A very happy 90th birthday to Doug Williams today!
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From the Blueseum:
Career : 1944 – 1951
Debut : Round 11, 1944 vs Footscray, aged 21 years, 162 days
Carlton Player No. 594
Games : 120
Goals : 7
Last Game : Round 12, 1951 vs Hawthorn, aged 28 years, 168 days
Guernsey No. 12
Height : 178 cm (5 ft. 10 in.)
Weight : 70 kg (11 st.)
DOB : 3 February, 1923
Premiership Player 1945 & 1947
A skilled and consistent wingman for the Blues in a fine career spanning eight seasons, Doug Williams was a member of Carlton’s legendary 1945 and 1947 Premiership teams, as well as the losing Grand Final side of 1949. He was recruited from Yallourn in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in 1944, and rarely missed a match in his first five years.
Deceptively tall and slender, Williams was quick, agile and strong overhead. A typical wingman of that era, his style of play was to provide a link between defenders and forwards, so he rarely ventured into attack. In his 120 games of VFL football, he kicked just seven goals. Nevertheless, he was widely regarded as one of the better centre-line players of the post-war years.
Williams was given his first opportunity at senior level for the Blues in July 1944, in a Round 11 match against Footscray. On that typically wet and windy afternoon at the Western Oval, Carlton’s scoreless last quarter was costly, and Footscray got home by three points. Williams’ impressive first-up effort however, ensured that would retain his place in a promising Carlton side for the rest of the year.
In Doug’s second season, Carlton got off to a very shaky start. Three heavy defeats in a row sent the Blues tumbling to the bottom of the VFL ladder, before a stirring mid-year revival culminated in a 53 point thrashing of Footscray in the last of the home and away rounds. That win snatched a finals berth for the Blues, and set the stage for one of the most sensational and controversial final series of all.
In August 1945, World War II ended when the Japanese Government signed an unconditional surrender to the Allied nations. Seven years of widespread death and destruction was ended at last, and the VFL proclaimed the 1945 flag – to be contested by South Melbourne, Collingwood, North Melbourne and Carlton – as the Victory Premiership. Instead, it has gone down in football history as the ‘Bloodbath’ Grand Final.
Carlton’s path to the ’45 Premiership was littered with the carcasses of North Melbourne and Collingwood, who were both vanquished in hard, spiteful games on the way to a deciding clash with the hot flag favourites South Melbourne. For Doug Williams, gaining a place in that Premiership play-off topped off a good season. He had missed just two games since his debut, and followed up his selection in the Victorian state side earlier in the year by controlling his side of the ground in Carlton’s Preliminary Final win over Collingwood.
On that sensational day, Doug lined up against South’s Billy King, who, like Williams, was considered a star in the making. King later paid tribute to his opponent for keeping him out of the fierce physical clashes – some within the rules, but most without – that began in the second quarter and intensified as the Grand Final degenerated into a series of rolling brawls.
There were passages of good football – even when the rain came in the second half – but they were instantly forgotten amid the mayhem. Eventually, the Blues’ inspirational captain Bob Chitty led his team to victory by almost five goals in a match that resonated through the league for years afterward. Nine players were reported, on fifteen charges. The eight found guilty were handed suspensions totalling 68 games.
Carlton’s eighth VFL Premiership in 1947 is fondly remembered for the last-minute goal by Fred Stafford – a celebrated snap-shot that won the ultimate football prize for the Blues by one point – and for the outstanding leadership of our first-year captain, Ern Henfry. A champion centreman from WA who led by example, the key to Henfry’s game was his superb disposal, which brought those around him into the game.
Among those to benefit most from his new captain’s influence was Doug Williams. He, Henfry, and Fred Fitzgibbon (himself notorious for his part in the 1945 Finals battles) made a formidable combination across the middle of the ground for Carlton, and as a combination, were a driving force for the Blues throughout the ’47 finals and beyond.
When Carlton shaped up to Essendon in 1949 Grand Final, Williams, Henfry and Fitzgibbon plunged into the fray together once more. But this time, neither they nor their team-mates had any answer to a rampaging Essendon. Spearheaded by their young full-forward John Coleman, the Bombers blitzed the Blues by 73 points – bringing to an end a golden era of three Grand Final appearances in six years by the team from Princes Park.
Perhaps inevitably, Carlton began a period of stagnation in 1950. After almost a decade of joy, the champions who had sustained the Blues through the tough football campaigns of the war years had reached the twilight of their careers, and the team began fading to the lower half of the ladder.
On a wet Saturday afternoon in July at Glenferrie Oval, after Carlton beat Hawthorn by 17 points, Williams brought the curtain down on his senior career in the navy blue number 12 guernsey. He wasn’t quite finished however, and stayed around long enough to celebrate one more flag, when Carlton beat Essendon by 12 points in the 1951 Reserves Premiership. In a fitting finale, Doug was the master of his side of the MCG once more on Grand Final day, and walked off the ground a winner for a third time.
The following year, Williams was appointed captain-coach of Tasmanian club North Launceston, and took the Robins into the NTFA finals at his first attempt. But home was calling for Doug and his wife Margaret, and in 1953 they returned to the Latrobe Valley. There, Doug rounded out a long and memorable career with one last season for the Morwell Tigers, which included another premiership, and to cap it all off – a Best and Fairest.