This page is a record of a scholarly article relating to Fremantle.
- Part of:
- Title: Hell for Leather: North Fremantle Football Club and the Great War
- Authors: Baden Pratt
- Published: 2018 Fremantle History Society (Fremantle)
- Reference URL: https://freopedia.org/Hell_for_Leather:_North_Fremantle_Football_Club_and_the_Great_War
- Tags: Fremantle Studies; Football; North Fremantle Football Club; Second World War
- Authority control:
I wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we are meeting on, the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation and pay my respects to elders past and present.
It may seem strange that, in addressing the subject of World War I and Australian football in Fremantle, a little suburban club like North Fremantle should take centre stage rather than, say South Fremantle or East Fremantle, both successful clubs within the Western Australian Football League, commonly known as the WAFL.
Yes, South Fremantle lost 6 footballers in World War I, and East Fremantle had 7 footballers killed.1 Across the WAFL, 84 players and two umpires would die. Not to take too narrow a view of things, it can be noted that the Fremantle-based Caledonian Soccer Club was effectively decimated as a result of the war with 27 players and officials signing up and 8 being killed, though it was able to ‘regroup with sufficient numbers in 1922.’2 But, as I will go on to demonstrate, the North Fremantle Football Club, then playing in the senior WAFL competition against teams like East Fremantle and South Fremantle, suffered more than these, and probably at least as much as any senior sporting club in Western Australia. Yes, it suffered much - and then was treated appallingly.
The title of this article, ‘Hell for Leather: North Fremantle Football Club and the Great War,’ could begin to make sense when one knows that volunteering for World War I military service depleted its player list to the extent that it was no longer able to field a team in the WAFL competition.3 Then, post war, as the North Fremantle community re-established itself, the club was ambushed by the WA Football League and stabbed in the back by all of today’s existing league clubs.4
Hell for Leather? Yes, Hell as 44 players walked off the North Fremantle Oval, as it was then called in 1914, 20 in 1915, 19 in 1916 and 2 in 1917 to volunteer to serve Australia. Twelve would die, 23 would return limbless, shell-shocked or brain impaired from gas attacks, and the remaining 9 received bullet wounds. Only a handful would ever play Australian football again, though it is worth recording that one, Cyril Hoft, playing for Perth, would go on to win the first Sandover Medal in a tie with Tom Outridge, in 1921.5
When life returned to something like normality in 1919 the North Fremantle community agitated to have its team readmitted to the West Australian Football League for the start of the 1920 season.6 At a well- attended public meeting, Councillors William White and Arthur Counsel, were deputed to attend a special meeting of the WAFL at which North Fremantle would have the opportunity to ‘receive the fullest consideration for readmission to the league.’7 Despite the gallantry of these North Fremantle footballers on the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Western Front in helping to preserve the freedoms that allowed the playing of Australian football to continue after the war, this meeting was never held. During the week before its scheduled date the WAFL club delegates met secretly and passed a motion to change the constitution of the League that had the effect of removing two clubs - North Fremantle and Midland Junction - from its membership.8 It meant that any special meeting to consider North Fremantle’s readmission was now beside the point - the matter had been decided by the stroke of a pen. The North Fremantle players who had hoped to play again for their old team then drifted to the league clubs who had voted it out of the competition.
Recruiting Posters
While a case could be made that the North Fremantle footballers were influenced by the recruiting campaigns to urge sportsmen to enlist for the war - such as Norman Lindsay’s, ‘The Trumpet Calls, showing an image of soldiers in the trenches and civilian sportsmen watching on, or the 1917 direct appeal to Australian footballers to ‘be in the last quarter’ and join the Sportsman’s 1000 - a more compelling factor could be the social context. To fully understand the response of both the North Fremantle football players and the North Fremantle community at large - more than 600 men and boys, dads and sons, brothers together, would enlist from this small village - one needs to know that from 1901 until 1915 these footballers were the pride of the North Fremantle municipality. Everybody went to the football at the North Fremantle Oval.
One factor in this could have been that the venue itself was exceptional — located alongside the Swan River with its iconic grandstand and fenced oval. Not only did it have its own press box, a facility famous at the time for having its own telephone links to the newspaper offices. Another factor was the proximity of the Gresham Hotel, which was located on the other side of John Street, just behind the press box.
If you wanted to be elected to the North Fremantle Council you had better join the football club. In one year, for instance, almost all the North Fremantle councillors served on the football club’s committee.
Samuel Cookson
The fans were fanatical. Samuel Cookson, for instance, went to all games wearing a black and white waistcoat, had one trouser leg torn off at the knee to display a black and white football sock and always carried a railway lamp that he would turn on and swing wildly every time North Fremantle kicked a goal. In 1915, Cookson donated a one-off 5 guinea medal to the WA Football League for umpires to vote 3, 2 and 1 for the ‘Fairest and Most Brilliant Player’ in each game. The votes were placed in envelopes and counted by the league at the end of the season. It was won by an Aboriginal player for Midland Junction, George Blurton, with 22 votes from East Fremantle’s ‘Nipper’ Truscott with 18 votes. Six years later the Sandover Medal was introduced, building on the idea that Cookson had launched.9
It is easier to understand this fanaticism when you know that North Fremantle had some of the greatest players ever to pull on a boot. Players included Phil Matson, for instance, who went on to be named in East Perth’s team of the century as captain/coach, Sam Gravenall went home to Victoria as captain/coach of St Kilda, Jim Toohey represented Western Australia 4 times and then played in a Fitzroy premiership team. Dolph Heinrichs became an East Fremantle champion and Albert ‘100 miles’ Franks was a WA and VFL superstar.
Seven Players
(Player images 4 and 5 by permission of the Rod Baltovich collection)
Their exploits were not confined to the football field. Billy Orr became secretary-manager of the WA Football League.10 Bill Lang - or, to give him his correct name, Bill Langfranchini - fought Tommy Burns for the World Heavyweight Championship and was later inducted into the Australian Boxing Hall of Fame for his exploits in the ring.11 One hundred and thirty six game player Les Charlton became Mayor of North Fremantle.12 Club delegate J J (Boss) Simons was a prominent politician, journalist, trotting and football administrator, and founder of the Young Australia League.13 It seemed that everything in North Fremantle revolved around the football team.
Margaret McPherson described the football club this way:
The North Fremantle Football Club had a name for aggressiveness, supporters were one-eyed and to some outsiders we were a lower socio-economic community. It was a rich community, with the football club made up of decent, hard-working, kind men.14
As former State Member for Fremantle Jim McGinty said in 2006:
You can’t exist in Fremantle and not be, at some stage, reminded of the exploits of ‘The Mighty Maggies’ of North Fremantle because the club’s members pervade all walks of Fremantle life.15
Back in 1915 at the start of the new football season, the war seemed to be a long way off. ‘Enthusiast’, the Fremantle Herald’s football writer, greeted the coming 1915 football season, with the words:
There is no shadow of doubt whatever that the national game is with us once more. On every open space the youth of the country is afoot with the elusive leather, secretaries have come forth from their summer seclusion, and clubmen are stiffening their sinews and summoning up their blood for the stirring times ahead. Training rooms are now beehives of industry and small talk.16
He made no mention of three North Fremantle footballers - Jackie Newham, ‘Chum’ Whittle and William Byfield - who had been among the first to sign up for the war in August, September and October 1914. Such was the public’s frame of mind that everybody knew they would surely be back for the end of the 1915 season.17
As the North Fremantle Football team ran on to what is now called the Gilbert Fraser Reserve for the start of the 1915 season, on Saturday 24 April, nobody knew that their two champion ruckmen, Whittle and Newham, were preparing to storm the beaches of ANZAC Cove the very next day.
Gilbert Fraser
At the Fremantle Post Office, letter carrier Gilbert Fraser knew everybody in North Fremantle.18 The young man was destined to represent the district in the WA Parliament for 30 consecutive years. The North Fremantle Oval was re-named after him in acknowledgement of his 27 years as president of the football club.19 In those early days of the war he was in the front line of delivering information.
North Fremantle were 5 games into the 1915 season when the news swept across the North Fremantle community that the club’s 2 champion ruckmen, Newham and Whittle, were dead. Private Arthur Gilbert ‘Chum’ Whittle, a 27-year-old coachbuilder from Preston Point Road in East Fremantle, died just 7 days after the Gallipoli landing. Over 6 seasons he had been a 78-game champion ruckman who was said to do his side ‘a lot of good and not a little evil’.20 He also was a champion WA yachtsman. 21 Second Lieutenant John ‘Jackie’ Drummond Newham was killed just 13 days after landing at Gallipoli, during the famous charge of the 2nd Infantry near Krithia. He had played 26 games in two seasons. Newham had been captain of Melbourne’s exclusive Wesley College, and captain of their cricket, football, athletic, rowing and shooting teams before being transferred to WA as sports master of Scotch College.22 He was just 25 when he died.
You can imagine the impact the devastating news of these losses had on the remaining football players.
A week later the postboy rode down John Street and stopped at the home of Mrs White with the news that her 20-year-old son Tom had bled to death from Turkish bullets to his abdomen, thigh and legs on Dead Man’s Ridge at Gallipoli.23 The White family were prominent members of the football club and the news swept through the team.
Five times the postboy cycled up to Mrs White’s front door as one after the other the news arrived that her other four sons, George, David, Clarence and Bruce had been shot and wounded.24 If that wasn’t enough for the White family, and the football club, the postboy arrived a sixth time. Mrs White’s only daughter had married William John Westergaard before he went to war and their son was born while he was overseas. The postboy arrived to say Westergaard had been shot and killed.
Over the next few weeks a further 20 players walked off the North Fremantle oval and signed up, so many that the football club had to forfeit the final four games of the 1915 league season. They had simply run out of players. The club sought and was granted a three-year exemption from league competition ‘on the understanding that League readmission would occur when the club could firmly re-establish itself.’25
In 2008, Australian football celebrated its 150th anniversary since the first game was played in 1858. Today’s club, wearing the same black and white jumpers, playing on the same oval, using the same change-rooms under the same historic grandstand as the original club, but now in the A Grade competition of the WA Amateur Football League (since renamed the Perth Football League), decided it would celebrate the anniversary by holding special ANZAC services at every gravesite and memorial of these fallen footballers at both Gallipoli and the Western Front.
At the Cape Helles Memorial on the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, North Fremantle footballers remembered Jackie Newham and at the Lone Pine Cemetery wreaths were laid on the grave of ‘Chum’ Whittle. On The Western Front, 35 young footballers held ceremonies at the site of the battle of Mouquet Farm, where 20 year old centre half forward Private John Morris ( Jack) Toohey and 27 year old centreman Private William Byfield died; at the mud and horror of Passchendaele, where 36 year old ruckman/forward Private Frederick Charles Shingler, 25 year old wingman Private Victor Ernest Ellement and 35 year old half forward flanker Lance Corporal Walter James Backshall lost their lives at the battle of Flers, where twenty six year old midfielder Private Samuel Thomas Podger was killed; at Fleurbaix, where nineteen year old ruckman/forward Lance Corporal William John Hewby died; at the second battle of Villers-Bretonneaux, where twenty two year old midfielder Lance Corporal William Arnold Spencer Thomas of the 51st Battalion died on 24/25 April 1918; and at Polygon Wood, where twenty seven year old miner Lance Corporal William Thomas Maddern was killed.26 To complete the services, in April 2019 the club visited the gravesite of Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant John Leonard Dunstan who is buried at the Highgate Cemetery in England.
Some people question why a football club of today, with no personal connection to these soldiers, would go to such lengths to honour their former players, even for some to suggest it was promoting war. Well, there are three reasons, one is the compelling stories of each of the 12 footballers killed from the club, another comes from a former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and finally there is Mrs White.
Maddern’s Gravesite
Let me just talk about Lance Corporal Will Maddern and you may then ask yourself whether it is important to remember this man.27 When he enlisted he was newly married. He would never see his daughter, Evelyn, who was born after he left for the Western Front.
Maddern had been a tall centre half forward. He was fit, fast and fearless and the Army recognised this by giving him one of the worst jobs on the Western Front battlefield, that of runner. Time and again at the call ‘Runner!’ Will would crawl forward, take the note from his superior, climb out of the trench and run as fast as possible. He won a Military Medal for his bravery at the bloody killing field called the Windmill Site, continually running messages through the hail of bullets. But his luck ran out. Will Maddern was shot and killed at Polygon Wood on his 28th birthday. Australia’s official war historian, Charles Bean, said the Windmill Site marks a ridge ‘more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other spot on earth,’ with 23,000 Australian casualties, almost 7,000 killed, on that little plot of land.28 So symbolic was this place that after the war the Australian Government negotiated with the French to buy the site. When the decision was made 75 years after the end of World War I to bring home the body of an unknown soldier taken from a cemetery at Villers- Bretonneux to be interred in the Australian War Memorial, dirt from the Windmill Site was flown 17,000 kilometres to Canberra.29 In the week before our young current footballers left for the Western Front an email arrived at the football club, amazingly from a relative of Will Maddern asking if the club had any information on him because his family was on its way to the Western Front to visit his gravesite. They were simply amazed to find that a little amateur football club in North Fremantle was also planning a visit to the same gravesite to honour Will Maddern. The family emailed back.
This is extraordinary. My wife sent off the email on a chance and lo and behold a reply. Real lump-in-the-throat stuff for us I can tell you. We are visiting Ypres later this year and taking our daughter and three grandsons to trace my grandfather’s steps through the campaigns of the Somme and Belgium. I grew up without knowing my grandfather, as did my mother who was only one year old when her dad, Will, died on the Western Front. This kind of story must have been the norm for so many of these men and boys; they gave up so much for this country of ours. The fact that your club is taking a group of young men from the old club to visit the graves of their predecessors is a deeply touching tribute to both them and to the spirit of tradition in your club. We are deeply touched by this project. I rather fancy that Will Maddern would have been amazed to think that, ninety- one years after his death, his old team would come to pay him a visit. I am sure Will’s tale is not too different from those of many of his generation who went off to serve our country, but it is a gruelling and confronting litany of deprivations, hardships, raw courage, grit and determination. Their stories truly deserve the telling and for all of us who have had the incredible privilege of growing up freely in this great country, it seems to me we have a duty to pass them on to the next generations. Someone has to bear witness to the loss of so many grandfathers, fathers, brothers, and sons.
When the club got to Will Maddern’s gravesite at the military cemetery on the Menin Road they were gob-smacked to find an envelope there addressed to the North Fremantle Amateur Football Club with the inscription in Will Maddern’s own handwriting. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper with just 4 words – ‘Thank you, Will Maddern’ - again, in his handwriting. Very strange. It took a little while to work out that his family had photocopied some of Will’s letters home and carefully cut out individual words from his letters, and then meticulously assembled them to create the soldier’s supposed message.
Now that second point. Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating said this in his address at the ceremony for the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial:
In the long shadow of these upheavals, we gather to ponder their meaning and to commemorate the values that shone in their wake: courage under pressure, ingenuity in adversity, bonds of mateship and, above all, loyalty to Australia.30
He went on:
We have gained a legend: a story of bravery and sacrifice and, with it, a deeper faith in ourselves and our democracy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian. It is not too much to hope, therefore, that this Unknown Australian Soldier continues to serve his country - he might enshrine a nation’s love of peace and remind us that in the sacrifice of the men and women whose names are recorded here there is faith enough for all of us.
As Keating spread the soil from the Windmill Site over the coffin of the Unknown Soldier he proclaimed: ‘He is all of them, and he is one of us.’
Well, so is Will Maddern, and so are all the 12 North Fremantle footballers who gave up their lives. It is about history, about our club history, about your history.
So what about Mrs White? So determined was she that her sons not be forgotten that she rallied friends, neighbours, and the community generally to start a fund to assist in building a memorial to the lost men, and footballers.31 The widows and bereaved of North Fremantle went door to door asking for donations, they held dances, and held fetes, and organised food and clothing stalls in the streets, to raise enough money to help build a memorial to their lost men, the first to be erected in Fremantle.
Today’s Footballers at Fallen Soldiers’ Memorial
That Fallen Soldiers’ Memorial is on the old Perth-Fremantle road, now known as Queen Victoria Street, North Fremantle, near the old Weeties factory where every Anzac Day the players, officials and members of the North Fremantle Football Club gather at 9am for a 30-minute service of remembrance. Schoolchildren from the North Fremantle Primary School introduce the short service with a story about one of the footballers.
May I conclude with the words of C.E.W. Bean, editor of Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918.
What these men did, nothing can alter now,
The good and the bad, the greatness and the smallness of their story will stand.
Whatever glory it contains nothing now can lessen.
It rises, as it will always rise, above the mist of ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and, for their nation a possession for ever.32
Fremantle Studies Day, 2018
References
1 G. Wardell-Johnson, WA Football League War Casualties, [Perth, WA], [2018]. https://www.wafooty.com.au/download/d/7cEBEeJfdgHJyekmSslq2mAqbV9- cIJ-ZhTYCH1aW8Y. Accessed 16 July 2021.
2 Caledonian Soccer Club, Fremantle Anzac Centenary, City of Fremantle, 2015. https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20160305163942/http://www.anzacfremantle. com.au/Stories/18/caledonian_soccer_club. Accessed 16 July 2021
3 W. Foreman, The great men of norths, Western Mail, 26 April 1951, p. 57. https:// trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/39112543. Accessed 16 July2021
4 B. Pratt, Hell for Leather: The Forgotten Footballers of North Fremantle, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2008, pp 39-41.
5 B. Pratt, The Mighty Maggies of Gilbert Fraser Reserve, 1895-2006, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2006, p 29.
6 North Fremantle Senior Football Club, Daily News, March 31, 1919, https:// trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/81835319?searchTerm=Gresham%20Hotel%20 North%20Fremantle&searchLimits=. Accessed 16 July 2021
7 Meeting of the League, West Australian, May 1, 1919, https://trove.nla.gov.au/ newspaper/article/27603248?searchTerm=History%20of%20football%20in%20 North%20Fremantle&searchLimits=l-state=Western+Australia. Accessed 16 July 2021
8 Midland Junction and the league, The Swan Express, Midland, April 25, 1919, p. 4. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/207323995?browse=ndp%3Abrowse%2 Ftitle%2FS%2Ftitle%2F981%2F1919%2F04%2F25%2Fpage%2F22685768%2Far ticle%2F207323995. Accessed 16 July 2021
9 B. Pratt, Hell for Leather: The Forgotten Footballers of North Fremantle, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2008, p. 9.
10 Perth Football League, William Orr, [Perth] http://www.perthfootball.com.au/ history/hall-of-champions/champions/william-orr. Accessed 16 July 2021
11 “Death of Bill Lang,” The West Australian, September 5,1952, p. 18, https://trove. nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/49050740?searchTerm=death%20of%20bill%20lang. Accessed 14 August 2021.
12 Wally Foreman, “The Great Men of Norths,” Western Mail, April 26, 1951, p. 57, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/39112543?searchTerm=the%20 great%20men%20of%20norths. Accessed 14 August 2020.
13 Lyall Hunt, Australian Dictionary of Biography, John Joseph ( Jack) Simons (1882-1948), v. 11 (1988), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/simons-john-joseph- jack-8430. Accessed 14 August 2021.
14 B. Pratt, Hell for Leather: The Forgotten Footballers of North Fremantle, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2008, p. 87.
15 B. Pratt, Hell for Leather: The Forgotten Footballers of North Fremantle, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2008, p. 5.
16 Enthusiast, “Football”, Fremantle Herald, April 23, 1915, p. 3 https://trove.nla. gov.au/newspaper/article/212551271?searchTerm=white%20counsel%20north%20 fremantle%20football&searchLimits=. Accessed 14 August 2021.
17 B. Pratt, Hell for Leather: The Forgotten Footballers of North Fremantle, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2008, pp. 30-38.
18 Parliament of Western Australia, Members’ Biographical Register: Gilbert Fraser, 2001, https://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/parliament/library/MPHistoricalData. nsf/(Lookup)/D585CD584DCA6187482577E50028A5F6?OpenDocument, Accessed 14 August 2021.
19 Heritage Council, State Heritage Office, Gilbert Fraser Reserve and Grandstand, 2007. http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/Public/Inventory/Details/8f70dfaa- 062a-491d-8c86-037d51269b58. Accessed 14 August 2021.
20 Football, Western Mail, 23 April 1915, p. 28, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ article/37424669, Accessed 14 August 2021.
21 “Western Australian Heroes at the Dardanelles,” The Daily News, July 4, 1915, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/81000150. Accessed 14 August 2021.
22 John Drummond Newham, Wesley College: About Wesley, https://www. wesleycollege.edu.au/about-wesley/our-history/roll-of-honour/john-drummond- newham. Accessed 14 August 2021.
23 Fremantle Herald, May 28, 1915.
24 Andrew Pittaway, Fremantle Voices of the Great War: A History of Fremantle People who Served in the Great War of 1914-18, The author, 2015, p. 335.
25 Greg Wardell-Johnson: Birth of a Football Icon 1895-1915, The Mighty Maggies of Gilbert Fraser Reserve 1895-2006, [Mandurah: Drum Print + Publications], p. 19.
26 B. Pratt, Hell for Leather: The Forgotten Footballers of North Fremantle, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2008, pp. 11-38.
27 B. Pratt, Hell for Leather: The Forgotten Footballers of North Fremantle, Drum Print, Mandurah, 2008, pp. 19-22.
28 The Windmill, Pozières, ANZAC Portal, n.d. https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/ resources/windmill-pozieres, Accessed 14 August 2021.
29 Simon Berry, Welcome Home - The Return of the Unknown Soldier, Virtual War Memorial Australia, https://vwma.org.au/research/home-page-archives/return-of- the-unknown-soldier. Accessed 14 August 2021.
30 Paul Keating, ‘Remembrance Day 1993: Commemorative Address,’ Australian War Memorial, 11 November 1993, https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/ speeches/keating-remembrance-day-1993. Accessed 14 August 2021.
31 ‘Fallen Soldiers: Memorial at North Fremantle, The Advertiser, Fremantle, 21 October 1921, p. 1 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/255934615?search Term=raising%20money%20for%20the%20North%20Fremantle%20Fallen%20 soldiers%20Memorial&searchLimits=, Accessed 14 August 2021.
32 ANZAC Voices, Australian War Memorial, https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/ exhibitions/anzac-voices/remembering-them. Accessed 14 August 2021.