When Brenton Peddle and his siblings began clearing out their mother Betty’s Wheelers Hill house - their father had died two years earlier and the old place had become too much for her – they worked through the rooms as you do, sorting the keepsakes from the discards.
Some of them went, some of them stayed . . . and then there was the photograph.
“No-one wanted it,” Peddle recalled, “but I said, ‘Hold up. There’s got to be something to it’.”
The Charles Boyles postcard photo features the Carlton captain Bob Atkinson and his players in full kit moments before the first bounce of the Footscray match at the Western Oval – the 11th Round contest on Saturday, July 15, 1944. The photo had belonged to Peddle’s uncle, Jack Maxwell - a Blues man to his bones – whose jottings in pencil on the card’s reverse reflect as much. There, each member of the team is listed by name and number, as are the nicknames – ‘Bomber’ Atkinson, ‘Porky’ McInnes and the suspended ‘Tiny’ Anderson to be precise.
At 17, Jack was a boy who’d lied his way into the RAAF, and a man who came back from Borneo carrying other people’s sons from the wreckage of the Pacific War.
Peddle had kept Uncle Jack’s photograph close in the days, weeks and months since. But he recently paid the old Carlton ground a visit to hand over the item to the Club’s archive.
To quote Peddle: “Instead of it kicking around the house, it’ll be in the museum in this amazing facility so that one day my grandchildren might be able to see it”.
Back row, l to r: Jim Mooring, Jack Howell, Ron Savage, Jack Bennett, Bert Lucas, Rod McLean, Arthur Sanger, Jim Clark and Bob Chitty
Middle row, seated: Doug Williams, Bert Butler, Bob Atkinson (capt.), Bob Green, Charlie McInnes and Jack Wrout
Front row: Albert Price (vice capt.), Les McCann and Vin Brown.
Jack Maxwell was born into a family of eight children on a run-down block on Watsons Road, Glen Waverley. There was no running water, so what the Maxwells had came out of a well pumped by hand.
Jack’s father William, born in Devonport, had crossed the Strait and first settled in Carlton, where his and his kin’s allegiances to the old dark Navy Blues were first forged. Even when circumstance forced the ever-growing Maxwell clan to relocate to the eastern edge of the city, Blue was always the colour; Carlton the team.
The Maxwells were not untouched by wartime. William was a returned soldier of the First World War, having somehow survived the mustard gas attacks alongside his mates of the 27/12th Battalion. Many of William’s cobbers didn’t make it back. William did, but not entirely.
“He showed little interest in us as kids,” Jack’s youngest sister Betty wrote of her father, in a memoir entitled My Brother Jack. Betty was twelve years Jack’s junior, and as she revealed in writing, it was Jack - not their father – who cared for her and their younger brother Bill.
As the Depression cruelly hit, Jack, at 13, saw fit to tunnel his way under a neighbouring fence to dig up potatoes his mother could put on the table.
At 14 he gave school away, having found work for Ball & Welch at its Flinders Street emporium – at around the same time the Maxwell clan found new digs behind a butcher’s shop in outer suburban Springvale.
“He was a sports nut who never got the chance to play any,” Betty wrote. “Keith Miller was his hero, Jack copied the great all-rounder's haircut and practiced flicking his hair back the way Miller did.
“And he had Carlton, handed down from his father like a surname. He taught his little sister and little brother to barrack for the Blues, and they did, all their lives.
“Jeez, he loved Carlton.”
When World War Two broke out, 17 year-old Jack was determined to go. He needed both parents to sign his enlistment papers, because he was underage, and his mother refused outright.
But he enlisted anyway after his father relented and he forged his mother’s signature.
On completing his training with the RAAF in Townsville, Jack was deployed to Borneo, where his unit was committed to the construction of an airstrip under Japanese bombing. He turned 21 there, but there was no candle-lit birthday cake.
“Hollywood made it look glamorous, like it was one big adventure, but Jack said it was bloody horrible. He said they were all scared,” Peddle recalled.
“Jack had left Australia a teetotaller who had never touched a cigarette. He came home a heavy smoker who’d learned to drink. War changed him like it did all of them. I guess they saw some horrible things.”
At war’s end, Jack resolved to stay on. In keeping with his caring nature, he supported the many starving Prisoners of War flown in from the camps – walking skeletons too weak to be sent home. though he stood at just 5’7”, Jack often carried emaciated POWs on his shoulders; some of them in his arms because there was no other way to move them.
Jack had married young and fathered four children, but the marriage didn’t last. In the end, he returned to Carlton – the place his father first frequented after crossing the Strait – and his matchday pilgrimages to Princes Park exposed him to the on-field greatness of ‘Chooka’ Howell, John James and ‘Big Nick’.
After finding a high rise commission flat within walking distance of the old ground, Jack met a soulmate in Sylvia – as fate would have it, a Carlton cheersquad member. Together they raised a son and frequented the Carlton area until Sylvia died.
When Jack could no longer manage alone, Betty and her husband Graeme stepped in. With the assistance of the RSL they found him a unit in Caulfield and ensured that the totally and permanently incapacitated former soldier had everything he needed.
“He hated leaving his beloved Carlton,” Betty wrote. “But I needed him closer to me so I could care for him.”
Peddle’s first memories of his uncle relate to this period of his life. “Uncle Jack was really old by then,” Peddle recalled. “First impressions were that he was a bit of a character . . . smoke hanging out of his mouth, bottle of whiskey by his table.”
Jack Maxwell’s old team photograph now sits with the club’s historical collection, catalogued and conserved, alongside the many, many artefacts that carry Carlton’s story forward.
It’s a small thing, as objects go. It went to war in a kit bag and came home again. It outlasted a well, a market garden fence, a butcher’s shop, four houses, a marriage, a wife, and finally Jack himself - and it came within one conversation of ending up in a skip in a Wheelers Hill driveway.
“There’s got to be something to it,” his nephew had said.
There was.
By sheer coincidence, Andy McCann, son of former Carlton footballer Les McCann, happened to join fellow Members and supporters in a club-convened Tour of IKON Park. McCann proudly displayed the same 1944 Carlton team photo featuring his father, which he had kept close on his mobile phone, and posed proudly at the locker of the No.7 Les wore on his back.
“It’s pretty emotional,” Andy said after completing his visit. “I’m getting emotional just thinking about it now. To come back to see where Dad played is awesome.”
Leslie John McCann represented Carlton in seven senior games through 1944, having set foot into Princes Park whilst still on wartime service with the RAAF. Born in Moama in 1920, Les passed away in Echuca in February 1994 at the age of 73.
The Carlton Football Club thanks the Peddle family for their donation. The club, through its Archive Group, welcomes enquiries from Members and supporters who hold material of historical significance.
