Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

VX 20940 Cpl Wilfred Arthur Smallhorn 2/4 Reserve Motor Transport Company

Wilfred A Smallhorn was the 1933 Brownlow Medallist, the best and fairest player in the Victoria Football League for that year. He played for the Fitzroy Football Club. Upon the outbreak of war, he joined the army and eventually transferred to the 2/4 Reserve Motor Transport Company when it was forming in Melbourne in March 1941. He served in Malaya and Singapore and was taken PoW. After the Japanese surrender, he was repatriated home in October 1945. But there is much more to his story.

Wilfred Smallhorn was a true inner Melbourne fellow. He was born in 1911 in North Fitzroy. He lived in Thornbury not very far to the north of North Fitzroy where he had been born. He joined the Fitzroy Football Club in 1929 and became a highly skilled and successful Australian Rules Football wingman. His first league game was against St Kilda in Round 4 of the 1930 season. Only 173 centimetres tall and weighing in at just 65 kilograms, he was fast, agile and athletic. In his early days with Fitzroy, he worked a round using a horse and cart, to sell everyday goods to the local people. The Depression years were hard on everybody not the least for a skinny, young local footballer who everyone called “Chicken”. Up until he joined the army nine months after the outbreak of war, he had played 150 games for Fitzroy and kicked 31 goals. As well he had represented the “Big V” (Victoria) on seven occasions against NSW, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia. Apart from winning the Brownlow Medal in 1933 even with champion footballer Hayden Bunton in the same team, he was runner up in 1934 and again in 1938. He was the first Brownlow Medallist to be presented with the medal in front of the crowd on the MCG at the Grand Final of the VFL. Four games into the 1940 season, on 18 May he broke his leg in a game against Essendon. It could not have been too bad a break because after a rather quick recovery of a month, he decided to join the 2/AIF and was medically accepted. But it ended his VFL career.

Wilfred Smallhorn enlisted into the army at Caulfield on 18 June 1940. By then he was married with one child. He described his occupation on his enlistment form as a “storeman and driver”. How much and what sort of “driving” he was doing is unclear but the recruitment officers must have given thought to him being a motor vehicle driver. At the time his enlistment was important enough to be reported in the papers as was the news of other VFL players who were making a commitment to the Australian forces. It seems his skills as a footballer were well recognised – as to driving skills, that was another matter. Although he was 29, a current VFL footballer and had been very good at the sport, and his army medical assessment was “class 1”, he was directed into the transport part of the army. He spent a little time with 19 Reserve Motor Transport Company then in November 1940 he transferred to 8 Division Petrol Company working out of Seymour and Bonegilla in north east Victoria. By now he was an acting corporal and he took the rank to the newly forming 2/4 RMTC on 20 March 1941. At Caulfield Racecourse he trained as a driver with other members of “A” and “B” Sections for a month before embarkation. He sailed with everyone else in his section on the Nieuw Amsterdam eventually arriving in Singapore in April 1941. He served as a driver (later corporal) throughout the garrison and wartime period being captured upon the fall of Singapore.

The initial PoW period in Changi/Selarang from Cpl Smallhorn’s point of view is significant for one major happening; the formation of an Australian Rules Football league of six teams. Smallhorn, although not now a player himself (due to his old leg injuries and present weakened physical condition including a bout of dysentery and the poor diet he was getting as a PoW), never-the-less was involved significantly in the negotiations to establish the league (with Australian PoW command and the Japanese). Additionally, he was the main umpire. This whole story is documented in the book “The Changi Brownlow” by Roland Perry. Suffice to say here Cpl Smallhorn played a major role in establishing the league, setting the rules, the overseeing various games and his actual umpiring through 1942. He umpired the final match played on 24 January 1943 before some 12,000 spectators at Selarang. It was Victoria verses “The Rest”. Inevitably it was won by the Victorians. Despite suffering significant stomach pains, Cpl Smallhorn ran out the whole game as the one and only umpire. Pain killers had kept him going although he had vomited through the game. He collapsed after the bell was sounded for the end of the game. His mates rushed him to the prison hospital for an operation to remove his appendix. It was the last game of Australian Rules Football ever played at Selarang and it was where the best player in the “league” over the past weeks of the “season”, VX 9846 Cpl L A (Peter) Chitty of 2/2 Motor Ambulance Convoy, was presented with a recently engraved (by a PoW) “Brownlow Medal.”

Corporal Smallhorn did much of the organisation needed to establish the system of votes for each game. He also organised to get “Brownlow” medal made and presented. The actual medallion was found in British army stores in Singapore and was originally intended to be a soccer medal. It was made in Birmingham in 1929 and after it was found in the Selarang wreckage, was given to a skilled PoW jeweller sometime in 1942 who turned it into the “Brownlow” medal. The medal is now in the collection of the AWM, Canberra.

Smallhorn had his appendix removed on 25 January 1943 in the prison hospital at Selarang, the day after umpiring the big match. The stomach pains he suffered during the game came from his infected appendix. He lay in hospital for two weeks recovering. This, under the Japanese regime, would be a very hit and miss affair made very much worse by the lack of nutritious food available, let alone proper drugs. He left hospital on 8 February 1943 but in a much weakened condition. He was never to recover his full strength.

The Japanese eventually put a stop to such contact sports like this as football injuries were taking an undue toll on weakened men thus cutting down the pool of men capable of working either on the present work gangs in Singapore or the work forces the Japanese were sending away.

Corporal Wilfred A Smallhorn, debilitated as he was, was selected for “F” Force in April 1943 and like the other 3,659 Australians on “F” Force found himself in the most terrible circumstances in the centre section of the Thai-Burma Railway. Miraculously he survived to return to Changi in December 1943 even more weakened by the treatment he had received over the past eight months. He survived 1944 and the first nine months in Changi Gaol in 1945 along with others of the 2/4 RMTC imprisoned there. He had to go out on work gangs building the airstrip amongst other tasks the Japanese demanded.

Corporal Smallhorn was recovered from Changi upon the Japanese surrender but by then had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis. His body weight had dropped to dangerous levels but

fortunately the Japanese surrender allowed allied medical teams to move in quickly and under their proper care, his recovery began.

Corporal Smallhorn sailed home on the Hospital Ship Manunda a very sick man. The ship left Singapore on 5 October 1945 eventually arriving in Melbourne on 24 October 1945 discharging 197 patients including Cpl Wilfred A Smallhorn. He was taken into the care of the army medical system in Melbourne and sent to the Heidelberg Military Hospital where he stayed for many months to come. He was assessed in September 1946 by medical staff who classed him “D”, a very low medical class when he was eventually discharged. He was considered 100% incapacitated. When he joined the army in 1940, he was a fully fit “class 1” VFL footballer. Six years of military service, terrible treatment at the hands of the Japanese and pulmonary tuberculosis had taken its toll upon this wonderful footballer and soldier. He literally was a shadow of his former self. Wilfred A Smallhorn died in 1988 at the age of 73.

Wilfred Smallhorn has been recognised by the game he loved by being chosen in the Fitzroy (now Brisbane Lions) Team of the Century in 2001. He was admitted to the AFL Hall of Fame in 2006. This national recognition specifically included his achievements in leading and running the one-off football league in Selarang/Changi in 1942/early 1943

Resarched and witten by Historian abd Author Tony Wege