In New Zealand, football is not exactly a big topic in the newspapers or the media in general.
‘Real’ football (or soccer) has its base in a grassroots movement and once you do the numbers, you find there are nowaday more than 200,000 people playing football across 342 clubs.
Football has overtaken even rugby. It is the third most watched sport, after rugby and netball.
There are more schoolkids playing soccer than any other sport although many of the boys switch to Rugby Union as they get older.
Football first came to New Zealand in 1891 - the first club was probably North Shore United, while the All Blacks had already played 21 years earlier in Nelson. One club in Auckland has a long and interesting history.
It began as the Grey Lynn Comrades Club and operates now as Western Springs AFC. Thanks to men like Colin Gallagher, we still have newspaper clippings, reports and team photos about the early days of Grey Lynn football.
In a way, the story of a small football club is a like flicking through a family photo album. It is not a story about Manchester United or Real Madrid. There are no great achievements, nationally or internationally. But this is story about survival, a club that is still alive and kicking. And a man who was pivotal to it - whose own story of survival is a small miracle.
In the old days, sport was one of the most important ways to spend your leisure time. In 1923 the Comrades Club was founded. It had its first base at Victoria Park.
Comrades Club? Today you would possibly ask whether it was a Communist Football Club. But ‘comrades’ was a very common expression, especially within the New Zealand Labour Party. The connection to the unions was real. One of the club founders, Lou Ross, was the treasurer of the Painters Union. The former Prime Minister Michael Savage was also involved as a patron.
The two most important names to note, however, are Garth Carsley Ballantyne (a hockey player who had never played a game of football in his life) and Jack Church (a former rugby player). He created an effective tactic to attract young kids to football. Whenever he saw a group of boys playing in Victoria Park, he would toss them a soccer ball, they would start kicking it and he would convince them to join the club. By the end of 1924, there were six teams and by 1937, the Grey Lynn Comrades were the largest football cub in New Zealand.
Garth Ballantyne was an extraordinary person and his story deserves to be heard.
A conscientious objector in the First World War, he was one of those brave men who saw the madness of war and refused to be a soldier. New Zealand does well to remember those who lost their lives in Gallipoli and the Second World War. However, there were also men from New Zealand like Garth Ballantyne, Archie Baxter, Mark Briggs and others who stood up against the jingoism of the time to take a principled stand against a war being fought thousands of miles away.
Most of those conscripted against their will were forced to join the British Army. As they were not prepared to take up a gun or even a uniform, they were were brutally beaten and tortured.
In 1916, the New Zealand government shipped 14 of the country’s most outspoken conscientious objectors to the Western Front in an attempt to convert, silence and quite possibly kill them. Garth Ballantyne was one of them.
He was ridiculed, had tea cups tied to his hands, was manhandled, punched in the face and went five days without food or water. In a prison camp near Dunkirk, Ballantyne was yelled at, bullied and tortured with the ‘three three’ (three days of bread and water, solitary confinement and 12-hour spells of handcuffing behind his back). Refusing to compromise, Ballantyne worked in the battlefield as a stretch-bearer under the condition he would not take the oath of allegiance. Finally he accompanied the occupation army to Germany as part of the regiment’s aid post.
Once they returned to New Zealand, the ‘conchies’ were stigmatised in their hometowns. Their story is very well told presented in the New Zealand movie ‘Field Punishment No. 1’ (which is still available on TV One On Demand). As an aside, Garth Ballantyne was played by Eli Kent, son of J. K. Baxter. Garth Ballantyne never spoke about his war time again. It took a long time until his great work for sport and for the youth playing football was recognised. He was only introduced the Soccer House of fame in 2000, 17 years after his death.
The players for the ‘Comrades’ were from the working -class area of Freeman’s Bay and were mainly of Irish, Scottish, Welsh or English descent, with the odd Dalmatian or Maori among the team. Les Mills, who later became Mayor of Auckland, once was a goalkeeper. After the 1940s state housing boom, most members lived in Grey Lynn and Westmere. They joined forces with Grey Lynn United in 1952 to become the Grey Lynn Comrades Club. Their colours stayed green and white. The teams played at different pitches - Grey Lynn Park, Nixon Park, Western Springs Stadium.
The Cold War in the 50s had an impact even on football. Due to the the inference with of the name to communism, the club dropped it to become the ‘Grey Lynn United Club’. Meanwhile, there was panic in Grey Lynn when the Adelphi movie theatre in Richmond Road was bought by ‘mysterious buyers’ who showed foreign movies from communist states including one Polish movie by a guy called Roman Polanski. The anti-communist ‘Freedom Needs Vigilance’ movement, scared communism could be introduced into Grey Lynn, protested outside the movie theatre. No wonder the comrades had to change their name.
But the biggest scandal in the history of the Grey Lynn club was the 1963 walk off of most of the players at the promotion-relegation match between Grey Lynn and Mt Wellington at Blandford Park in the Grafton gully (now an off-ramp of the motorway). It made media headlines and was even called a ‘pandemonium’ and a ‘disgraceful ending’.
What actually did happen? After a clash between a Grey Lynn and a Mt Wellington player, both were handed a red card by the referee, though it was not clear whether the Grey Lynn player was provoked or was defending himelf. The Grey Lynn players disagreed with the referees decision and most walked off the pitch. Though the remaining five tried to continue the final 15 minutes, the referee abandoned the match. It all ended with long suspensions for seven players, a hefty fine and the Grey Lynn team banned from the premiere division for the 1964 season. Unfortunately the walk off at Blandford Park created a generational split inside the club which saw a decline of Grey Lynn AFC and their gradual drop to the 4th Division in the following years.
In 1986, there was another name change to Grey Lynn Celtic and the club started looking for new club rooms. They settled on Seddon Fields, which was at that time was a rubbish dump full of broken glass, concrete, but complete with grazing cattle and a very muddy rugby field. As the football club of Point Chevalier AFC faced similar problems, both amalgamated in 1989 playing mainly in the 2nd Division. Their new name was now Western Springs AFC and their nickname ‘The Swans’ because of the Western Springs lake nearby.
About four years ago, with a new coach, club rooms and pitches, the Western Springs AFC were on the up again. Three years ago, they were promoted to 1st Division then graduated the following year to the Northern Premier League. This season we will see whether they can improve even further, but there is definitely no ‘swan song’ for the (greater) Grey Lynn club with its 118 teams. As long as they stay as ‘comrades’, the future looks bright that they remain a valuable and important identity within our ‘hood. (SOL de SULLY)