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“Robert Heatley started out in life as a baker. After his stepmother put he and two of her other stepchildren out of the house, he then took on a house with his brother and together they raised their three sisters. As a result, the three sisters idolised them for the rest of their lives,” Adams said.
“He later became a rails bookmaker at Flemington and other courses. He was part of the firm Hayes Heatley and he was on the flat - he wasn’t one of the top line ones, but he did well.
“On one occasion, according to what his son had told me, they got to the point where they had a very bad day with bets because the favourites had all come in. Gramp said to him, ‘Look, if things go badly in the next couple of races, we’re done. If that happens, you run and I’ll face the mob’. As luck would have it they came through in the last, and they went on from there and made a lot of money.
“There was one famous incident at the Tattersall’s Club where Gramp used to go because he was a bookie. One day ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, a standover man in the 20s who was one of John Wren’s confederates, approached my grandfather in the club and said, ‘How about giving me a pony, Bob’ (and a pony in those days was about 25 bob). Gramp responded by picking Squizzy up and throwing him down the stairs, and Squizzy was a hit-man.”
Adams believed that his grandfather got out of bookmaking around 1910. “He then began to develop properties, particularly in and around Carlton, and he bought a lot of houses,” Adams said.
“He was President of the Carlton Club for three years and then he got into conflict with the coach, John Worrall. As I understand it, and Hugh Buggy wrote it up, they were playing a game at South Melbourne and he found out afterwards that Johnny Worrall, whom he had appointed as the secretary and coach, had taken the takings from the game and put them into his own account. Now my grandfather wouldn’t have a bar of anything like that, so he confronted Johnny then had him sacked.
“Apparently Johnny Worrall did hand the money back when confronted, as if to say, ‘it was just for safekeeping’, so it became a grey issue - it wasn’t black and white.
“Now the club members were irate because they could see that the club was rising and so they called a special meeting and voted Johnny Worrall back in.
“So my grandfather said “I’m out” and resigned.”
Adams said that Heatley remained a supporter but “went into quiet recession” from Carlton, until he resumed his association with the cricket club. He also recalls Heatley being appointed chairman of the ground committee “and then applying himself energetically to building up the outer”.
“It was an age where these dominant people could do this, and he quite literally moved the boundaries. He had the concrete wall put up on the southern side of the ground, and had all this earth brought in to raise the area. He contributed a lot of time and money to the ground throughout his life it and it was for this reason that he was acknowledged later on,” Adams said.
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