickly or with few casualties, as so many had anticipated, and that Australia increasingly would be called upon—indeed, pressured—to contribute its men and materials to the Imperial war machine.
By mid-1915, at least as far as the Australian public was concerned, an inglorious defeat on the Dardanelles, coupled with the indignity of a covert retreat just before Christmas, had not yet been contemplated, let alone become a foregone conclusion. But enough was now known about Gallipoli to seriously focus the minds of the young men who might be considering volunteering for the Imperial force. Despite the best efforts of the recruiters to paint enlistment and fighting the enemy as a glorious prospect, war against the Germans and the Turks was quite obviously not some sporting contest to be undertaken lightly. If you enlisted to fight, you did so knowing that there was a fair chance you would be injured or even killed.
It is worth bearing in mind that this was well before the most epic and bloody battles of the Somme and Flanders, such as those at Fromelles and Mouquet Farm, where Australian losses, when compared on a daily basis, far eclipsed those at Gallipoli, where 8141 Australian soldi
ers died during an eight-month campaign.
Collingwood waited tensely for news on how the war was going and, more importantly, on the fate of its sons. A long-time Collingwood resident whom the Collingwood Historical Society interviewed in the 1970s said this:
One thing I can remember was just after I started school in 1914. War broke out and my Uncle Bob got a job of going with his horse and cart into the Herald office in the city and getting the ‘Extraordinaries’, and I can remember him taking me and rushing up and down Hoddle Street—which was only a dusty old road with small cobblestones in those days—selling these ‘Extraordinaries’.
That happened nearly every week for quite a while. They were a small, say two page, paper telling you what happened at Gallipoli or the Dardanelles or anything specific that was happening in the war. There were no wireless or even cat’s whiskers sets in those days. All you got was by the newspaper or by word of mouth.
Hundreds of young boys went and we couldn’t get the casualty paper quick enough of a night time to see. There was a lovely lad next door. He’d been away and just come home for his 21st birthday and was only home a couple of days and he went back and he was killed.
Victorian football was anything but immune from the impact of the war. The daily newspapers and the weekly Bulletin raged with heated debate over whether the league season should be abandoned so that the young and able warriors who graced Melbourne’s football grounds on Saturday afternoons might apply their gladiatorial prowess to defeating a more palpable enemy—the terrible Hun and the godless Turk. The more vociferous critics of the game maintained that football was a distraction from the war and that paying players was a disincentive for them to respond to the military call.
The affluent, middle-class clubs firmly favoured abandoning the game, certainly for the duration of the 1915 season, and perhaps for the length of the war. But while Collingwood’s most pressing imperative for continuing to play in wartime may well have been financial (it needed the gate receipts to stay afloat), it defended its policy on the more publicly acceptable grounds that football matches were precisely what the fans—and, therefore, the community that the Magpies served—wanted.