The West Adelaide Football Club was a reconstructed team founded in 1892. It trained in the South Park Lands, all its League players well-known locally. To the late 1930s they lived mainly in Wright, Sturt and Gilbert Streets. Westies’ supporters, who more often than not played in teams with highly localised allegiances such as St Luke’s, the Whitmore Squares, the Brunswicks and the West Adelaide Ramblers, gathered to listen on Sunday mornings in Whitmore Square when their idols discussed the previous day's matches. Sport and religion did mix: indeed, Westies might well have once been dubbed ‘The Irish Eighteen’ for its numerous Catholic players.
The graded teams of the Brunswick footballers were a 'training ground' for Westies. The Brunswick Juniors ‘knocked around’ George Beckoff’s ham and beef shop on the southeast corner of Gouger and Brown Streets and had supper there after games. They trained by Sir Lewis Cohen Avenue in the South Park Lands, where Westies Colts (the League Club's under-age team) also trained until about 1947: their changerooms – a green iron shed with chip heaters – were erected by the Council. A former local resident and Council mace-bearer, Ronald Bailey, was one-time honorary secretary of the Brunswicks, who nicknamed him ‘Roaster’ for his disciplinarian coaching.
The King of the West End, Albert Augustine (Bert) Edwards was the publican of the Duke of Brunswick Hotel from March 1916 to September 1924 from where he organised the Brunswicks. The teams played in the Patriotic League, the competition formed when South Australian Football League ceased matches in 1916 because of the impact of World War One. Thereafter, to the end of the Great War, a combination of League, parkland, and amateur clubs played Patriotic League matches in support of both the football tradition and Australia's fighting forces. Edwards was a controversial chairman of the West Adelaide Football Club (1921-22), a Club president, and Club patron in 1930.
Lesley Currie, an ‘outsider’, vividly recollects that the South West [of Adelaide] was ‘like a country town’ in the early 1970s. Certainly by that time the knife sharpener, the egg man and the rabbit’o (a man who skinned your purchase on the spot) no longer hawked in the streets. Although she was not a local resident, her familiarity with the South West grew in ‘walking the accounts’ from the petrol station where she worked to customers of her employer and in talking to residents over their front gate while they worked in their gardens.
Steve Cimarosti left Sturt Street school at 14 years of age to work in the family shop, later becoming a licensee of the Duke of Brunswick Hotel for four years to December 2002, then returning to the butcher trade outside the city. Steve's grand-parents ran a terrazzo and cement laundry trough works nearby in Gilbert Street. Changes of scale and economy imposed by outside forces brought an end to many such small, industrious family businesses.
SW Historic A5 Booklet :
http://www.sahistorians.org.au/175/bm.doc/sw-historic-a5-booklet-2.pdf
