Darcy Vescio’s historic maiden goal for Carlton’s AFLW team on Friday night has prompted the question: who was the club’s first male equivalent to send one over the goal umpire’s hat?
Turn back the hands 120 years, and William ‘Winkie’ Weir is quite literally your man. Weir is accredited with booting the old dark Navy Blues’ first ever goal - against Fitzroy at Brunswick Street in the opening round of the fledgling competition, Saturday, May 8, 1897.
Turn them back another 30 years, to the formative years of the 1860s, and it’s a little hazier – although the name of the Carlton player William Cornelius (‘Billy’) Williams jnr. has now been touted.
The Williams claim has been made by Peter ‘Fish’ Whiting, a passionate and lifelong Carlton supporter and member.
Whiting contacted the club this week, wanting to know, “in the spirit of Darcy Vescio being Carlton’s first female goalkicker, if a story passed down through my family is really true?”.
Darcy Vescio boots Carlton's first-ever AFLW goal. (Photo: AFL Media)
“My grandmother’s grandfather was William Williams, who played in the first Carlton team,” Whiting said.
“I was told William kicked the first goal for the club and I was also told it was in the second game as no goals were kicked in the first.”
The researcher and rabid Carlton supporter Pete McLean has, through the Blueseum website, determined that Williams was born in Wales, in or around 1847, and was therefore 17 years of age or thereabouts when the Carlton players turned out for their first season, a year after the club’s establishment in 1864.
William Williams in later life. (Photo: Peter Whiting)
Regrettably, match details for the 1865 season are virtually non-existent. The writer/researcher Mark Pennings has cited the staging of a game between Carlton and Melbourne Grammar on May 27, 1865 as possibly the former’s first. A match in July with Richmond was recorded in The Argus, but only because one of the players, John Newton Jacomb, suffered a broken leg in it.
These two games bookended Carlton’s contest with the Warehousemen – a gentlemanly version of the present Storemen and Packers – on June 10, 1865. That match, played out on a sodden area of parkland flanking the Melbourne General Cemetery, resulted in a nil all draw.
Not until July 15, 1865, in a contest with Williamstown at Royal Park, are the team’s first goalkickers listed – in this instance Andy McHarg and Orlando Thomas Lockyer (‘Lanty’) O’Brien – in a match won by Carlton 2-0. Which of those two players booted the first goal remains unclear, but what is clear is that it wasn’t Williams.
While it’s now doubtful that Williams booted Carlton’s first goal, what’s beyond doubt is the man’s true worth as a player of renown through 13 seasons to the end of 1876. Of Williams a football correspondent noted: “He played for many seasons with credit, was a capital mark, and useful player”.
Was it McHarg, O’Brien or Williams? We may never know. (Photo: Carlton Football Club)
Employed by the Victorian Railways and a Carlton member throughout his later life, Williams died far too young at the age of 44. The end for him came at the long gone Flower Hotel in Drummond Street in May of 1891 and he was laid to rest at the Melbourne Cemetery - within cooee of the place where he first played for Carlton.
The Australasian newspaper reported;
“Footballers of the old school will learn with keenest regret, that Mr. W. Williams, who in the seventies was prominent and exceedingly popular member of the Carlton club, has gone to his account.
In his day he was sterling player, full of pluck and determination, and his gallant efforts were often a signal to his side.
For many years the calls of business have precluded his even watching the game he loved so well, but his heart had ever a warm corner in it for his former associates upon the field.”
