A FORMER Carlton footballer from colonial days is to have a central Victorian oval named in his honour, some 115 years after his passing.

The player, Henry Frederick (‘Harry’) Boyle, represented Carlton in 16 matches through its premiership season of 1874 and also served the Club as a committeeman. The Australasian of June 1895 also notes that Boyle was Carlton’s first delegate to the Football Association.

Significantly, Boyle was one of the most important and influential Australian cricketers of the 1870s and 1880s. He represented Victoria and Australia as its 17th Test cricketer – and in 1882 at The Kennington Oval famously took the final match-winning wicket against England which led to the creation of The Ashes.

The ground identified as the future Harry Boyle Oval is the Woodvale Recreation Reserve located about 14 kilometres north of Bendigo and a short drive from neighbouring Eaglehawk. The area was known as Sydney Flat at the time Boyle spent his formative years there in the 1850s and ’60s. While the oval’s genesis was undoubtedly the result of a community effort, Boyle is credited as leader of a group of youths who worked tirelessly to get the oval completed in time for the 1863 cricket season.

Driving the initiative to name the oval is Matt Thompson, who relocated to the area from Melbourne some 21 years ago. Thompson learned about Boyle’s connection to the oval from Bendigo historian Peter MacIver, who is researching a proposed book about Harry Boyle.

The Boyle family came to the goldfields from Sydney in 1853. Harry’s father, Daniel had a successful spell looking for gold and later settled in Sydney Flat where he established the Australian Store/Hotel. The premises was on the main road and very close to where the oval was positioned a few years later.

Shortly after Boyle’s death in December 1907, Dave Scott (Boyle’s lifelong friend and business partner) penned a memorial article for The Referee about Harry. Scott described how in 1857 or 1858 he had first heard of Boyle as “a wonderful boy cricketer whose bowling was causing great havoc amongst the stumps”. Following a successful spell playing for Sydney Flat (on the oval he helped create) Harry joined the ‘big’ club in Bendigo, the Bendigo United Cricket Club (BUCC). Such was Boyle’s progress that in season 1865/’66 (at 19 years of age) he was selected to play for Bendigo against a strong Victorian team. Boyle took 4-11 and 4-9 with Bendigo winning by an innings and seven runs.

During the off-seasons between 1872 and ’74, Boyle chased the oval ball for Sandhurst. In July 1873 he was named by the Bendigo Advertiser in a squad of footballers selected to meet Melbourne at the Kangaroo Flat Cricket Ground. While it is not clear if Boyle turned out for that game, a report in The Australasian from July 1872 described him as exhibiting fine play in a game for Sandhurst against South Yarra.

Boyle’s continued form for the BUCCs kept him on the radar of the big metropolitan teams and following a fine performance in a Colts match against a strong Melbourne CC team in the 1871—72 season he was invited to play for the East Melbourne Cricket Club by Alfred E Clarke. For a couple of years Boyle would travel to Melbourne each weekend (full expenses paid) to play for the Jolimonters. In 1874 he moved to Melbourne permanently, eventually becoming the third captain of the EMCC.

Boyle was primarily a cricketer and one of the most important events in his cricketing life occurred just prior to his permanent move to Melbourne. In December 1873 Boyle became the first man to bowl WG Grace when he played for Victoria against the Leviathan’s touring English XI. Scott described how Boyle, “. . .with a faster ball than usual, with a slight break from leg, beat the champion and clean bowled his middle stump”. Scott souvenired the ball Boyle used and it now resides in the Australian cricket museum at the MCG.

Boyle’s success against Grace established him as one of Victoria’s leading bowlers. He became a regular fixture in the Victorian XI and was also a selector for many years. Between 1872 and 1888 he played for Victoria in 28 first-class matches taking 62 wickets at an average of 19.56, while with the bat he accumulated 614 runs at an average of 12.03 from 51 innings. Boyle also captained the Vics in the inter-colonial games of 1875, 1879 (twice), 1881, 1882 and 1887.

Boyle’s connection with the Carlton Football Club can be sourced to 1874 when he represented the senior 20 as a defender throughout the season. The newspapers were generally positive about Boyle’s play in ’74, although one report has the umpire and Boyle being ‘hooted’ at by a mob over a disallowed goal in a game against Albert Park. Boyle was supposed to have touched the ball just before it passed the goal line, depriving Albert Park of victory.

It appears that Boyle stopped playing football at the top level beyond the 1874 season as his name is not recorded on team lists for the Carlton first or second 20s for competitive matches. 

A football first - the charging of admission at the gate - occurred on Boyle’s watch in 1875, after Edward Jackson, a friend of Boyle’s from the BUCC days, lost his sight and use of his hands in a mining accident. Through Boyle, Carlton and Melbourne agreed to charge patrons a cost of sixpence to view their third match of the season at the University Cricket Ground. In all, £106 was taken at the gate and after expenses, a sum of £97 3s 4d was handed to the Jackson family. This amount, along with other monies raised in Sandhurst, enabled the family to start a small business and escape the potential of poverty due to Edward’s injury.

Boyle’s last on-field involvement with the Carlton senior 20 appears to have occurred in June 1877. The following year he assisted John Conway in identifying the Victorian players for the national team which embarked on a tour of the Australian colonies.

Off the field, Boyle was also involved with football affairs, as Carlton’s first delegate to the Football Association. He was also a member of the football club’s committee of management in 1875, 1876 and 1877.

Following the successful Australian XI tour of 1878, Boyle established the Boyle and Scott’s Cricket, Football and Sports Warehouse, which hugely impacted upon Victorian and Australian Cricket in the 1880s. 

Boyle became one of the most famous players in the cricketing world and with the constant demands of arranging tours and touring this period appears to have marked the end of his active involvement in football - although in August 1889 he did appear in an old boy’s match for Carlton against Geelong to raise money for the Geelong Hospital.

Boyle toured England with Australian cricket teams as a player in 1878, 1880, 1882, 1884 and 1888 and as manager in 1890. Renowned as an exceptionally accurate medium pacer with a deadly leg break, Boyle and the legendary Frederick Spofforth formed the greatest bowling combination of the age – as exemplified in 1878 when they dismissed a powerful MCC side at Lords for 33 and 19, to set up the tourists’ nine-wicket win. As famously, the pair (through their bowling) were largely responsible for the famous win at Kennington Oval in 1882 which gave birth to the Ashes legend. W G Grace wrote of Boyle that he “had a rare head on his shoulders and was often successful in getting batsmen out when other bowlers equally as good had tried and completely failed”.

Following the closure of Boyle and Scott in 1892 and time in Queensland and Tasmania, Boyle returned to work for the Victorian Government as Inspector of Tracks based in Walhalla. After he was retrenched from this position he became Collector for the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum, a position he filled until his death in 1907.

Boyle clearly never lost his love of football and Carlton. On 21 September 1907, having been released from hospital following major surgery, Boyle fronted up to the Melbourne Cricket Ground to see Jack Worrall’s Carlton overwhelm South Melbourne to secure the second of three consecutive League premierships. A number of reporters remarked favourably of his attendance on Grand Final, but barely two months later Boyle was gone.

Shortly after attending the football match, Boyle travelled to Bendigo to stay with his brother-in-law for the purpose of further recuperating from the operation. He quickly relapsed and was taken to Nurse McKinnon’s Private Hospital where he died on 21 November 1907. Boyle, a lifelong smoker, died from oesophageal cancer.

Boyle and his wife Margaret Wilson Scott had no children, and it also appears that his two sister’s families have also died out. On the other hand, Boyle was descended from two first fleeters (one a convict and one a marine) and a glance at the First Fleet website indicates that there are thousands of Australians with blood connections to him.

MacIver, who greatly assisted in the research for this article, is a retired teacher of Literature, English and History. He assisted Richard Cashman and Ric Sissons with research for their book, Billy Murdoch: Cricketing Colossus and is currently working on a proposed book about Boyle.

MacIver’s interest in Boyle stems from pieces he wrote for the Bendigo Advertiser a number of years ago. Through his research for a proposed book on Boyle, he came into contact with Matthew Thompson and informed him of the Boyle connection to the oval at Woodvale.

“Matthew and I are both keen to try and gain Harry Boyle the recognition he deserves and while I have helped Matthew with information and contacted a few people the success in getting the oval renamed has been largely down to his efforts.”

Thompson’s interest in Boyle was based on his own passion for cricket, given his family connection with sports equipment manufacturer Kookaburra Sport, which was established in Melbourne by Alfred Grace (AG) Thompson in 1890.

But he was mindful too of Boyle’s Carlton connection – which he hopes will stimulate further interest at a ground which has not seen a football match staged there since 1970.