Seddon’s team sailed for New Zealand and Australia on RMS Kaikoura. For 46 days they traveled. Calm waters and shocking seas. Heavy galleys and dense fog. It passed a week when “they weren’t seen only or stars,” he reported.
They played 19 games in New Zealand, 16 in Australia, but they hadn’t finished yet. They played another 19 games of Victorian rules – Australian rules, in fact. Fifty -four competitions for just over 20 players on a tour that lasted 249 days. This time the elected will play nine times more than a month. Blink and you will miss.
Seddon, of Lancashire, was engaged to get married. Twenty games on the journey has drowned in the Hunter river in the new South Wales. Some people do not get lions and call it anachronism and an not important exhibition. Do they ask why lions count in the current era?
They import, in part, due to folks like Bob Seddon and all the heroes and all the social history that has come in his wake.
Tommy Cree, the Irishman, was a lion in South Africa in 1896. Vincia a Victoria Cross in the Bora war. Alexander Todd, English, was a lion in South Africa in 1896. He died in Ypres. Matthew Mullineux, a priest from London, was also a lion in 1896. He won the military cross during the First World War. Eric Milroy, a Scottish one, was a lion in South Africa in 1910. He died in the sums. Phil Waller, the Welshman, was also a lion in 1910. He died in Arras.
Paddy Mayne, from the County of Down, was a lion in South Africa in 1938. He won the distinct medal of the service order and three bars for three separate acts of heroism in war and then assigned him the Honneur Legion and the Croix de Guerre by the French government for his work in the liberation of France. He was also the founding member of the Sas.
Harry Jarman from Pontypool did not die at war. The 1910 tourist died of complications after throwing herself on the path of a coal wagon fleeing to a necklace of Southern Wales while shaking towards some children playing on her path.
Those are images of a mercifully passed age, but feed on what must be a lion today, the privilege of being part of something with such a profound past.