Vale Bob Speechley

 

 

 

It is with much sadness that I bring you the news that our dear friend, Bob Speechley, a great supporter of the Footy Almanac, died on February 15. He was 81. A memorial gathering will take place at University House at the University of Melbourne, a place Bob knew and loved, on Tuesday March 12, from 3pm. We are all welcome.

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Bob Speechley was one of the characters of the University of Melbourne. A fine administrator across various departments – Engineering, Music, the central admin – he gave his energy and enthusiasm to good causes. This included trying to make sense of the world and its people. He was an observer and a thinker. He read widely and deeply.

Bob lived the University Life, which those who’ve experienced it will understand, and those who believe in universities will appreciate. He had a deeply held conviction that the best of University Life had much to offer, which included the academic, the professional, the social, the cultural, the spiritual – and the absurd.

He was very kind. He could detect when a young student was restless and a little lost in which case it was the vibe of the law, and his sense of common humanity, which mattered. He wanted the best for everyone, even the ratbags – especially the ratbags.

He had a connoisseur’s nose for pomposity and self-interest and he knew when a senior faculty member was corked. He had little time for the straiteners and life-deniers.

To quote progressive-thinker and economist, Alistair Watson (another Almanac member over many years), “Bob was like many academic administrators who had more sense of what a university should be about than some members of the professorial board.”

Bob had a reformer’s sensibility. At a conference in Melbourne in October 2010, he and his colleague Arthur O’Neill presented a brave paper: ‘Looking back to the future.’ The blurb was illustrative: “Having worked for many decades at the hopeless task of administering higher education institutions, these two old codgers regurgitate their experience for the benefit of new chums and speculate about the next half century.” Tertiary education mattered to him. Radical thinking was attractive to him. In this paper the old codgers wrote:

“If you were young in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was not all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. There was resistance – to the State and authoritarian institutional structures, to rampant capitalism dressed up in pietistic gab, to patriarchy, to orthodoxy in all its guises.”

He had ideas and the energy to act on them. He could find common ground with people and many of his friends seemed to share his sensibility.

He had a wonderful sense of humour. He was acutely aware of human folly and his droll observations were delivered with a glint in the eye, followed by a quiet chuckle.

He was wonderful company.

 

**

 

I met Bob at a lunch.

After being part of a panel – with Martin Flanagan, Peter Goldsworthy and the ABC’s Amanda Smith – at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I was chatting with a couple of people on the steps of the stage, when I was approached by a phalanx of middle-aged men, armed with a thirst and the will and resources to alleviate it.

It was led by Jim Young, author of a brilliant book Any Old Eleven, the story of Naughton’s Old Boys, the park cricket team of the famous university hotel on Royal Parade known as Naughton’s. It was the spiritual home of the Speechley genus who gathered there to laugh at themselves, each other and life in general.

The book depicts a philosophy which debunks any sense of nobility in cricket and describes matches, and those who played in them, with profound accuracy.

“What kept [NOBs] together most of all,” Jim wrote, “was a wholehearted enjoyment of the disappointments and humiliations so frequently visited upon one’s colleagues, and especially one’s best mates.”

I had never met any of the members of this phalanx but I had communicated with Jim Young after a copy of Any Old Eleven landed in my letterbox, out of the blue. I reviewed it, more than favourably, for the Fairfax papers – which it totally deserved.

“What are you doing now?” they asked.

“This arvo? No plans,” I replied.

“We’re going to lunch.” It was like a chorus. “Do you want to join us.”

We got kicked out of Walters, a restaurant along Southbank, just as the first of the dinner guests were arriving.

Bob was among that crew.

It says something about that crew that I remain friends with them to this day.

When, the following year, Susan and I moved to Melbourne, we became close friends of NOBs wicket-keeper batsman Max Radcliffe and his wonderful partner Pauline Drayton, and with Bob. I would catch up with them on Friday nights at the North Fitzroy Arms, or for lunch when Jim came down from his mountain retreat in Warburton.

The conversation was always fun. Life’s memorable events were described in detail, stories told with ever-expanding exaggeration to highlight the failings of their characters.

Max, for example, was famous for having the loudest cover drive in the history of cricket – but could not hit the ball off the square. He also had a million stories, from the army (he was a pox doctor’s clerk) to schools to the tertiary sector. He’d met a million people. But Bob knew more.

“Bob Speechley was the Arthur Daley of Melbourne Uni,” Max once told me, confidentially, with Bob sitting right beside him. “He knew everyone. He knew what was going on and, whether they realized it or not, he could influence another faculty without even being in its employ.”

Bob and I started having lunch together at University House from time to time. He would sometimes bring a book he thought I’d enjoy, like the biography of Brian Fitzpatrick or a novel by Laurie Clancy, or an essay in a collection by Laurie’s brother Jim. He’d tell me about characters from Uni life – like Dinny O’Hearn, a monument to whom stands on Lygon Street just outside Jimmy Watson’s – and Melbourne Times types like Barry Dickins and Wacker. Bob knew I had an MA in Australian Studies, so he introduced me to Kate Darian-Smith, and June Senyard, among others, while he had an involvement in the Australian Studies Centre. Bob did know everyone.

When new uni types came on the scene, he befriended (and supported) them. He met Sean Gorman, author of Brotherboys, when Sean took up a position in the University of Melbourne’s Indigenous Studies department. They became good mates during Sean’s time there.

There were other lunches – they were called Loose Men Charities Lunches – which some of the NOBs would attend. Bob was often there, in fine form, as we auctioned a significant item from the world of sport. At one lunch we’d managed to secure the B Sample from Mummify’s swab which sold for about $65. It came with a certificate of authenticity which verified that it really was a test tube full of McWilliams Crème Apera sherry. We raised more money – for, appropriately, research into prostate cancer – when we came across the shirt umpire Peter Carey was wearing when he marked the footy in Perth that time. Murray Bird had pinched it and sent it to us – and it went for $600 after Ray Wilson and Julius Colman got into a bidding war.

Bob loved these get-togethers and, because he was a natural organizer, decided he’d put a few on himself, sometimes at University House, sometimes at International House, sometimes in a pub. He called them Conversazione where Gideon Haigh and I would interview someone from sport or politics or both. Doug Walters was magnificent. Doug’s only request was that he be well-watered and an intermission scheduled, so he could pop outside for a dart. Other interviewees included Kerry O’Keefe, Phil Cleary and Merv Hughes, all of whom trusted the assurance of Chatham House Rule.

Bob loved sport. Born in Sydney, he moved to Melbourne with his family while still a babe in arms. They settled in Williamstown where Bob played cricket, lacrosse (very Willy) and footy. He got more serious about footy and, for a couple of seasons, got a game with Williamstown’s thirds and seconds before retiring to the gentler church league where he donned the colours of Williamstown Methodist which later became Williamstown United. During his twelve-year career he especially loved playing at Fearon which United shared with Willy CYMS, known very well to Almanac readers through the writings of the stay-at-home full forward Smokie Dawson.

After retiring, Bob missed the footy life. He started umpiring with VAFA and then in the country. Some of the exploits of his umpiring brothers are recorded in a chapter he wrote for Footy Town, which Paul Daffey and I put together a decade ago. The fabled taxi to the bush was a key element of umpiring back then.

He barracked for Footscray in the early years, then Essendon, but returned to the Western Bulldogs about a decade ago.

Bob also loved cricket. Max’s memory prevents him from recalling, with any accuracy, when Bob first played for NOBs. But the story Max prefers to tell is that, on turning up, Bob assumed the captaincy and didn’t relinquish it for the rest of his career. He was an imperious skipper.

“One of the grounds at Royal Park featured a tree in the outfield, at deepish square leg, or long off from the other end,” Max remembers. “It was a beautiful tree and no-one would dare cut it down. Bob planted himself under that tree and skippered from there, and did not move. Unless of course he was bowling his right arm help-yourselves which he claimed were off-spinners.”

Although Bob didn’t have the megahertz of his swashbuckling keeper, he was a handy middle order batsman, notoriously stubborn and difficult to remove. Jim claims Bob was motivated by the unlikely possibility he might win the batting average trophy on the basis of red ink – long before Steve Waugh made it de rigeuer.

Bob was very Melbourne and, along with others, showed me what Melbourne Town is all about. Philosophically. Culturally – the arts and sport. Spiritually. He was a product of Melbourne life and he added to Melbourne life. He taught me what it means to be a Melburnian.

Although they spent a life-time loath to concede anything to anyone, deep down the NOBs loved Bob. They will all be sad.

We will all miss him.

 

Our deepest sympathies go out to Bob’s family and friends.

We will celebrate Bob’s life at University House, of course, on Tuesday, March 12, from 3pm. Please email me if you would like to come so I can let the family know.