The 94-year-old daughter-in-law of Wally O’Cock – the first player to kick a goal for Carlton in League competition – has forwarded to the Club a collection of previously unseen photographs, certificates and general correspondence chronicling the man’s life and career.
Lilian O’Cock, whose late husband Horace was Wally’s son, was also able to shed her own precious memories of the famous Carlton figure, with whom she first made acquaintance in New South Wales almost 80 years ago.
“I was 16 when I met Wally in Holbrook. He was a very kind man,” Lilian said.
“I met him in 1938, the war broke out the following year and Horrie went to the Middle East in ’40.”
The story of Wallace Alfred Richard O’Cock is this. He was born in the Melbourne inner-city suburb of Clifton Hill on June 17, 1875. His father, was a bank manager named Alfred Ferrie O’Cock, his mother, Anne Wallace, and records indicate that Wally’s paternal grandfather originally hailed from Somerset in south west England
The dedicated club website Blueseum notes that Wally joined Carlton in its final year in the VFA (1896) and was one of the first players considered for selection for the opening round match of the fledgling VFL – Saturday, May 8, 1897. It also notes that Wally lined up a placekick in the second quarter of the match against Fitzroy at Brunswick Street and sent it sailing through the posts – the history-making six-pointer, Carlton’s first.
That July, after being laid up for a period with injury, Wally endeavoured to force his way back into the Carlton team. Initially he was overlooked for selection after failing to obtain a medical clearance, but the Club registered him under the name Alfred Wallace and he promptly booted two goals in a match-winning performance against the Fuschias.
The Wallace surname is itself famous in sporting circles. Wally’s uncle Donald Smith Wallace was an MP and pastoralist who owned the respective Melbourne Cup winners of 1888 and 1890, Mentor and Carbine – and as a descendant Graeme Cumbrae-Stewart OAM said in a previous interview, “the story goes that Donald got Carbine on the cheap”.
Wally’s 15 goals from ten matches through season 1897 earned him the plaudits as Carlton’s first leading goalkicker. He would manage a further 31 appearances for the Club over the next four years, despite having been in absentia for all of 1900 for reasons unknown.
He was only a few days short of his 26th birthday when he turned out for Carlton for the last time, against Essendon at the East Melbourne Football Ground in June 1901. He later fronted for a local outfit in Preston, but his glory days on the paddock were long gone.
“I remember Dad telling me that Wally was a nuggety little bloke with a fiery temper,” said Cumbrae-Stewart.
“I believe he had to give up footy after he copped a spike from a boot to his leg. He was also left with a permanent limp, which forced him to give up his work as a commercial traveller with MacRobertson’s.”
Cumbrae-Stewart’s story is borne out in Lilian’s precious images of Wally, who carried a walking stick in later life.
Old photos Lilian has kept show her husband Horace and her father-in-law Wally making their way to the MCG
in 1937. (Photo: Carlton Media)
According to Cumbrae-Stewart, Wally relocated to the small southern New South Wales town of Holbrook to work for his brother-in-law Adam Anderson and his wife Alice who managed at property called Wentworth.
“He later took on his own property, but fire wind and rain ruined it and he went broke,” Cumbrae-Stewart said. “He then started as a stock and sales agent in Holbrook, during which time he and his wife Luisa Durrant raised six children.”
But Wally would ultimately return to Melbourne, as Lilian explained.
“Towards the end of his life, he came down from Holbrook and for a brief time lived with an aunt of Barry Humphries in North Caulfield,” she said. “He returned to Holbrook to live with his eldest daughter, but then asked my husband and I if he could come back down to live with us, at 55 Norwood Road, Caulfield North.”
Wally O’Cock was 74 years of age when he died in Richmond’s Epworth Hospital on June 14, 1951. His body was returned to Holbrook, and laid to rest in a grave shared with his beloved wife who died nine years previous.
It’s now almost 120 years since Wally O’Cock created history for Carlton, and Lilian is almost certainly the last living person to have known him.
Thanks to her, Wally’s story endures.
