INTRODUCED in 1924, the Brownlow Medal is celebrated as the highest individual accolade in Australian football.
By virtue of being attached to this nationally recognised award for over a century, Brownlow is one of the most famous names in the game’s history. Curiously, however, few people know much about the man upon whom this honour was bestowed. Charles Brownlow led a rather extraordinary life, inextricably linked to his beloved hometown Geelong. Brownlow was a prominent local businessman, renowned as a skilled craftsman, widely admired for his community work and charitable endeavours, and ubiquitous as both a competitor and administrator across Geelong’s wider sporting landscape. He was universally respected as a football official and it was his club role as Geelong’s secretary spanning 36 years that anchored Brownlow’s longstanding service to football at the state and national level.
Early years
Charles Brownlow was born in Geelong in July 1861. He was, in fact, the third in a line of five Charles Brownlows. His English parents Charles and Eliza (née Whitaker) got married in 1858, shortly before migrating to Australia where the goldrush first attracted them to Ballarat before soon settling in nearby Geelong. Charles Snr had been an apprenticed bookbinder in Oxford, but in his new hometown established himself as a well-known importer of goods from London and Liverpool operating Brownlow’s China Warehouse in Moorabool Street just a few drop punts away from where GMHBA Stadium stands today. Charles and Eliza had six children (four daughters, two sons) and their Wesleyan faith was the bedrock of Brownlow family life. Indeed, so strong was the family’s commitment that the leadlight ‘Brownlow Window’ remains a feature at Geelong’s Wesley Uniting Church in Yarra Street.
It is often claimed that Charles Brownlow attended Geelong College, but delving into the school’s own records confirms this is incorrect. There are two likely causes for this confusion: first, a student named Bromilow attended the school around this time; second, Charles and his wife Matilda (née Barber) sent their only son there, so a Charles Brownlow did attend Geelong College but a generation later.
Silversmith, watchmaker, jeweller
In the late 1870s, Brownlow completed his apprenticeship with the silversmith, watchmaker, and jeweller Edward Fischer — a master craftsman famous for creating the first Melbourne Cup winner’s trophy made in Australia (1876). Brownlow inherited his father’s entrepreneurial spirit and aged 20 opened his own business. Besides watchmaking and jewellery work, it was his skills as a silversmith, and in particular handcrafting trophies, that would prove especially fruitful for Brownlow in coming years. Fusing together his business acumen and craftmanship with his civic mindedness and a desire to support local causes, Brownlow donated his bespoke trophies to all kinds of organisations ranging from churches, schools, and literary groups to sporting clubs and even flower exhibitions. Brownlow’s benevolence not only helped countless local endeavours but also had the corollary benefit of promoting his business.
All-round sportsman and outstanding footballer
Weighing just 10 stone five pounds (65 kilograms), the athletic Brownlow was a talented middle-distance runner with good endurance and a sharp turn of pace. His physiology aligned well with rowing, one of Brownlow’s main sporting loves that saw him win titles and later coach the Corio Bay Rowing Club. From his mid-teens onwards he maintained a lifelong passion for cricket, too, although he was never much more than a plodder out in the middle.
It was on the football field where Brownlow really shone as an athlete. As a teenager he commenced playing at the strong local junior club North Geelong in the late 1870s. His potential was clear for all to see, and leading into the 1881 season the Geelong Football Club invited Brownlow to play in a scratch match. He immediately made the grade. Brownlow debuted against Hotham (North Melbourne) at the East Melbourne Cricket Ground and played a total of 18 games that first season. As was typical for those times, half of Geelong’s games were played against inferior local outfits and the other half were against the highest quality metropolitan teams in the Victorian Football Association (VFA) including Melbourne, Essendon, Carlton, and South Melbourne. When South Australia visited in August 1881, the debutant Brownlow was selected to play in an intercolonial representative game at Corio Oval in Geelong. In his second season Brownlow consolidated his spot as a mainstay of the Geelong team that claimed the 1882 VFA premiership. He also participated on the club’s tour of NSW that saw Geelong claim a clean sweep of wins against four opponents in Sydney plus Albury on the way home. The expedition was designed to promote the Australian game north of the Murray River — a cause that Brownlow would enthusiastically continue to support as an administrator in future decades.
Aged just 21 and entering his third season of VFA football, Brownlow was elected captain in 1883. He led Geelong to another VFA premiership. One of Geelong’s best players and captain of the competition’s leading side, Brownlow was carving out a reputation as one of the most influential footballers in Victoria. Then, in the middle of the 1884 season, he suddenly announced his retirement effective immediately. Brownlow explained that growing business interests meant he could no longer devote sufficient time to training or playing. It is curious that the popular captain of the reigning premiers would step aside mid-season simply citing time constraints, especially given that he chose to give up playing elite-level football while maintaining several other local sporting commitments and even picking up some new interests. For instance, Brownlow remained on several committees of the Corio Bay Rowing Club, which also elected him as its captain just a month after he had relinquished the football club’s captaincy. He also served on the Barwon Regatta sub-committee, was a member of the Geelong Volunteer Fire Brigade, and even took up fox terrier coursing, racing a dog named ‘Tarantula’.
Brownlow clearly had a choice and could have given up other activities to free up time to continue representing Geelong in the VFA as he entered his prime footballing years. His decision suggests two things: first, a genuine enjoyment in being actively involved in diverse sporting interests; second, moreover, even at this comparatively young age Brownlow was becoming more attracted to off-field administration than on-field action. The year he announced his retirement — 1884 — happened to be the same season that he joined the club’s general committee, which marked Brownlow’s entry into football administration. One of his first tasks was serving on the five-person sub-committee charged with amalgamating the town’s two leading sporting entities, the Corio Cricket Club and Geelong Football Club, into the Geelong Cricket and Football Club (it remained this way until the 1950s when the partnership was officially dissolved). Four years later, Brownlow would become club secretary in 1888, effectively his era’s equivalent to a modern AFL club’s CEO.
The industrious Brownlow combined the salaried GC&FC secretaryship with running his own businesses. He had married and started a family, too, and yet despite his earlier ‘retirement’ over the next half-decade Brownlow somehow found the time and energy to occasionally pull on the boots for Geelong. Brownlow’s final appearance in the VFA was in a come-from-behind victory against Footscray in atrocious conditions at the Western Oval on 27 September 1890. Early records are imprecise, but Brownlow made around 70 appearances against senior VFA opposition, kicked at least 15 goals, and regularly featured among the best players. His overall playing career for Geelong was far more extensive when contests against local junior teams and country clubs, intercolonial representative matches, and assorted charitable or exhibition games are taken into account.
Local sports administrator with an entrepreneurial spirit
Brownlow’s involvement in sports administration across the Geelong region is far too extensive to list. By way of illustration, for many years he was a committeeman or elected official at several cricket clubs and eventually served as the inaugural secretary of the town’s first turf wicket competition once the Geelong Cricket Association was established in 1896-97. Similarly, he was connected to several junior football clubs in Geelong and served as chairman of the region’s Church Union Football Association. Besides his decades of service to rowing, Brownlow’s connection to water sports officialdom extended to swimming. He also spent time in charge of the Geelong Athletic Club. Brownlow was even the driving force behind establishing a local baseball club, serving as its treasurer and secretary as well as playing — in a uniform he naturally ensured was comprised of those familiar Geelong colours of blue and white.
Brownlow often devised novel ways to simultaneously promote sports in Geelong while promoting his business interests among likeminded townsfolk. In the mid- to late 1880s, for instance, he created extra foot traffic by producing a ‘football scorecard’ and a season ‘fixture card’ that could be obtained free of charge only from his shop. As a partner in a sports depot during the 1890s, Brownlow drummed up extra business by running quoits tournaments after hours, and as the Geelong agent for Acme Cycles arranged bike races.
Brownlow made opportune connections between his main administrative role as GC&FC secretary and his various shops conveniently located in central Geelong. It was his job to liaise with Victorian Railways to schedule the special trains whenever Geelong played away games in Melbourne. The clubrooms out at Corio Oval sat empty during the week, so supporters were advised that they could purchase train tickets for upcoming matches by visiting Brownlow’s stores. This masterstroke was expanded by Brownlow making arrangements for package deals: Pivotonians could combine a football game in Melbourne with reserved seats to catch a show at a theatre afterwards, with the option of skipping the train and returning home across the bay via the SS Excelsior. Brownlow also arranged a special train on 9 May 1901, so that Geelong residents could travel to the capital and witness the opening of federal parliament (at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building).
As club secretary Brownlow arranged all kinds of charitable events, often involving special football matches. When the Bulli disaster claimed the lives of 81 men and boys from a gas explosion at a colliery between Sydney and Wollongong in 1887, he captained ‘The Undaunted’ against ‘The Invincibles’ in a fundraiser game played in fancy dress. In 1891, Brownlow again made all arrangements for a game played between Geelong and the Queenscliff Garrison Artillery to raise funds for the families of two men who were killed when trying to unblock a six-inch breechloading Armstrong gun that had become jammed at Fort Queenscliff. The following year, Brownlow helped coordinate the fundraising for a local widow after her husband was killed by a blow from a cricket ball. Likewise, he led the fundraising efforts when the brother of future Geelong champions Bill and Alec Eason died while playing in a junior football match in 1899. There are countless other examples over the decades involving charitable causes such as local orphanages, churches, the Geelong Infirmary and Benevolent Asylum (the town’s original hospital), and joining forces with lifelong best friend Jim D’Helin to help guide the region’s unemployed relief committee.
As GC&FC secretary Brownlow arranged numerous trips for Geelong footballers to promote the game throughout country Victoria plus Tasmania, Adelaide, and Sydney. On the cricketing side, he organised for the England XI to play an exhibition game at Corio Oval during its Ashes Tour of 1911-12, and again in 1920-21.
State and national heavyweight
It was Brownlow’s club role at Geelong that facilitated everything he accomplished in the higher levels of administering Australian football. Along with other key officials including Essendon’s Alex McCracken, Fitzroy’s Con Hickey, and Collingwood pair Edwin Wilson and Ern ‘Bud’ Copeland, Brownlow counted among the decisive core of club figures who not only were involved in the courageous decision to secede from the VFA to form their rival Victorian Football League (VFL) in 1896-97, but also led this competition during its formative decades. Brownlow served the VFL as a longstanding vice-president, chaired its umpire and permit committee, and was a Victorian delegate for the 1911 national carnival staged in Adelaide. Furthermore, from 1911 Brownlow served as a Victorian delegate to the code’s national governing body the Australasian Football Council (AFC), ultimately rising to the role of AFC president in 1919.
It is evident that Brownlow cared deeply about the game of Australian football and devoted much of his life to promoting it far and wide. It is surprising, then, to discover that Brownlow and Hickey tried their hardest to kill the code in 1914! Joining forces with leading rugby administrators from Sydney, they proposed a merger between their two games with the hybridised version to be known as ‘universal football’. Brownlow chaired a conference in November 1914 (conveniently timed to allow their guests from Sydney to attend the Melbourne Cup), and the two delegations agreed on a strange amalgam of rules from their respective codes. By early 1915, newspapers across Australia were reporting that the proposal looked almost certain to go ahead. But news of the Gallipoli landing and subsequent realisation that Australia found itself in a war with no end in sight put paid to the idea. The timing of WWI inadvertently saved the game of Australian football from a shared fate with rugby.
Tireless charity work during WWI and final years
Geelong spent time in recess during the war, but as club secretary Brownlow worked tirelessly nonetheless. He organised a local Sportsman’s Carnival in aid of the Red Cross and Wounded Soldiers’ Fund. He led charity events for churches and orphanages and arranged special football matches to raise funds for causes such as the YMCA so it could provide comforts in military camps at home and abroad. In 1916, Brownlow even coordinated a fundraising campaign that saw Geelong collect around £1,000 for the French Red Cross Society. It was also during WWI that Brownlow joined forces with two other prominent club figures, president Arthur Bowman and Clive Myers, to lead the campaign and raise £30,000 for Geelong to build a new hospital (opened in 1924).
One of Brownlow’s most admired traits was his empathy and he was greatly admired for the relationships he cultivated with players over the decades. This came to the fore during WWI as Brownlow maintained regular correspondence with Geelong footballers away at the front including Leo Healy and Joe Slater. After Healy informed him in December 1915 that men at Gallipoli were in need of woollen scarves and gloves, Brownlow used the Geelong Advertiser to call for townsfolk to send in knitted supplies so he could dispatch a parcel. Similarly, he sent Slater a package of supplies including football books that could be handed around in the trenches. Leo Healy survived the war and upon his return played for Geelong again in 1919-20. Brownlow maintained correspondence with his dear friend Joe Slater, a remarkable athlete who played representative cricket against the touring England XI and was named as a defender in Geelong’s official Team of the Century, until receiving the tragic news that he had been killed in action on the Western Front in May 1917.
Following the war, Brownlow started to scale back his charity work albeit not entirely. He remained fully committed to sports administration, especially football as Geelong’s club secretary, acting president of the VFL, and AFC president. In August 1923, however, it was reported that Brownlow was seriously ill, suffering from chronic nephritis (kidney disease). Typically, he carried on determinately and only relinquished his secretaryship in January 1924, some 36 years after first assuming the role. Brownlow died a week later, aged 62, at his family home in Sydney Avenue, Geelong.
Legacy
Charles Brownlow was such a popular and widely respected figure that his funeral was one of the largest ever seen in Geelong. Friends and colleagues travelled from far and wide to pay their respects, with around 30 pallbearers representing the Geelong Cricket and Football Club, the VFL, the VFL Umpires Association, rival VFL clubs, interstate football leagues, and the Victorian Cricket Association. The following month, one of Brownlow’s fellow longstanding VFL delegates, Collingwood’s ‘Bud’ Copeland, proposed at a League meeting:
To perpetuate the memory of the late Charles Brownlow [for] his many years of most valuable service to the Australian game both as a player, Club Secretary, Delegate and Vice President of the League, and President of the Australasian Football Council, a gold and enamel medal of the value of £10 shall be presented annually by the League to the best and fairest player in premiership matches each season, the medal to be called the Brownlow Medal.
Copeland’s motion was carried unanimously, with the League’s best-and-fairest award viewed by Brownlow’s peers as an appropriate way to ‘perpetuate the memory’ of a man who had left such an indelible impression on the game.
Another great Collingwood man, Edwin Wilson, served as the League’s inaugural secretary from 1897 to 1929. If any of his contemporaries could fully understand and appreciate Brownlow’s enormous contribution to administering the game it must have been Wilson. Following Brownlow’s death, it was Wilson’s duty as the League’s secretary to acknowledge this momentous passing in the VFL’s annual report of 1924. Drawing inspiration from a quote taken from Shakespeare’s 1599 play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Wilson succinctly captured the essence of how and why Charles Brownlow was so widely appreciated and admired:
His life was gentle and the elements so mixed in him, that nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man!
For a more detailed account of Brownlow’s life, access a free copy of the article ‘The Man Behind the Medal: The Life of Charles Brownlow, 1861-1924’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, by Bob Gartland and Tony Joel.
Bob Gartland OAM is an Adjunct Researcher and Advisory Board member of the Centre for Contemporary Histories at Deakin University in Australia. He is a life member and former vice-president of the Geelong Football Club. In 2022, Bob was awarded the R.J. Hickey Award for ‘outstanding service to Australian football’. He spent a decade working on the creation of the Geelong Sports Museum, which opened in GMHBA Stadium at Kardinia Park in 2024. Bob was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia ‘for service to the community of Geelong’.
Tony Joel is Associate Professor in History at Deakin University, Australia, where he has taught sports history for two decades. At Deakin, Tony created the world’s only university unit exclusively focused on the history of Australian football. He is a co-founder of Deakin’s Centre for Contemporary Histories. Tony has won multiple awards for teaching excellence, including an Australian Awards for University Teaching (AAUT) national Award for Teaching Excellence in 2016. His most recent book, entitled Line & Length: A History of the Geelong Cricket Club, co-authored with Mathew Turner, won the Australasian Society for Sports History (ASSH) 2025 Book Award.