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Rugby League ANZACS of World War One
E. Larkin (League official) fell at Gallipoli in 1915, while Newtown's F. Cheadle, J.E. Williams, H. Bolt and S. Sparrow were all killed, along with Easts' R. Tidyman. While Cheadle and Tidyman had both played for Australia, Cheadle is credited with being the first player to abandon the NSWRU and sign professional terms in 1907. We feature four articles that examine the path that rugby league and some of its players took during World War One.
League's
Anzacs - Two of a Rare Breed George
Franki is a sports and military history enthusiast, and David Middleton
is a Sydney-based freelancewriter and statistician. Few of Australia's elite rugby league players volunteered for service in World War I. This was a controversial subject for many years during and after the conflict. In the ranks of the graded clubs in Sydney and Brisbane were some of the country's finest young fighting candidates. Fit, strong, working-class men who would have adapted comfortably to the disciplines of the Australian Imperial Force. Why then did so few of the game's elite players enlist for service? The rival rugby union encouraged its players to join the colours and closed down its competition in 1914 for the duration. But rugby league continued to play its grade premiership, attracting large crowds. Definitive answers are hard to find. Many of the top players were tradesmen working in essential wartime industries. Many would have married young and saw their place as being with wives and children. The League secretary H. R. Miller reasoned that "so many of them are married and have family responsibilities". Another theory for the low enlistment rate was expounded by Dr Herbert (Paddy) Moran, in his classic autobiography, Viewless Winds. A majority of the pre-war rugby league internationals had been Wallabies in Moran's 1908-09 team which toured Great Britain and had "turned", joining the new professional code in 1909. Moran said his players, who earned a reputation for rough play and had three men sent from the field in disgrace, were infuriated by the treatment of the team by the British press and crowds. The Morning Post said they were "damaging imperial relations". Moran wrote that "most of them developed a dislike for everything English" and six years later when the war broke out "those 31 men were still in the flower of their physical vigour, yet only seven took part in the War". They may not have wished to fight in "England's war". The legendary Dally Messenger was one of many prominent league identities who did not enlist. He married in 1911, had retired as a player by the time war broke out and had heavy responsibilities with a hotel business he had bought. Two rugby league internationals, Frank Cheadle and Bob Tidyman, were exceptions to the general rule and paid for their devotion to the cause with their lives.
He was educated at Marrickville, Stanmore and Fort Street Schools and played his first club football with the Stanmore team. He graduated to Newtown Rugby Union club in 1906 and was on the verge of international selection when he joined the new professional movement in August 1907. He played in the inaugural series of matches between NSW and New Zealand's "All Golds" in 1907, took part in three Tests against the Kiwis in 1908, toured with the Kangaroos the same year - playing only seven matches out of 46 - and played again against New Zealand in 1909 in Australia. He played only 16 games for Newtown and by 1911 his first-grade league career was over. Cheadle enlisted in the AIF on January 6, 1915, at the age of 29 and was posted to the 17th Battalion, 5th Brigade, 2nd Division. He must have been a promising soldier, as he was promoted to regimental sergeant major on March 29, 1915. Like many who enlisted in the AIF, he had previous part-time military service under the compulsory military training scheme which existed in Australia before World War I. The 17th Battalion, as part of the 2nd Division, landed on Gallipoli in August 1915 and was welcomed warmly by the hard-pressed 1st Division, which had been there since the landing in April. He transferred to the 18th Battalion and was promoted to lieutenant in October. The 18th was evacuated from Gallipoli in December 1915, regrouped in Egypt and reached France in March 1916, where it was assigned trenches near Armentieres. Cheadle was shot through the head shortly after his battalion moved into the trenches and he died of wounds on May 12 in the 7th Australian Field Ambulance, which recorded that "his brain was protruding" on admission. C. E. W. Bean, the Australian war historian, wrote that "Lieutenant Cheadle of the 18th Battalion, when boldly scouting with the moon nearing the full, was seen by the enemy, fired on and fatally wounded as the patrol withdrew over the parapet". He is buried in Erquinghem-Lys Churchyard, 1.2km west of Armentieres. His widowed mother was awarded a pension. Bob Tidyman was a Queenslander by birth, but played as a winger for Eastern Suburbs and appeared in the last two Tests against Great Britain in 1914. His last Test was the famous Rorke's Drift Test which Great Britain, depleted by injuries, won heroically with only 10 men holding out 13 Australians.
While training in England on Salisbury Plain, on July 25, 1916, he was charged with being late on 6.30 am parade and was sentenced by Lieutenant Percy Storkey to confinement to camp for four days. On April 17, 1918, while serving with the 19th Battalion, Storkey won the Victoria Cross for gallantry at Hangard Wood when the Australians were holding the line against the last German offensive of the war. Tidyman joined the 19th Battalion in France on September 25, 1916. The battalion had taken part in the terrible battles at Pozieres in July and August, and was attacking at Flers in the last action of the Somme offensive of 1916 before winter set in. The battalions of the AIF were near exhaustion and had suffered heavy casualties for six months. Bean wrote that an observer watching Australians leaving the trenches stated: "I was rather shocked with the look of the men. Not demoralised in any degree - but grey drawn faces and very grim. "It is the first time I passed an Australian battalion without seeing a single smile on any man's face." Tidyman was listed as missing in action on November 14, 1916. A report said: "We gained our objective and took two lines of trenches. We made 50 prisoners. Tidyman was told to look after these prisoners but I think he was sniped taking them down." On August 22, 1917, his sorrowing mother wrote to Base Records requesting that her son's action - "being first on the parapet and was last seen jumping into the trench - should entitle him to some distinction". However, he was not awarded a decoration. Tidyman had two brothers in France - W. C. Tidyman and C. Tidyman. Both served with the 55th and 17th Battalions and were wounded. Bob Tidyman and his fellow league international Frank Cheadle had been in France for barely two months when they were killed. It was not until 10 months later, September 8, 1917, that Tidyman was recorded as "killed in action". His body was not recovered for burial and his name is listed on the Australian Memorial at Villers Bretonneux, along with 11,000 other Australians who fell in France and have no known grave. PART 2 - Rugby League Anzacs of World War One Ian Heads (from True Blue - The Story of the NSWRL) examines the war years It is fair to claim that the rugby "war" - the heated conflict between the establishment rugby union and the upstart rugby league - was decisively won by the professional code long before the outbreak of hostilities in World War One. By then rugby league was clearly the preferred game with a lead over its rival that rugby union would never make up. In Sydney in 1915 the Rugby Union suspended formal competition. The NSW Rugby League chose to play on, its spokesmen arguing that to continue was to provide sorely needed entertainment for a troubled public, that the staging of matches could generate valuable funds to aid the war effort, and the playing of such sports as rugby league kept young men fit in the event of them being called on to fight. The issue of professionalism was forgotten; patriotism was now lead item on the agenda. The pressure was persistent and intense. In July 1915 the Labor Premier of NSW, W.A. Holman, exhorted the sportsmen of the state: "Your comrades at Gallipoli are calling you. This is not the time for football and tennis matches ... it is serious. Show that you realise this by enlisting at once." Throughout Australia the debate raged: should sport continue during a time of war? In Victoria in 1916 five VFL clubs voted to suspend competition - while four played on. "PLAY THE GREATER GAME! RESPOND TO YOUR COUNTRY'S CALL," shouted a headline in the Melboume Argus. Inside the paper sportswriter Old Boy posed the prickly question: "Which game? War or Football? Which will you play?" In Sydney The Bulletin left no doubt about where it stood. "War and football are rivals, and there is no room for both of them," it declared. The Bulletin in 1917 published a letter purportedly written by an enlisted league player who claimed, "I would rather a million times be here in Flanders, waiting to hop over to Fritz than be among those unblushing loafers in Sydney." Rugby league players were subjected to increasing pressure but most papers concerned themselves more with one sportsman than with any sport in general. The plight of Les Darcy - the great middleweight boxer - attracted much flak that may otherwise have been fired elsewhere. Hounded by the papers to enlist, Darcy left Australia secretly in 1916 for the US. The Sydney press turned savagely on him and branded him "shirker" and "deserter". But he did enlist - in America! In Memphis in 1917 Darcy joined the Flying Corps, only to die tragically soon afterwards of blood poisoning. In his book The Australian People and the Great War Michael McKernan argued that the recruiting campaigns reflected a class bias, being aimed much more strongly at the working class games such as rugby league, while sports such as cricket and horseracing continued with their programs with far less pressure. All sports were severely depleted by enlistments, with rugby league no less affected than the others. For example, at one club alone - Glebe - 95 members enlisted for overseas combat. In 1915, J.C. Davis, in The Referee, gave a balanced view: "It is, I believe, generally admitted that the professional footballer, whether he be in Australia, or England, or on the Continent, is not in as good a position to enlist as the amateur, that is, on the average." "I think it will be found that there are more men playing professionally who are married than are to be found in the ranks of the amateurs. And married men who enlist may not show a higher degree of patriotism than married men who do not enlist." "The NSW Rugby League is compiling a list of those who have enlisted from its ranks and when this is available I will give full publication to it in The Referee." "Meanwhile it may not be fair to a big body of men to make deductions from a comparison of the numbers of union and league men who have left for the front or are preparing to do so. All honour to those who have risen to the occasion. All honour to the rugby union players in Australia and New Zealand who have come forward in such large numbers to fight for the old flag and the freedom of the world. All honour to the rugby league men who have responded." Davis then recorded a long list of league men who had answered the call. In 1916 the NSWRL estimated that two thousand league players had enlisted - an overly-generous estimate surely, considering comparatively modest nature of the game at that stage. As the war unfolded in all its horror the rugby league world mourned its inevitable losses. Sergeant Edward Larkin fell at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. Newtown first graders J.E. Williams, H. "Nutsy" Bolt and S. Sparrow were killed, as was Easts star Bob Tidyman, who played for Australia in 1914. Lieutenant Frank Cheadle, the 1908 Kangaroo and perhaps the first man to sign to play rugby league in Australia, was one of the last men out of Gallipoli but died in Egypt of the wounds he had suffered.
Stan Carpenter, first captain of Newcastle in 1908, was involved in acts of green heroism at Gallipoli. With Lance Corporal E.A. Roberts, Carpenter made four journeys with a stretcher in the face of enemy fire at a place called Fisherman's Hut to bring in wounded men. Bumper crowds supported the NSW Rugby League theory that people were looking for a release in times of great stress. Two interstate matches in 1915 drew total crowds of 35,000 to the Agricultural Ground, NSW winning them both easily - 53-9 and 39-6 - with the remarkable Harold Horder scoring five tries in each game. Five percent of gross takings from the matches were donated to the Belgian Relief Fund. They were the last NSW-Queensland matches played until 1919. At various carnivals and knockout competitions through the year the League generated thousands of pounds for the war effort. A fully equipped Little Giant Motor Ambulance was presented by James Joynton Smith on behalf of the NSW Rugby League to the Army Medical Corps. By season's end the NSW Rugby League had raised £3,440/8s/9p for patriotic purposes. PART 3 - League's First Secretary - Ted Larkin by Roy Masters (Sydney Morning Herald 26/4/04) Before the match (Anzac Day, Roosters v Dragons), Bill Collier, a lock in St George's 1941 premiership team and a veteran of the WW2 New Guinea campaign, was part of the official party that honoured the fallen. Doug McClelland, former chairman of St George Illawarra and a past president of the Senate, has reminded the NRL next year is the 90th anniversary of the Anzac landing and also that the inaugural secretary of the NSWRL died on that first Anzac day. Ted Larkin was the first full-time official of the infant league in 1908, having been captain of Newtown Rugby Union club and representing Australia in the first rugby Test against New Zealand in 1903. He resigned as NSWRL secretary in 1913 to stand as a Labor candidate for Willoughby, the first won by Labor on the north side of the harbour. However, Larkin's term as an MLA ended with the outbreak of World War I when he enlisted. When struck by illness in Egypt, he was offered passage home but insisted on embarking with the AIF's 1st Battalion to the Dardanelles, drawing praise from Australia's official war historian Charles Bean. At dawn on April 25, 1915, the 1st Battalion landed at Gallipoli and Sergeant Larkin's platoon scaled the heights to Pine Ridge where, late in the afternoon of that historic day, his life ended in a hail of Turkish machine-gun fire. The City Cup final of 1915 was turned into a testimonial for Larkin and raised £171 and one shilling to aid his widow and two sons. "Men like Larkin and other founding fathers of the game who were active servicemen should be honoured, particularly on a day where it is a privilege for us to provide a gathering place for people to remember them," NRL chief executive David Gallop said. PART 4 - Rugby League's During First World War by Terry Williams (Sydney League News) When Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife the Countess Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28 1914 he had never heard of rugby league. The shots he fired that day, however, would have profound implications for the fledgling professional code in NSW. Rugby League, after a faltering start, had won the rugby war in Sydney by June 1914 and the opposition union code was reduced to a shadow of its former strength. When war broke out the remaining union players and officials, who were confined to the upper and middle classes, rushed enthusiastically to join the adventure of overseas battle. Many league men were also caught up in the initial excitement, but there were also mitigating factors which held others back. Number one was money. Many league players and officials were working class men with families who could not afford to be away for any adventure, as it seemed in 1914. Others were involved in key industries which could not spare their muscle or skill. There was also a large Irish-Catholic contingent that would not go out of its way to support Great Britain when their homeland was still under the British thumb. Those feelings were heightened after the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland. In spite of such factors, though, league did more than its share during the war. We only have to look at a few individual cases to substantiate that. Edward Rennix Larkin, the first fulltime Secretary of the NSWRL, a graded referee and the first man to be elected as a Labor member for the North Shore in state parliament enlisted in the first wave and was amongst those who perished on the first Anzac Day at Gallipoli in 1915. League could ill afford to lose a man of Larkin’s calibre, and just his rise played a part in the game’s early growth, so his death played a part in the slump of the 1920’s. “Johnno” Stuntz was one of the players that threw in his lot with the NSWRL when the game started in 1907, signing up for the matches against Baskiville’s New Zealanders. He played for Easts, Souths and Wests before enlisting and making the ultimate sacrifice. Bob Tidyman was another who didn’t come home. He had switched to league in 1913 and played with Easts premiership winning team that year, and two Tests against the visiting Englishmen in the following season. One of his Tests was the famous Rorkes Drift encounter at the SCG. Henry “Nutsy” Bolt had been in Newtown’s 1910 premiership winning side but that didn’t save him from death when he went to the western front. Newtown organised a benefit for him which included a march through Newtown down to Erskineville Oval where a carnival took place. Among the highlights of the day was a race where the contestants had to rip an effigy of the Kaiser apart, the winner being the one who finished with the biggest piece! Within the forces, servicemen were allowed to play football, as long as it was rugby union. League players who had switched codes and been banned by union authorities were whitewashed for the war and permitted to compete in service competitions. Many league players therefore enjoyed distinguished playing careers in the forces, although this did not interfere with their combat commitments. Joe Murray, another Newtown star in 1910 and a 1911-12 Kangaroo, was a member of the AIF team that played in the series of union matches in Great Britain after the war. He was joined in that side by other league players such as Dave Hickey and Jack “Bluey”Watkins. Watkins was one of the stars of the era, a classic lock forward who was an integral part of one of Easts’ golden era on both sides of the war. Watkins played over 100 first grade games for the club when there were only 14 premiership games per season and also appeared in seven Tests – all this despite serving overseas for three years! Others resumed their careers in spite of hardships – Duncan Thompson became a legendary figure in both NSW and Qld after losing half a lung at Denancourt in France, while Annandale’s Bluey Compton played first grade in 1920 after spending two years as POW in Germany. The experience of all these men shows not only the many ways rugby league was influenced by the First World War but also the ways in which the game reacted to the conflict. Their varied contributions were part of a huge Australian commitment to the cause and underline the reason why the sport of Rugby League continues to honour their memory. Lest we forget See
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  RL1908 Copyright © Sean Fagan 2000-2005: all rights of the author are asserted No content may be reproduced without written permission from RL1908 |
As
the First World War unfolded in all its horror the rugby league world
mourned its inevitable losses. 
Frank
Cheadle was a fast, lightweight centre or winger with Newtown.
Born in Wollongong in 1885, he moved to Sydney with his family when
he was a boy. 
Bob
Tidyman was the only one of his team to enlist. He joined the
AIF in Sydney on December 6, 1915, and sailed for England on the transport
Megantic on June 29, 1916, as a member of the 11th Reinforcements
for the 19th Battalion, 5th Brigade, 2nd Division.