Thank God for David Adams. Now 78 and living quietly in retirement, Adams is Robert Heatley’s grandson. And today, more than sixty years since Heatley’s passing, Adams clings to the precious personal memories of one of the true pioneers of Princes Park, whom he affectionately knew as “Gramp”.
“To me, my grandfather was a real role model, in the sense that he had tremendous character,” Adams said this week.
“You would think that as a child you wouldn’t pick up on that, but I quickly began to see that Gramp was a man who was very good to people and his friends told me many wonderful stories. One of his good friends used to say that ‘during the Depression he was marvellous to me. I couldn’t pay off the mortgage on the house, but he came over and paid the lot out’.
“He was a man who knew everybody, but people had to come to him. He didn’t go out back slapping and he didn’t seek favours. He wasn’t a man with intimate friends. He was a taciturn man, he didn’t have a lot to say, but what he said was very much to the point.
“Gramp was extremely astute, but he hated hype and I’ll give you a good example of that. He once had a garage built, a beaut double garage at his old house, and he went to buy a car. Anyway, the salesman expounded at such great length about the wonders of this car. My grandfather just stood there in silence and, after some time, said to the salesman: ‘You are so much in love with this car that I couldn’t bear to take it off you!’.”
A far-reaching family tree in Adams’ precious keep reveals that Robert Murray Heatley was born in Carlton on December 28, 1863, the year before the Carlton Football Club itself was founded.
Heatley, the second of eight children reared by Scottish immigrants, represented Carlton in the then VFA for just one season – 1883 - before interests in first bookmaking and then property development took precedence.
The Blueseum’s Stephen Williamson, supplied the following extract from The Carlton Story by Hugh Buggy and Harry Bell, which acknowledges Heatley’s on-field contribution at that time.
“Opening the season against a Waverley 23, Carlton had an easy victory by seven goals to nil. Among the new players to show that game was Robert Heatley, who later became president of Carlton and worked indefatigably for many years for Carlton sport and the Carlton Recreation Ground. The Heatley Stand was named to honour his memory, and in appreciation of his distinguished services to the club”.
Ten years after completing his maiden season with the Blues, on May 10, 1893, Heatley married Marion Bowman in her home town of Kyneton.
The Heatleys eventually settled in McIlwarith Street, North Carlton, at a place known as Anchorite (a name later given to a horse Heatley owned which won the Werribee Cup). In the end, the family relocated to the grand home at 393 Royal Parade just before the outbreak of the First World War.
“He (Heatley) had the house built,” Adams said. “It was a very large home on a block of about three quarters of an acre and it faced the Carlton ground. “Unfortunately in the early 1960s, around about 15 years after he had died, the State Government acquired that property for the Pharmacy College. I was rather annoyed to find that they had acquired it at a cut-down rate and sold it off to the Dental Society. They didn’t keep possession of it and the Dental Society still owns the building, which was one of the reasons that the University of Melbourne didn’t take over the Pharmacy College when it wanted to become part of the University .
“The house is now gone, but I still go there to pat the elm trees out the front. The incredible thing is that the houses that remain on Royal Parade are the old terraces which in our day were the poor homes and are now worth a million.”
Robert and Marion Heatley raised five children. “There were three sons first and two daughters, and he (Heatley) gave each of them two terraces in North Carlton to set them up for life,” Adams said.
“He also gave his wife’s sister, who was living in moderate circumstances, a home in North Carlton – so there’s 11 homes that he bought and gave away – and he provided homes for his four sisters. He was unbelievable.”
Adams described Heatley’s three sons as “rather wayward souls” who were difficult to deal with, and Robert was a “Victorian-strict father as I understand”. Adams recalled that two of the sons enlisted for World War I, leaving behind the eldest, who had lost his arm in a train accident.
Robert Heatley’s marriage to Marion Bowman was unfortunately cut short when Marion, 16 months Robert’s senior, died of a heart ailment in 1915.
Though Heatley never remarried, his love affair with Carlton endured, together with his canny business sense.
“Robert Heatley started out in life as a baker. After his stepmother put he and two of her other stepchildren out of the house, he then took on a house with his brother and together they raised their three sisters. As a result, the three sisters idolised them for the rest of their lives,” Adams said.
“He later became a rails bookmaker at Flemington and other courses. He was part of the firm Hayes Heatley and he was on the flat - he wasn’t one of the top line ones, but he did well.
“On one occasion, according to what his son had told me, they got to the point where they had a very bad day with bets because the favourites had all come in. Gramp said to him, ‘Look, if things go badly in the next couple of races, we’re done. If that happens, you run and I’ll face the mob’. As luck would have it they came through in the last, and they went on from there and made a lot of money.
“There was one famous incident at the Tattersall’s Club where Gramp used to go because he was a bookie. One day ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, a standover man in the 20s who was one of John Wren’s confederates, approached my grandfather in the club and said, ‘How about giving me a pony, Bob’ (and a pony in those days was about 25 bob). Gramp responded by picking Squizzy up and throwing him down the stairs, and Squizzy was a hit-man.”
Adams believed that his grandfather got out of bookmaking around 1910. “He then began to develop properties, particularly in and around Carlton, and he bought a lot of houses,” Adams said.
“He was President of the Carlton Club for three years and then he got into conflict with the coach, John Worrall. As I understand it, and Hugh Buggy wrote it up, they were playing a game at South Melbourne and he found out afterwards that Johnny Worrall, whom he had appointed as the secretary and coach, had taken the takings from the game and put them into his own account. Now my grandfather wouldn’t have a bar of anything like that, so he confronted Johnny then had him sacked.
“Apparently Johnny Worrall did hand the money back when confronted, as if to say, ‘it was just for safekeeping’, so it became a grey issue - it wasn’t black and white.
“Now the club members were irate because they could see that the club was rising and so they called a special meeting and voted Johnny Worrall back in. “So my grandfather said “I’m out” and resigned.”
Adams said that Heatley remained a supporter but “went into quiet recession” from Carlton, until he resumed his association with the cricket club. He also recalls Heatley being appointed chairman of the ground committee “and then applying himself energetically to building up the outer”. “It was an age where these dominant people could do this, and he quite literally moved the boundaries. He had the concrete wall put up on the southern side of the ground, and had all this earth brought in to raise the area. He contributed a lot of time and money to the ground throughout his life it and it was for this reason that he was acknowledged later on,” Adams said.
Not long after his wife’s passing, Heatley’s spinster cousin moved into the Royal Parade premises and more or less managed the place with the assistance of servants. Later on, when the cousin died, Heatley turned to his daughter Catherine (Adams’ mother) for support, Catherine having split from her husband and relocated to Brighton from her home in Tasmania.
“Robert was living alone in this big house and he took my mother and I in,” Adams recalled. “The Depression came on of course, and we didn’t have much income, so my mother looked after him and the house. That was around 1933 and he would have been about 70 at that stage, but he was still hale and hearty.
“In 1935, when I was five years of age, Gramp took me to my first football game. At that time the Heatley and Gardiner Stands stood, but he had a little picket fence enclosure by the race where the umpires came out. We had a couple of seats there exclusively for our family’s use, so he’d take me and other cousins to every game and we’d sit there, right by the flagpole where they used to raise the premiership pennants. The enclosure went in about 1938 or ’39.
“One of the things that fascinated me about being in the enclosure was that there used to be fairly big crowds at the game, all standing of course, and there was a chap who had a cockatoo, and when a goal was scored he’d raise the cockatoo which would screech “Come on the Blues!” That was on the hill to the left of the Heatley Stand.
“When they shut down the enclosure probably because of the pressure with crowds (and Gramp would have agreed to it – they wouldn’t have done it without his permission) we sat with him in the Gardiner Stand. He liked to sit there because it was opposite the centre of the ground and he could also see the Heatley Stand.”
Adams spent ten wonderful years following his grandfather to the footy in the company of his siblings and his cousins - one of whom, Foster Heatley, remains a passionate Carlton supporter. “There were three grandchildren, myself included, and then there were two other grandchildren of his second son, all of whom he took in and raised,” Adams said.
“How well I remember the players . . . Baxter, Wrout, Bob Chitty, Carney, “Socks” Cooper, Ron Savage and “Soapy” Vallence who was my idol. When I was very young, about five, I used to run out with the team wearing a “Soapy” Vallence sweater.
“Gramp liked to talk about the play, the strategies and what was going on at the club. He didn’t have a lot to say, and he always held these discussions with the same group – old players and officials of the club from the 1890s and early 1900s – men in their seventies by then.”
Adams said that these precious outings weren’t confined to Princes Park alone.
“In the summer, whether on a Saturday or Sunday, he Heatley would take family members out on a cable tram ride to the end of the line at Fitzroy and back again. We used to love sitting up the front of the cable trams, that was tremendous, and my mother also benefited in getting a day off,” Adams said.
“Sometimes he’d also take us out on the bay on a day’s trip on the English paddle steamer Weeroona. That would happen every weekend of the summer until the start of the footy season.
“When footy began we’d walk with him to the grounds. He was a wealthy man but he never got there in a cab. We’d catch the tram to the MCG to see Carlton play Melbourne or to Punt Road for games against Richmond, and we’d catch the train to Footscray. We’d walk to the other grounds because they were so close together and the only ground I can recall never going to was Geelong.”
Adams also sat alongside their grandfather in the Gardiner Stand to bear witness to the ferocious Grand Final of 1945, known in football lore as “The Bloodbath”. “Gramp was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s by then and he wasn’t altogether clear about what was going on, so I actually took him to that Grand Final and I was only 15,” Adams said.
“I remember the game so clearly, with the fighting, Jim Cleary and so on . . . it was incredible. I can remember Ken Hands being hit and seeing Bob Chitty’s face turn red. Chitty’d run through a wall and he wasn’t a big fellow – he must have been all muscle and bone.”
Robert Heatley died on May 7, 1947, four months before Freddy Stafford sank Essendon with his Premiership-winning goal on the final bell. He was buried in a family mausoleum in Coburg Cemetery.
To the end Heatley supported the Carlton team, and his ’47 membership ticket - which carries his signature in the corner - remains a precious family keepsake six decades later.
Adams is understandably disappointed, but philosophical, in the knowledge that the Robert Heatley Stand, together with the George G. Harris Stand, inevitably faces the wrecking ball. “I’m very sad and it is a bit unfortunate . . . but you’ve got to move on,” Adams said.
“I just hope some elements of both stands – such as the Heatley and Harris names – can be preserved and put on a wall – to ensure that these men are remembered.”
Of more concern to Adams is the harsh reality that these precious links in the family chain will soon be broken. “Unfortunately Robert Heatley’s legacy will probably end with our generation because we were the last to know him, but we do try to tell the younger generations how he set us up for life,” Adams said. “Gramp taught me that in life you share what you’ve got. If you come into good fortune you share it, not only with your family, but also with others.”