Old Carlton’s blue and white flag is flying,
Like its jubilee banner of yore;
After nineteen long years of brave trying
Their Premier flag’s waving once more.
There is something wonderfully immediate about this scrap of paper. The words appearing on it weren’t penned weeks later for a club history, nor for a nostalgia piece years later.
The carefully-crafted jottings were committed to parchment on the night itself, Saturday 22 September 1906, when the ink on the evening’s newspapers was barely dry and the beer was flowing freely in Melbourne’s inner city watering holes.
Carlton, under the watch of Jack Worrall, had just overwhelmed Fitzroy by 49 points on the MCG - 15.4 (94) to 6.9 (45) – before a then record Australian sporting audience of 44,437, to land the club’s first VFL premiership in only its tenth season of trying. This was the breakthrough, and it would prove to be no one-off, with the old dark Navy Blues going on to complete a hat-trick, with Grand Final victories in 1907 and ’08.
Into that mood of release and civic pride stepped former Carlton Vice-President and committeeman Cr. George Hawkins Ievers, who sat down and set the whole triumph to verse - meant, as per the note at the foot of the sheet, to be sung to the air of “White, Blue-ral, White, Blue-raliadity”, a comic-song formula typical of the era’s music-hall balladry, and the kind of singalong tune a clubroom or a pub crowd could pick up in a chorus or two.
What makes the piece sing, even 120 years on, is how it functions as a verse honour roll. Ievers works through virtually the entire triumphant eighteen, rhyming his way past ‘Pompey’ Elliott (“Eli Elliott has never play’d grander than roving for the old Dark Blue”), champion full-forward Mick Grace, who that season became the first man in VFL history to boot 50 goals, and the “silvery” sharpshooter Frank Caine. He salutes the fearsome half-back combination of Norman ‘Hacken’ Clarke, Billy Payne and Charlie Hammond, praises the “always victorious” midfielders Ted Kennedy, Rod ‘Wee’ McGregor and George Bruce, and even finds room for the club's hierarchy, thanking members “from the President to the youngest boy playin’” for funding the soon to be built Ald. Gardiner Stand.
Ievers doesn’t forget the walking wounded either – notably Martin Gotz, who dislocated a shoulder in the semi-final against Collingwood, and “game Snell” – both earning a wistful verse of get-well wishes.
There's a lovely, human closing note too: three cheers not just for the players but for Worrall himself and for the President Bill Evans - a reminder that this was a genuinely amateur-era institution earning the plaudits, having been run as much by committeemen and coaches as by the “warriors” who chased the leather.
And for a club now marking its deep and ongoing Irish connection - from Zach Tuohy, Ciaran Sheehan and Ciaran Byrne through to Dayna Finn, Erone Fitzpatrick, Siofra O'Connell and Aisling Reidy today – there’s a small, delightful thread running back to this very sheet. Amongst the “old warriors” name-checked in Ievers’ second verse is one Orlando ‘Lanty’ Lanty O’Brien, his name sitting there in 1906 blue-and-white ink between George Robertson and “Goer” - a tiny reminder that Carlton’s Irish story can be sourced to the years before Federation.
As a physical object, the sheet carries its own quiet history of custodianship - long held in the collection of Albert Coulson, and made available here through Robert Maslen - the sort of chain of private hands through which so much of football’s earliest ephemera survives at all. That it has never previously been published means this is, in effect, the first time in well over a century that Ievers’ celebratory doggerel has been read by anyone beyond the family and friends who originally folded it away.
It’s a modest thing to look at - creased, tea-toned, a little foxed at the edges - but Ievers’ dark navy ditty captures something a match report never could: the actual sound of Carlton, on the night it rid itself of its reputation as a nearly-club and became a premiership one.
