The story of 'Old Lysander'
A recent article by Roy Hay touched on a football match played as part of the celebrations in November, 1850, of Victoria's Separation from the rule of New South Wales.
The news reached Melbourne via a coastal vessel, the Lysander under the command of Captain C. Lulham. As well as carrying a cargo of iron piping, the Lysander had picked up the newspapers carrying the proclamation of the Separation from the English ship Delta in Adelaide a week before.
Hardly a glamorous vessel, the 476 ton brigantine Lysander was designed for cargo work with accommodation for 4 to 6 passengers.
The humble craft plied her trade carrying wool, timber and iron around Australian ports until the 1860's and as well as her part in one of Melbourne's earliest recorded football matches and despite a rather ignominious end to her career, the Lysander made another significant contribution to Australian football.
After the brig was decommissioned, she was sold to the Government and used as a prison hulk anchored off Williamstown in Hobson's Bay before being broken up.
The Prisons Department stripped the ship of most things of value and transferred the bell, originally cast in 1825, to Pentridge where it was used for some years to warn the local population of the escape of a prisoner.
The bell was then used by the Coburg volunteer fire brigade until the local group was absorbed into the Fire Brigade Board; "Old Lysander" as she became affectionately known (although probably few people knew exactly why) was then used at Richmond before being replaced by an electrically-operated alarm.
The bell was then stored at the Board's Eastern Hill station where it lay gathering dust for some years.
As football crowds following the resumption of play following the end of the Great War, most of the hand-rung "cow-bells" had become virtually impossible for the umpire to hear above the noise of the crowd.
Somewhere along the line, an observant and presumably Melbourne supporter apparently noticed the almost-forgotten bell (probably two-thirds to a meter high) and suggested to the football club that it could solve the problem of signalling the end of play at our largest ground.
Just before the commencement of the 1922 season, the Fire Brigades Board presented it to the Melbourne Cricket Club and to the cries of anxious supporters of "ring the bell", "Old Lysander" sounded the start and end of football's hostilities at the M.C.G. for over thirty years before being replaced with an electric siren system.
At the time, The Argus (22 August, 1922) noted :
“Football competition is so keen nowadays that a second may make all the difference in the result of a match. It is the duty of timekeepers to ring a bell at the end of each quarter, and the rules say that the ball shall be 'dead' at the first sound of the bell. It is thus essential that on each ground there should be a loud sounding bell, for a premiership may be won or lost in less than a second through an umpire nor hearing the ringing of the bell … Most of the bells used are insignificant. Recently the Melbourne Cricket Club installed a bell which should materially reduce the difficulty. It hangs from the front of the member's balcony and it's rich, deep tone echoes across the huge ground, so that no one will in future will be able to say that "he did not know that time was up."
The Argus went on to suggest one enterprising member of the St Kilda club some years previously had been credited with inventing "a patent football time bell", an experimental version of which was trialled with success at (modestly attended) practice games. In the days when clubs battling every sixpence they could lay their hands on, none were prepared to incur the expense of the installation of the new bell".
Sadly, the fate of "Old Lysander" is not immediately known (at least to the author) - perhaps sold off for scrap, or maybe hidden away somewhere in the catacombs of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Can anyone at australianfootball.com shed any light on “Old Lysander”?
Footnotes
For more details on the Separation and the subsequent celebrations, visit http://www.ozsportshistory.com/melbournerules/separation.html
Comments
Brian Membrey 31 July 2012
Further to my original posting, I uncovere some further note on "Old Lysander".
“Old Lysander” was watched over during most of her time at the Melbourne Cricket Ground by Mr. William Spry, the timekeeper for the Melbourne Football Club from the late 1890s through to the start of the Second World War.
The bell is believed to have been used up until 1948 when The Argus reported (21 July) “The world's most up-to-date outdoor sound system may be ready for use at the Melbourne Cricket-ground in time for the football finals this season”.
“Mr L. A. Moss, managing director of a Melbourne electrical engineering firm and a St Kilda FC committeeman, has evolved the new system. It broadcasts an alternating high and low pitched note, which can be amplified and relayed to any part of the ground through a system of loud-speakers, enabling umpires and players to hear the timekeeper's signals instantaneously”.
The report unfortunately did not reveal whether Moss was the “member of the St. Kilda club” mentioned in 1922, but it did suggest that in that 1948 interstate match against South Australia, and experiment of transmitting “Old Lysander” via loudspeakers positioned around the ground had been a resounding success.
Sadly, the fate of "Old Lysander" is not immediately known (at least to the author) - perhaps sold off for scrap, or maybe hidden away somewhere in the catacombs of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Robert Allen 12 August 2012
Hi Brian. I believe an incident at St Kilda in August 1922 sparked the Argus report you quote and helped speed the introduction of louder time bells. South Melbourne played St Kilda on 3 August and the Saints kicked a point to draw the game just as the final bell rang. South Melbourne - believing the point was kicked after the bell - appealed against the result and called upon the League to install "uniform Time Bells, preferably electronically controlled, on all grounds..." The appeal against was dismissed but the motion seems to have helped spur the League and the clubs to improve their time bells thereafter.
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