The first-grade rugby league players who also fought for Australia
Ian Heads
The Daily Telegraph
April 25, 2011 12:00AM
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Anywhere will do...A team of Australian soldiers from the British Commonwealth Occupation Force take on a team made up of crew members of HMS Shropshire on cleared ground among the ruins of Hiroshima in 1946, a year after the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city in August 1945. Picture: Australian War Memorial
FOR the football warriors of the Dragons and the Roosters, certainty awaits at the end of this afternoon's Anzac Day battle: a winner, a loser - and, afterwards, yarns to tell.
No such sureness exists in the stories of Bob Tidyman and Spencer Walklate, who long ago pulled on those same club colours worn today.
Young men of great potential as rugby league players, both died in the World Wars of the 20th Century - Tidyman the First, Walklate the Second.
The exact circumstances of their deaths remain cloaked in eternal mystery. But it is such stories that provide the sobering backdrop for today's generation of players - a jolting reminder of the link that exists between rugby league and war of young men leaving home and mates, and sailing away to uncertain fate.
Robert Richardson (Bob) Tidyman was a genuine star with Easts in the years 1913-15, a dashing wingman who played two Tests for Australia in 1914, one of them the famous "Rorke's Drift" epic.
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In late 1915 he enlisted, following his two younger brother's to Europe's battlegrounds.
He left Australia in April 1916 and by September was with the men of the 19th Battalion in the ghastly trenches of the Somme.
Within two months he lay dead in the mud and slush and withering cold at Flers on the Western Front.
Historian Geoff Armstrong's fine examination of his life in the Roosters' official history (From Where the Sun Rises), delves into the mystery of how and exactly where Bob Tidyman died, listing various theories - the most likely being that he was overpowered and killed after being put in charge of 50 German captives.
The following year (1917) there came a remarkable postscript, in the form of a letter from France to a Sydney newspaper.
A lower-grade league referee, Private R.B Fitzpatrick of the 4th Battalion, told of how he and another soldier had found a body alongside which lay an old rugby league membership ticket, with the name R. Tidyman just discernible on the envelope.
Even though they were under fire, Fitzpatrick and his companion buried the body, with army censorship preventing identification of the location.
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That place of Bob Tidyman's death and burial was never marked or found, although he is recognised, along with 11,000 other Aussies, at the Australian National Memorial at Villers Bretonneux.
Spencer Walklate, a highly promising forward, made a big impression when he came down from the North Coast to join St George in 1943.
He played 15 first grade games for the Saints, but on enlistment was posted overseas with a commando unit (Z Special).
Don Dennis, author of the book The Guns of Muschu, tells how on the night of April 11, 1945, eight commandos, including Walklate, landed on the Japanese-held Muschu Island, off the coast of New Guinea.
The mission went tragically wrong and Dennis records how the place became a "killing ground" - and only one of the eight survived.
On the fate of Spencer Walklate, he wrote later: "We believe we've determined that he was captured and executed by the Japanese."
Stories of rugby league players at, or during wars, punctuate the game's 104 seasons.
Historian David Middleton has recorded an even longer connection: that Dan Frawley, Easts' star winger in the game's Foundation Year 1908, served in the Boer War (1899-1902).
I have been told many other tales via conversations, or things learned about rugby league men, over the years, including:
HOW the great Rabbitoh captain and forward Jack Rayner bore a scar on one knee - legacy of a Japanese bayonet lunge in New Guinea.
The admirable Rayner also shared privately with family the saddest of all his memories - witnessing two brothers burying a third, younger brother in the mud alongside the Kokoda Track;
TINY Clem Kennedy (Souths), remembering New Guinea, where he fought on the Kokoda Track: "I was in the final assault on Gona Beach when the Japs came in and we were waiting for them ... and we were lucky enough to get them away";
OF Dick Dunn, a legendary Easts figure, recalling the week-to-week struggle to keep sport going as Prime Minister Menzies had encouraged: "We'd have players available one week, and not the next. Some weren't seen again until the following season. You just got on with the game";
EASTS' great Wally O'Connell portraying the way it was after the attack on Sydney by the Japanese midget submarines (May 1942): "That year for training Souths and Easts shared use of the Sydney Sports Ground. We would have 20 minutes each on a Tuesday and Thursday.
As darkness came, the lights would be off - and we'd head home"; and
HOW the most famous of commentators Frank Hyde was told years later that he had been pencilled in as captain of the proposed 1941 Kangaroo touring team.
There was, of course, no tour in '41 because of the War and Hyde never wore the green and gold.
All such yarns are woven into the fabric of today's big occasion. The casual chat 10 years ago between rival CEOs Bernie Gurr (Roosters) and Peter Doust (Dragons) that locked Dragons v Roosters into the tradition was a moment of inspiration, cementing a realty which had existed informally since the 1920s: that the morning Anzac march and gatherings and two-up games of April 25 were inevitably followed by a trek to Moore Park to watch rugby league.
Football is not war, and parallels must be handled with the utmost care.But rugby league's link down the years stands as a very genuine one and this afternoon two stout-hearted coaches in Wayne Bennett and Brian Smith will get their messages across - and respect for traditions and the sadness and bravery of things past will fill the dressing rooms and the stadium.
Ian Heads is a highly respected journalist, author and rugby league historian whose father George was killed in New Guinea in 1944
