Gordon Sawley, Allan Pearsall and Jeff Grieve played a combined 20 games with a 1941 South Melbourne side that finished 8th in 1941 under first-year coach Joe Kelly. They kicked a combined eight goals and had nine wins. They were not exactly household names.
It was a team dominated by Herbie Matthews, runner-up in the 1941 Brownlow Medal, and Jack Graham and Jim Cleary, who finished top 10 in the same year.
But the unheralded trio shared a common bond with the star trio, who played a combined 640 games and are Swans Hall of Famers.
They were part of a Swans playing group that was shattered by Australia’s greatest naval tragedy on 19 November 1941, when 645 young men died after the HMAS Sydney II was sunk off the coast of Western Australia.
After a long and illustrious service in the Mediterranean, Sydney II had returned to Australia in February 1941 before being sent to escort troops heading to south-east Asia. Returning home from one such mission, it was intercepted by a German ship, disguised as a Dutch merchant vessel, 180km west of Shark Bay in WA.
The whereabouts of the Sydney II and its crew was a mystery until it was found on 16 March 2008 about 2500m below the surface, sitting upright on the ocean floor.
While South Melbourne were spared any direct connection to the horrific incident 80 years ago the unheralded 1941 trio of Sawley, Pearsall and Grieve would later join the list of Swans players killed in active service.
Flying Officer Sawley, a standout player with Norwood in Adelaide who joined South while on duty with the RAAF in Melbourne, and Flight Sergeant Grieve, a Melbourne local, were killed in a training accident in Scotland in 1942.
Flying Officer Pearsall, originally from Hobart and also a first-class cricketer, died when his plane crashed into the English Channel in 1944.
They will be among those remembered in Perth on Friday night when the Swans play the West Coast Eagles in an annual fixture that commemorates the link between Sydney, as the home port of the ship that carried its name, and West Coast, the symbolic ‘home’ of the ship’s resting place.
The match, played since 2010, was the initiative of the AFL, the Finding Sydney Foundation and the Royal Australian Navy. The teams will play for the HMAS Sydney II Commemorative Trophy, while the player judged best on ground will receive the perpetual Gun Shell Gallantry Trophy.
