Hill

Left: Clyde 'Clicker' Hill, taken from the Mooroopna team photo GVFL Premiers of 1923.
They won the flag defeating Tatura on Wednesday September 05, with Clyde being the match hero, booting 5 of his team's 6 goals.
Ten days later Hill played his one and only game for the Blues.
(Image: Mooroopna FC web site)

Clyde Hill played just one senior match for Carlton, in between serving his country in the two biggest wars of the twentieth century. He was a country boy from Mooroopna in the Goulburn Valley, and his only appearance for the Blues came in a humiliating 65-point thrashing by Geelong in the last round of the 1923 season at Corio Oval. Just a few months short of his twenty-eighth birthday by then, Hill played as a follower-forward in guernsey number 9. However, like most of his team-mates, he was rarely sighted.

A little more than eight years beforehand - in the midst of World War 1 - Clyde left his job as a grocer in Mooroopna, to enlist for overseas service with Australia’s famous Light Horse Brigade. Although highly-trained as cavalry, the Brigade fought more often throughout the war as infantry, as most offensives stagnated into trench warfare. Clyde somehow survived the slaughter, and came home in one piece in February, 1919. He resumed playing football for Mooroopna, and eventually attracted the interest of the Blues.

Season 1923 was a horror story for the Carlton Football Club. The Navy Blues lost five of the first six matches of the year, and from then on never looked like making the finals. The club churned through twelve first-game players over the season, in a desperate search for improvement. Eventually, we wound up seventh on the nine-team VFL ladder, with the debacle against Geelong in round 18 indicative of the whole year. Two players – Clyde Hill and Roy Dick – made their first and only appearance against the Cats that afternoon, but with nothing to play for, Carlton was smashed.

Hill went home to Mooroopna for good after that one unfortunate taste of VFL football, and probably planned to live out his life in the district. But when Australia went to war against a resurgent Germany once more in 1939, Clyde was soon on the doorstep of his local recruitment centre. Because of his age (he was 44) he was assigned to the Volunteer Defence Corps - Australia’s equivalent of England’s Home Guard – and soldiered throughout the conflict. In so doing, he joined that unique group of Carlton’s sons to have served their country in both World Wars.

FOOTBALL PIN UPS NO.1

The Shepparton Advertiser's (April 26 1946) write up on Clyde Hill
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article187168996