Born Nagambie, Victoria, September 20, 1892 – died West Heidelberg, Victoria, December 5, 1986

Recruited to Carlton from Eaglehawk (Bendigo Football League)

Carlton Player No. 276

At Carlton

53 matches, 16 goals 1913-1915

Premiership Player 1914 & 1915

Captain 1915

The legendary Roy Cazaly, in an article penned for The Sporting Globe newspaper in June 1937, wrote of Alfred Miller Baud: “He (Baud) could play anywhere. I think that Baud by comparison would have made (Haydn) Bunton look ordinary. Baud would have been a football sensation had it not been for the war.”.

Cazaly’s view reflected the universal respect Baud commanded, in a playing career interrupted by global conflict.

Baud made his way to Princes Park in 1913, on the end of a brief but beneficial period with Eaglehawk. He was adjudged best afield for the Hawks in the 1911 Bendigo Football League Grand Final – which in turned piqued the interest of a Carlton talent scouts - and by early 1913 Baud was fronting for training at the old Carlton ground.

Baud completed his Carlton senior debut in May 1913 – the 5th round match with the long gone University team at the MCG – and was prominent in the Blues’ 16-point victory. Finding his nice as a half-forward flanker (with the occasional run in the centre), Baud impacted significantly in his maiden season, contributing 12 goals from 14 matches and earning selection in the Victorian state squad.

However, Baud was relocated to half-back on the sayso of the three-time Premiership player Norman ‘Hackenschmidt’ Clark, who was appointed Carlton Senior Coach in 1914. Clark’s canny call proved correct, as Baud, playing alongside his captain Billy Dick, contributed to his team’s steady rise up the ladder.

Carlton accounted for Fitzroy by 20 points in the 1914 Semi-Final, but a bout of influenza cost Baud his place in the Preliminary Final team which surprisingly lost to South Melbourne the following weekend.

Under  the then competition rules, Carlton, as minor Premier, was entitled to challenge South in the Grand Final, and when Baud was pronounced fit he earned an automatic recall.

Carlton set a League record by naming nine first-year players in that 1914 Grand Final, and famously prevailed by six points in a low-scoring thriller.

That Jubilee Premiership was, however, tinged with apprehension and uncertainty. Only three weeks previous, Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany, and as a consequence Australia and the rest of the British Empire followed suit.

As thousands of young men answered the call of King and country through 1915, the VFL found itself in crisis,  with attendances plummeting and all clubs struggling to field competitive teams.

Carlton was not untouched - and in Round 10 of that troubled season also lost its captain Billy Dick for a mammoth ten-match ban imposed after he appeared on report for striking Fitzroy’s Jack Cooper. Suddenly Baud, at just 22, found himself captain of the reigning Premiership team.

That September, as Carlton prepared to defend its title, Baud, a telegraphist by profession, enlisted in the Army Signals section. Whilst waiting for the inevitable call-up, Baud magnificently led his contemporaries to a first-up semi-final victory over Melbourne and a tough Preliminary final win over Fitzroy – thereby ensuring a second successive Grand Final outing, only this time involving the competition minor Premiers and unbackable flag favourites Collingwood.

When Carlton toppled Collingwood by 33 points in the 1915 Grand Final - a contest described as “one of the grandest that had ever been seen in the finals,” it set the seal on Baud’s reputation as a player and leader of the highest calibre. Two days shy of his 23rd birthday, he etched his name into the record books as the youngest player to captain any club to a League Premiership – a record that would endure for 43 years until Collingwood’s Murray Weideman, at 22 years 216 days, completed the deed in the Grand Final of ’58.

The 1915 Grand Final would be the first of five won by Carlton at Collingwood’s expense, with the conquests of 1938, ’70, ’79 and ’81 to follow.

But the 1915 Grand Final would also prove to be Baud’s swansong. He was called into uniform in 1916, and by March of that year was on his way to war.

Mercifully, Sergeant Baud survived the horror – but only just.

In September 1917, his battery was locked in combat at a feature later known as ANZAC Ridge, when an enemy shell exploded nearby. A shrapnel splinter smashed into the side of Baud’s head, fracturing his skull and severely impacting the sight in his left eye. Quickly ferried to hospital, his life hung in the balance for some days – and were it not for his vim and vigor he wouldn’t have made it. But make it he did, and in March of 1918 he was repatriated to Australia and duly participated in the Armistice celebrations that November.

Baud died in December 1986 at the ripe old age of 94, having maintained a great connection with the game as a member of the Australian Football Council and a much-respected Tribunal panelist.

He is remembered as a modest, humble man who maintained a great love for Carlton and the game, and he thought much of both.