1914 Tasmanian Carnival Player Cap – Ivor S Margetts

This 1914 Tasmanian state cap belonged to Lefroy ruckman Ivor Stephen Margetts. His hand-written nametag is stitched into the inner lining. It was presented to Margetts on the eve of the third Australian National Football Carnival, staged in Sydney in early August 1914.

Tasmania was outplayed at the carnival, beating only lowly Queensland. Margetts was named among the best players in the rout by the dominant Victoria but he was more concerned about returning home to enlist. Barely two years later he lost his life on the battlefields of the Western Front.

For more than 100 years the cap lay among the stored family belongings of Major Charles Simmons VD, Margetts’ military mentor in the Derwent Regiment in Tasmania and the one-time superintendent of the Hobart jail in Campbell Street.

Margetts was on the staff of the Hutchins school in 1914, having been drawn south from his home in Launceston two years earlier for work and for the opportunity to play with Lefroy Football Club. He had played his first game of senior football with the Launceston Football Club while still at school and made an instant impression. Tall and athletic, he was a natural star.

In his five-year senior career Margetts also played for both the North and the South in the annual games against each other, and for representative teams against touring clubs from Melbourne. Lefroy won the Southern premiership in 1912 with Ivor among the team’s best players, then beat North Launceston for the first official state premiership.

When not in residence at Hutchins, Margetts boarded with the Simmons family in the jail superintendent’s house at the bottom of Melville Street. Charles, his wife Amy and daughters Jean and May, treated the cheery and popular Margetts as their adopted son and brother.

War was declared the day the Tasmanian team arrived in Sydney for the 1914 carnival. Margetts left all his belongings with the Simmons family. He received a commission in the 12^th Battalion and sailed with the first convoy to depart Australia in October 1914. The 12th was among the first Anzacs to land at Gallipoli on 25^th April the following year and Ivor was conspicuous with his bravery on that extraordinary day.

Margetts survived Gallipoli, being the only Allied officer to spend the entire nine months of the campaign on the peninsula. However, in July 1916 he was killed by shrapnel on the first day of fighting at Pozieres on the Somme. His death was felt across the state, given his reputation as a footballer and his popularity with the troops.

Charles Simmons kept Margetts’ state cap with the many letters Margetts wrote back to Hobart from the front. When Charles died suddenly in 1930, his family kept the cap and it eventually passed to Charles’ grandson Robin Jones. When Robin died in Melbourne in 2017, the cap was rediscovered and donated to the Tasmanian football history collection in 2023.