by Daley, Paul
The mail brought birthday greetings from his brothers, his sisters and his mother. It also delivered a postcard that he had probably neither anticipated nor knew how to interpret. The front of the card featured a bucolic landscape that was reminiscent of Dight’s Falls in the 1850s, and a swallow perched on a twig of blossom. Accompanying this scene were the typeset words:
Wishing You A Happy Birthday
Sunny skies and happy hours
Full of love and laughter
Make your birthday bright for you With good times following after
Doc turned the card over. He immediately recognised the neat, feminine writing, with its curlicues and flourishes on the ‘u’s and the ‘m’s. It read:
To Uncle Malcolm
Wishing him a Happy Birthday
From his little friend
Percy. Rowe.
Young Perc was barely a year old. It was Louie by another name, writing to Doc.
Throughout their lives, as children who lived a couple of doors apart, and later as adults, they had celebrated many birthdays together. But this time, given everything that had happened, the sentiments Louie was conveying to Doc were more complex than those of any previous birthday wish she had offered him. The card seemed to be saying, ‘Don’t forget about us.’
Doc carried that card in his wallet for the rest of his life.
A few months after his birthday, Doc sent both of the horseshoes to Australia. One went to his mother at ‘Birkenhead’—coins from France and Egypt had been welded onto it and it was inscribed ‘To Mum from Malcolm’. The other horseshoe arrived at Victoria Park towards the end of the 1917 season, when a resurgent Collingwood was the favourite to win the Premiership. This one was elaborately patterned and engraved with the words ‘GOOD LUCK’ and ‘To CFC from Doc 1917 France’. For the remainder of the season, it was taken into the Collingwood change rooms before each match—just as, ninety-something years later, it would be repeatedly brought into the Magpies’ rooms by the Collingwood president, Eddie McGuire, to inspire his players and remind them of their club’s rich history.
Soon after the horseshoe’s arrival at Victoria Park, a Melbourne newspaper reported:
Mr MW Copeland, secretary of the Collingwood Football Club … received a welcome gift from one of the old players of the club who is now doing ‘his bit’ in the great match against the Germans. The gift, which is a horseshoe, was displayed in the Collingwood dressing room at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and it cheered the Collingwood players.
It was from the old Collingwood player Malcolm (‘Doc’) Seddon, now at the front. Accompanying the horseshoe is a letter from Seddon explaining that it was made under fire by the shoeing smith with his company. The shoe was made from the driving band of a German 15-inch shell that Seddon found at Baupaume. The nails were made from pieces of a German aeroplane which the Australians brought down at the Somme. He had recently seen Dan Minogue, the old Collingwood captain, who was looking well. ‘I hope,’ wrote Seddon, ‘that this shoe will bring the boys to the top of the tree this year’. The players regarded the arrival of the shoe as a good omen.
Minogue, who was also serving on the Somme, had been in and out of hospital with illness and injury throughout 1917. In light of Percy Rowe’s recent death on the front, the Magpies officials would have been relieved to hear first-hand that another champion was doing well and might yet return to play for the club.
Dan Minogue had been one of Collingwood’s most revered players before the war. A tough-as-boots former goldminer from the Bendigo area who survived a fall down a mine shaft as a teenager, he had broken his collarbone in the opening minute of the 1911 VFL Grand Final but played the rest of the match without complaint. Collingwood narrowly lost that game to Essendon and, as misfortune would have it, Minogue captained the Magpies in their next Grand Final appearance—the infamous 1915 loss to Carlton.
A combination of mismanagement by the Magpies and Minogue’s loyalty to his teammate Jim Sadler, who himself had fallen out with Collingwood, would lead to the club and its champion parting ways. On returning from the war Minogue joined Richmond, where, as captain-coach, he led the Tigers to successive flags—in 1920 against Collingwood, to the horror and chagrin of his old club, and in 1921 against Carlton. (Doc would be absent from the Collingwood team for the 1920 Grand Final, having been suspended, as Collingwood legend—unsurprisingly—has it, because of an appalling act of umpiring.)
Minogue’s decision to leave Collingwood may have stemmed from an Australian Rules exhibition match that was played in London in late 1916. The match was organised by the Richmond ruckman Hugh James, with whom Minogue became great mates. While he was in England, Minogue managed to secure a fragment of a German zeppelin that had been shot down that October at Potter’s Bar, north of London. Just as Doc would later send a horseshoe back to his old club, Minogue posted his little scrap of German airship back to Victoria Park with a wellwishing message to his teammates. This treasure sat behind glass in the old Collingwood boardroom for many years and is now on display at the Magpies’ newer headquarters, the Westpac Centre on Melbourne’s Batman Avenue.
The horseshoe that Doc had sent to Victoria Park seemed to work magic for the Magpies in the Premiership decider played on 22 September 1917. Collingwood convincingly defeated its old rival Fitzroy by 35 points. It was the first of eight premierships that Jock McHale, who had played in the back pocket, would coach his team to over the next thirty-two years.
One of the horseshoes—fashioned from a downed German aircraft and the band of an enemy shell—that Doc sent home in 1917. Mike Bowers
But the horseshoe that Doc had sent to ‘Birkenhead’, which had been accompanied by an Anzac biscuit inscribed with a good luck message to his parents, for good measure, brought no such fortune. Doc’s elderly father, William, died at home the day before the 1917 Grand Final.
Several years ago, Doc’s descendants gave the ‘Birkenhead’ horseshoe to the Collingwood Football Club. David Seddon says that he and his elder brother Ron had grown up with both items ‘just floating around the house—you know, around about in the back shed and on the wall in our bedrooms at different times. Ron and I always used to call the horseshoe the Holy Grail because it had that great sense of history attached to it and we knew about Doc’s life as a player and in the war. You know, when we were a bit older we’d have a few drinks and pull out the Holy Grail and then look at pictures in Collingwood books and think about it all … Anyway, Ron barracks for Geelong, so a couple of years ago he said, “I’m not worthy to have the Holy Grail,” so he gave it to me. I thought, “I can’t keep this.” So I read something about Eddie [McGuire] showing the horseshoe that Doc sent back to the club, every Anzac Day. That’s when I realised that what we had was pretty significant.’
As for the Seddon family’s very distinctive Anzac biscuit, it could not be found. David says, ‘Our biscuit was a bit different—it had a bite out of it. When Ron was a kid he thought he’d take a chunk out of it with his teeth.’ However, two other Anzac biscuits that had been transformed into prize examples of so-called ‘trench art’ have recently found their way into the Collingwood collection. These biscuits, rock-hard and the size of bread-and-butter plates, were a staple of the ration packs distributed among the Australians who fought at Gallipoli, on the Western Front and in the Middle East. On one of the biscuits, Doc depicts himself wearing a Collingwood guernsey and taking a mark above the trenches, while not too far behind him, a machine-gunner blasts away from a bunker. It is inscribed with the words ‘What I am Training on’.
The other biscuit is inscribed ‘From Doc to Ted’. It was possibly sent to Doc’s good mate Ted Rowell, a Collingwood vet- eran who first played for the team in 1901 and last appeared for the Magpies in the notorious 1915 Grand Final. Both of these biscuits were found in recent years in Victorian RSL clubs.
Trench art—the Anzac biscuit that Doc sent back to his teamma
tes at Collingwood. Mike Bowers
In late July 1917, everyone in Doc’s unit was forced to attend a lecture, organised by one of the company’s chaplains, on the moral and physical dangers of venereal disease. Since the Australian forces had arrived in Egypt at the beginning of the war, VD had been their scourge. Hundreds of men had contracted syphilis and gonorrhoea after visiting the notoriously unhygienic brothels of Cairo, creating among the battalions a health problem of almost epidemic proportions.
The official Australian historian of World War I, Charles W Bean, wrote:
Cairo is a hotbed of it [venereal disease]—in particularly serious forms—and some of the cases are simply tragic, young soldiers, really fine clean simple boys who have been drinking and have found themselves with a disease which may ruin them for life. In one case which I heard of, the youngster was said to have been made drunk by two older soldiers.
The soldiers were constantly warned about the dangers of such diseases, but seemingly to no avail. So seriously were the ranks depleted by VD-afflicted men being admitted to hospital—and, in the most severe cases, being shipped back to Australia—that the men were warned by their superiors that the contraction of syphilis and gonorrhoea would be viewed with similar gravity to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The pay of those who contracted VD was routinely docked as a punitive measure.
The problem eased, for obvious reasons, while the battalions were in Gallipoli, but it flared again when they returned to Egypt. It was similarly pronounced in France and Belgium, where prostitutes flocked to the towns near the German and Allied front lines to service a seemingly infinite client base in makeshift brothels and out of some estaminets.
Soon after his special horseshoe was delivered to Victoria Park, with a grand final win in his teammates’ sights, Doc became one of the Australian casualties of the VD curse. From 15 September 1917, he was in hospital for six weeks with what was a very painful and medically challenging—not to mention stigmatic—affliction.
Doc could hardly be described as one of the naive young men to whom Bean had referred—even 100 years ago, star Collingwood players attracted more than their share of romantic attention from female fans. And as a lifelong teetotaller, he could not readily use the excuse that he was drunk. But then again, Doc did not really need an excuse. He was a man who daily lived with the haunting experience of violent death and probably fully expected to die himself.
As a privately religious man, in the years to come Doc no doubt atoned for what his church regarded as a weakness. He was also a proud man and would have felt ashamed, if not by the act that led to his sickness, then certainly by the fact that his military record would make it abundantly plain, for all time, what had happened.
Soon after Doc was released from hospital, he took the holiday in the United Kingdom that he and Percy did not get to enjoy together. It seems the trip may have had a partially recuperative aim, for he told his daughter Shirley many years later that he had been sent to England to recover from being gassed. Certainly, the Germans were increasingly deploying poisonous gas on the Western Front, especially at the Somme. But Allan Monohan is nonetheless amused by this aspect of his grandfather’s service. He says it is something that his now elderly mother, Shirley, who adored Doc, has always been in denial about.
‘I know he told my mum that he was gassed and that is why he went to England in the war,’ says Allan. ‘I’ve gone through the medical records and he wasn’t gassed. And she would never ever believe that … she always said that he would never ever lie. I mean, poor bloke, he couldn’t really say, “I went to England in the war because I got the clap.” … I mean, Mum always kept saying, “Don’t worry that he smoked ninety-nine cigarettes [every] day, it would have been the gas that gave him his heart attacks,” when he was older. And I would say, “Oh, I don’t know Mum, I think it’s got a lot more to do with the cigarettes than the gas.”’
Doc’s other grandson, David Seddon, says: ‘The old man reckons that Doc did come back from the war crook, with a real bad cough. But that could’ve been the French cigarettes more than the gas, I’d say.’
Towards the end of the war, Doc was suffering from severe synovitis, an arthritic affliction in his lower legs. The crippling condition probably resulted from him having spent three freezing winters in the trenches. He spent much of the final months of the war in field hospitals and convalescing in the UK.
His war was over. Doc sailed from Devonport, England to Australia on the hospital transport ship Cluny Castle on 23 April 1919. During the long trip, he would have eagerly awaited the mail that was brought aboard at each port. He received one letter from his little brother, Donny, to say that he was engaged but that he would wait until Doc arrived back home before getting married, so that Doc could be the best man at yet another wedding at St Philip’s.
But there was one particular postcard, featuring a caricature of a kookaburra wearing a service cap and airman’s goggles, that he would have read and reread during the long sea voyage. ‘Good Luck To You From Australia,’ the card declared, below which the following sentiment was offered:
Hear the kookaburra shouting,
While his men are nobly scouting.
Hear him say Good Luck I send you,
And may heaven above defend you.
Of course, he immediately recognised Louie’s handwriting:
To Dear Malcolm,
Wishing you a happy Xmas and a speedy return to sunny Australia from little Percy and Louie Rowe.
xxxxx
From Percy to Uncle Dock
Exhausted and very sick, having aged well beyond his thirty years after having seen far too much death, Doc regarded the postcard as an invitation to dream about what might await him back home in Collingwood.
There was his old room in Hoddle Street.
There was his football club.
And there was Louie.
Much as it nearly always had been.
19
Home
He stood in the park, leaning casually against the trunk of one of the infant gum trees. Keeping one hand in a trouser pocket and crossing one sturdy leg across the other, he pulled the brim of his hat down low with his free fingers so that a deep shadow smudged his forehead and his eyes.
Just about everyone in the street had noticed him standing there since early that morning, when the frosty grass had still crackled underfoot and the notorious smog of the Flat, a foul-smelling miasma of tannery chemicals, brewery yeast and human waste, had hung low between the corrugated-iron roofs, still ascendant in its daily joust with the milky autumn sunlight. From time to time he’d shift his weight from one foot to the other, extract a cork-tip from a silver case and light it up. He’d smoke slowly, sometimes drawing just a few lungfuls out of a whole cigarette, which he’d savour before blowing the fumes out of his nostrils. Then he’d stub the cigarette out against the tree and slightly adjust his hat again.
It was cold, but he was overdressed for early autumn in a long, black woollen coat and a thick woollen vest, underneath which was a plain, off-white shirt neatly tucked into tightly belted trousers that were at least a size too big for his lean, though broad-shouldered, frame. The clothes were obviously old. But they were clean and freshly ironed, and they adorned a man who, though neither well-off nor poor, carried himself with pride and assurance.
These days, men often loitered in the suburb’s parks and vacant lots, on the corners down Smith and Johnston streets. Lost men. Men who’d left their minds and often parts of their bodies, too, as well as their friends and comrades, back on foreign beaches, or in faraway deserts and bogs. Some talked to themselves, yelling out unpredictably, answering the voices that existed only in their minds. Others wept. Most were shabby and unshaven; they smelt of the street and cheap tobacco, of grog and piss. You had to be wary of them, these young men who had aged before their time. They could be dangerous, often reaching out to grab some
one by an arm or collar, an ember of a not-quite-lost memory from a less turbulent past having been stoked in them. Or perhaps they just wanted to try and explain what was going on in their minds.
But this man was different. He seemed purposeful as he stood there, hour after hour, watching the little weatherboard cottage of Louie’s parents.
‘Today,’ he told himself, ‘today.’
He had walked past her house 100 times since he’d arrived home, pacing along the edge of the little reserve behind the railway line and the town hall. Once he’d even seen her out there on the verandah, with the little boy. He had been dressed like a girl in a white smock, his blond hair in long, beautiful ringlets; a boy in need of a man. Louie had tossed a shiny, fire-engine-red Sherrin to him from a few feet away. The boy had marked the ball with surprising dexterity before dropping it quickly onto his boot, sending it dribbling across the grey wooden planks of the verandah and into the hydrangea bed.
‘Young Perc’ and Louie in the backyard at Park Street, about 1918. Seddon family collection
Time had been very kind to Louie: her once angular features, the aquiline nose and the sharp jaw, had softened to accommodate her heavily hooded, deeply set eyes—eyes that he had dreamed about staring into. She had filled out with motherhood, too, become fuller in the breast and the beam. It was nowhere evident that grief had taken its physical toll. With her hazel hair pulled back and fastened with a comb, she was more than the dowdy, middle-aged widow he had feared, expected, perhaps even hoped, that he might find. Her radiance made his immediate task more complex, if, that is, he acknowledged the truth that burned at his core.
He’d been over it again and again. He was here because Perc had asked him to come and check on Louie and the boy. He had promised him that. And now he was just being a good mate. Nothing more.
