Almanac Footy History – Wilfred Smallhorn: The Remarkable Chicken

 

 

 

One of the worst things to be called in the schoolyard when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s was ‘chicken’.  Chicken-hearted; afraid of getting in there; too scared to do the daring – or reckless – stuff.  Just the thought of being dubbed ‘chicken’ was enough to get you to do things.  That’s peer pressure for you.

 

But there was nothing ‘chicken’ about Wilfred ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn, in fact his approach to football and life made a mockery of any humiliating associations with the word.

 

Born and raised in Fitzroy (Miller Street, North Fitzroy), Chicken told Jack Dyer he was given the moniker by his mother as a little boy because he was so small and light, ‘just like a little chicken’.  The name stuck from that moment on, and for the rest of his life almost everyone referred to him as Chicken, or just Chick.

 

Chick didn’t do much in the physical sense to challenge the nickname; he stayed small and light, eventually reaching the not-so-dizzying height of 170cms, while playing at around 60-65 kilograms.  Not that it mattered much – Chick used his lithe frame, speed, agility and ability and could read the play to great effect.

 

Debuting for the Maroons as a nineteen years old in 1930, Chick came to the club as a rover but was moved in no time to the wing, a shift designed to take advantage of his pace and protect his light frame from the intense physical stuff that playing on the ball would have exposed him to.

 

By the end of the 1932 season Chick had already debuted for Victoria and started racking up serious numbers of votes in the Brownlow count, including a top ten finish the year his Fitzroy teammate, champion Haydn Bunton, took out his second consecutive Brownlow.  In 1933 Chick made it a hat-trick of Fitzroy Brownlows.

 

Dan Murray, teammate of Chick in 1933, described him thus: ‘For a small man, he could mark over the big ruckmen…he could get up very high for a mark and was tremendously fast.  He could baulk and turn and do all the things necessary for a star winger.’  Another teammate, John Cashman said of him: ‘Chick was a sensational little player.  He was very fast and you could knock the ball in from the ruck five yards in front of him and he’d be there first, nine out of ten times.’

 

The reigning Brownlow Medallist finished only three votes behind Essendon’s Dick Reynolds in 1934, and when Reynold’s won his third medal in 1938, Chick finished third.  He also finished in the top ten in 1939, his last full season at Fitzroy.  There’s little doubt that if Bunton hadn’t been in the Fitzroy team pulling in so many Brownlow votes, Chick would have grabbed at least one, and possibly two more, Brownlow Medals for himself.

 

But Chick was under no illusions about the Brownlow, as he observed in the early 1980s: ‘I don’t think it’s a fair award, I never have.  It took forty years for a wingman to win one after me – Keith Greig in 1973.  We’ve had one back-pocket player and one full-back…only a certain type of player wins – and that’s not fair in my book!’

 

Fitzroy failed to make the finals in any of the years Chick played, a seemingly odd situation considering the team had three Brownlow winners in it, Bunton, Chick and Dinny Ryan, winner in 1936, as well as several genuinely top-level players including Doug Nicholls, Frank Curcio, Clen Denning, Maurie Hearn and Jack Moriarty.  In fact the team barely made it out of the bottom four in this period, even managing to ‘win’ the club’s first wooden spoon in 1936.  ‘We just weren’t good enough, we had too many fellows coming through our ranks who weren’t good enough,’ Chick recalled.

 

Chick had several run-ins with the club administration, largely for what he saw as the poor treatment dished out to local players by the club.  It was the Depression, and one of the most valuable things a club could do for its players was find them a decent, well-paying job.  In Chick’s view the club always gave the best jobs to interstate and country recruits at the expense of local boys.  In his case he had to put up with a range of poor, unsatisfying jobs including working in a factory, on a bread-cart and at a motor-wreckers.

 

The oddest job the club found for him was doing a tea-round in Fitzroy, selling tea to supporters and whoever else wanted it.  At first he did it on a bicycle but he soon moved on to a motorcycle (with a sidecar) before getting hold of a small, horse-drawn, wagon.  He emblazoning his name on it, added extra products to the range and had the tea wrapped in Fitzroy colours:

 

‘I used to take a basket into a person’s place and if they didn’t buy a half pound of tea, I’d often sell them a jelly and I would make a penny.  By the end, the round paid eight pound a week, which, added to the three pound I got from football, was good money in those days.  I was in clover.’

 

But running a tea-cart through the streets of Fitzroy had its problems, particularly if you were a well-known and much-loved Fitzroy footballer: “After a number of years on the round, I really thought I was going mental.  Because Fitzroy almost always lost each Saturday, you’d go to customers on a Monday and they would ask, ‘What happened to you last Saturday?’  And you would go through the game with them and you’d have to explain why you were going to win the next Saturday.  But I knew I was going to have to answer the same questions the next Monday.  In the end you start to go around the bend.”

 

Chick seriously injured his knee during the 1936 season and sold the tea-round on the understanding that the club would find him a better job.  But this never happened – he then found himself without work for ten months.

 

With virtually no income from any source, Chick had had enough of Fitzroy so at the end of 1936 he sought a release to play with Collingwood, in part because they were offering him better employment.  However, as he was contractually tied to the club, Fitzroy refused to let him go.  He then tried crossing to Melbourne and VFA club, Camberwell, both clubs also promising better paying work than what was on offer from Fitzroy.  When Fitzroy again refused to release him, Chick had to accept his fate: “I had no alternative, I would have been disqualified for life (if I’d transferred without a clearance).”

 

Chick called it quits during the 1940 season after breaking his leg in Round 4, his 150th game for the Maroons.  He was 29 years of age.  He soon enrolled in the army and was unfortunately captured by the Japanese Army in early 1942.

 

Chick spent the next three years as a prisoner-of-war at Changi, including a ten-month stint on the notorious Burma railway, where thousands of Allied prisoners died during its enforced construction.  “I was as close as anyone to Chick during those days at Changi and he was one of a small group from his unit who stuck together on the long march and later on the railway working parties…it was his mateship which helped in our survival,” recalled Jim Boyle, a fellow POW.  Chick’s hard war years seriously affected his health for the rest of his life, not surprising when you consider he caught malaria and developed tuberculosis. By the end of the war his weight had dropped to just 19 kilograms.

 

There were plenty of terrible experiences in Changi and on the Burma railway though a rare, pleasurable episode took place during late 1942, early 1943: Chick and a couple of other prisoners convinced the Japanese to let the POWs play a ‘season’ of Aussie Rules.  With plenty of South Australian, West Australian and Victorian country and suburban players among the prisoners, a competition was quickly set up and several games were played between five teams bearing Melbourne club names. Chick’s health wasn’t too good so he didn’t play; instead he took on one of the two umpiring roles.

 

Following the close of the ‘season’ (the Changi ‘premiership’ was won by ‘Geelong’), a match was organised between a combined Victorian team against the Rest of Australia. Chick umpired and an enormous cheer went up for him when he ran on to the ground in his all-white uniform. He had been in terrible pain for the previous two days but still managed to officiate throughout the game – the next day he had to have his appendix removed.

 

After the war Chick moved into football commentating on radio and later television but eventually had to give it away due to ill health.  He remained a staunch Roys supporter throughout and often made appearances at team and club functions.  In his latter years he made the cheeky observation that although football had changed enormously since his playing days, he didn’t ‘see any reason why I couldn’t get a kick today.’

 

Despite the regular fights he’d had with the Fitzroy administration during his playing days, Chick made it clear he loved playing for the Roys, his boyhood dream come true.  ‘To wear a maroon and blue guernsey, you would give your right arm…’

 

Chick died in November 1988 aged 77 and his family donated his Brownlow to the MCG Gallery of Sports the following year.

 

In 2001, Wilfred ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn was named on the wing in the Fitzroy Team of the Century.  Where else would a bloke with that nickname play?

 

 

 

This is a modified version of a piece that originally appeared in 2007 at a short-lived Fitzroy FC history website.

 

Material for this story is sourced from:

 

The First 100 Seasons by Sutherland et al, a history of the Fitzroy FC produced for the club’s centenary in 1983

 

Fitzroy – Brisbane Lions Historical Society Newsletter, Vol.1, 2006.

 

For details on the Changi ‘premiership’ and Chick’s role, see the articles, Football Behind Bamboo, from Football Life, September 1969, and Changi’s Football Hero, from the Sun News Pictorial, 24 April 1984.

 

 

Our writers are independent contributors. The opinions expressed in their articles are their own. They are not the views, nor do they reflect the views, of Malarkey Publications.

 

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