The names surely roll off the tongue... Clover, Diggins, Chitty, Henfry, Nicholls, Jesaulenko, Fitzpatrick and Kernahan, the latter the game’s longest-serving leader period.
First-placed in the much-vaunted captaincy collective, at least in chronological terms, is Jimmy Aitken, whose origins can be sourced to the old working class town of Sebastopol in Victoria’s north-west. It was Aitken who was given the nod moments before he tossed the coin in the lead-up to the opening round contest of the 1897 season, when the Carltonites turned in a spirited if unsuccessful showing against Fitzroy at Brunswick Street.
Ernie Walton, who’d soon enough inherit the captaincy from Jimmy, was also part of that historic 20 who took to the field for the match with the Royboys on that fateful day in May. Ernie, the first Carlton footballer to complete 50 and 100 senior appearances, officiated as captain through 1898 and ’99 and prevailed as a Carlton player until his 120th and final appearance in the 1904 Grand Final when the team again lowered its colours to Fitzroy.
Today, some 107 years after he last laced a boot, Ernie Walton’s surviving daughter Celine Parkinson has painted a picture of a colourful Carlton character come racing identity and dedicated family man.
“He was a real livewire,” says Celine, a spritely 91 year-old and a fiercely loyal Carlton supporter now domiciled in South Australia.
“He played for the love of the sport and he didn’t get the money they get today.”
Celine proficiently recalls the story of her father’s life, which in part took in his years as a Carlton footballer and later honorary treasurer. She knows Ernie was born in Geelong in April 1875, the youngest of eight children to George Walton from Bunbury, England, and Margaret Chalmers Orr from Lanarkshire. They had married in Melbourne’s Presbyterian church on Victoria Parade in 1858 and later relocated to an old Georgian mansion known as Fairfield Hall, since demolished.
Ernie’s father, a pharmacist, tragically died at 45 when the former was just four years old. Ernie’s mother later married a man who’d been her husband’s assistant in the pharmacy - a disastrous decision as he completely swindled her of funds. Circumstance forced the young Ernie (he was seven when Margaret remarried) to forsake his schooling and as Margaret tried to make ends meet managing a boarding house, he sold newspapers.
“Dad had to leave school before his time, but he had the brains all right - he was still very good with figures and he wrote very well, but he had to leave school before he would have liked,” Celine says.
“He knew what it was like to be poor because he had to earn money doing odd jobs, selling newspapers and that type of thing. He always loved music and going to the theatre and if he earned a sixpence selling papers he’d buy a seat up in the gods at the Royal Theatre.”
“He and a pal, who later became a police constable, also used to sell homing pigeons and of course the pigeons would fly back so they could sell them a second time.”
Ernie Walton, circa 1897 - image courtesy the Parkinson family, SA
After relocating to Carlton, Ernie was apprenticed to a watchmaker on Lygon Street and there’s a good story relating to his time at the premises.
It was during his apprenticeship that an irate client threw a heavy china cup at the boss, which missed its mark and caught Ernie on the side of the head, splitting it open.
“Dad got sewn up, but 50 years later, when he was playing a game of social cricket in Brighton, he again got hit on the side of the head with the ball.
“The side of his head became quite inflamed and it warranted an x-ray, which revealed a little dark shape, so Dad had to go to hospital for an operation... it was then they discovered this little piece of china, which he’d carried in his head for 50 years. It had never given him any trouble until after the operation, when his left eye began to droop and it always seemed that he was winking at you.
“I can remember that whenever we had new visitors to our home in Brighton and there was a lull in the conversation or he needed to be more entertaining Dad would drag out a little matchbox in which he’d stored that piece of china and he’d tell the story.”
Celine remembers that her father had a penchant for putting new lyrics to popular tunes of the day, amongst them Lily of Laguna - and in relating the tale, she appreciates she’s challenging the common perception that a couple of spinsters in Hawthorn reworked the old music hall ditty later on.
“That song was one of his (Ernie’s) favourites and I’m quite certain he put the club lyrics to that song,” Celine says. “He had this gift of reworking the lyrics of a popular tune to suit the occasion and that’s why I always had the impression he put the Carlton lyrics to the Lily of Laguna.
“That’s where the Carlton theme originated and I know that while a couple of other people have claimed credit I didn’t want to dispute it. I just know that’s what Dad did and that when the team wins I love to hear that song... ‘We are the Navy Blues’.”
In 1904, in what was his final year as a Carlton footballer, Ernie married Anna Isabella Duke, who was born at Woodend, Victoria and hailed from Sunny Corner, New South Wales. According to Celine, Anna had relocated to Melbourne “to work as a piano teacher in Melbourne, which was how Dad met her... and he did enjoy hearing her play the piano”.
The wedding was wonderfully-received by the rank and file at Princes Park, for as the club’s honorary Secretary Jack Worrall noted in the club’s annual report: “During the season Mr. E. Walton entered the holy bonds of matrimony. The committee and Players took advantage of the occasion, making a couple of handsome presentations”.
Ernie Walton c 1940 - image courtesy the Parkinson family, SA
By then, Ernie had already resisted overtures from two of his brothers to chase the leather in Western Australia. “They tried to persuade Dad to come across, but he was keeping company with my Mum and he delayed the decision,” Celine says.
“In the end he agreed to join them because they were quite persuasive, but when he got to the railway station he had a change of heart. He had written a letter to Anna to tell her that he was leaving Victoria and then he changed his mind. He sent her a telegram to tell her he wasn’t going. She received the telegram before she had received the letter! He couldn’t leave her and he never went.”
Celine knows that when Ernie hung up the boots and officiated as secretary through 1911 and 12, he and Anna helped establish a Carlton social club of sorts for members and their families at the old ground.
“He had a billiard table installed there, which ended up in the upstairs room of our house in Brighton, and he got Mum playing the piano for their ‘sing songs’,” Celine says.
When world War One broke out Ernie tried to list with two of his close mates, but was most upset to be turned down (he was married with three children by then). His two mates never came home, having been mown down in Gallipoli, and Ernie kept their photographs close for the rest of his life.
In time, Ernie and Anna raised four children - George, Marie Anna (known as Jill), Clarice and the last surviving child Celine. For a brief period, home was a glorious doubled fronted premises at 242 Palmerston Street Carlton, (“in my mind’s eye I can still see the bay window” says Celine) but not long after Celine’s birth in the Royal Women’s Hospital, the Waltons relocated to North Brighton by the sea in 1921.
“One of Dad’s friends introduced him to this lovely house right on the beach. That friend had built the house there because of his wife’s poor health, but she died before he could take up residence, so it was never lived in,” Celine says.
“Now the friend offered Dad the house to buy. It was at No.5 St Ninians Road, in what became known as ‘The Golden Mile’ because the properties backed on to the beach. One man who lived near us was a big racing man Eric Connolly, who owned a couple of horses. Next door to him was a lovely man who I knew only as Mr. Guest (because I was very little) of Guest’s Biscuits. I used to see Mr. Guest when I wheeled my doll past his place in a pram and he used to give me a tin of bikkies every Christmas.”
“We were very fortunate because the house was new and the backyard trailed through the ti trees right down to the sea. It was the only house I ever knew and sadly it’s been knocked down, but it still evokes wonderful memories for me,” Celine says.
“Dad was very handy. He cleared the land of a lot of the ti trees and built a fishpond and when the tide was out he and I would go down to the shore to gather the stones with white coral on them and he built an archway of that. You’d walk through this archway beneath the ti trees, past the shrubs, the fishpond and an aviary for the birds.
“He also acquired an old tram car, a dummy carriage that was pulled by the engine in and around Carlton. He built the land up to it and we used it as a bathing box. I remember the older ones using it as a changeroom, emerging from the carriage in those old fashioned bathers neck to knee.
“He spent a lot of time building that place up. He even built a boatshed for his little motorboat and he used to take me out with him to go fishing for flathead.”
By the time the family had relocated to North Brighton, Ernie was already firmly entrenched as a ‘Commissioner of the Turf’ by profession.
How did he become involved with the sport of kings? “John Wren had done very well out of racing and I was told that his offsider took a liking to Dad because he was so honest and wanted to set him up in the racing game,” says Celine.
“Dad was a low-key bookmaker and he only took the smaller bets. He was on the flat rather than on the rails like ‘Manny’ Lyons and all the big bookies I heard about. He was ‘The Gentleman Bookmaker’, taking bets of 2’6 each way and once a week he’d go into the Victoria Club to settle.”
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Ernie Walton c 1940 - image courtesy the Parkinson family, SA
Tragically, a kidney ailment claimed Anna’s life in 1940 and although Celine was only 19 then, her mother’s death only served to strengthen the close ties with Ernie, who fashioned a wonderland on St Ninians Road.
When Ernie’s wife died, the old man respectfully asked of Celine ‘You’ll have to be my cobber now’. Celine naturally lent her father her unswerving support because she got on well with him, but the final act was so very painful.
“Towards the end of Dad’s life I gave up my job in the city to look after him,” Celine says.
“He was so lonely after Mum died. He used to sleep upstairs near the billiard room where he could see the sea. One morning I went up there to give him his breakfast and he couldn’t speak. He’d had a stroke and of course was struggling to communicate with me. I knew it was something serious so I called his doctor.
“Dad only lasted for a week and it was all so very sad. I had gone into the city to collect the last of my papers from the office, but I missed the tram that would have taken me right back to Bay Street and the one I caught only took me to the Elwood depot... so I had to wait there for the next one to come. I didn’t make it home in time. I was so sad I wasn’t there.”
Ernie Walton died on August 23, 1946. He was laid to rest alongside his beloved wife Anna in Cheltenham Cemetery.
It’s to Celine’s eternal regret that one of Ernie’s most precious Carlton keepsakes was lost by the family some years ago.
“There was, in his bedroom, a beautiful framed and illuminated testimonial from the Carlton club thanking my father for his services after he stopped playing,” Celine says.
“I don’t know what happened to it… but I’d give anything to see it again.”
