Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  Allan Monohan says that, after 1939, his grandfather never watched Collingwood play football again. ‘That ended, as far as we know, his official connection with the Collingwood Football Club and his support for the club,’ says Allan. ‘The rift lasted and lasted. He came back to the cricket club but never to the football club and he detested Frank Wraith for the rest of his life. Like I said, Doc was a very loyal friend and a very bad enemy—once crossed, that’s it. Although Nanna still followed the club with a passion. Two of her husbands had played football with the club, she loved the football club and the Collingwood Cricket Club, and she was still going to support them both.’

  For years, Louie had undertaken a ritual on home match Saturdays: she would leave Victoria Park a few minutes before the end of the match and order fish and chips for the family in Johnston Street. By the time Doc and the kids arrived home, the food would be waiting. She would later briefly go out again to Johnston Street where the boys would be selling the final edition of the Herald, complete with the match reports. It was a ritual she continued even after Doc severed his ties with the club. The couple’s children, not yet fully conversant with their father’s bust-up with the Magpies, continued to attend matches with their mother.

  Doc’s son Malcolm would grow up, like his half-brother, young Perc, to be a prodigiously gifted player. But according to Malcolm’s son, David Seddon, as a teenager Malcolm adopted, to his great detriment, Doc’s hatred of the Collingwood Football Club. He knocked back an invitation to train with Collingwood in 1950. He also rejected requests from Essendon and Melbourne to offer himself for consideration.

  The footballing future of young Perc, who had been regarded as one of the best of Hughie Thomas’ players, was apparently cruelled at the club by virtue of his kinship with Doc. However, there had already been tension between young Perc and McHale’s team.

  Doc and his stepson, young Percy Rowe, in the mid 1930s. Seddon family collection

  ‘The story goes that they were going to promote him to the firsts because he was a bloody good centre half-forward,’ says Allan Monohan. ‘And then someone said to him, “The only reason you’re getting a game, Rowe, is because your old man is on the selection committee”. So he never played another game—he said, “Stick it”.’

  Hughie Thomas eventually went on to coach St Kilda in 1944 and 1945. Doc was spotted at St Kilda training sessions alongside his old mate, but while he was willing to offer informal advice, he was not, it seems, ever quite up to formalising the arrangement—during World War II, he had knocked back offers from St Kilda to join the club as a selector and a coaching assistant. It seems that, sadly, when he turned away from Collingwood, Doc also turned his back on the game.

  Despite Doc not being actively involved in football throughout the early 1940s, his life was still full. His business, which had, like most others, faltered during the Depression, was once again booming and in 1941 he became mayor of Collingwood; Louie naturally relished the role of lady mayoress.

  Then, in 1942, Doc’s ‘MASHI’ syndicate finally hit paydirt in the Tattersall’s sweepstake. He won £10 000. Comfortably well-off before the win, he was now a very wealthy man. He used some of the money to buy a number of investment properties around Collingwood and the rest to buy a holiday house at Rye on the Mornington Peninsula, where he, Louie and the children spent many weekends and holidays.

  ‘I can imagine him down there on those weekends sitting by the old Bakelite radio trying to get a Collingwood score. Stubborn old bugger wouldn’t go to a match again, but he’d have wanted a score for sure. And Louisa never lost her passion for Collingwood,’ says David Seddon.

  Doc did have one major concern during the early years of World War II. In late 1941, despite his stepfather’s protestations, young Perc joined the Army. Doc, who was all too aware of the tough lot of the infantryman, had asked his stepson, ‘Why be a footslogger when you can be something else?’ But young Perc was insistent. Curiously, barely three months after he had enlisted, he was suddenly transferred to the RAAF, where he served largely out of harm’s way in northern Australia for the rest of the war. And in early 1945, about the time the RAAF was increasingly involved in the battles north of Australia, he was transferred yet again, this time to the Air Force Reserve.

  Young Perc’s son-in-law, Bob Johnson, explains: ‘And so Doc was the mayor of Collingwood at the time and … Percy, he joined the Army against his father’s objections. And they were going to shift him overseas, the Army, but anyway, Doc pulled a few strings and he was transferred to the Air Force and so he just flew around up in the islands for the rest of the war. Doc being the Labor mayor of Collingwood, he used his influence with John Wren, who used his influence elsewhere, to keep him away from harm.’

  A quarter of a century earlier, on a frozen battlefield in France, Doc had vowed to his best friend Percy that if anything bad should happen, he would care for Louie and young Perc. With the help of John Wren, he had met that promise.

  It had begun in Liverpool Street, and it ended just a punt kick away in Abbotsford Street. The elderly Doc, still rarely seen without a cigarette in his mouth, spent the final months of his life fighting against state government plans to knock down a block of ‘slum’ houses in his ward. The demolition would have forced dozens of poor families off the Flat and into the burgeoning outer suburbs. He looked after the people of Collingwood right to the end.

  On a cold August day in 1955, Doc, aged sixty-seven, died of a massive heart attack. He fell where he stood at the woodpile in the backyard at Abbotsford Street, with an axe in his hand. He’d been chopping wood for the fires inside his home and for those of his constituents who couldn’t afford heating fuel.

  The cold. Always the cold.

  Louie was heartbroken. Her sadness morphed into intense loneliness and then, gradually, into illness. On Saturday 17 August 1957, Louie left the match at Victoria Park early and strolled the few blocks to her home. Her beloved Magpies were on track to beat North Melbourne and she felt unwell. After the short walk, she opened the window in the front bedroom of her house and then she lay down on her bed.

  Around about dark, a neighbour dropped by with the final edition of the Herald, complete with the scores. They knocked. There was no answer. The neighbour looked through the front window and saw Louie just lying there on the bed, perfectly still.

  The Football Record for the match Louie watched, between her beloved Collingwood and North Melbourne, on the day she died. Seddon family collection

  All families have their complica-tions, their secrets, their papered- over sadness—the emotional wounds that time covers with scar tissue but which are never quite hidden or healed. Nobody can recall Doc and Louie Seddon talking about Percy Rowe when they were together. But in occasional moments of unguarded candour shared with her daughter, Shirley, Louie would reminisce whimsically about the man she had loved so intensely but so briefly such a long time ago. He liked to eat pickles, Louie would volunteer. And then she would laugh. And he was very good-looking, with dark hair.

  By then, in old age, her good and loving and prosperous and reliable life with Doc must have made Percy or Paddy sometimes seem like part of another life altogether. Except that every time she looked at young Perc, she’d have seen the handsome, boxing footy player from the bush. And whenever she felt the memory of him, she could rest assured that Percy Rowe continued to burn just as brightly for Doc.

  The elderly Doc and Louie on the beach at Rye. Seddon family collection

  They both loved him and they both missed him.

  And that was as much a part of the fabric of their love, and their lives together, as long-gone Liverpool Street, that small laneway of dirt and gravel in the most downtrodden part of colonial Australia’s wealthiest city, where a boy and a girl were born just a few doors apart.

  Epilogue

  After watching the Magpies win the 2010 Premiership, I passed through Collin
gwood in a taxi with my brother-in-law, Mick, and my twelve-year-old son, Joe, who was slumped in the back seat, his Collingwood guernsey stained with tomato sauce and his voice hoarse from yelling throughout a match that he’d seen, somewhat ironically, courtesy of an acquaintance of mine who is a die-hard Carlton supporter. There was a crowd outside the Grace Darling, where it had all begun for the Collingwood Football Club, but for the rest of Smith Street, it was pretty much just the usual Saturday- night business. Across Hoddle Street, Victoria Park was quiet, too. The Magpies and their legion of fans were celebrating over at the Westpac Centre, a long way across town from the old ground and its famous ghosts.

  On a glorious spring day a few weeks later, I find myself looking at the little black magpies that have been stencilled all over the red brick walls at Victoria Park. The turnstiles and the ticket boxes and the change rooms are still here, but bulldozers have moved in to pull some of the stands down. Along with a couple of other football tourists, I have returned for one last look, to remember this place as it was before the great brick walls are demolished.

  One of the workmen tells me that the Ryder Stand is staying. ‘Can’t pull that down, mate. It’s like the spire at St Pat’s Cathedral,’ he says.

  I walk out onto the grass and remember the times forty years ago when, after a match, we’d clamber over the fence and kick a footy in the mud. My team back then was South Melbourne, out of loyalty to my father, but I was always among cousins and uncles and aunts who were fanatical about Collingwood, as was my mother and my sister, Cathie. Collingwood, because it was the club to which my grandfather, ironically a leading Richmond goal kicker, gave his heart, his loyalty and, in better times, his financial support. Collingwood, because it was where we came from, before the family grew and spread to the east and the north and the south. Collingwood, because it represented our past and that of our grandfather, no matter how little we actually knew about it or him.

  Dad had put me in a South Melbourne guernsey at two years of age. But by my early adolescence, I had joined the others. Collingwood had felt like a celebration of us. It still feels like that to me.

  The grass out in the middle is perfect today. I don’t really remember grass ever having been there on match days back then. I just remember marvelling at how the likes of Peter McKenna and Des Tuddenham, Phil Carman and Twiggy Dunne could move like lightning across the course of thick, black mud and boot goals from what seemed like miles out.

  There is only the sound of the bulldozers today. But the noise from the stands when 30 000 Magpies fans booed or jeered Carlton heroes like Nicholls or Jesaulenko, a kind of Jurassic sonic boom, still echoes about the place if you shut your eyes, lean your face back to catch the sun … and remember.

  The infamous dunnies are still standing over towards the corner of Turner and Bath streets. As a ten-year-old I’d prefer to go home, bursting, rather than wade through the great, ankle-deep, beer-inspired stream of piss that covered the floor and flowed out the doorway after half-time.

  I walk back outside the ground and go around to the old social club. Workmen have painted over the great black and white bird that adorned the club’s exterior, its dark eyes fixed on the corner of Abbot and Lulie streets. The paint seems to have been more of a symbolic gesture, really, to emphasise that the Magpies have moved on to their flash new headquarters near the city. It couldn’t have been a genuine attempt to erase the image because a ghostly visage of the magpie still peers out from under the sheet of white paint.

  It’s fitting because for many, the Magpies are still here.

  Victoria Park, October 2010. Mike Bowers

  The old social club is where we’d wait hour after hour while my uncles and aunts and my mum celebrated deep into a cold winter evening when the Magpies had won. The players would pop in sometimes, and so as a kid you could get an autograph or two and shake hands with the current team members and with some of the real old-timers. Just like their father, Ed and his brother Matt Bourke, who was once touted as a club president, were deeply involved with the club and they knew them all.

  Not long before the 2010 Grand Final, Martin Flanagan, a distinguished journalist and author whose football prose—especially about Collingwood—is rarely paralleled, wrote evocatively about the club’s old ground. He noted that the curb outside the social club still bore the name of Kevin Rose, the esteemed former player and club president immediately prior to Eddie McGuire. A few weeks later I meet up with Kevin as he parks his car at Victoria Park, perhaps for the last time, and wanders towards the oval.

  ‘The noise. It was something special, particularly if you got a run on,’ says Kevin. ‘It was deafening, because you had 30 000 Collingwood and very few opposition [fans]. It was great. At three-quarter time if it was reasonably close—and it wasn’t usually reasonably close here at three-quarter time because our third quarters always seemed to be big quarters and that was when we would run away with it … but at three-quarter time … the trainers used to get out in front of the stands and they’d have the towels and they’d go whoosh with the towels like this so that the crowd would go mad. There was a sense of history. There was always a sense of strong discipline and strong team ethic at Collingwood, that’s what I noticed from day one when I came here. There was a sense that the team was always much more important [than] the individual and that probably started with McHale. It disappeared for many years but I reckon it’s coming back again now. What I saw this year of Collingwood, it was such a team-oriented premiership that I reckon it’s made its way back in the last two or three years.’

  He is talking about the resurgence of the fraternal sense of teamwork coupled with sharp skills that led to Collingwood’s four-in-a-row during the Depression years. Martin Flanagan had coined a name for this in his paean to Victoria Park: ‘If you see Collingwood and the way they’re playing, if you look at how much they do for one another off the ball, the radical acts of sacrifice they perform, what you’re seeing is the Collingwood method.’

  Some would dismiss this as hyperbolic nonsense, but not Eddie McGuire, who is constantly looking to his club’s past for lessons that might resonate with its contemporary off-field ethos and on-field success. He says of the Seddon–Rowe story: ‘If it wasn’t the personification of what Collingwood was about then, then it is definitely the personification of what we’d like Collingwood to be about today.’

  This is why he began telling the story of Doc, Percy and Louie before Collingwood’s Anzac Day matches, and it is why he likes to take Doc’s horseshoe into the change rooms at some matches.

  ‘I sort of unearthed this story about Doc Seddon and Percy Rowe and Louisa a few years ago, and I told it [on] Anzac Day and like so many war stories, I probably told the romantic one,’ says McGuire. ‘I suppose sometimes you look back on these stories and you look for the greater good and the working-class honour and all that sort of stuff that is certainly also there … but the truth is that it was also tough and dirty and hard and mean—real life. The players have looked at the horseshoe and they know the story of Doc and Percy and Louisa … I want them to understand—and Mick [Malthouse, the Collingwood coach] is very strong on it with his interest in military history—I am always at pains … to show them that you might think you are big-time but you are just part of the ongoing saga that is Collingwood. You know, this place has been big since the dawn of football. So don’t get carried away; we are only custodians.’

  From Victoria Park I wander up Johnston Street, past the old Austral Theatre and Wren’s Tote, to Smith Street. Then I double back and walk up busy Hoddle Street to look for the old Seddon house at number 403, but a big building supply depot now stands in its place.

  Now I go down Roseneath Street, just around the corner, to look for my grandfather’s old factory. Like so much of Collingwood, Abbotsford and Clifton Hill, the street has undergone such a dramatic renewal in the past ten or fifteen years that you realise that, if Collingwood had
remained at Victoria Park, the old club’s gritty history would have been at odds with the gentrified streets now surrounding it. The old red-brick facade that once housed the Commonwealth Government Saddlery Works, and then my grandfather’s boot-making operation, still stands. But it has been transformed with metal and glass into highly desirable apartments. Where people once dreamed of escaping Collingwood, today they need close to a million dollars to live here.

  I cut back up to Hoddle Street and turn left, crossing the freeway that accounted for row upon row of the slum houses that Doc Seddon had once fought, fruitlessly in the end, to protect, trying to ignore the fumes and the noise from the lanes of traffic. There on the left is St Philip’s, where the Seddons and the Newbys worshipped and wept over the caskets of their poor lost children. It is where Louie married her two Collingwood players and where her children married, too. The original church, once the oldest building in Collingwood, is gone now—demolished amid some controversy four decades ago so that a glass and brick multidenominational worship centre could be foisted upon those who actually preferred the cold old Gothic building, which had been steeped in the suburb’s past. A small part of the original vicarage still stands next door to the town hall, the building that the city hocked itself to make just so that the Flat could boast to the rest of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, and to the world, really, that while it might be dirt poor, Collingwood would always consider itself the equal of anywhere else.

  I walk past the great banner out the front of the town hall that reads ‘City of Yarra welcomes refugees and asylum seekers’, go down the side of the building and cut under a railway bridge, which brings me to Gahan’s Reserve. I look back towards the railway, to the place where Liverpool Street once was, and then over towards the old Newby house, with its pitched roof and its neat picket fence. It stands much as it probably always did here on Park Street, except for the 2010 Magpies victory poster that has been Blu-Tacked to the front window.