The Fourteenth Foot
Western Australia's links with the game of which Henry Colden Antill Harrison is called 'father' date from 1868. On 5 June that year two companies of the Second Battalion Fourteenth Foot (Buckinghamshire) arrived in the Swan River Colony from Hobart Town on the Virago. The regiment was a footballing as well as fighting unit. A year after serving in the Maori Wars, the Fourteenth Foot had played a Challenge Cup football match against Harrison's Melbourne club, in July 1867, before 5,000 spectators at Melbourne's ground - now the M.C.G.
It was described as “the roughest, if not the best match that has yet taken place' at that venue and Harrison said of the soldiers, “they were pretty rough customers”. Melbourne won, but the Fourteenth Foot took the return match two goals to one after a three-hour tussle.
On Friday, 19 September 1868, in the first football match played in Western Australia, the regiment met a team of locals on the Bishop's Collegiate School grounds, just below their barracks on Mount Eliza.
The Inquirer reported 'a very spirited match at this manly game . . . After a sharp contest for about an hour, a goal was scored by the civilians, and the play was kept up, but without scoring, until dark, when the game was struck by mutual understanding, to resume it at the end of the present week'. When it did resume on Saturday, 27 September “the military came off victorious, after some capital play on both sides, with two goals consecutively”.
Nevertheless there must have been some handy players among the locals, for when some joined forces with the soldiers based in Fremantle as the Western Australian Temperance and Recreation Society to play the Town of Fremantle on 16 October, they won three games out of three.
In those days football was played under a long-standing British system of the best of three goals winning, regardless of time, with ends changing after goals. It is impossible to judge from reports, however, what other rules applied in the regiment's matches.
The Fremantle Herald responded to interest aroused by the match at the port by publishing a set of rules from Cassell's Out Door Games, but these were Rugbeian laws which had been initially adopted by the (English) Football Association in London in 1863. Victorian clubs had formulated their own uniform rules in 1866, but according to Harrison the Fourteenth Foot had refused to play under them. When he had complained about their hacking in 1867, the soldiers told him “To Hell with your rules. We're playing the - Irish rules”.
Football in various disorganised forms may have continued in Western Australia after the departure of the regiment in February 1869. The Reverend Charles Grenville Nicolay wrote in The Handbook of Western Australia in 1877, “The climate certainly favours out of door amusements, so that, not only in Perth, and the bigger towns, but wherever sufficient numbers are to be found . . . football has its regular clubs, practices and matches”.
The good reverend probably overstated the case, but certainly in 1876 there was a series of matches between the boys' schools of Perth and Fremantle. With the encouragement of his headmaster, the Yorkshireman George Bland Humble, the captain of Fremantle's school cricket team, George Frederick Gallop, challenged his counterpart at Perth, Carlton Richard Pether, to a match. Pether replied that cricket was not possible, but Perth would be glad to meet Fremantle at football on the Fremantle Green on 18 March.
A mid-nineteenth century view of Perth from Kings Park about the time that WA was ready to adopt Australian football as the major winter code ahead of rugby.
The Perth boys sailed down the Swan River on the Lady Sterling for the match on a green near the Customs House. The game started at eleven o'clock and went on, interrupted by fights and refreshments of ginger beer, until four, when, with the score at one goal each, it was decided to resume on another day in Perth. The return was played at the foot of William Street and afterwards the young footballers were entertained to dinner at the Freemasons Hotel, the proprietress of which, Mrs Lucy James, had a son attending Perth Boys' School. That son, Walter Hartnell James, later Sir Walter and a State Premier, was to have an influence on the future of football in the colony.
On 24 April, 1877 the Western Australian Times reported the first moves to form a football club in Perth and suggested that since the city “can boast of some fast-travelling pedestrians, little difficulty ought to be experienced in getting a team together”. The newspaper was very much behind the idea, since it lamented the lack of public amusement and the idle time spent by the city's young men in public houses, billiard rooms and brothels – “if they cannot get good amusement they find bad . . . Here we have few or no amusements for the people. Our buoyancy evaporates in tea meetings and soirees, where we become lively under the influence of weak Bohea and the vapid speeches of flatulent orators.”
If a guiding light was needed, it arrived on 12 November of that year in the form of St John St George Ord, son, private secretary and aide-de-camp to the new Governor, Sir Harry St George Ord. Ord was educated at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where rugby had been introduced in 1864. He was a keen sportsman and, at the age of twenty-six, a participant. He imported footballs at his own expense for 'friendly and spirited games' on the Collegiate School grounds in 1878, having found an ally in the school's new headmaster, Richard Davies, a product of rugby-playing Haileybury School and Cambridge University and still a young man of twenty-four. Further encouragement came from letters to the Western Australian Times in 1879. 'Old Boy' of Perth wrote, "I hope our young men will devote their attention to that ancient and excellent game - football, which I regret to say seems never to have been much in favour by our Western Australian youth'. 'Citizen' replied in the Inquirer, “I see no reason why football should not be continued this year, by the formation of a Football Club. Perhaps Lieut Ord, himself adept at the game, will take the necessary steps in the matter.”
A club was formed at Davies's High School. The school magazine Cygnet recorded on 13 June that Charles Vernon Birch was captain of school football and Walter James secretary. Within two years the school club would give organised football in Western Australia its start. In 1881 Davies was succeeded by Thomas Breame Beuttler, born and educated at Rugby and another Cambridge graduate. Still twenty-eight, and described as a first rate footballer, Beuttler not only fostered the playing of rugby at the school, but took part himself, along with another master from a rugby-playing English public school, Owen Pennell Stables, who had been educated at Tonbridge. To add to the influence, the school captain was Alfred Edward Parry, whose father, Bishop Henry Hutton Parry, was an Old Rugbeian, and two of the men involved in school affairs, John Charles Horsey James and the Perth-born Henry Bruce Lefroy, had played the game with distinction at the Warwickshire school.
Beuttler arranged a match against a Town XV, led by Theophilus Rodda Lowe, for 18 June 1881 on the school grounds, the High School winning by two touchdowns to nil. 'Looker On' reported for The West Australian, “the rules were new . . . scarcely any of the players had played that game (Rugby Union) before”. Two further matches were played against the Town, then a fourth against a Colony XV, which included 'two or three Nor-West men'.
The organised activity of 1881 led to the formation the next year of at least five clubs in Perth and Fremantle. From the outset, however, arguments arose as to which code these clubs should adopt. Perth and sister club Rovers decided to carry on with rugby - understandably, since many of their members had been involved in the 1881 matches. Edward John Steere (later Lee Steere) had, for example, played for the High School and was made captain of Rovers when they formed in 1882.
Today the Parmelia Hilton Hotel stands near this site but when this picture was taken more than 125 years ago it contained only one dwelling and was the site of many of Perth's early sporting contests.
Fremantle and the short-lived Fearnoughts also opted for rugby, but a fifth club, ironically called the Unions, elected to play Victorian rules. A correspondent to The West Australian supported their move as being 'in the right' as 'the "bouncing" rules are those . . . universally adopted in the other . . . colonies. The mere fact of our having several Rugby me out here, who know how to play the Rugby game, is no excuse for our clubs adhering to the rules which govern that game.' The other side was intractable. 'The few teams which adopted the Victorian rules soon learnt the error of their ways', came the reply. 'I have never yet met a man who, having changed from Victorian to Rugby Union, ever regretted having done so.'
One visitor to Perth in 1882 who would hardly have agreed with that sentiment was the journalist Richard Earnest Nowell Twopeny. Twopeny came from a rugby background at Marlborough College but in 1883 wrote in his Town Life in Australia, “the Victorian game is by far the most scientific, the most amusing both to players and onlookers, and altogether the best . . . there is much more "style" about the play . . .”. He had come west to organise an international exhibition after having, in 1877, suggested and organised the first intercolonial match under Victorian rules, and captained Adelaide in it against St Kilda, and in 1881 played for South Australia against Victoria in Melbourne. Stables described Twopeny as a prominent figure in football circles in Perth who 'used to play wearing spectacles, and was captain of his team, leading them on in stentorian tones'.
Yet despite Twopeny's presence, and that of fellow advocates Frank Ernest Leopold Stafford and two young West Australians who had played the Victorian game at school in Adelaide, Harry Herbert and William August Bateman, rugby held sway, in the Fremantle team at least for the time being. But Fremantle were accused of 'conspicuous want of knowledge of the rules of the game' and, in the first match of what was to become a fierce rivalry with Perth, of tripping and other illegalities. It was within the Fremantle club that, in 1883, the first move came to change the allegiance of West Australian teams from rugby to football.
Harry Herbert and Bill Bateman, sons of Fremantle merchants and shipowners, had been together at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide and had been won over to the Victorian rules. On 30 March 1883 they were instrumental in the calling of a meeting at Flindell's Hotel in the port to form a club called Swans to play the Australian game. Unions were no longer in splendid isolation. The view was put by 'Little Mark' in the Inquirer: '. . . we should very much like to see . . . a proper game, namely, "Victorian Association", for I am positive . . . such play would be enjoyed more and witnessed with greater pleasure than the "Rugby Union", while the players themselves would be able to show what they are really made of to a greater advantage . . . there is next to no satisfaction derived . . . in witnessing a game played as in Perth and Fremantle last season; and I feel positive that after our youths had played under Victorian rules for a short while they would realise the truth of these few remarks . . .'
Feeling on the issue was clearly high and on 20 April the Perth club, at their annual meeting, succumbed to the experiment with the Australian code regardless of the strong rugby attachment of their captain, Ernest Chawner Shenton. The West Australian took an interest in the matter, applauding the plan to try out the 'much vaunted' Victorian rules in a series of matches and allow the Perth public to judge for themselves on the merits of the two codes. The newspaper pinpointed the two areas contributing to the steady decline of West Australian rugby: the haphazard manner in which fixtures were arranged, and the loss of public interest in the game as a spectacle. There was, it reported, 'a great deal too much holding the ball. If men would only stick to the letter of the rules . . . they would find that the Rugby Union game would be infinitely more attractive both to themselves and the public generally. As played now in Perth, football resolves itself into one continuous round of close scrummages, which are neither edifying to spectators nor exciting . . .'
Rugby managed to struggle on into 1884, with Bateman and Herbert having to content themselves with displaying their drop-kicking skills in that code, Frank Stafford leading Rovers 'with the zeal and zest of the English Rugby Union players' and Walter James playing for Perth. But before the end of that season Fremantle had left the other two clubs to go their own way, thus triggering off the inevitable switch of codes for Western Australian football clubs.
The issue came to head at the annual general meeting of the Fremantle club at Captain Edward Henry Fothergill's Cleopatra Hotel on 27 April 1885. Bateman was elected captain, blue and white were adopted as the club's colours, and after an animated discussion a majority decided in favour of playing 'the Association game as played in some adjoining colonies . . .' That same day Fothergill's future son-in-law, Hugh Robert Dixson (above), placed an advertisement in The West Australian calling a meeting at Chipper's Hotel on 29 April to form a Victorian rules-playing club in Perth. The paper commented: 'For the sake of this old English sport, it is clearly desirable not only that a uniform game should be established all over the colony, but also that the game should be one whose popularity is the highest, and most extended'. The writer went on to say: 'The Victorian game . . . for life, dash and general interest to spectators, is probably unequalled . . .'
Dixson had to adjourn his 29 April meeting to Saturday, 2 May because of a number of prior commitments, and in the interim the Rovers club had decided to join Fremantle, urging their players to practice the new rules. Dixson's club was duly formed, and called themselves the Victorians. Immediately he scheduled a meeting of delegates of the three clubs at the Criterion Hotel the following Friday to form an association. Dixson, an astute young business man and promoter, had recognised where rugby had fallen down and, having made his start, was not about to let Australian football follow suit.
Frank Stafford took the chair at the 8 May meeting and observed that such an overall controlling body should have been formed long ago. Dixson, who had come west from Adelaide earlier in the year, read out the rules of the Adelaide and Suburban Football Association, and, with some minor alterations for local conditions, these were adopted. It was decided an unlimited number of clubs would pay an annual subscription of a guinea. Dixson was elected secretary; Dr Edward Scott, a later Mayor of Perth and the father and grandfather of England rugby union internationals, the patron; Barrington Clarke Wood, the Mayor of Fremantle, the first president; and a host of the colony's most prominent citizens, with names like Marmion, Parker and Sholl, became vice-presidents.
The Perth Esplanade was one of the earliest venues for Australian football. This picture, taken looking down Barrack Street, shows two sets of goalposts on the Esplanade at the turn of the century.
Dixson had previously been assured, he said, that Beuttler would bring the High School into line with the other clubs, and Fremantle delegates expressed confidence that Unions would affiliate. So the colony's five clubs were to play the one code, and a Western Australian Football Association had been established. The West Australian applauded the move: “It is quite apparent that the popularity, interest and success of the game in the colony depended upon some such arrangement being come to…Without such an institution it would be impossible to make satisfactory arrangements for a succession of interesting matches, or to preserve the high and manly tone becoming to this ancient sport, and save it from the licence of roughs and rowdies”.
Much of the credit for the formation of the WAFA, the forerunner of the WAFL, must be given to Dixson. Born on 11 November, 1865 at Forbes in New South Wales, he was educated at Scotch College in Melbourne and Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, two of the cradles of the Australian game. His grandfather, the Scotsman Hugh Dixson, had started a tobacco dynasty in Sydney in 1839, and after Dixson's uncle, also Hugh, had taken over the company, his father, Robert, had headed the Adelaide branch, from whence young Hugh came to Perth to work for a short period for the firm I.W. Wright and Company. Soon after forming the WAFA and playing in the Victorians' early matches, Dixson moved back east to work for his father. He returned in the early 1890s to establish a tobacco factory, during which time he served as president of the WAFA in 1891 and married Sara Fothergill in Fremantle in 1893.
After his uncle Hugh had been knighted, Dixson changed his name by deed poll to Denison in 1907 to avoid confusion with his uncle. As 'U.R. Robertson' he was known as the owner of the great Poseidon, winner of the 1906 Melbourne Cup, two Caulfield Cups and both the VRC and AJC Derbies and St Legers and £19,946 in prize money. He became Sir Hugh Denison in 1923, an Australian Commissioner to the United States and a newspaper and tobacco industry magnate. He died in 1940, his contribution to WA football all but forgotten.
From the first match under the auspices of the WAFA, however, the rapid resurgence of football in the colony and the firm establishment of the Australian game as the code of preference are testimony enough to the achievement of Hugh Robert Dixson.
Footnotes
This article was first published in The Footballers: From 1885 to the West Coast Eagles, published by St George Books, 125 St Georges Terrace - a division of West Australian Newspapers Limited. (First published 1985. Revised edition 1988.)
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