by Daley, Paul
The club’s secretary, Ernest (‘Bud’) Copeland, strongly argued that war should not be allowed to interfere with ‘the workingman’s relaxation on his half holiday … It is cheap amusement for thousands of people’.
As the public debate intensified, the VFL took the only course open to it, convening a vote by the nine participating clubs on whether the 1915 season should be played out. Five clubs—Geelong, St Kilda, South Melbourne, Melbourne and Essendon—voted to abandon the season, while the four most working-class clubs—Collingwood, Richmond, Fitzroy and Carlton—supported playing on. Technically, although the proposal received majority support, the vote was lost because support was needed from three-quarters of the clubs to carry the motion. But there was unanimity among the clubs that 10 per cent of the gate takings from the season’s remaining matches, plus extra monies from the finals series, should be donated to the war effort.
Collingwood Football Club trip to Brisbane, in 1915, featuring Percy Rowe/Paddy Rowan (second front row, third from left) and Doc Seddon (standing, fourth from right). Seddon family collection
Perhaps to counter the suggestion that paying young men to play football distracted them from their obligations to the Empire, the Magpies cut the players’ wages in half and deferred their payments until after the season had ended. However, after it became known that the pay of the club’s trainers had only been deferred until after the war, not cut as well, the players were reluctantly given the same deal.
If there was a pervasive anti-war sentiment or polarity of views within the club’s hierarchy, then it was not obvious. Such positions largely remained private. The same could not be said for the opinions of two of the club’s most high-profile supporters and patrons.
John Wren was a non-drinking, non-smoking health fanatic. He slept with the windows open at his grand Victorian mansion, ‘Studley House’, which stood high above the Yarra on the crest of Studley Park Road in Kew, allowing him to look down upon his origins at Collingwood. As a constant reminder to himself, perhaps, of where he had come from and of the potency of wealth as a social elevator, he walked to his office in the City of Melbourne every day.
Dressed without fail in a perfectly cut suit and tie, with spit-polished black leather shoes, the diminutive but dapper Wren would walk down Studley Park Road and across the bridge into Johnston Street before nine every morning. From Johnston he would then turn left at Hoddle Street or, if fancy took him, continue along Johnston past his old tote to Smith Street, where he would turn left and make his way across Victoria Street into East Melbourne, and then into the city. It is said that, along the way, associates and old friends from Wren’s days at the Tote would tip their hats to him. He would stop and talk, collect hard-luck stories from the streets where he had once lived, and occasionally furnish an empty trouser or apron pocket with a few shillings or pounds.
Wren’s friend and neighbour, the archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, took a similar route daily from his stately official residence in Studley Park Road, ‘Raheen’, to St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne. The whippet-thin and pale Mannix, with his crop of dark, collar-length hair, was something of an exotic sight as he crossed the river and descended into the filthy streets and toxic air of Collingwood, stopping occasionally to talk to locals and, like Wren, distribute a few shillings. Mannix was tall, genuinely so, as opposed to a Collingwood six-footer. The black silk top hat and the ankle-length black gown that he wore rendered him an even more imposing and towering figure.
A resident of Collingwood during the early part of the twentieth century, who was interviewed by the Collingwood Historical Society, described Mannix on his walks:
Dr Mannix was the priest up at the Cathedral in East Melbourne and he used to walk from Raheen at the top of Studley Park Hill and come across and walk up Langridge Street about half past eight every morning with his big, long black frock coat on and a great big top hat about twice as high as any other top hat I remember. Always a walking stick or an umbrella whatever the weather was. He’d walk all the way up to St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Mannix was as passionate a supporter of the Magpies as Wren was a generous patron of the church. To Wren, the church went hand-in-glove with Irish roots, in the same way that the Collingwood Football Club was sentimentally important to him because of its links to the suburb that had raised him. Perhaps only marginally less importantly, the church, again like the club, offered Wren another network through which to wield influence. That said, while Wren was an admirer of Mannix, and had a confidant of sorts in him, there is no evidence to support the oft-repeated assertion that the ‘colourful’ businessman bought ‘Raheen’ for the archbishop, so that he might hold sway over him.
Whomever of the two men left home last each morning may have walked to work through Collingwood in the other’s footsteps. But Mannix and Wren were not in lock step when it came to the war.
Mannix, born to a farmer in County Cork, was a vociferous Irish nationalist whose position at the outbreak of the conflict was somewhat ambiguous. A lifelong supporter of the Irish struggle, he nonetheless supported Britain’s declaration of war in late 1914. But in 1915, when sectarianism became a potent undercurrent in Australian society amid suggestions that Irish Catholics were not doing enough in the fight against Germany, Mannix’s opposition to the war grew proportionately. ‘Apparently,’ he said contemptuously, ‘not enough nuns are joining.’
The Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916, when British troops (and, it is said, some Australians) were used to put down pro-Irish independence forces, hardened his anti-British position. His opposition became even more fervent throughout the rest of that year and in 1917 as Australians debated, and twice voted upon, whether to give the federal government the right to conscript men to fight overseas. As it stood, the government could only force men to fight for the protection of Australia.
Wren was also a passionate Irish nationalist who opposed the British ‘occupation’ and supported independence for all of Ireland. But he also considered himself, foremost perhaps, an Australian patriot. He not only supported Australia’s involvement in the war against Germany, he also volunteered to go and fight in it.
Initially, Wren convened a number of public events across Melbourne to encourage leading sportsmen, not least football players, to enlist. He also pledged to give £500 and a gold watch to the first Australian soldier to become a recipient of a Victoria Cross in the war. He didn’t have to wait long: Albert Jacka was awarded the cross, the highest bravery award in the Commonwealth, after his actions at Courtney’s Post at Gallipoli on 19 May 1915. (It is an interesting aside that Jacka, a remarkably courageous soldier, later went into business with Wren who, fearing he had made an unsafe investment, withdrew his capital during the Great Depression. Jacka, a St Kilda mayor, lost his business, struggled financially and died early.) Collingwood would eventually have its own Victoria Cross winner. Major William Ruthven was awarded the medal for his bravery at Ville-sur-Ancre in May 1918. Doc and Ruthven would later serve as fellow Labor councillors for Collingwood.
Apparently hoping to set an example for Collingwood players, Wren then enlisted himself, aged forty-three, on 13 August 1915, and set about trying to win recruits for a special sporting battalion. But the players, although admiring of Wren and content to take a bob or two from him from time to time, were largely unmoved.
Wren’s military file, incidentally, makes for tremendously curious reading. Upon enlisting he gave his occupation as ‘investor’ and is recorded as being 5 feet and 4½ inches tall, 10 stone and 10 pounds in weight, of ‘fresh’ complexion—due, doubtless, to all the healthy exercise he undertook—and with a distinctive tattoo on his right forearm. He did some basic training, all of which he passed easily, but he was discharged as medically unfit less than four months later, on 8 December, after being hospitalised with severe respiratory and sinus illness and acute middle ear catarrh, which resulted in deafness on his right side. The
conduct report deemed Corporal Wren to be of ‘good’ character and his file made it plain that he was discharged ‘not [as a] result of misconduct’.
Meanwhile, in his quest to win public support to amend the Defence Act to enable his government to conscript men for overseas service, Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes convened two plebiscite votes, in 1916 and 1917. The first was narrowly defeated, with 52 per cent of Australians voting against the proposition, while the second vote was defeated by a slightly greater margin. There was, however, no such equivocation among the voters of Collingwood and its surrounds: in the federal electorate of Yarra, which included Collingwood, Clifton Hill and Richmond, the first plebiscite was opposed by 72.6 per cent of voters; at the second vote, an even greater number said ‘No’.
Collingwood and the suburbs closest to it might have been opposed to conscription, but war was certainly a boon for the local economy. The milliners made hats in their thousands for the soldiers, while the canneries ensured that they would be fed on the ships that took them overseas, and on the battlefields. There was plenty of work for those who didn’t mind getting dirty and smelly. The tanneries down on the river worked overtime, their smokestacks belching endlessly to make leather that was taken to the factories to be made into soldiers’ boots and webbing, bandoliers and holsters, and saddles and bridles for the Australian Light Horse. Collingwood leather quickly gained a reputation among the other troops of the Empire as being incredibly tough, durable and impervious to decay when waterlogged. (Having helped to retrieve the body of a fallen Australian World War I soldier from a muddy grave on the Somme, I can attest to the fact that Australian leather can spend the best part of a century in mud and remain intact.)
‘There was a big factory on the corner of Groom Street and Roseneath Street—they used to make harnesses for the First World War,’ recalled an old Collingwood local. That factory was the Commonwealth Government Saddlery Works. In 1923 my then wealthy grandfather, William Bourke, having made his fortune on horses, bought the factory from the government, only to lose it all barely a decade later. He died soon afterwards, leaving his widow and his children with scarcely enough money to bury him.
During the debates that preceded the conscription votes, in which Victoria voted ‘Yes’ but Australia voted ‘No’, Mannix was branded a traitor. When he was refused permission to use Melbourne’s Exhibition Buildings to make an anti-conscription address in 1917, Wren, who had also been appalled by the Easter Uprising but who nonetheless continued to support the war and conscription, gave the archbishop access to his racecourse at Richmond, a venue for pony races and trotting carnivals. Close to 100 000 people turned up to listen to Mannix.
Wren’s decision to sign up to fight, as farcical as it turned out to be, probably had little influence on Doc and Percy. Both were already in the Army by the time Wren got around to joining up. But there can be little doubt that Wren would have personally encouraged them to enlist, just as he had most Collingwood players.
Doc and Percy both volunteered in Collingwood on the same day: 14 July 1915. They had decided to fight alongside each other as infantrymen in the newly raised Victorian 29th Battalion, which was part of the recently formed 5th Division. On their enlistment forms, each man put his age at precisely twenty-six years and two months, even though Doc was roughly a year older.
It must have been an incredibly heady and exciting time for these two mates. The Collingwood Football Club was enjoying one of its best seasons for years, drawing huge crowds to its home games at Victoria Park. It looked like it was going to be the Magpies’ year, and Doc and Percy had every right to look forward to the prospect of playing in a grand final. But the war, and the uneasy anticipation that they would soon deploy to Egypt and from there to the battlefield, must have hung like a great counterweight around their footballing lives.
And then there was everything that was going on privately between Doc and Louie and Percy. Percy, we know, got the girl. Or was it a case of the girl getting Percy? Either way, Doc’s childhood sweetheart was now with his best friend.
Allan Monohan has only shadowy, vague memories of his grandparents, who both died when he was a young boy. He says, ‘You think you remember—or you think that you remember that you remember, if you know what I mean. But I’m never really sure If I’m actually remembering Doc and Louie—or if it’s just the photographs that have sort of come to represent the memory.’
He shows me a picture of himself and Doc that was taken in 1953, when he was about two. The blond, tousle-haired boy sits in the tray of a wheelbarrow while his granddad, dressed in shirtsleeves and a vest, holds the barrow by its handles and looks down admiringly upon the infant.
I ask him what sort of a man his grandfather was. ‘I’d say that he was probably as good a friend as you’d have as a friend. And probably a real bad enemy to have if he was ever crossed,’ he says.
A doting Doc Seddon with his grandson, Allan Monohan, Abbottsford, 1953. Seddon family collection
Allan then contemplates how his grandmother and Percy might have become a couple, and how Doc might have felt about it all: ‘Doc was a bit shy, you know. A bit backward in coming forward. He was always a serious-looking bloody kid, too. Mum and Dad always seemed to think that he was always reasonably, you know, really keen on Lou before Perc entered the scene.’
Doc and Louie’s daughter-in-law, Dorothy Seddon, agrees that her father-in-law was a deeply shy and reserved man who ‘seemed to push the relationship a bit with Paddy Rowan and Louise [Louie]. You know he introduced them. I mean, if he’d have been real keen on Louise he would have kept him away from her you would have thought, wouldn’t you? Really deep down he was a shy man.’
Allan says that when Louie and Percy married, Doc ‘just copped it sweet’.
Or maybe not.
I think the marriage between his best mate and his old sweetheart probably came as a bit of a shock to Doc. Certainly when he and Percy signed up on 14 July 1915, there was no sign at all that Percy was planning to marry Louie. He listed the man he believed to be his father, John Rowe, as his next of kin and he did not make provision for any of his pay to be forwarded to a spouse—although Percy and Louie were undoubtedly in a deeply passionate relationship, these were hardly the actions of a man who was planning to settle down, to marry and start a family. But whether Percy and Louie liked it or not, a child—Percy Rowe Junior, who would be known throughout his life as ‘young Perc’—was on the way.
‘Louise and Paddy Rowan—they weren’t married very long when Perc was born, were they?’ Dorothy Seddon asks, somewhat mischievously. ‘Maybe he was premature. And, well, Percy did seem to go off to the war in a hurry, didn’t he?’
Percy would not have been the first man to go to war to escape a woman, although few would have imperilled (albeit unwittingly) their best friend in the process. For in signing up to the same battalion on the same day, Percy and Doc were effectively vowing that not only were they going to fight side by side, but that that was also how they would die, if it came to it.
Louie was probably pregnant when the two mates volunteered. Percy may or may not have known that. And Doc probably would have had no inkling. He would have been preoccupied with the prospect of war—and a grand final.
But first, there would be a wedding to attend.
9
A Pre-match Wedding
They knelt side by side, trying to ignore the discomfort of the unyielding, frigid stone beneath their knees. She flicked him furtive glances, being careful to use only her eyes and not to move her head at all, as close as it was to his, so that it would all remain imperceptible to the members of the skeleton wedding party who sat in the pew behind them.
He could feel her warmth pressing through the rough cloth of his tunic even though they were inches apart. But he remained unmoving and stolid, as if he was determined not to react to her looks or to give her more than he had already promised. Instead, he
just stared straight ahead, past the priest in his flowing vestments and up towards the leadlight window. Softly stained shafts of blue, green, purple and red light refracted onto the vast altar through the forms of staff-waving shepherds and saints, sheep and crucifixes, boats and anchors.
She couldn’t manage to catch his eye. That’s all she really wanted, the reassurance of his beautiful hazel eyes meeting hers and perhaps an added little sideways grin. But he gave nothing back.
The only picture taken of Louie and Percy together, close to their wedding day, 1915. Seddon family collection
His hands were folded before him. During one of her little glances, she thought she saw him pinch the taut skin just above the knuckles of his left hand with the thumb and forefinger of his right. The only other thing that she was able to register was the small, jagged badge of bronze on his collar—a royal crown, representing the British Empire, floating inside a rising sun, beneath which sat the words ‘Australian Commonwealth Military Force’.
She thought he loved her. She kept reminding herself that he had, after all, said it to her often enough during their short time together. But she couldn’t hold off the sickening feeling, that gnawing sense, that it was all so unfair.
On this of all days, her day, she was supposed to feel elated and excited. There was ceremony enough in this old bluestone church, St Philip’s, which was as much a part of life’s uncertain rhythm on the Flat as the nearby town hall, as Smith Street or Victoria Park. Her parents had been married here. It was where she was baptised, where she went to Sunday school with Doc for all those years. And it was where she’d prayed over the tiny coffin of her baby sister Frances, who’d lived just seven weeks. She’d always known that one day she’d stand here in white next to the man she’d be with forever. But she’d never thought that she would feel like this, racked with anxiety and self-pity, questioning her choice and terrified about the future.