Goodall, John Edwin

BORN IN 1893 AT ST KILDA, the son of Charles and Ada, he was early left fatherless, and followed in the footsteps of his grandfather, a founder of the ASX. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and first played for Melburnian ice hockey club which had formed in 1908 when he was 15. It was made up mostly of Melbourne Grammar students.

He donated the trophy to the Victorian association for Australia's first interstate series which commenced in the winter of 1909 and is still known today as the Goodall Cup; the holy grail of Australian ice hockey. It has been contested annually to the present time with few interruptions and today it is the coveted prize fought over by the elite teams of the Australian Ice Hockey League. Very few winter sports trophies in the world are bathed in a comparable longevity or glory.

His first interstate game on record was with the second Victorian State team in 1910, when he was 17-years-old. In 1914, he became the fourth NISAA National Mens Skating Champion following Hal and Andy Reid. In 1916, when he was 23 years-old, he inherited a share of his grandfather's estate, a purchasing power in excess of $20 million in today's money, and much more taking account of all assets. He was already at that young age a well-known, independently wealthy, stock and share broker who worked with the Queen St company his grandfather had established.

He had lost many of the foundation players to the war, some never to return, others to raising families of their own. He became president of the VIHA and was captain of Victoria in 1922, the last occasion the state was to win a Goodall Cup for a quarter century. His wife Kathleen presented the inaugural Gower Cup for senior women's interstate competition that same year. She was a soprano and a well-known performer of her time who gave away her stage career when they married, but returned to public performance during the Great Depression playing right through the heyday of theatre — over 3,500 performances — then breaking into radio.

He guided the rebuilding of the decimated Victorian game; captained the last of the Victorian Goodall Cup champions for a quarter-century to come, paved the way for the first interstate women's ice hockey competition in 1922; and became the first president of the first national association in 1923 (the National Ice Hockey and Speed Skating Council). He married, retired as a player, returning briefly only for Kendall's farewell series in 1925, busied himself with setting the sport on a national footing, and dutifully presented the Goodall Cup at interstate tournaments.

He returned in 1930 after a five year absence to head the VIHA, following the death of its president, Peter Ross Sutherland. In the depths of the Great Depression, he presided over the re-organisation of the VIHA clubs with the aim of giving "young players a better chance to improve themselves". In the 1931 season, St Kilda IHC was dropped, and the three remaining clubs — Hawthorn, Brighton and Essendon — were restructured with both senior and junior teams. Seniors played Monday nights, and juniors on Thursdays. The first inter-club juniors and the first inter-schools competition were both created that year, the first true, age-delimited junior ice hockey leagues in Australia.

The inaugural VIHA Junior Public Schools under-16 competition was won by Melbourne Grammar that same season. The league included Scotch College and Wesley College and games were played at the Glaciarium on Saturday mornings. Although "schoolboys" had competed in "teams races" in Victoria since sometime before 1924, the Victorian speed skating championships under the control of the same association were simultaneously redefined in 1931, enabling boys and girls to compete in under-sixteen and under-eighteen junior age divisions. He returned to the association executive as Junior Vice President after the war, when Victoria tied the Cup series for the second time with a team that included the players developed during the wartime programs. The next year Victoria won back the Cup after 25 years in the wilderness.

While contemporaries owned, raced or punted on horses, Goodall cruised yachts with the Royal Yacht Club of Victoria and raced cars. He was a well-known member of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria and owned a rare 1923 Aston Martin Sports in the mid-1920s. He began racing the next year and four years later, on March 31st, 1928, he entered his 1923 Aston Martin-Anzani in the 100 Miles Road Race at Phillip Island, which is now regarded as the inaugural Australian Grand Prix. The Aston Martin remained in the Goodall family for over fifty years. He and Kathleen had children including a son named John, who had a son named John.

His family connections with his great uncles in North America, helped to position Australian ice sports at the forefront of developments occurring worldwide, not so long after the first wave of engineered ice rinks in the world were built in the 1890s. Capt Charles Miner Goodall and his brothers, Harry and Samuel, had also inherited considerable wealth and influence and they were well-established on both east and west coasts, in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere, long before skating and ice hockey became mainstream sports.

From 1877 to 1916, the vessels of their new Pacific Steamship Company plied the Pacific all along the West Coast, between California, British Columbia, Washington, and Alaska, and it was these centres that mostly influenced Australian ice sports. The Goodall shipping line and its related coal and railway companies was a pioneering arm of a loosely defined trade alliance sailing trans-Pacific routes during the formative years of organised ice sports worldwide. Incidently, but quite literally, it connected ice sports in America and Canada, then straddled the Pacific to Australia.