From the very first day that John Birt was introduced to Essendon royalty in the mid-1950s, the talented teenager from Ballarat who grew up following Collingwood immediately fell in love with the football club on Napier Street, where he would call home for more than a decade.
That life-changing summer day had seen Essendon’s long-time coach, Dick Reynolds, along with great mate and club captain Bill Hutchison, visit the Birt family home to entice their boy to come to Windy Hill.
“Neither of my parents barracked for Essendon,” Birt explained for the 16th episode of historical podcast Fabric of the Essendon Football Club, “but, after meeting Dick and Hutchy, they said to me, ‘You’re going to play with Essendon.’ It was pretty exciting. I played in practice games the year before I came here, because I was striving to get a clearance from Ballarat footy club—they held me up for two years. But that first practice game I played here [in 1956], my father was playing golf in the morning in Ballarat and he was driving me down to the game [afterwards]. But he was late, so we were late getting here. He couldn’t get a park anywhere; we had to walk probably a kilometre or further. Then we learned that that practice game was the game when John Coleman was making his comeback [from a long-term knee injury suffered in 1954].
“I was late getting into the rooms, they were all ready to go out, I’ve come into the rooms and [chairman of selectors] Howard Okey said, ‘You’re late! You’ll have to wait until half-time.’ So, I got changed and waited until half-time, watched the first half and saw Coleman kick four goals. Then he came in at half-time, I’m ready to go out, he was just near me and he took off his boots and he said, ‘That’s it—my knee’s sore.’ I remember him saying those exact words.” Sadly, Coleman’s comeback was over before it even began. “Subsequently, people have asked me over the years, ‘Did you ever play with Coleman?’ and I say, ‘Well, I missed out by half a game.’”
In his first VFL season, 1957, Birt was coached by Reynolds and mentored by Hutchison—two of the finest ball-winners the game has ever seen.
“For me it was very, very special, because I gained this great friendship with Hutchy in his last year,” Birt recalled. “Whether he was doing it deliberately or not, he kept on passing all these little nit-bits [of wisdom] to me at training and in games; things that helped me so much in my career. The number-one thing Hutchy said to me was, ‘As a rover, you’ve got to get possession of the ball a lot. And the only way to get possession of the ball is to get to where the ball is.’ In those days, you never had the ball passed to you as a rover, it was kicked to, say, centre half-forward or to the ruckman or whoever. Hutchy said, ‘The more of those packs you get to, the more chance you’ve got of getting the ball.’ I wasn’t quick, but I did have good stamina and I was able to get to many of those contests where, as Hutchy would say, ‘Most times they’re going to punch the ball to the front, [so] get to the front.’ It was the thing that kept me going in that first year.”
The Bombers lost the Grand Final to Melbourne in 1957, then were runners-up to the Demons again two years later. The following year, after losing the first semi-final to Collingwood, Reynolds was sacked as coach after 22 years and four premierships and replaced by Coleman. Having grown close to the Reynolds family, Birt considered an offer from ‘King Richard’ to join him at South Australian club, West Torrens, in 1961, but he ultimately stayed at Windy Hill to try his luck under Coleman. However, those early weeks under the club’s new leader made him quickly question that decision.
“He (Coleman) wasn’t one to give you false praise,” Birt said. “You might play a good game, kick a few goals, but he wouldn’t give you false praise. Whereas, with Dick, he’d say, ‘Oh, you didn’t do too well today, but all the best for next week.’ Coley wouldn’t even talk to you! It was a little bit difficult [at first]. He’d been telling me in the first couple of weeks of the year a certain way I should play, but I was more in Dick’s corner and played the way I played under Dick. He did tell me certain things, Coley, and I wasn’t taking notice of him.
“After the third game, he dragged me at three-quarter time [but] I thought I was going all right. We came in after the game and I went up to him and said, ‘What was I dragged for?’ and he turned around and walked away, as much as to say, ‘You heard what I told you before and you didn’t take any notice of me.’ From then on, I felt that there were three ways to play: for the club, for yourself, and I was always playing to try and show Coley that I was better than what he thought I was.”
Playing the Coleman way, Birt won the first of his three Crichton Medals in 1961. The following year, he was a premiership rover after the Bombers defeated Carlton in the Grand Final. In 1965, Birt won a second premiership medallion and earned his second best and fairest award, along the way helping to cement his dual premiership-winning coach as one of the finest leaders of all-time. At the end of 1967, Coleman and Birt—who, that season, won his third Crichton Medal as a 30-year-old—both departed Windy Hill, with Birt having played 193 games and kicked 303 goals. He moved to South Australia and coached West Torrens for the next three years.
After the 1970 VFL season, Essendon coach Jack Clarke was sensationally sacked and Birt, having taken Torrens to the finals in 1969, was coaxed back to Windy Hill to lead the club during what became a transitional period that produced only sporadic on-field success over the next decade. He was offered $1000, less than he was receiving at Torrens, but the opportunity to coach his former club was too good to pass up. Alas, it was a short-lived venture. With injuries to key players and the need for new blood to rejuvenate an aging list, the Bombers won just four of 22 games (plus a draw) in 1971 and finished second-last. Birt was on borrowed time.
“I couldn’t do the John Coleman type [coaching approach], I was more like Dick,” Birt admitted. “I wasn’t a coach who came up with a lot of new ideas; I was a copier. I copied Dick, I copied bits of Coleman and, as far as a game plan went, I didn’t have a game plan that was revolutionary. When I look at the game today, the way in which the game’s played has been changed by the coaches. There’s got to be a way of doing something different to get an advantage—like John Kennedy did at Hawthorn. I didn’t have a great imagination, I don’t think, as a coach. But I coached schoolboy teams at Essendon Grammar and Ballarat College to premierships, and I was better with younger players to bring them on—I got Footscray’s reserves into a Grand Final—because I was better with the younger blokes [than I was at trying to motivate older players].”
The sacking of any coach is never a positive experience. For Birt, the way his departure was handled by the Essendon hierarchy at the time both shocked and upset him.
“When it came to sacking me, Dick came to me just after the season finished—they took quite a while before appointing Tuddy (Collingwood champion, Des Tuddenham) as coach, a few weeks—and Dick said to me, ‘I think you’re in a bit of trouble.’ That’s all he said, because he was on the committee and he couldn’t tell me too much. As it turned out, I found out from Dick later that four of the committee voted for me, the rest didn’t vote for me.”
How did Birt learn of his sacking? “I read it in The Sun newspaper on the morning of the appointment of Tuddy! Headlines in the back page: ‘Des Tuddenham appointed coach of Essendon.’ No word that I’d been sacked. I’d had nothing from the club telling me, but I had it in the back of my mind that it would happen, only because of what Dick told me. I was filthy. And I was filthy for a few weeks, before the great [1954 Bulldogs premiership player] Jack Collins came along and offered me the job as Footscray assistant coach to Bobby Rose. Bobby Rose was a great hero of mine—I was rapt.”
Birt spent many years away from Essendon in supporting roles as an assistant coach and an administrator, but his love and appreciation for the Bombers, although tested in the immediate aftermath of his sacking, remains as strong today as it was when he ran laps of honour around the MCG with his jubilant teammates after the 1962 and ’65 Grand Finals.
“I feel that the players who play today who aren’t one-club players are at a bit of a disadvantage,” Birt said. “If you’re a one-club player and you’ve played for a number of years, you’re known by that club. It’s a great privilege to me when people say ‘John Birt, you played with Essendon.’ I went and worked at Collingwood for 17 years, but I was always known as John Birt, the former Essendon player. That means a lot to me. It's always a privilege to know that you played with Essendon, particularly in a couple of premierships.”
In 2002, Birt was selected at No. 21 in the top-25 ‘Champions of Essendon’. At age 85, he remains passionately engaged with the club through the Essendon Past Players & Officials Association.
Fabric of the Essendon Football Club is a weekly 20-episode series powered by Liberty, featuring in-depth chats between club historian Dan Eddy and 20 of the club’s most adored names across multiple decades. You can listen via Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
