Young Love

Peter Crimmins in 1964 at Assumption College, around the time that he met his first girlfriend, Carmel Shaw.

As a biographer, one aspect of the researching process which consumes me is the question, “Did I speak to everyone?” To me, finding as many people as possible to enlighten me on a subject is vital to being able to paint the fullest picture of not only the individual, but also the times they lived through. I never cease asking myself, did I speak to enough people?

When researching CRIMMO: THE PETER CRIMMINS STORY, I spoke with people from all different periods of Peter’s life, including school friends and early sporting teammates. Peter’s four brothers had told me that, before meeting his future wife Gwen Blum, in 1968, Peter had two previous girlfriends: Carmel Shaw, then Beryl Alexander. Sadly, Beryl passed away some years earlier. And much to my regret, I was unable to track down Carmel. That was, until this week, when I was contacted out of the blue by a ‘Polly’ Shaw, who wrote:

Hello Dan. I have just bought your book “Crimmo” and was surprised to find myself named in it. I was Peter's first girlfriend ... I still have his letters from Assumption if you are ever interested. Carmel Shaw (AKA Polly).

I figured Carmel may have had a different surname, hence why I struggled to find her, but wasn’t banking on her first name being different! Turns out, ‘Polly’ was a nickname given her by nephew Bernie, which stuck as some nicknames are wont to do. Intrigued, we spoke the following day then caught up over coffee, near Glenferrie Oval of all places, on the weekend.

As any dedicated biographer knows, we always wish we could include more stories in our books. Alas, deadlines, a lack of information to go on, or the restriction of page numbers can scheme against us, meaning certain snippets of ‘gold’ get lost or left on the editor’s cutting-room floor. Although CRIMMO is now available in book stores (physical and virtual) around Australia, after speaking with Polly—who was 15 months younger than Peter—I wanted to share her memories of that special time in her life when the farmer’s daughter from Laverton in Melbourne’s west became a huge part of Peter Crimmins’ world.

“I’ve got a lot of letters, about eight letters from him from that 18 months we spent together,” Polly began. “These letters have been very prominent in my mind, as I’ve recently moved house and have been throwing out some old stuff. I’m a sentimental person, so I’ve kept everything, including Peter’s letters. My three brothers, John, Brian and Patrick, all went to Assumption.” It was through those brothers, and through football, that Polly encountered the 16-year-old Peter for the first time. One day, I went up to see my brothers play footy at Assumption. I can remember it was foggy and I was standing on the sidelines when I saw this little blond kid run past me: I instantly got ‘zapped’, and he got ‘zapped’ at the same time. Straight after the game, Peter said to my brother, ‘Who’s that?’ He replied, ‘My sister,’ and Peter said: ‘I want to meet her!’ It was funny, because we both experienced the same feeling just by him flashing past at the start of that game; we both had this chemical reaction. If you’ve never experienced it, it’s very real. We spent about 18 months together, but he broke my heart. Oh god, did he break my heart.”

Peter with Polly at her grandmother’s home in Moonee Ponds.

The letters shared between the young lovebirds, which Polly has kept stored in a box all these years and which remain in great condition—and which are written on official Assumption College letterhead—provide a snapshot into boarding school life during the 1960s. They include Peter’s anxiety over looming exams, and of a teenager at an all-boy school who was hormonal and excited to have someone special on the ‘outside’ he could communicate with. Peter’s letters are littered with his cheeky sense of humour, occasionally joking about getting “molly”, his word for becoming inebriated. “There was a lot of going to parties and drinking, although we were underage,” Polly explained. “Drinking and smoking: Peter used to do both those things in excess, like lots of people did back then. In our letters, there’s a lot of ‘don’t get too molly’ which was his way of saying, ‘don’t get too drunk.’ He put a lot of information in these letters and some of them are quite long; it’s a reflection of life at Assumption, really.” One surviving letter is 11 pages in length:

Dear Carmel,

As the majority of the senior school is over getting a talk and watching experiments from some travelling science space laboratory I thought, that as I know just about all there is to know about space and science (I failed the latter in Inter), I would spend all afternoon writing to you so that I can go for a swim after school as it is a pretty good day up here—for a change.

I will need all afternoon to try and write a letter that would be half as good as yours because unfortunately there is no way I can get half molly up here except if I had a flagon of pure alcohol from the Chemistry Lab, but I don’t think it would be appreciated as it is supposed to be fairly expensive and anyway I might need too much!

I have brightened up a fair bit in the last few days—in more ways than one. Firstly receiving your letter with all those nice remarks which undoubtedly was the foremost factor in operation ‘drag me out of the dumps’ and also I was brightened up around the head with a b@*..?@ haircut which has really made me look like a “little” schoolboy—a terribly young one at that. I hope I won’t be too hard to recognise tomorrow because I will be most probably hiding under a cap but if I see a nice widdle girl in brown I’ll know it’s you so it won’t be all that difficult.

Lots and lots of love,

Peter xxxxxxx

In a time before social media, much of Polly and Peter’s communication was conducted through more traditional lines: via the postman.

“The boys up there were starved of females,” Polly said. “They were all locked up in a freezing cold place where God’s being belted around their heads and they’re all hormonal. So, I think any girl that went there was probably interesting for them. Brother Domnus, or ‘Dom’, took a shine to me and used to let me see Peter whenever I went up there. Dom invited me up to a concert one night after footy. Peter was knocked out during the game that day and so he was recuperating in the dormitory. When I arrived, Dom said, “Peter’s in there, so you can’t by rights go in to see him. But I’ll let you go in” and he snuck me in there. Dom liked me, ‘Little Sis’ he used to call me, but I think that’s because Peter liked me and he loved Peter. He loved Peter, so he let Peter get away with a few things.” Peter clearly recognised that, through Polly, he could soften up his otherwise stern and strict football coach:

Unfortunately I won’t be having a kick with baldy [i.e. Dome] because he said that his foot is such that he won’t be able to have a kick again so, if you want to, you will have to try and get in sweet with him some other way but if I was you I wouldn’t worry about it too much because all you have to do is tell your mum to make some lamingtons and you give them to him personally.

During school holidays, Polly would often stay with Peter’s family at the Hawthorn Police Station. “I’d see Peter pretty often and we sent a lot of letters. And then, on school holidays I used to stay at the police station and he would stay at our farm in Laverton. Peter’s dad, Bryan, was a really gentle giant and his mother, Merna, was just gorgeous. She used to come up and sit on my bed and pat me on the legs. She’d tell me that she’d seen my ‘very fancy’ pair of knickers on the line and that they were ‘pretty wild.’ We laughed at that! She was just a charming, lovely lady.”

When reminded of Carmel Shaw this week, Bernie Crimmins, barely eight years old at the time, said, “I remember her very fondly. Vividly remember driving over to the western outer suburbs where she lived. That was a long way from Hawthorn in those days.” Polly explained that “Peter spent an enormous amount of time with our family and we had a lot of fun. My future brother-in-law, Ed O’Halloran, played with Footscray (1963-64, six games) while Peter was at Assumption and was being courted by Hawthorn, so those two would often talk footy. Hawthorn was really in Peter’s heart, so I was a bit surprised by the Richmond story in your book (where secretary Graeme Richmond tried enticing Peter to Tigerland). His heart was always Hawthorn, because he just identified with Hawthorn. It seemed that every few days Hawthorn were sending him clothes and other things.”

Around that time, Peter was clearly very nervous about his exams, which he eluded to a lot throughout his letters. It weighed on him. Polly recalled, “Occasionally he’d write something like, ‘I had a rotten day, but then I got back and I’d won the best and fairest, so it wasn’t too bad.’ He was very humble about his footy and humble about every sport he played; in sport, he was so good at everything. He had trophies for diving, trophies for golf, triple-jump—he was very versatile. But he didn’t speak about wanting to reach the VFL as such. It was obviously his destiny and I think he knew it, but he didn’t talk about it. Footy was just something he did, but he never boasted about it. He just loved people and was incredibly social.”

In a sign of his affection for his first serious girlfriend, Peter was particularly protective of Polly, which spills out within his letters; just like he later was with Gwen and anyone close to him. After witnessing one young buck moving in on his girlfriend at school, Peter wrote:

On Saturday when I got into the bus I saw that boy talking with you at the car but I only got half way to the car when he left and I was in the mood for a “blue” but I had to get back in the bus unfortunately.

He admitted he would often get “cuddlesick” for his “Little Puddin” and pondered “how in the hell do you send a cuddle?” via the post to his “little cuddly kitten.” Also, that he craved his girlfriend’s presence and looked forward to each of Polly’s letters arriving; there was then the challenge of producing more pages than she had sent him. Once, as he passed through page 10 onto page 11, Peter wrote, “I don’t think you would believe I could write 10 pages and anyway I want to have concrete proof so I can say I wrote 10 pages before you.” Polly recalled, “It was as if, say I wrote you five pages, you’ve got to write me five pages, then six, that sort of stuff. We’d try to pad it out with no real news at all, but it was good fun at the time and interesting to reflect back on now.” Once, Peter joked, “I asked Dome if you could come and massage my [injured] thigh (like hell!) and I think the only reason he didn’t like the idea was because he has a pretty crook foot and would have got jealous.” In a P.S. to one letter, Peter wrote:

I couldn’t care less if you were even a big Christmas pudding because as a rule I like pudding and then I could eat you up and bring you back here with me…good thinking!

Reflecting on the letters, Polly smiled and said, “We were totally in love. We were just a couple of young teenagers who were crazy about each other. He would tell me he loved me all the time. We would go to films. I remember going to see The Sound of Music and coming out from the theatre and dancing together through the Fitzroy Gardens. We were 16 going on 17 and we were exactly the ages of those two in the film. He was very sweet. All my girlfriends at school used to love hearing about Peter and about his letters; I wasn’t very discreet with all that, because I was just so happy to be with him.”

Peter with Polly (left), her brother John and his future wife Lorraine, at her sister Eileen’s wedding.

In two surviving photographs from their time together, Peter and Polly are pictured looking very much the adoring couple at, firstly, Polly’s grandmother’s home, then at Eileen Shaw’s wedding. There was no hint in either picture that the relationship was about to end. “The last big function was my sister’s wedding, then he went off to teacher’s college and met Beryl, unbeknownst to me, and that was the end of me,” Polly explained. “He didn’t tell me anything, but, as soon as he got to teacher’s college, I didn’t get phone calls anymore; this was after having three-hour phone calls almost daily during those 1966 school holidays.

“After a few days I rang him and he said, ‘Oh, I’m really busy, I’m swimming all the time’ and so on. Then I was at my school’s swimming sports and somebody said that he was the boyfriend of their friend, Beryl, and I just about died. I was just heartbroken. But that was typical of the times: lots of young boys wouldn’t have told their girlfriends—they’d just dump them. It’s not fun to be on the receiving end, but I can understand it when you’re the one dishing it out. Peter was a soft little thing, so I think he would have found it incredibly hard to say how he was feeling regarding why he broke up with me. I spoke to him a few times afterwards, but never one-on-one. I never confronted him over what had gone wrong.”

A few weeks later, Peter walked into Victoria Park for his VFL debut with Hawthorn, against Collingwood, holding the hand of Beryl. “I suppose I tried to block him out a lot after we broke up, although I always heard about him because he was always on television and always talked about,” Polly said. “It would have been nice to discuss it with him in our middle-age years, but he was unfortunately dead by then. I spoke to Merna when he died, I rang her and she was very sweet over the phone. I didn’t go to the funeral though, because I couldn’t have handled it.”

Decades on from that blissful 18 months in the mid-1960s, Polly lives in central Victoria and is happily married to another Peter—this one a big, burly rower. She has a child of her own and three step-children, and, like Gwen Crimmins, is also a grandmother. “I didn’t marry until I was 34,” Polly said. “The broken heart over Peter made me wary of commitment.” 

When Polly’s cousin told her about the newly released CRIMMO story, there was that “zapped” impulse to buy the book and reflect again on a man she, at least for a while, knew so very well. “My mother just loved him, as did my grandmother—they all loved Peter, the whole family,” she concluded. “Did I even tell them the news that we’d broken up? I think for about three weeks my mother didn’t say much to anyone and just tried to keep me alive, because I was so distressed. I wasn’t going to harm myself, but I think she saw how I was and thought that I might do something silly—that’s how sad I was. So, I don’t remember anyone being officially told, and I don’t remember anyone in the family bringing up the issue with me. It was a case of: don’t mention the war. But I still have vivid memories of that time with Peter, he was a lovely, sweet young man.”

Carmel ‘Polly’ Shaw in November 2020.

CRIMMO: THE PETER CRIMMINS STORY is available now through daneddybooks.com for just $35 plus postage—the perfect Christmas present!! Also available at books.slatterymedia.com, hardiegrant.com & Hawks Nest shop.