Tom Wills

This article is about the Australian sportsman . For other people with the same name, see Thomas Wills (disambiguation).

Tom Wills
Tom Wills the cricketer
Born	19 August 1835(1835-08-19) Gundagai, New South Wales, Australia
Died	2 May 1880(1880-05-02) (aged 44) Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia
Known for	One of the key inventors of Australian rules football

Thomas Wentworth "Tom" Wills (19 August 1835 – 2 May 1880) was an Australian all-round sportsman, umpire, coach and administrator who is credited with being a catalyst towards the invention of Australian rules football.

He was in 1859 a participant in meetings within days of each other which firstly founded the Melbourne Football Club and then a few days later determined the first Laws of Australian Football. He also co-umpired one of the earliest known school football matches in Australia.

Wills was a champion footballer and cricketer. On more than one occasion he was judged the longest drop kicker of a football in the Colony of Victoria. He was also a notable cricket player and, in 1866-67, assisted for a few months in the coaching of an Aboriginal cricket team. The following year some of those players were members of the first Australian cricket team to tour England.

Early life

Wills was born in 1835 near Gundagai, New South Wales to parents Horatio and Elizabeth, first of their nine children.

'The Argus' newspaper dated Saturday 12 March 1921 page 4 records the Horatio Wills family being at Burra Burra Gundagai till around 1840. In November 1840, Tom moved with his parents and the rest of his family, to Lexington, a 125,000-acre (510 km²) property in the Ararat District in western Victoria he was educated in Melbourne for two years.

There is no evidence that Wills played Marn Grook, an Aboriginal game alleged to have similar rules to the first football codes with members of a nearby community as a boy; however, the connection may have had some influence. He spoke the language of the people with whom he grew up, the Djab wurrung, knew their dances, and the first games he played were with local Aboriginal children. Due to his family's extensive interaction with local aborigines, it is assumed that he would have at the very least seen the game being played and some believe this may have had an influence on his rules for Australian Football.

Time in England

In 1850, aged fourteen, Wills was sent by his father to England to attend the famous Rugby School. At school he played both rugby football and cricket, excelling at both sports. He was noted as an attacking rugby player, who would dodge and weave opponents. He was also the team's dedicated kicker, noted for his long and accurate shots at goal.

Wills was a tall teenager and grew quickly. By 16 at 174.8 cm (5' 8.8") he was already taller than his father.

After Rugby, Wills attended Cambridge University, where he played cricket, notably in the Cambridge XI in the Varsity Match. He was listed in Bells Sporting Life as being one of the most promising young cricketers in England.

Cricket career

Tom Wills with the Aboriginal team he captained in a match at the MCG in late December 1866

On his return to Melbourne near the end of December 1856 at the age of twenty-one he became one of Victoria's best cricketers, representing the colony in intercolonial cricket matches against New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania.

Wills regularly commuted between his father's property in Geelong and Melbourne between 1856 to 1859.

Wills was elected secretary of the MCC in 1857-58. However the following year he had a falling out with the club and left for a rival club, Richmond. The result was a lasting tension between both parties. The ill feeling was heightened by an incident during a match while Wills was playing for Richmond, in which he became involved in fist fights with some of its members.

Wills captained Victoria in 1862.

Wills was the grandson of a man sent to Sydney from England for highway robbery, and this convict heritage had a strong bearing on his life. Wills was a strong advocate for the rights of free settlers and "emancipated convicts" (those who had proven their worth to society). The Melbourne Cricket Club, like many institutions of high society, was known to discriminate against the "Convict Stain". An achievement of his advocacy, was his own admission as a high-ranking member of the MCC, despite his convict heritage.

Wills was twice called for throwing by different umpires during cricket matches in 1872.

Football

Statue of Tom Wills umpiring a schools football match

Further information: Australian rules football - Early years in Victoria

Some historians claim that Wills was instrumental in setting up at least six "football" clubs in Geelong before his famous letter dated 10 July 1858 to Bell's Life in Victoria (a Melbourne-based sporting publication) in an attempt to stimulate interest in the athletic games.

On 7 August 1858, Wills was one of the umpires at a match between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar School, also in the Richmond Paddock. Played as a 40 per side contest, the game is claimed by some as the first match of Australian football. A statue commemorating this event which features Wills as umpire was erected at the MCC members' entry of the MCG. Discussing the football played in 1858, a contemporary source noted that "exceptions were taken last year to some of the Rugby regulations."

On 17 May 1859, Wills chaired a meeting to incorporate the Melbourne Football Club in which the club's rules (later the Laws of Australian Football) were written down for the first time. While Wills was a fan of the rugby rules, his intentions were clear that he favoured rules that suited drier and harder Australian fields. His cousin H. C. A Harrison later claimed that he had made the declaration (which subsequently became legend although Harrison may not have actually been there to witness) that "We shall have a game of our own".

During that year, he was also heavily involved in the formation of the Melbourne Football Club. The club is still in existence today, playing in the Australian Football League.

Wills continued his involvement with football as player and administrator into the 1860s. His time at Rugby was influential in his attempt to introduce a rugby-style cross-bar into the sport in 1865. Wills was also ahead of his time. In the early years of football, according to an a column by William Hammersley, Wills pushed for the oval ball to be used in favour of the round ball.

In a match between Geelong and Ballarat Wills became the first captain coach to use the Australian rules football tactic of flooding. Facing a large loss against a stronger team, he ordered all players to stack the backline to the boos of fans a tactic later used by rival Melbourne.

In 1874 he ceased playing football, having for much of the previous decade been a member of the Geelong team.

Personal life

Monument and pavilion to Tom Wills in Moyston, Victoria

In 1861 Tom's father Horatio Wills emigrated north to Queensland where they took up a holding at Cullin-La-Ringo in the Nogoa region about two hundred miles from Rockhampton. They had only been on the holding for three weeks when they were attacked by a party of Indigenous Australians who killed nineteen of the group, including Tom's father. Tom was away from the property at the time, having been sent to a neighbouring property, about two days ride away, for supplies.

Wills returned to Victoria where he married Sarah Theresa Barbor in 1867 in Church of England, Castlemaine, Victoria. He lived in several locations including South Melbourne where he developed a reputation for not paying debts, though he continued to financially support local cricket and football teams. In his later years living in Heidelberg, Wills was notorious for being an alcoholic (which many attribute to the death of his father), spent time in Kew Lunatic Asylum confessing night terrors of aborigines attacking his property. Wills was admitted to the Royal Melbourne Hospital at the age of 44 suffering from extreme alcoholism. Delusional from induced alcohol withdrawal, Wills escaped from the hospital on 1 May 1880, returned home and the next day stabbed himself in the heart to death with a pair of scissors in his Heidelberg home.

In memoriam

In 1998, Wills was honoured by a monument in Moyston, his home town, which includes a pavilion and historical storyboard based on information supplied by historian Col Hutchison. The storyboard recognises the contribution of Marn Grook to the game of Australian football.

There is a painting of Tom Wills in the foyer of the Geelong Football Club at Kardinia Park in Geelong.

Wills is honoured with a sculpture at the MCG by Louis Laumen erected in 2002. The sculpture reads that Wills:

"Did more than any other person – as footballer and umpire, co-writer of the rules and promoter of the game – to develop Australian Football during its first decade."

A room in the Great Southern Stand, known as the Tom Wills Room, reserved for corporate functions is also named after him.

In 2008, Round 19 of the AFL season was named Tom Wills Round to celebrate 150 years of Australian Football and featured a curtain raiser at the MCG between Scotch and Melbourne Grammar to mark the match which Wills famously umpired.

For many years, Wills role in the birth of Australian Football was played down by MCC officials who instead credited most of this to his cousin (and also brother in-law), H. C. A. Harrison, and some believe this to be due Harrison's apparently more wholesome character. As the MCC has become more liberal in its attitudes, and Australians generally embrace convict heritage, Wills contribution has been recognised and acknowledged.

An interchange of the Monash and EastLink Melbourne metropolitan freeways is named the Tom Wills Interchange.

The Wills cup, the first national competition as part of the Australian Football League pre-season competition was not named after Tom Wills but the cigarette company W. D. & H. O. Wills.

See also

• List of Australian rules football and cricket players

External links

• In from the cold: Tom Wills – a nineteenth century sporting hero. Moore, Gregory Mark de (2008). PhD thesis, Victoria University.
• Australian Dictionary of Biography entry
• Wills, Tom (2000). "Thomas Wentworth Wills: Cricketer & joint creator of Australian rules football". An Index of Australian Wills Families. Tom Wills. http://www.tww.id.au/fam/tomwills.html. Retrieved 2006-07-05. 
• Biography on Full Points Footy
• http://www.convictcreations.com/football/inventors.htm
• http://www.footystamps.com/ot_tom_wills.htm
• Cricinfo article on Tom Wills
• ABC Radio National 1998 report on Tom Wills