Vale Tony Charlton

Sad news today of the passing of Tony Charlton. AussieRulesBlog vividly remembers Charlton on the TV in the 1960s. That precise pronunciation and dulcet tone never seemed to change.

 

 

More recently, Tony compered Essendon’s season launch function a few years ago — he was a Life Member of the Essendon Football Club. The function also entailed inducting new members into the EFC Hall of Fame and naming Legends of the EFC Hall of Fame.

 

AussieRulesBlog attended the function and noticed Tony and his wife getting out of their car nearby, but we hadn’t met previously and chose not to interrupt the man’s privacy.

 

It wasn’t an easy gig. It would have been very easy for someone less experienced to go over the top with the sentimentality or to gush in the manner of Bruce MacAvaney. But not Tony. He carried the thing off with panache — just the right touch of sentiment and gravitas.

 

Wandering back to the AussieRulesBlogMobile, we found ourselves walking very near the Charltons as they too wended their way home. We decided it was worth offering our congratulations on the wonderful way Tony had handled his duties. He was grace personified and just as human, friendly and engaging as the person we’d seen on screen so many times.

 

Some weeks later, wandering the corridors of The Alfred Hospital, we spotted Tony exiting the offices of The Alfred Foundation where, we later learned, he volunteered five days a week. We approached him and reminded him of our brief meeting after the season launch and thus was borne an all-too-brief casual acquaintance.

 

Over the next few years, every couple of months or so, our paths would cross at The Alfred. He never failed to acknowledge us or, when the opportunity presented, to have a few words about the Bombers’ progress. When it was announced on the Bomberland website that he had been diagnosed with cancer, we offered our wishes for his recovery, but he brushed the cancer off as though it were a mosquito bite.

 

We encourage anyone who wants to know more about this wonderful man to beg, borrow or steal a copy of the interview he gave Mike Sheehan on Foxtel during the 2012 season. What you see in that interview is exactly the same man as the one we approached a few years ago.

 

There’s a lovely story in Martin Flanagan’s obituary for Tony describing his father, a radio broadcaster in New Zealand, reading the news in a dinner jacket even though no-one could see him. There was that same sort of old-fashioned-ness about Tony, but it wasn’t snobbish in the least. It was simply a craftsman at work.

 

Thank you, Tony, for those few words we exchanged so infrequently. It was wonderful to know you personally even that tiny bit.

 

Rest in peace.