Alex and Harold Hanton lock hands as they pose for the camera . . . and there’s a glorious symbolism in it all.

For the identical twins - whose lives have been shaped by the bleak ordeals of The Great Depression, the horrors of world conflict, and the relative diversions of post-war Princes Park - togetherness has undoubtedly proved the survival mechanism.

The recent years have not been easy. The brothers, now closing in on their 89th birthday - are both blind, and Harold is confined to a wheelchair thesedays - not that those physical impositions have tinkered with their recollections.

Harold Roy and Alexander George Hanton were born in Frankston on May 25, 1922. Harold preceded Alex by 20 minutes.

Two years later the Hanton family relocated to inner city West Brunswick, and in time the twins chased the leather for St David’s in the local Church football competition.


Harold (left) and Alex Hanton, wartime

In August 1942, Alex and Harold enlisted for wartime duties in Western Australia, as signalmen for the Army’s B Australian Corps. Service would take them to Townsville, the tip of Cape York, back to Melbourne, and finally to Bougainville, before their discharge in 1946.

By then they’d participated in many a wartime scratch match with League luminaries - the likes of Les Foote, “Tarzan” Glass, Denis Cordner and the great Laurie Nash.

Alex relates a terrific tale of the time he and Nash crossed paths on a football field, in Townsville of all places, when brotherly love intervened.

“We always struck a couple of senior players in every game we played,” Alex recalls. “We were stationed at Townsville, and Laurie Nash was coming down from New Guinea on his way back to Melbourne, and he wanted a game of football. Anyway we were playing for the army, I’m not sure who we were playing, and Nash offered to play for either team. But our captain knocked him back, so he played against us.

“I started on him at centre half-back and kept him down to three goals . . . in the first ten minutes! I was admiring him instead of trying to stop him, so Harold took over and Nash didn’t kick another goal.”

At war’s end, and having safely returned to Melbourne from Bougainville, the Hantons tried their luck at Carlton. This was the Perc Bentley era, when men of stature like Bob Chitty, Bert Deacon and Ken Hands were the pin-ups, and Princes Park was a welcome abode.

“It was a very happy place, particularly with the team so successful,” Alex remembers. “Sunday morning they’d have a beer-up and a get-together . . . it was a good atmosphere.”


Alex and Harold Hanton, 1948 Carlton reserve grade team

The record books show that Harold Hanton - sporting the No.5 of the current Carlton captain - turned out in the famous dark Navy Blue strip for both the opening round of the famous/infamous 1945 premiership season, against Melbourne, and the second round encounter with Hawthorn at Glenferrie Oval.

Harold would have been part of that much-feted 1945 premiership team too, according to Alex, had war not intervened.

As he says, “We were posted overseas after the fifth round, and we weren’t very popular with Harry Bell the secretary because we didn’t tell Carlton early enough to stop our posting”.

A little over 12 months later - in the 10th round of 1946 - Alex strode onto the verdant field at Princes Park, for what would be his one and only senior appearance, against Footscray.

The home team got up by four points.

“I was picked in the first ruck with Jack Howell,” Alex recalls. [Jack] Wrout and [Fred] Davies were both out injured and Bob Chitty, who’d copped eight weeks after the ’45 Grand final, played in the ninth round of ’46 but got reported again . . . so I was chosen in his place.”

“I got half a dozen kicks and kicked a goal in the last quarter.”

Though he fared well in what would be his one and only senior outing, Alex, a 40-game Carlton reserve grade player, is man enough to admit that he probably wasn’t good enough to further his career in the ones.

And as he so readily adds:“It was great to put the Carlton guernsey on, and to play with some great players - Bert Deacon, Jack Howell and some of those chaps . . . it was a good team”.

As for Harold, injury unfortunately intervened.

“I got a knee in the groin in a practice match in Frankston at the start of ’46 and suffered a hernia,” he says. “I had to have an operation and for a time there they thought I wouldn’t have any kids.”

Though their tenures as Carlton footballers were all too brief, the Hantons’ love for the club never waned. For years they took their seats in the old Hawthorn Stand, and were shoulder-to-shoulder at the MCG for all eight of the Blues’ Grand Final conquests, beginning with 1968.

As late as 2000, Harold had his photo taken with Anthony Koutoufides on a much-anticipated visit to the old Carlton ground.

Today, Alex tunes in to Melbourne radio to follow the fortunes of his beloved Blues, as the names of Judd, Murphy and Gibbs are called.

So what do they make of today’s game?

Alex speaks for his twin brother when he observes, “Oh it’s pretty fast isn’t it? . . . and now they kick it backwards and sideways, a bit like bloody soccer”.