I take this opportunity to speak of Richard ‘Dick’ Wearmouth, who passed away on 5 April this year. In 1944, aged 18, Dick began playing football with Footscray Football Club where he won a Gardiner Medal for the best and fairest in the Victorian Football League reserve competition in his very first year. After taking a one-year break to serve in the Royal Australian Air Force, Dick went on to have an impressive 100-game VFL career in which he represented Victoria and finished 12th in the 1951 Brownlow Medal count.
In 1945 Dick married Joyce, and together they had five children. Dick’s success in the football world continued when his family moved to Terang, with Dick coaching the local team to three successive grand finals, two of which the team won.
When he retired, the Hampden league president was quoted as saying, ‘As Donald Bradman is to Australian cricket, so also is Dick Wearmouth to Hampden league football’.
Dick was a Terang institution. He worked at Montgomery and Bradshaw before running his own milk bar and working on various farms. He always enjoyed a walk around the township of Terang with Joyce, his wife of 64 years. He was described by his family as a generous, quiet and peace-loving humanitarian, possessing four great loves: his wife and family, football, horseracing and the Australian Labor Party. Dick served as secretary of the Terang ALP branch for many years.
I pass my condolences on to Dick’s wife, Joyce, and their children, Jillian, Ron, Richard, Judith and Jackie. Dick was a wonderful and accomplished man who will be greatly missed by everyone close to him and by those in the Terang township and the wider district.