by Daley, Paul
Doc was accumulating a great deal of wealth for his young family; they were among the most comfortably well-off in the area. But while Doc was one of the first men in the suburb to own a car, ostensibly for his business, and his children were always well dressed and wanted for little, he avoided crass displays of his growing prosperity. Likewise, Louie, although she had a penchant for fine clothes and always looked elegant, was not ostentatious.
As a notable former Collingwood player and now one of the club’s selectors, Doc was a prominent identity around the suburb. He maintained a close but essentially private relationship with John Wren, and he kept a close eye on the local community, discreetly helping out the families that were not coping well financially as the looming depression began to take its toll on the industrial suburbs of Melbourne. Many Collingwood families struggled—as did the football club.
The early 1920s were bereft of premiership success for Collingwood, which had not won a grand final since 1919. Since then, it had lost premiership deciders in 1920, 1922, 1925 and 1926, the last by a record 57 points to Melbourne. By 1927, the fans were demanding answers for the team’s poor form. In March of that year, hundreds of supporters crammed into the Collingwood Town Hall for the club’s annual meeting. Some tore up their membership tickets while others abused the team members and club officials on stage.
It was clear that changes had to be made to the player list. The club that had, since 1892, prided itself on brotherhood and equality, on fraternal loyalty, would be forced to put its head before its heart. And so, despite him playing well in a series of pre-season games, the committee suddenly sacked the Magpies captain, Charlie Tyson—not just as the on-field leader but, even more controversially, as a Collingwood player. Three other players were also sacked to make way for younger talent.
Tyson’s sacking remains unequalled as a Collingwood scandal in a competition that is plagued by controversy. While the committee never stated it, Tyson had to go because of rumours that he had taken a bribe to play dead in the 1926 Grand Final against Melbourne, a team that Collingwood had consistently beaten throughout that season. While the evidence against Tyson was scant and circumstantial, it seems that he was made a scapegoat, not only to appease an angry supporter base but to provide a circuit-breaker for the team’s run of poor form. Which is exactly what the sackings did: under a new captain, Syd Coventry, and with a swag of new recruits, Collingwood adopted a machine-like style of play centred on accurate stab kicks and constant handballing, as well as long punts for goal.
The Collingwood game became dominated by the Coventry boys, Syd and Gordon, and by Harry and Albert Collier, Harold Rumney, Billy Libbis, Percy Rowe, George Clayden, Jack Beveridge, Frank and Len Murphy, and Harry Chesswas. ‘The Machine’, as it became known, was born.
The hard-fought 1927 Grand Final, a scrappy, rough and ugly match played in mud and driving rain, vindicated the committee’s sacking of Tyson—Collingwood (2.13.25) beat Richmond (1.7.13) to claim another premiership. As their suburb’s economy groaned and the boot factories, tanneries and breweries began laying workers off, the Magpies were ascendant. The people of the area rallied around their team—the place had nothing else going for it.
Selector Doc Seddon and legendary coach Jock McHale at training at Victoria Park, during the team’s golden era of the unequalled ‘four-in-a-row’ premierships from 1927 to 1930. Collingwood Football Club Archive
Before long, the Collingwood Football Club was letting the unemployed into its matches for free, and soup kitchens were set up inside Victoria Park on match days to feed people who would otherwise go hungry. The team’s weekly performance, especially at home games, was the only bright note in many local lives. And in 1928 the team did not disappoint, producing another grand final victory over Richmond.
Late that year, using £1200 of government money and £8000 in borrowings, the Collingwood Council had built a new grandstand to replace a rickety, hybrid structure known as the ‘cowsheds’. The local unemployed, many of whom were battle-damaged veterans of World War I, provided the labour. It eventually became the Ryder Stand, in honour of the Test cricketer and famous Collingwood son Jack Ryder (this was a win for the Collingwood Cricket Club, the interests of which were at that time considered by the council to be more important than those of the football club). The building of the Ryder Stand, which was completed in time for the start of the 1929 football season, together with construction of Kew Boulevard and roadworks on Hoddle Street and Alexandra Parade, ensured the survival of hundreds of Collingwood families during the worsening depression.
Lou Richards, the former Collingwood captain who was born in the suburb in 1923, recalls: ‘When the sustenance workers on the dole were building the Boulevard at Studley Park we used to heave bricks at them and chant, “You’re on the susso [the dole] now”.’
But council funds could only go so far. One of Collingwood’s mayors during the Great Depression, GF Eastman, later described how, in 1930, he had been required to divide five sheep between 400 families, and said that he had personally distributed 6000 parcels of vegetables and 200 pairs of new boots.
However, even as the fortunes of the suburb it served faltered, the Collingwood Football Club’s continued to rise. Under the inspirational captaincy of Syd Coventry, the Magpies won the 1929 and 1930 grand finals, setting a record of four premierships in a row that remains unequalled to this day. Another record was established before the crowds of struggling families and the unemployed in the new Ryder Stand when the Magpies got through the 1929 home and away season without being defeated; again, this record remains, as yet, unmatched. Coventry and Jock McHale were rightly given the credit for the achievements. But, nonetheless, Collingwood would not have succeeded had Doc Seddon—as chairman of selectors and perhaps the best spotter in Melbourne of talented schoolboy footballers—not given Hughie Thomas a ready supply of raw talent to fashion for the seconds team, Collingwood District, talent that then found its way onto McHale’s list, where its energy and resilience complemented the skill and experience of the older players.
By 1930, about three in ten workers in the City of Collingwood had lost their jobs, and countless others were surviving on half a week’s work and casual labour. The council and the football club stepped in where they could. ‘During the Depression years the council was pretty good. There was always plenty of wood there for you, and vegetables. They were never hard on your rates,’ recalled one long-term Collingwood resident.
Doc collected and carted firewood, cutting it in his backyard and then delivering it to needy households identified by the Collingwood Football Club and the local council. Described while playing football as having a ‘fetish’ for physical fitness, he now displayed an obsession with physical warmth—which was understandable, given his bitter experiences during three unforgiving winters on the Somme. It is said that, no matter the outside temperature, there were always a few logs smouldering in the fireplace and in the kitchen’s wood-fired oven at Abbotsford Street. By delivering wood, he helped ensure that others did not suffer from the cold either.
Around the football club, this obsession led to Doc developing a reputation as ‘the Doc’, for it is said that his advice to players suffering ailments from flu to torn ligaments was almost always to ‘put another pullover on’ and ‘stay warm’. Doc was also known to stop children on the street and buy them boots—an extremely generous gesture given the number of Collingwood urchins who, eighty years after the barefoot child became a caricature of the slum suburb, still wandered the streets shoeless. Doc was not alone in taking such action. Personal benevolence on a neighbour-to-neighbour level pervaded the suburb.
Collingwood Football Club President Eddie McGuire is steeped in the history of the club of which he took the helm on his thirty-fourth birthday in 1998. He is proud of this history, especially of the club’s efforts during the Great Depression, despite the fact it was he that drove the decision to stop playing at Vi
ctoria Park in 1999 and to relocate the club’s headquarters in 2005.
‘The sustenance workers, you know, built the stands,’ says McGuire. ‘The stands were built with unemployed labour during the Depression and even before … Sustenance workers got in for free and we were the only club that did that sort of stuff. So the club became a celebration for those who needed a hand and there is no doubt that the club still prospered during these times. Someone was paying for it. And you know, I don’t think we need to dig too deep to see who that someone was.’
McGuire is talking about John Wren, the man who rarely wanted to be personally associated with his philanthropy and so used others in the community to distribute his money to those in need, and who was known to personally reward members of the footy team for playing well. Lou Richards, who played 423 games for Collingwood from 1941 to 1955, once told McGuire how he had showered twelve times after one match so he could keep walking past Wren, who was in the dressing rooms, ‘looking for the sling because he’d played a really good game’.
McGuire says:
There are all these stories that have been handed down, you know, about how he [Wren] loved [Gordon] ‘Nuts’ Coventry and looked after him. The stories of his philanthropy are great around the club … So to me he is, being an Irish Catholic and a Collingwood man, almost this mythical figure.
I’m probably of the generation of Collingwood people who only know him from the Power without Glory book and the series, which I think gave him a very bad rap. Wren was a complex figure and he was demonised, unfairly I think. My view is that he personified the whole grit of Collingwood, that he was in there and everything was done hard because the top end of town didn’t want him … but he found his place and he pulled people together in the community and around the club and he didn’t forget them. That is the ethos of what I have hopefully brought back to Collingwood.
I have really tried to set the tone of Collingwood in what we have to live up to in our philanthropy, based on why did Collingwood become such a big club, and that is because, as evidenced by the Depression … it always remembered the community that it came from.
For years, Wren’s portrait hung in the Collingwood Social Club at Victoria Park. McGuire plans to re-hang it at the club’s modern headquarters at Olympic Park.
In 1935, with the explicit political and financial backing of the Collingwood Football Club, Doc successfully ran as the Australian Labor Party candidate in the Darling Ward of Collingwood Council. It was established club practice to get its own people onto the council so that the club’s interests might remain ascendant over those of the local cricket club. Doc was one of those people—besides listening to and being a passionate advocate for the residents in his ward, he was happy to push the interests of the football club. For the next twenty-two years, Doc served on the council as well as on the boards of local hospitals, medical centres and community organisations, and he was also a justice of the peace. He personally knew hundreds of families in the streets around Victoria Park, Abbotsford and Clifton Hill.
Doc, Mayor of Collingwood, 1941. Seddon family collection
While Doc was a worthy servant of the residents of Darling Ward, little happened on the Labor side of the council without Wren’s imprimatur, as was also the case in the state parliament. Doc had been well known to Wren since he had been a young player. It is said that Wren never forgot the club men who had answered his call to serve in World War I, so he certainly would have been well versed in the story of Doc and Louie’s relationship, especially as it related to the death of Percy on the Somme. And so, while he was on the Collingwood Council, and during his term as mayor in 1941, there can be little doubt that Doc was also serving Wren.
‘I can remember my dad [young Perc] saying to me that when Doc Seddon was mayor of Collingwood, down in the back shed at the house in Abbotsford Street there was a box and it was full of money and it came from John Wren,’ recalls Ian Rowe. ‘And then Doc used to give it to the charities. The old man always said he wouldn’t hear a bad thing said about John Wren. From what Doc had told him, he would never hear of it when people said he [Wren] was a mongrel or a crook because he had helped so many families. But yeah, they were mates, particularly football club–wise. Doc had always said to Dad that Wren looked after the players pretty well—no salary cap trap in those days.’
Backing up Ian’s account, one of Louie Seddon’s grandchildren on the Rowe side of the family, Sandra, related to her husband, Bob Johnson, that Doc had kept significant amounts of money in the house to distribute on behalf of Wren. Bob says, ‘In Doc’s library … in every page of the books there was folding money: £20, £10 in-between the pages. Sandra always said, “Oh he had this big library where he kept a lot of money.” And Percy used to say that that was money given to him by John Wren. I suppose there was handouts and there was backhanders with the council, too.’
David Seddon also recalls his father, Malcolm Seddon Junior, reminiscing about Doc’s friendship with Wren: ‘Dad always said that John Wren and his dad were mates.’
There seems to be no doubt that Doc always had cash hidden around the house. He kept some of it in the kitchen chimney at Abbotsford Street, apparently along with important financial documents and personal papers—including, some members of the family speculate, the war-time correspondence between Louie and Percy.
Allan Monohan says, ‘He chipped a few bricks out of the chimney in the kitchen and stuck a heap of dough in there. There was about £600 or £700 just in that hiding place, with some other papers and letters and things. And anyway the bloody chimney catches on fire. Goodnight the money. It burnt half the kitchen down and the money is “See you later”.’
Doc and Louie with their children Shirley and Malcolm, and Louie’s parents, Fred and Frances Newby, at a Collingwood club picnic, late 1920s. Seddon family collection
After the success of the ‘four-in-a-row’, as the grand final victories of 1927 to 1930 became known around the club, the 1930s were comparatively lean, although successive flags in 1935 and 1936 were enough to keep the doubters away from McHale’s door.
Doc remained a loyal, hardworking committee man and selector who had the ear of the players. He was known to espouse, from time to time, the less than wholesome tactics that had earned him a reputation as one of the game’s toughs. If Doc had intelligence that an opposition player had a tender Achilles tendon, for example, he would tell one of his own players to go out and ‘give him a kick behind the ankle’ when nobody was looking. He was always seen at training side by side with his old mentor McHale, and for the most part they saw eye to eye; both men were disciplinarians who emphasised the importance of physical fitness.
Doc and Louie and their young children, Shirley and Malcolm, attended all of the club’s various social activities, including bayside picnics and excursions. Malcolm Junior was the envy of other kids on the streets of Collingwood because he always had a brand-new Sherrin—the footballs were given to the children of the players and officials at the club functions—and he was always in the rooms with his dad on match Saturdays at Victoria Park.
Then, in the late 1930s, a series of articles began to appear in the Melbourne sporting press that directly undermined the absolute authority and respect that McHale had enjoyed since he began coaching the Magpies in 1912. The stories praised Doc as a selector and Hughie Thomas as the seconds coach who had provided most of the players responsible for McHale’s greatest successes. The articles included one in The Sporting Globe in which the recently retired Gordon Coventry wrote:
Thousands ask what is the secret of Collingwood’s success over the other clubs of the League? I have heard the question many times but haven’t always heard an answer given.
Whenever it was put to me I could answer it without hesitation. Collingwood’s greatness in my time can be attributed to three factors: 1) The coaching of the second eighteen by Hugh Thomas; 2) The remarkably long service the club has
had from quite a number of players; 3) Intelligent captaining throughout.
For much of the 1930s, the seconds had engendered intense loyalty from its players, many of whom—including, at various times, George Clayden and Albert Collier—had refused to take a spot in the senior team lest it compromise the performance of Hughie Thomas’ boys. Due to his position as chairman of selectors, Doc was a bridge between the senior team and the seconds. He was also president of the seconds and he was Hughie’s uncompromisingly loyal best mate. Indeed, when young Perc was a teenager playing for Collingwood’s seconds and the younger Seddon children, Shirley and Malcolm, were reaching adolescence, there were few visitors to the house at Abbotsford Street besides Hughie and his wife, Alma. Doc, a non-drinker, always kept a few bottles of beer in the house for Hughie, although he never quite got the hang of putting them in the fridge and kept them instead inside a cupboard in the wooden hat stand in the hallway.
The Collingwood committee, unwilling to sit back and watch the undermining of McHale’s authority and the reputation of the senior team, fought to gain control of the autonomous seconds and to bring Thomas into line. Doc, ever loyal, backed his mate Hughie. But he played the politics badly. A group comprising seconds committee members and local politicians challenged the senior committee at the 1939 club elections. Due to his support for the seconds he had been dropped from the senior ticket, so Doc contested the elections on the rebel ticket but lost to the establishment group headed by the club’s long-term secretary, Frank Wraith.
The embittered Doc tore up pictures taken of himself with Wraith and, according to Collingwood’s version of events, he did not revisit the club until Wraith and his acolytes were ousted in a subsequent boardroom revolution in 1950. In the meantime, he railed against the Collingwood Football Club at council meetings and began lobbying for the cricket club’s interests instead. For years, he opposed the granting of a liquor licence to the social club at Victoria Park.