Episode 44 - The death of Walter William Williams

Download and listen to episode 44 here.

We begin this episode with the Mark Boric Express has been uploading late 1970s and early 1980s Marconi match programs, originally scanned and uploaded by Edgar Spath.

We follow up on last week's discussion on the fate of the extant 15 years worth of A-League match archives, and the reformatted A-League broadcast deal. FFA has manged, as part of its giving up a chunk of its due broadcast revenue, to secure the rights to the full 15 years of A-League archives. No news on whether the FFA Cup footage is part of that deal, nor pre-season tournament footage.

Then a brief discussion about the cultural implications on moving back to winter, and the question of freedom of choice to be a multi-sport fan which was introduced when the . This is followed by a mangled attempt at an analogy attempting to compare the way that broadcasters don't use their archival footage, to the way that major brewers protect trademarks and products which they have not used or produced for decades.

Then just before the break, Ian raises the matter of an article brought to his attention by Garry Mackenzie, about the early organisation of Melbourne soccer - which hints at the possible existence of soccer in Melbourne going back several years prior to the first documented games in 1883.

An extract from the coroner's report into the death
of Walter Williams in 1920, sourced via State 
Library access to the Ancestry.com database 

After the break we launch into a special edition of 100 Years Ago Today. We begin with a visit to Launceston and a pavilion-less York Park; then to Adelaide, where teams representing 'South' and 'North' play a scratch match to select a team to play against the HMS Renown in a game to be witnessed by the Prince of Wales; then to Melbourne, for the weekend's ongoing confusing results, including a game that was called off.

Then to Burnie, whose local paper inexplicably reports on the most serious weekend injuries in Victoria's football codes, including two broken legs in Aussie Rules, and a serious concussion suffered by a soccer player. That injured soccer player was Walter William Williams, who died from the injury.

Digging deeper into Williams' story, it is revealed that Williams was an English migrant from south-east London - possibly  arriving in Australia as part  of a migrant farm worker program, living in Carlton at the time of his death. In late 1914 he signed up for the AIF while living in Casterton, in south-west Victoria. He participates in the Gallipoli campaign, before being captured by the Turks. During the war, he appears to have suffered serious head injuries.

This mini-project serves as an example of the ways to use the wide variety of resources and networks at our disposal - state library digital resources, military service databases, online newspaper databases, and the coroner's reports - as well as utilising the skill sets and interests of various Australian soccer historians to build an incomplete picture of:

• Who Walter Williams was, and how he came to be playing soccer in Melbourne for Preston.
• The unfolding of the incident which led to Williams' death.
• The way the police dealt with the investigation, and their lack of awareness of soccer in Melbourne
• The eye-witness accounts of the incidents of those who were at the game, as well as a character reference from someone who seems to have served in the armed forces with Williams.
• The reaction of the local soccer community Williams' death, and their purchase of a headstone for Williams' grave at Coburg Cemetery, a headstone which apparently has since been removed.

Key to this, as asserted earlier, is the importance of the resources and networks available to discover these kinds of stories. The goal in cases like this is to try and establish the social, cultural, and family networks soccer players existed in; building a repository of tools to use when researching these matters; appreciating the historical networks at our disposal.