114 Facts About Tom Wills

Thomas Wentworth Wills was an Australian sportsman who is credited with being Australia's first cricketer of significance and a founder of Australian rules football.

Aged 14, Tom Wills went to England to attend Rugby School, where he became captain of its cricket team and played an early version of rugby football.

Tom Wills played for the Melbourne Cricket Club but often clashed with its administrators, his larrikin streak and defections to rival clubs straining their relationship.

In 1861, at the height of his fame, Tom Wills retired from sport to help his father run a station in outback Queensland.

In 1880, suffering from delirium tremens, Tom Wills committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart.

Australia's first sporting celebrity, Tom Wills fell into obscurity after his death, but has undergone a revival in Australian culture since the 1980s.

Tom Wills was born on 19 August 1835 on the Molonglo Plain near modern-day Canberra, in the British penal colony of New South Wales, as the elder child of Horatio and Elizabeth Tom Wills.

Tom Wills was a third-generation Australian of convict descent: his mother's parents were Irish convicts, and his paternal grandfather Edward was an English highwayman whose death sentence for armed robbery was commuted to transportation, arriving in Botany Bay aboard the "hell ship" Hillsborough in 1799.

Tom Wills died in 1811, five months before Horatio's birth, and Sarah remarried to convict George Howe, owner of Australia's first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette.

Seventeen months after his birth, Tom was baptised Thomas Wentworth Wills in St Andrew's, Sydney, after statesman William Wentworth.

Tom Wills was athletic early on but prone to illness, his parents at one stage in 1839 "almost [despairing] of his recovery".

Tom Wills implored himself and Tom to base their lives upon the Gospel of John.

Tom Wills's first sibling, Emily, was born on Christmas Day 1842.

In 1846 Wills began attendance at William Brickwood's School in Melbourne, where he lived with Horatio's brother Thomas, a Victorian separatist and son-in-law of the Wills family's partner in the shipping trade, convict Mary Reibey.

Tom Wills played in his first cricket matches at school and came in contact with the Melbourne Cricket Club through Brickwood, the club's vice-president.

Tom Wills' father sent him to England in February 1850, aged fourteen, to attend Rugby School, then the most prestigious school in the country.

Tom Wills took up cricket within a week of entering Evans House.

At bat he was a "punisher" with a sound defence; however, in an era when stylish stroke-play was expected of amateurs, Tom Wills was said to have no style at all.

Tom Wills went on to play with, and attracted praise from the leading cricketers of the age, including Alfred Mynn.

Tom Wills ended 1853 with the season's best bowling average, and in 1854 his hero William Clarke invited him to join the All-England Eleven, but he remained at school.

Tom Wills shone in the school's annual athletics carnival and frequently won the long-distance running game Hare and Hounds.

Tom Wills cut a dashing figure with "impossibly wavy" hair and blue, almond-shaped eyes that "[burnt] with a pale light".

In June 1855, nearing his 20th birthday, Tom Wills finished his schooling.

Against Horatio's wishes, Tom Wills, having failed to matriculate, did not continue his studies at Cambridge, but played for the university's cricket team, most notably against Oxford in 1856 when rules barring non-students from playing in the University Match were ignored, Cambridge claiming to be "one man short".

Tom Wills returned to Australia aboard the Oneida steamship, arriving in Melbourne on 23 December 1856.

Tom Wills won the match for his side with a top score of 57 not out, and The Age said of his playing style and entertaining ability that "there has not been a more amusing scene on this ground".

Back in Victoria, Tom Wills joined numerous clubs, including the provincial Corio Cricket Club, based in Geelong, and the elite Melbourne Cricket Club.

Tom Wills recovered, played on for two hours, and won the match at day's end with a top score of 49*.

Now a household name and the darling of Melbourne's elite, Tom Wills was proclaimed "the greatest cricketer in the land".

One week later, during a game in Hobart, Tom Wills earned the locals' ire as he "[jumped] about exultantly" after maiming a Tasmanian batsman with a spell of hostile fast bowling.

MCC delegates took issue with Tom Wills' "continued non-attendance" at meetings, and when the club fell into debt, his poor administrative skills were blamed.

Tom Wills was a compulsive writer to the press on cricketing matters and in the late 1850s his letters sometimes appeared on a daily basis.

On 10 July 1858, the Melbourne-based Bell's Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle published a letter by Tom Wills that is regarded as a catalyst for a new style of football, known today as Australian rules football.

In endeavouring to keep cricketers active during the off-season, Tom Wills made the first public declaration of its kind in Australia: that football should be a regular and organised activity.

Tom Wills' letter was alluded to two weeks after its publication in an advertisement posted by his friend, professional cricketer and publican Jerry Bryant, for a "scratch match" held adjacent to the MCG at the Richmond Paddock.

Tom Wills emerged as the standout figure in accounts of Melbourne football in 1858.

Tom Wills became president of Collingwood and vice-president of Richmond, raising the standard of the latter club's play to make it the best in the colony.

Tom Wills retained the Victorian captaincy for the January 1859 intercolonial against New South Wales, held at the Domain.

Hammersley wrote that Tom Wills felt obliged to perform for the large crowd that had gathered to watch him.

Tall, muscular, and slender, Mr Tom Wills seems moulded by nature to excel in every branch of the noble game,.

Tom Wills remained an influential figure in Australian football from 1859 to 1860.

At his father's beckoning, Tom Wills agreed to leave Victoria to help found and manage a new family station, Cullin-la-ringo, on the Nogoa River in outback Queensland.

Tom Wills prepared for six months in country Victoria where learnt the crafts of a squatter.

Food was scarce and Tom Wills hunted native game to fend off starvation.

Hitherto the largest group of colonists to enter the area, the Tom Wills party drew the attention of local Aboriginal people.

Tom Wills was away from the property at the time, having been sent with two stockmen to collect supplies the party left en route.

Tom Wills returned several days later to a scene of devastation.

Tom Wills never articulated his version of events in writing, but his brother Cedric wrote years later that it was an act of revenge for an attack made on local Aboriginal people by Jesse Gregson, a neighbouring squatter whom they mistook to be Horatio.

Tom Wills began to rebuild the station pending the arrival of his uncle-in-law, William Roope, who took control of Cullin-la-ringo in December 1861, but soon left due to Wills' "exceedingly ill" treatment of him.

Hypervigilant, Tom Wills slept only three hours a night with a rifle within reach and watched for signs of another Aboriginal attack.

Tom Wills went to Sydney in January 1863 to captain Victoria against New South Wales on the Domain.

Tom Wills took 8 wickets and top scored in both innings, but it was not enough to secure victory.

The Melbourne media castigated Tom Wills for allowing the game to resume, and Sydneysiders called him a turncoat for reneging on an earlier promise to play for New South Wales.

Tom Wills seems to have done so to meet familial expectations.

Tom Wills accosted government officials for failing to send a native police detachment to his station for protection, and scorned city-dwellers for sympathising with the plight of Aboriginal people in the Nogoa region.

Tom Wills arrived on the final day of the match to a rapturous reception, and went in as a substitute fielder.

Tom Wills then joined the visitors on their Victorian tour.

Allegations that Tom Wills cheated his way to victory failed to endanger his status as a folk hero and "a source of eternal hope" for Victoria.

Some of Tom Wills' contemporaries were shocked that he would associate with Aboriginal people in the shadow of his father's death.

Tom Wills' role took on a symbolic significance: supporters and critics alike used his status as a 'native' to identify him with his 'native' teammates, and he was noted for speaking in "their own lingo".

Back in Melbourne, two members, Bullocky and Cuzens, joined Tom Wills in representing Victoria against a Tasmanian XVI.

Tom Wills resented Lawrence for reviving the team without him; his exclusion from the landmark tour has been called the tragedy of his sporting career.

Tom Wills had been Victoria's preferred captain for over a decade.

The Victorians condemned Tom Wills and resolved to go on without him, after which he retracted his decision not to play.

Tom Wills planned to return to Cullin-la-ringo in early 1869, but his mother, still "very dissatisfied" with him, requested that he stay away from the station.

Tom Wills is the best general out to captain a team; no man is more difficult to send from the wickets;.

In February 1870 at the MCG, Tom Wills captained Victoria to a 265-run win over a New South Wales side featuring Twopenny, an Aboriginal paceman allegedly recruited by Lawrence as a foil to Tom Wills' "chucks".

Amid accusations that Tom Wills had incited a "plague" of throwing in Australia, one-time ally Hammersley, now Melbourne's foremost sportswriter, emerged as his harshest critic.

Tom Wills accused Wills of resorting to throwing to maintain pace as he aged, and criticised him for introducing a type of bouncer designed to injure and intimidate batsmen.

Not long after, Tom Wills was no-balled for throwing for the first time in a club match.

When he opened the bowling, Tom Wills became the first cricketer to be called for throwing in a top-class Australian match.

Tom Wills was again no-balled when a Victorian side under his captaincy lost to a combined XIII from New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia late in 1872.

Hammersley had seemingly triumphed in his campaign to have Tom Wills banned from intercolonial cricket.

Tom Wills strove to play for Victoria against Grace and rival factions fought over his possible inclusion.

Tom Wills went on to tour with, and play against the Englishmen.

Tom Wills coached Kadina's miners and captained them against Grace's XI.

Tom Wills made a pair and Grace later wrote of the "old Rugbeian" as a has-been.

In Geelong, Tom Wills was still idolised, though he seemed discontented, seeking any chance to earn money through cricket in the major cities.

Tom Wills maintained an interest in the development of football, what he called "the king of games".

Tom Wills continued to suggest rule changes, such as the push in the back rule to curb injuries, and, as captain of Geelong, helped shape the sport's playing style.

Tom Wills pioneered another tactical manoeuvre in Ballarat by ordering his men to flood the backline to prevent the home side from scoring.

Tom Wills served as Geelong's vice-president from 1873 to 1876, and briefly as club delegate after the 1877 formation of the Victorian Football Association, but was dropped for unknown reasons.

That year, Tom Wills, broke and hounded by creditors, began selling land in Geelong to help clear his debt, and moved with Barbor to South Melbourne.

Tom Wills held no positions of power at the South Melbourne Cricket Club and only occasionally appeared in local team lists, but managed to convince the club to open its ground to football in winter as a means of improving the turf's durability.

From February 1879 onwards, Tom Wills lived with Barbor in Heidelberg, a small village on the margins of Melbourne.

Tom Wills's alcoholism worsened over this period, as did Barbor's, a heavy drinker.

Tom Wills occasionally coached the Heidelberg Cricket Club, its members composed mostly of farmers.

Tom Wills took five wickets, his "chucks" working "sweetly" on the rough pitch.

Isolated and estranged from most of his family, Tom Wills had become, in the words of cricket historian David Frith, "a complete and dangerous and apparently incurable alcoholic".

Later that night, Tom Wills absconded, returned home and the next day, in the grip of paranoid delusions, committed suicide by stabbing a pair of scissors into his heart three times.

Tom Wills's burial took place the next day in an unmarked grave in Heidelberg Cemetery at a private funeral attended by only six people: his brother Egbert, sister Emily and cousin Harrison; Harrison's sister Adela and her son Amos; and cricketer Verney Cameron, who later ran an unsuccessful fundraiser for a tombstone over the grave.

Tom Wills struck his contemporaries as peculiar and at times narcissistic, with a prickly temperament, but kind, charismatic and companionable.

Tom Wills's letters are laced with puns, oblique classical and Shakespearean allusions, and droll asides, such as this one about Melbourne in a letter to his brother Cedric: "Everything is dull here, but people are kept alive by people getting shot at in the streets".

Tom Wills could be dismissive, triumphant and brazen all within a single sentence.

Tom Wills was "at once a cricket crank and genius", according to The Bulletin.

The rarity of Tom Wills' genius drew comparisons to William Shakespeare's.

Tom Wills's bowling was said to have "the devil" in it at times; English batsman Sir David Serjeant remembered Wills as the only bowler he ever feared.

An outstanding fieldsman anywhere, Tom Wills excelled in the slips and ran out batsmen with deadly accurate throwing.

Tom Wills was a "tear-away" footballer whose "pluck and skill", it was said, only George O'Mullane matched.

Tom Wills was buried on the hill top at Heidelberg, overlooking that green valley which, eight years later, Streeton and Roberts and the painters of the Heidelberg School would depict in summer colours.

Australia's first celebrity sportsman, Tom Wills began to fade from public consciousness within his own lifetime.

Tom Wills was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1989 and became an inaugural member of the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 1996.

Tom Wills Oval, inaugurated in 2013 at Sydney Olympic Park, serves as the training base for the AFL's Greater Western Sydney Giants.

Since the 1980s, it has been suggested that Tom Wills played or observed an Aboriginal football game, Marngrook, as a child growing up in the Grampians among the Djab wurrung, and incorporated some of its features into early Australian football.

De Moore therefore argues that Marngrook was likely played around where Tom Wills lived as a boy, "or, at the very least, that the local Aboriginal people knew of such a game".

That Tom Wills knew of Marngrook, he adds, is speculative at best.

Academics Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy write that Tom Wills, in adapting football to Melbourne's parklands, wanted a game that kept the players off the ground and the ball in the air.

Family historian T S Wills Cooke disputed that such a story existed, calling the Marngrook link "a bridge too far" and an example of historical revisionism motivated by political correctness.

Tom Wills wrote at this time that he attempted to promote football in Victoria as early as 1857, "but it was not taken to kindly until the following year".

De Moore rejects this view, noting that the contributions of Hammersley, Smith, Thompson and other pioneers, rather than those of Tom Wills, were generally overlooked.

Tom Wills concludes that Collins and other scholars have "perversely" devalued Wills' real contributions "in their rush to discredit [the Marngrook theory]".

Molonglo is given as his birthplace in an 1869 biographical piece in which the author states that Tom Wills had given him notes on his life.

Gordon suffered a demise similar to that of Tom Wills, committing suicide in 1870.

Tom Wills describes Wills as a fearsome bowler in his 1865 long poem "Ye Wearie Wayfarer".