Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  It was improbably serendipitous, given all the ambiguity about the identity of Doc’s footballer mate, who lay buried on the Somme, that his new partner on the field should have shared the same name—Percy Rowe. Together, he and Doc were just as formidable as Doc and the namesake Percy Rowe had been from 1911 to 1915.

  Collingwood finished the season down in fourth place, with ten wins and six losses. But the Magpies found form in the Semi-Final, defeating the second-placed Fitzroy. A week later, they won their Grand Final place by convincingly defeating Carlton by four goals before a crowd of 57 000 at the MCG. In the second quarter of that game, Doc and Carlton’s half-forward flanker and leading goal kicker, Percy ‘Dubs’ Daykin, began tussling behind the play. While it is impossible to say who started the fight, it is clear that Doc struck Daykin when (customarily, perhaps) he thought that the umpire was not looking. But in this case, the umpire saw the Magpie thump his rival. Doc was reported and ordered to appear before the VFL tribunal late in Grand Final week.

  Much apprehension preceded the tribunal hearing. With Dick Lee, Bill Twomey Senior and Ernie Wilson already injured and unable to play, a decision to rub Doc out for the Grand Final contest against Richmond could potentially prove disastrous for the Magpies.

  The Argus reported on the proceedings:

  The independent Tribunal of the League (Sir Baldwin Spencer and Professor Lyle) met yesterday evening to consider a charge laid by the field umpire (J. Elder) in the match Collingwood v. Carlton last Saturday against M. Seddon (Collingwood) of having struck P. Daykin (Carlton). Seddon admitted the charge, but urged that he had struck the blow in retaliation. The decision was that Seddon be disqualified for three playing Saturdays. Sir Baldwin Spencer said that they were satisfied that there had been provocation and Professor Lyle added: ‘We both feel very sorry, but the authorities must be upheld.’

  The victory against Carlton in the Preliminary Final had ‘cost Collingwood dearly’, declared The Courage Book of VFL Finals, 1897–1973, because ‘Bill Twomey Senior and Ernie Wilson were injured and Doc Seddon was reported and missed the Grand Final’. Richmond would ultimately be the 1920 premiers.

  Robbed. And again by Carlton!

  Although he was suspended for the first two rounds of the 1921 season, Doc fronted up regularly for training as always and took to the field in the round 3 match against Geelong. The Herald later reported:

  Collingwood members are pleased with the return to form of ‘Doc’ Seddon, the hefty follower of the Magpie team, who showed in the match against Geelong that although it is his eleventh season in the game he can still play as ever he did … he is one of the veterans of the game but it is not the policy of the Collingwood committee to allow a veteran to lag superfluous on the stage.

  They believe in judiciously blending age with youth in the team as long as age shows no sign of breaking under the strain, and their wisdom has been justified by results in the case of men like Seddon. When a footballer reaches his thirtieth year, his value, as a rule, deteriorates, but there are exceptions and Seddon is one of these. At the outset of the season when the training list was being pruned the big follower’s form was a subject of doubt but in persevering with him the selectors showed good sense, and, judging by his display a week ago, he will continue to be one of the stalwarts of the eighteen.

  They were kind words indeed for the Collingwood veteran. But they were also rather prescient, because Doc managed to play out most of the season. He then spent the summer of 1921–22 considering his football future and, just shy of his thirty-fourth birthday, he decided his body could not take another season.

  After the Collingwood committee had accepted Doc’s resignation, the club’s treasurer, Bob Rush, wrote to thank him for his

  long and faithful service as a player and club man … While the supporters will remember the many fine games in which you … assisted the team to maintain its high prestige in the football world the committee value even more highly your excellent conduct as a clubman and your gallant service in the AIF.

  While Doc’s playing career was now over, he was immediately appointed to the Collingwood Selection Committee, eventually becoming its chairman.

  Collingwood again played in a losing grand final in 1922. The reality was that the quality of the playing list had been in decline since the Magpies’ 1919 Premiership. While some new talent was emerging, the club was top-heavy with older players. And so the 1920s would be a lean period for Collingwood as McHale and the selection committee rebuilt the main list, and the coach of the seconds, Doc’s good mate Hughie Thomas, recruited and trained up a stable of new champions for the seniors.

  But the club that was forged from Melbourne’s greatest slum at the beginning of Victoria’s first crippling economic downturn was about to enter its glory days, ironically during the Great Depression. As it had been at its genesis, the Collingwood Football Club would become the social cornerstone of its crippled suburb. It would be the era in which the club would repay its supporters, and some of its favourite sons, including Doc Seddon and John Wren, would be at the heart of it all.

  While making the transition from player to selector, Doc also carefully prepared for a new life with Louie. Consistent with his cautious nature, there was nothing impulsive or reckless about his plans, and he left nothing to chance. From the moment he had begun courting Louie at her parents’ Park Street home, soon after returning from the war, he had intended to ensure that, when they did eventually marry, he could care for her and any children they might have.

  For some time he had been building up his own business as a carter, servicing the Collingwood boot trade and leather industry, and now it was booming. On 12 February 1923, he paid cash for a small, single-fronted, three-bedroom cottage in Abbotsford Street, just a stone’s throw from Johnston Street and Victoria Park. The house had a small picket fence and a neat, covered verandah. The bathroom was out in the backyard beyond the kitchen, along with a small stable where Doc’s draught horse, ‘Jock’, lived when he and his master were not doing the rounds.

  Four days after he had bought the house, Doc knelt with Louie before the altar at St Philip’s. It was precisely where they had been eight years earlier, but those circumstances had been vastly different. This time, when Doc signed the registry, it was as the groom and not the best man at Louie’s wedding. Once again, May Newby served as Louie’s matron of honour, while Fred Newby, having aged and slowed right down, signed as Doc’s witness.

  Soon after Doc and Louie married, young Perc was sent to live with his grandparents, Frances and Fred Newby, at their new house in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Aspendale. It must have been difficult for the boy, being separated from his mother and from Doc, whom he also loved, no longer calling him ‘Uncle’ but ‘Dad’.

  It was true that Doc cared greatly for young Perc. ‘From everything I have known, young Perc and Doc got on famously and Doc looked after him like he was his own son,’ says Allan Monohan. But there remains an enduring sense that, throughout his life, young Perc stood outside the nucleus of the Seddon–Newby marriage, which produced two other children: Shirley, born in April 1924, and Malcolm, born in September 1926. It is instructive that, from the time his two kids were little, Doc weekly bought a ticket in the Tattersall’s lottery under the pseudonym ‘MASHI’, a partial anagram of ‘Malcolm’ and ‘Shirley’; young Perc’s name was not included.

  Although young Perc’s father had long been dead, he had remained an omnipotent presence in the early years of Doc and Louie’s relationship. In late 1921, Louie received a memorial scroll containing a message from England’s King George V, who expressed his regret over Percy’s death. And in August 1922, she was sent a memorial plaque, known to those who had the misfortune to receive them as ‘death medals’. It was inscribed with the words:

  HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR

  PERCY EDWARD ROWE

  Then, just a fortnight before Lou
ie was to marry Doc, Percy’s Victory Medal, which commemorated the Allies’ defeat of the Axis powers, arrived in the post. On top of all this there was the boy, a constant reminder of Louie’s former life with Percy Rowe.

  Given the complexity—and occasional fickleness—of the human heart, the newlyweds could have been forgiven for thinking that, at times, there was a third person in their marriage.

  The plight of young Perc is not often spoken about when the myth—the footy club legend—of Doc and Percy and Louie is recounted, but it is a painful truth that still resonates with his family.

  I am visiting Ian Rowe and his sister, Carole Schmidt, who are the two younger children of young Perc. Along with Paul Rowe and Leonie Rowe, they make up the four surviving grandchildren of Percy Rowe and Louie. Their elder sister, Sandra, died some years ago but her husband, Bob Johnson, is here with us. So, too, is Carole’s husband, Norm. They all loved young Perc. Talking to them, I get the distinct impression that, while his life was not always easy or happy, he was a very loving father and a welcoming, knockabout, entertaining father-in-law.

  We are sitting around the kitchen table in Ian’s light-filled, inviting home in Castlemaine, a town of renovated colonial grandeur in northern Victoria that is increasingly catering to artists and writers seeking a tree change, and weekday Melbourne commuters looking to balance their working lives with a little country splendour. Ian is a long-term Castlemaine resident who likes the quietness of the place.

  This town is where young Perc and his beautiful wife, Gloria, moved to from Melbourne in 1957, soon after Perc was told he could no longer work in Doc’s transport business. There had been some pain involved in that because Doc’s biological son, Mal, stayed on to continue working with his father.

  ‘Dad was working in the carrier business and he got told one day there wasn’t enough work for the three families,’ Carole explains. ‘And they found him a job in Dummett’s factory … And he hated it. Really hated it. So … he met some men. They were really con men actually. They talked him into selling our house in Coburg and sinking all the money into a quarry up here in Barker’s Creek. A slate quarry. And he lost all the money. That’s why we came to Castlemaine and ended up in a commission house, left the washing machine behind, you know, came to nothing with five kids … It was very hard for Mum and Dad.’

  But it all happened a long time ago, and the Seddon and Rowe families have been speaking of late about their extraordinary family history.

  ‘They sent him [young Perc] off to live with the grandparents for a while, for a few years, when he was little,’ says Carole. ‘It was for quite a while actually … I can remember Dad saying once that Pa Seddon had wanted to adopt him properly. And Dad wouldn’t. He said, “My name is Rowe”.’ Young Perc did, however, come back to live with Doc and Louie when their two other children were little. In all of the photographs I see, he appears to be comfortable around Doc, never more so than as a boy on the cusp of his teens, standing sentinel-like over the smaller children.

  Like his real and de-facto fathers, young Perc was a precocious, talented footballer who played as a twenty-year-old for Hughie Thomas’ Collingwood seconds, including in the 1936 Premiership team. You get the sense that he was a tearaway who played his footy hard and enjoyed life to the full. There were times when, as a young man, he clashed with Doc and Louie, especially when he’d been out having a drink or two with his mates. And women were always interested in him.

  Gloria was a glamorous woman from a big family in Fitzroy. She and young Perc had five children together, but they lost one of them, Noeline, to illness in 1947 before moving to Castlemaine a decade later. Despite the tension between young Perc and Doc and Louie over business matters, the Seddons were doting and loving grandparents, although those of Louie’s grandchildren who remember her well enough describe Louie as a woman slightly detached—loving, but hard and a little cool. Ian Rowe says, ‘He was a really nice man. She was just quiet. But tough. You know, you didn’t get out of line around her.’

  Doc, Carole recalls, ‘was always fun and you knew that he loved you … Like he got us a big rocking horse. He sent us a Bible in pictures. He bought Sandy a bike. We never presumed to ask him for gifts, but he would just leave presents for us when we were little. I would call her a snob. But that is being mean. She wasn’t one that you’d go up and hug. Ian, Sandra and I, we used to fight over who was sitting on Pa Seddon’s knee … I got to sit in the middle. We didn’t have a bar of Nanna. Maybe she was more of a lady. Because I’ve got photos of her and she’s got a fur on and she is sitting on the beach.’

  After talking to her Aunt Shirley, Carole had been left with the impression that Louie did not approve of Gloria. ‘I don’t know that she ever thought Mum was good enough for Dad,’ says Carole. Regardless, young Perc and Gloria spent much of their lives together—it was only a few years after Gloria had passed away that young Perc died, aged sixty-seven.

  Louie with two of her children, Shirley and Malcolm Seddon, in central Melbourne, early 1930s. Seddon family collection

  On the table before us now are spread the few material objects that link Ian and Carole to their long-lost grandfather, the man whom their father never met but spent a lifetime trying to understand. Ian produces the original letter written by the bugler Alf Cohen to the Collingwood Football Club, which so vividly describes his grandfather’s death on the Somme. There are his military medals, including the death medal that was sent to Louie, and the tiny Bible that Louie had held during her first wedding at St Philip’s.

  ‘Dad never talked to us about his family,’ says Ian. ‘I was really surprised when he showed us that letter … He had that in his box … a special box with secret drawers.’

  Bob goes out to his car and comes back with a cardboard box. He reaches in and extracts the silver tea service won by Paddy Rowan all those years ago. Also in the box are pictures of Sergeant Percy Rowe in uniform and cigarette-card etchings of Percy as Paddy Rowan, the star Collingwood footy player.

  Then Ian brings out another letter, this one dated 27 October 1990. It is from his great aunt, Gwendoline, Percy Rowe’s youngest sibling. She had been held as a baby by her mother, Charlotte, when the uniformed Percy visited St Arnaud just before he shipped out to Egypt.

  It reads in part:

  There were fourteen children, many of whom did not live to adulthood. My mother and father had a sad and hard life … Fourteen children. As you can see one lived two days only and two others were just over two years of age, another three. Henry and Doreen died when my mother was expecting her 14th child. Then, of course, my brother Percy was killed in 1916. This was a terrible blow … to them as they all were very proud of him and loved him dearly. I can remember them always talking of him and how pleased they were that he had a little son Percy.

  Gwendoline wrote that, for a time, her mother’s sister, Aunt Louisa, had lived with them at the tiny house in St Arnaud and ‘had caused mayhem and merry hell in the family’ before suddenly disappearing. She went on:

  My sister Ethel was twenty years older than I, and was very close to our brother Percy Edward. She spoke of him a lot and I can remember my two elder sisters talking to my mother about him whenever they were together. Before he went to World War 1 he came up to see his parents. I was a baby at the time and my mother told me I would cry every time he put his soldier’s cap on. They regarded this as a bad omen, however, people were more suspicious then maybe.

  It was a pity that we did not mix as a family when your father was young, but things of the past are over and gone and cannot be altered.

  In a sense, young Perc fell between the cracks dividing two families—the Seddon–Newbys of Abbotsford Street, and the Rowes of St Arnaud, who never knew him.

  Carole says that the mysterious Aunty Louisa turned up once on Doc and Louie’s doorstep and characteristically raised some sort of hell:

  Aunty Shirley said that sh
e can remember this lady coming to the house because her name was the same as Nanna’s—Louie … And whether she caused trouble saying things to Nanna and then Nanna didn’t want anything to do with the Rowes at all after that, I don’t know. Nanna was stand-off-ish.

  Because it is not really clear what Carole is implying, weeks later I telephone her to clarify her comments. Carole says that the troublesome Aunty Louisa might have told Louie Seddon that her first husband, Percy Rowe, was illegitimate—that nobody knew who his father really was. She refers me to Percy Rowe’s birth certificate, explaining: ‘On his birth certificate it has got “father unknown”. Because his parents weren’t married when he was born. That’s when I said to Aunty Shirley, “Are we really Rowes?” Because I don’t know if we are.’

  This is a perplexing question for the Rowes. Carole says that, while her Aunt Shirley had been fairly sure that John Avent Rowe was Percy Rowe’s father, nobody could be absolutely certain. It remains an open question, adding another element of mystery to the story of her grandfather, the boxer and Collingwood follower.

  Carole’s grandfather may have been Percy Rowe, or he may have been Paddy Rowan. But he may well have been someone else altogether.

  21

  Promises Kept

  As new machinery increased production in the boot factories around Collingwood, Doc Seddon’s carting business got bigger by the year. He was also fortunate (or shrewd) enough to secure one of about twenty agencies that were licensed to sell season tickets for the Collingwood Football Club. Doc received a 2.5 per cent commission on each ticket sold. Given that the immensely popular Collingwood was about to dominate the game in a way that no club has since, and become the first of Australia’s pre-eminent national sporting brands, along with the racehorse Phar Lap, cricketer Donald Bradman and snooker player Walter Lindrum, it was a good business decision.