A removed section from the original Chapter 7: The 16 Year Struggle to Streamline Rugby League.
Cowan says that at the time of his campaign for one board, the NSW Rugby League was run by a clique. This was a widely held view within rugby league circles at the time. The General Committee consisted of delegates and vice-presidents from every club – more than 40 delegates attended the monthly meetings. It was extremely unwieldy and inefficient. It is difficult enough for a 15-person board to get to good decisions in reasonable time, says Cowan. He recalls his time on the NSWRL executive in the early seventies.
What’s really funny is that for a while I thought that I was in the clique. We used to meet before every general committee meeting and decide what we were going to support that night. There were about eight of us, and we all thought we were involved in the important decisions.
But I found out later that I was never really “in”. The “in” team was quite small. It was a bit like an archery target – you have the inner and outer circle of the bullseye. So, even though I was on the executive, I was on the outer circle. It took me till 1974 to work it out, and one night I publicly resigned from the executive over a decision they made, but I stayed on the committee as a delegate.
The week after his resignation Cowan crossed paths with Jack Gibson, the coach of Eastern Suburbs, who congratulated Cowan on making a stand. He said a lot of people were sick of the fact that a small group were running the league to suit themselves. The clique still existed in some measure until Super League came on the scene in 1995.
Tom Wilson also remembers the workings of the clique. At the time of the Mulgoa Road purchase, he was a delegate to the NSWRL. The league was concerned about the bad state of many of the playing fields and was pushing clubs to make improvements.
Back then, the Penrith ground was leased to us by the Department of Lands. For us to commit to spending any large sums of money on doing anything, we would need them to guarantee us something like a forty-year lease. Anyway, there was some talk of having our own playing field on the new land. When I tried to explain all this at a league meeting, the chairman, Kevin Humphreys, accused me – in his inimitable fashion – of hedging. Basically, he said I was bullshitting. I objected and asked for an apology, which I got.
But of course, that was not the end of it. When we all went downstairs for the usual drink after the meeting, I was completely ostracised. The only person who came near me was Peter Moore [former Canterbury CEO]. It was a strong lesson.
Charlie Gibson was widely regarded as part of that inner circle. He was a good friend of Humphreys, and the man that Mackie and the Super Six recommended for the job of rugby league secretary for Penrith.
Although the new structure fell short of the model Cowan had long advocated, it was seen at the time as a significant step forward.
Both Cowan and the board were pleased with the appointment of Charlie Gibson. He was part of rugby league’s inner circle1, a close friend of Kevin Humphreys, and the man recommended by Mackie and the Super Six for the role of rugby league secretary at Penrith.
The ad appearing in the SMH in August 1980 produced a large number of applicants and resulted in the appointment of Charlie Gibson.
Gibson came with excellent credentials. He had been secretary of the South Sydney club for ten years and was there during the club’s winning streak of four premierships between 1967 and 1971. While the structure fell far short of the ultimate solution Cowan had been fighting to achieve for more than ten years, it was a huge step in the right direction. The Board and Cowan made an agreement that he would concentrate on the licensed club and take no further part in rugby league management. Cowan recalls;
We all thought – great! Charlie really knows his way around the rugby league world and that is what we need. We thought it could be the turning point in our rugby league fortunes.
I thought the board was making a mistake by having him report direct to the board, but I was willing to give it a go. I even agreed to have my contract changed to reflect that rugby league was no longer part of my responsibilities.
Charlie’s role was going to involve a lot of co-operation with the licensed club management in areas of accounting, ground maintenance, and in football-related marketing and promotions.
My vision for the club had always been a structure that united all the expertise available. For example, the club’s catering manager was far better qualified to manage rugby league functions than honorary committees or a rugby league manager. The club’s maintenance and cleaning managers could look after the ground. Financial management could come under the club’s finance manager. Making rugby league successful would require a united effort and a high degree of co-operation.
Problems began to emerge quite early.. They were used to working as a team with overlapping needs, and they felt there was a lack of co-operation that was making their jobs difficult.
The fact is that we were not ready for such a radical departure from the way football was managed in those days.
Although no one realised it at the time, we were again seeing culture at work. This time it was a clash of cultures. Charlie was new to the organisation and we probably should have done more to talk through the tensions that were building. Culture can be a building force but it can also be destructive.
Keith Rhind says that Charlie Gibson was very much a part of the old rugby league ethos. Penrith was developing a culture that was unique, and Gibson often found it hard to adapt. It started out well enough, but eventually the cracks began to appear as the management culture developing at Penrith came into conflict with the rugby league culture that had helped Gibson achieve success at South Sydney.
Tension between the club and rugby league was growing. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. The Gibson appointment would also create a bitter division within the board and ultimately destroy a long-standing friendship between the chairman and Cowan. It would also light the slow-burning fuse that culminated in Detective Sergeant Mick Howe’s raid on the club a few years later.
When the election was held in 1980 for the first joint board, John Hewett became chairman. He had held that position on the licensed club board for the previous ten years, and he and Cowan had become good friends and built a strong working relationship.
Rhind says that Gibson also developed a close relationship with Hewett, taking him to events and functions to meet the high-profile people in his rugby league circles. Hewett was enjoying the attention. Another director from those days describes him as ‘basking in the reflected glory’.
When a Kangaroo tour was coming up, Hewett told others on the board that Gibson was going to use his influence to take him on the tour. It seems likely that Hewett was pushing for this favour and Gibson was doing his best to accommodate him. But there was disquiet among other members of the board, and Gibson himself also appeared unhappy about it.
Looking back, it was a relatively minor issue. Yet it became one of those moments where personality, disappointment and misunderstanding combined to produce consequences far beyond the original dispute.
Hewett believed that he was about to be invited to join league heavyweights on a Kangaroo Tour2, but that belief was against the designs of the heavyweights themselves. When it didn’t happen, Hewett was devastated and the conflict within the Board intensified. His disappointment, and the atmosphere of conflict on the board, caused him to resign as chairman in 1982. But his bitterness remained.
Deputy chairman Barry Hubbard, who was Hewett’s close friend, also resigned, leaving two vacancies on the board executive. Both men remained on the board. Keith Rhind, then deputy chairman, moved into the chairman’s role, which he held until the following AGM. At that meeting, Leo Armstrong was elected unopposed, and would become the club’s longest serving chairman.
Few could have known it at the time, but Armstrong would go on to become the longest-serving chairman in Panthers history and preside over some of the most significant years in the Club’s development.
Nevertheless the tensions that had been building were far from resolved — and the consequences were only just beginning to emerge.
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Despite the promise shown in 1974, the underlying problems did not go away. Ashurst and Stephenson had settled in — the team had shown promise by reaching the finals of the Amco Cup and the budgeting and financial controls were in place. Cowan recommended that it was time for him to hand over to ex-player, Ron Workman.1
The committee agreed and Cowan stepped aside to concentrate on the management of the licensed club.
The potential shown in 1974 was never realised. The first-grade team finished in the bottom four of the competition for most of the seventies.
Cowan’s growing frustration with a system that he considered wasteful, inefficient and noted only for a succession of failures fuelled his determination to convince both clubs of the advantages of a united effort.
If I analyse that history, I can see that the real cause of a lot of the internal problems through the seventies and early eighties was my unequivocal belief that Penrith would never achieve success as a rugby league competitor while it had separate administrations. I harped and nagged boards for ten years before I finally won the argument, and even then, the win was only because of the involvement of the NSWRL [New South Wales Rugby League] executive.
Later critics would portray Roger Cowan as a CEO surrounded by yes-men. The events of the 1970s suggest otherwise. They must have been either unaware of or had forgotten those years. It was an ongoing battle to achieve his ‘one board, one CEO’ ambition. He often thought he would never win. Neither side was willing to make the concessions necessary to bring the two together. Cowan laughs at the ‘yes-men’ tag.
For more than ten years, I did my very, very best – put my absolute best efforts into getting one board, one management. I kept going back, and going back, and it didn’t happen. So, no – they definitely weren’t yes-men.
One time in the late seventies, I was getting so frustrated, I thought I’m really going to make the effort here. I prepared a 19-page booklet for the next board meeting. It had graphs, and charts – every piece of information I could pull together to try and convince them. I was determined to make them see that “this is the only way this club is going to succeed”. I gave it to them a couple of weeks before the meeting to give them time to read it.
On the night of the board meeting, I made sure it was on the agenda. The item came up, and the deputy chairman, Murray Clarke, said: “I move that this document be received”. Somebody else said, “I second that”.
And that was it, there was no discussion, nothing – they just moved on to the next item! I blew my top, lost my temper completely.
It was really stupid putting a 19-page document before a board anyway – boards need concise documents. But I’d tried those for years and they hadn’t worked either.
It took me another couple of years, and a lot more frustrations to win that argument. And we haven’t looked back since. Many other clubs now operate the same way.
Cowan’s commitment to the cause was also used by his opponents to brand him as anti-rugby-league. This is one of the major Cowan myths, and it would be used against him many times by many people. It was also another factor that contributed to his appearance before Ian Temby in 2004. That one small trickle that began as a frustration with failure in rugby league in 1971 combined with some other small trickles along the way, became a raging torrent 33 years later.
Editor’s Note: Roger’s long campaign for “One Board, One CEO” was about far more than administrative structure. It reflected a deeply held belief about accountability, organisational unity and the future direction of Panthers. Readers seeking additional background may wish to read Why One Board, One CEO?
Barry Hubbard says that at one time, Cowan and the board executive even travelled down to the NSW rugby league office in Sydney to talk to Kevin Humphreys [then NSWRL president] to see if there was some way for the licensed club to take over the rugby league club. Hubbard was dead against the idea but still felt it should be explored. Humphreys told them in no uncertain terms that it was impossible. It was unconstitutional, and if they tried, they could be expelled from the game.
Local butcher and prominent cricketing identity, the late Trevor Wholohan OAM2 interpreted Cowan’s trip to rugby league headquarters very differently. His opinion, expressed with his characteristic passion and vehemence, was aligned with those branding Cowan as anti-rugby-league. He declared with his characteristic passion and vehemence, that Cowan’s meeting with Humphreys was “to get rid of rugby league”.
Cowan’s reaction to this was disbelief. He wonders how any rational person could come to such a conclusion.
Imagine meeting with Kevin Humphreys to talk to him about getting rid of rugby league. Any sane, logical person would know that you wouldn’t do that. Humphries would chew you up and spit you out.
Hubbard said Cowan had returned from the meeting with Humphreys undaunted.
Roger was never one to take no for an answer. He had tunnel vision. He went back to the club and resolved to have a meeting with the football committee to decide on holding a joint election for a board that would have responsibility for both clubs.
In discussion, the football committee had agreed, in principle, to hold the electionBut when the actual motion was put to a vote, a division was called, and people were asked to vote by moving to opposite sides of the room. It was narrowly defeated. A couple of the committeemen who had agreed to an election now crossed the floor and voted against it.
The internal squabbling at Penrith – and the poor performance of the team – was becoming an embarrassment to rugby league administrators. The executive of the NSWRL offered to help, bringing in Alec Mackie, a highly respected rugby league administrator, who was chairman of St George and a vice president of the NSWRL. A committee – dubbed the Super Six3 – was set up to find a way forward, with three representatives from each board. Roger Cowan was also a part of the committee. Mackie chaired the meetings, which eventually concluded that there should only be one board at Penrith. The two committees, for the second time, came to an agreement.
When the joint election was held in 1980, the new board comprised all the directors of the licensed club. No-one from the football committee had been successful. It became the first board in rugby league history to handle the affairs of both a licensed club and a football club. However, it was only halfway towards the model that Cowan had been recommending.
I believed that a structure comprising one board employing two chief executives would be just as difficult as having two boards dealing with two chief executives.
In many ways it could even be worse. It missed the whole point of the recommendation.
When the boards came together, that is what they did. Rugby league was controlled through a newly appointed chief executive, Charlie Gibson, while I retained responsibility for the licensed club.
A promising coaching strategy for the 1974 season was derailed by a committee modifying it for the wrong reasons. It was years before its time and it might have been successful had it been given a chance. Here we were in 1980 and I had a feeling it was happening again. The system I had been advocating was being half introduced and again the modifications were for all the wrong reasons. You can’t half bake a cake.
And that was exactly the position the Club found itself in.
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Ron Workman is Panthers player number 13, a member of the 1967 foundation team, he retired as a player in 1973 after playing 93 1st Grade matches. In 1975 he was appointed as the Secretary of the Football Club, a role he held until 1978. ↩︎
Trevor Wholohan was a long-standing critic of Roger Cowan, with tensions between the two dating back to 1974 when Wholohan’s butchery supplied the Club. A dispute over an account led Wholohan to claim that Cowan had impugned his honesty. He later attended most sittings of the 2004 Temby Inquiry as an observer. ↩︎
The committee was in fact: Kevin Humphreys (NSWRL), Alec Mackie (NSWRL), John Jennings (Penrith Distric Club), Tom Ellis (Penrith District Club), John Hewett (Penrith Leagues Club) Rocky Davis (Penrith Leagues Club) — that’s the “Super Six” — and Roger Cowan. Keith Rhind (Penrith Legues Club) was on the bench for this team. ↩︎
Cowan continues with further thoughts on the bad decision to place Clare as head coach:
It was a ridiculous decision. Jack had some strange ideas about the strategies of the game and started clashing with the captain, Mick Stephenson. Mick was a passionate competitor and was quick to argue with Jack if he thought the coach was talking nonsense. Jack said he would take him out the back of the grandstand and sort him out.
My response was something like: “Jack, if you think the answer is to fight our captain, I want you to know that you will be doing it over my dead body”.
It was one of the many signs that we had made a bad decision.
This episode reinforced Cowan’s belief that Rugby League decision-making should be seated in one body, looking after the interests of the entire club.
Tom Wilson gives an example of the way the football committee worked at the time.
Les Boyd was a brilliant newcomer at the time, only a very young kid. The coaching committee had invited him and his father to come to the club to talk to us. His father was a little short stocky bloke. Les wasn’t much bigger, but he was a very strong looking, solid boy. And he had already started to make a name for himself.
We’re all standing around talking, and Pat Russell — who was on the football committee — is down at the end of the bar, holding court. He says to me, ‘Look Tom, look at the kid’s old man, the size of him. This kid will never grow up to be any decent sort of a footballer.
That’s what we were up against. Les Boyd did grow up, and he became an outstanding footballer — a mongrel, but a great footballer. It was only one man’s opinion, but that’s all it needed back then. It was like that all the time — how would the bloody schoolteachers know?
Appointing Jack Clare as head coach, the football committee cited Masters’ lack of first grade experience, saying he only had coached school football. In fact, his credentials were very similar to Jack Clare’s, but Masters had a far better CV.
So, the 1974 season began with Clare in the driving seat. Masters was to look after tactics, Harris coached the forwards, and Wilson the backs.
It soon became apparent that there was a problem, says Masters. The team lost its first four games and conceded a total of 107 points.
So on a wet Sunday at Warragamba, after a club family day up there, Roger gathered all four coaches in his car, and gave us an ultimatum. He said, “It’s obvious that this is not working, and I’m going to appoint Roy as head coach. You can accept it, or we go back to the board – who will no doubt go to the media, and wherever else it goes from there.
Cowan made it clear it was up to them — handle it quietly and confidentially or suffer the glare of media coverage and the uncertainty of how the committee would handle making a new decision.
For the remainder of the season, Harris became second grade coach, Wilson coached third grade and as far as the world knew, Clare was the head coach. None of us ever revealed to the press what the situation really was. We maintained that situation only to preserve Jack Clare’s dignity, but the reality was that I was first grade coach for that season.
The entire Penrith experience is one that Masters would prefer to forget. He felt very let down at the time.
My significant problem was that Roger … didn’t give me any support … I had to make my own arrangements … I just had to cop it sweet.
I thought that I had made a significant investment in a life change and ended up being dumped pretty much high and dry
In a recent exercise to select Penrith’s best team and coach of the past 40 years, Masters is named as the first-grade coach for 1974, but it’s taken 40 years to acknowledge it. Cowan told a meeting held in 2006 to discuss that 40-year team, that Panthers has treated Roy Masters abominably.
Masters speaks highly of Cowan,
I have a very great affection for Roger. But my admiration for him is based on what he’s done for the club since I left, not any problem that I had at the time with him.
See, you’ve got to be measured in this world – you just don’t define your personal history in terms of a couple of years you spent somewhere, and that forever influences your view of a person. You also make observations as you go down the track. And I can’t deny the fact that he, selflessly, with massive amounts of hard work, has built a vast empire.
Roger’s model introduced a revolutionary coaching plan It was a good model, but it was too far ahead of its time in terms of the politics that existed at the club in those times.
It didn’t matter what you tried to do with those people. If you came up with something new — like trying to develop match plans or produce videos — or had any kind of scientific training, you were completely alien. You belonged to a culture they didn’t like, and couldn’t accept. Yet look at the game now, it’s all scientific, all research and video analysis.
The politics during those days of two boards was treacherous … and it was very destructive and soul destroying. Merv Cartwright wasn’t on the committee at the time, but he was still a powerful force behind the scenes.
My experience at Penrith steeled me for the future.
In 1974, the year that Roy Masters came to Penrith, Mike Stephenson and Bill Ashurst also came — from England, to play with the team. Under the direction of Roy Masters, the team made the final of the new mid-week competition, the Amco Cup. They finished in ninth position in the first-grade competition, and had come close to making the semi-finals.
Although the team had its best yet success under Masters, he opted to remove himself from the politics and coach the Under 23 side the following year.
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From early in the 70s, Roger Cowan maintained an absolute commitment to the belief that rugby league would never succeed at Penrith while it was a separate entity. Cowan passionately believed that the secret of success was to integrate rugby league, uniting all the expertise within the management structure.
It took more than ten years to achieve that goal. Yet the struggle came with an unforeseen downside — the move to integrate had a negative impact on some relationships and reputations.
Cowan says there had been consistent failure under the two-committee system, and serious conflict.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had taken the easy path and simply kept out of rugby league. I am not sure that it would have been possible to do that and also protect the interests of the licensed club. In so many ways, the two are interdependent. But if I had found a way to do it, there is no chance whatsoever that the police would have walked through that door in 1985.
I know some very successful CEOs of large clubs who have kept right out of Rugby League. I think they were smarter than me. If Rugby League had been managed openly, honestly and effectively in the first few years there would have been no need for me to ever get involved. But I was never about to lead a team working for the success of the Registered Club and have it all blown away by irresponsible management of football.
As the club moved into the seventies, the licensed club continued its growth. But on the football side of things, the club was struggling
The results told the story.
The team’s best performance throughout the seventies was equal seventh in the 12-team competition, in 1971. It was second-last twice and had collected its first wooden spoon in 1973.
Something had to be done to improve performance and Cowan formed a small strategic sub-committee to focus on new strategies. The group included Cowan, Tom Wilson – who would become the club’s director of coaching the following year, Dave Podmore, a local businessman and Frank Ley, a schoolteacher who was also heavily involved in school rugby league. Podmore, Wilson and Ley were on the football committee.
The group devised a whole new concept of coaching.
The plan was to appoint a panel of coaches. The head coach would lead a team of specialist coaches – one for backs, one for forwards, and one skilled in tactics and strategy. The panel would oversee all three grades of football, and each would train the players in their specialty.
This was a new concept for Australian sport and structurally very different. There were similar systems used at the time in American football. Balmain coach Jack Gibson1 had also spoken in support of such a coaching system, although he never actually used it. It is now in common use in all football codes.
The system was introduced in time for the 1974 season.
Roy Masters, who would become a prominent Sydney sports journalist2, was part of that 1974 coaching panel. Barry Harris – a former state representative – was to be the forwards coach, and Wilson, already established as a coach, would oversee the backs. The fourth member of the team was Jack Clare. Clare was popular in the world of rugby league and seen as a ‘nice bloke’. He had been chairman of selectors with the Balmain club but had no experience coaching at grade level. He had coached high school teams and had only ever played five first grade matches.
Cowan and the strategy team wanted Masters as head coach. He had coached a number of successful school teams, notably the Australian schoolboys’ team that returned unbeaten from a tour of England in 1973.
Tom Wilson remembers that some of the group travelled to Tamworth to meet with Masters, who was teaching high school there at the time.
We spoke to Roy for 40 minutes on the sideline of a training session. We watched the session, and Masters didn’t say a thing to the team the whole time. They went through 43 moves – and dropped the ball once. What an efficient team!
Roy had developed a completely different way of doing things. It was a real management concept. We convinced him to leave Tamworth and come to Penrith to head up the new coaching panel.
But it would not prove that easy! Wilson continues,
When they got back and started to work on the new strategy, the old brigade came out fighting, “What would some schoolteachers and a couple of businessmen know about football?” The committee was prepared to go along with the new coaching concept but personality clashes within the committee caused a poor decision that derailed the strategy. The decision was later corrected by Cowan in quite extraordinary circumstances, but the strategy did not recover.
Masters says there were problems from the start.
The pervading culture on the football committee at that time was anti-intellectual. If you were a schoolteacher, you were gone from the start. There was one particular person on the board who really had it in for me. He was very vocal and wielded a lot of power.
There was something like 16 men on that committee, and most of them were the same.
It was never going to work. Frank Ley – who was a teacher – signed me. Roger, the club secretary, had also been a teacher, and here was I, another one. They just would not accept me. And it was all down to the prejudices of this unbelievably insidious committee.
It was even worse than that, says Cowan.
Frank Ley was unpopular with the committee, and he was seen by the committee as the driving force behind the appointment of Roy Masters, so the vote to appoint Jack Clare as the head coach was really a vote against Frank Ley. Personal prejudices easily won the battle over logical argument.
Headline SMH Herald 11 October 1973 – click image to read the article
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Jack Gibson did not coach Balmain. In 1973 he coached Newtown and in 1974, he was in his second stint as coach of Eastern Suburbs. ↩︎
Roy Masters later became a prominent journalist and columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald and is now based in Melbourne. ↩︎
A removed section from the original Chapter 5: Building the Basics — Business Principles and Property. This examines the challenges faced in negotiating with Council over the Station Street site.
Roger reflected that certain individuals within Council held the view — and perhaps the expectation — that he would eventually be taken down a notch or two. To this day one aspect of this attitude irks Cowan, describing it as one of his worst memories.
While others involved in the negotiations may have viewed the issues differently, Roger believed the Club received little recognition for its contribution to the community. In his view, the charges and conditions imposed during the sale and development process reflected a lack of support for what Panthers was attempting to achieve.
I think the Club was treated very unfairly by Council. Before we could start building on Mulgoa Road, we had to sell the Station Street site. Council made it extraordinarily difficult. One of the conflicts related to two roads on the Station Street property. One of them was no more than a line on a map. It had never been a road. But the only way we were going to be able to sell that property was to negotiate with Council. The price Council sought was $850,000 — around a quarter of the total amount the Club expected to receive for the entire property.
I tried everything to get a better deal. I told them of a similar case where a club had been able to negotiate an agreement with its local council to close a road for the nominal sum of $1, as a sign of support for the club.
Our involvement in our community was far greater than that of the other club. For instance, we had previously agreed to a joint venture with Council to build a Police Citizen’s Boys Club in Penrith. It was the first boys club ever built without the need to raise funds from the public. We were sponsoring most sports in the area. On top of this the Club’s work to get Penrith to the elite level of rugby League had dramatically increased the city’s profile. I thought we had earned the right to support from Council, rather than obstruction. The city was benefiting on a number of levels from the work we had done, and it was giving nothing back. In fact it was profiteering from our planning.
I told them what we were planning to do would be a tremendous boost for Penrith. But all they saw were the problems, rather than the advantages.
The roads incident was not the only problem imposed on us by Council over that property sale. Another episode contributed to a very nasty police investigation a few years later.
One of the key issues underlying these negotiations related to what are known as paper roads. Paper roads are sections of land set aside by councils for roads in the future. According to Pat Sheehy:
Council planners had discovered the paper road in earlier negotiations for the property. It meant that Panthers did not own the whole site, with the result that Council said “OK, if you want to buy that land back from us, this is what we’re going to charge. All this happened before I was on council, but as far as Panthers was concerned it was absolutely exorbitant.
Robinsons 1957 Street Directory showing Frederick St ( a “paper road”) between Station & Wooddriff Sts. The other street in the negotiation was Park St.
Cowan said the problems extended beyond the property sale and continued into the approval process for the new site:
Council imposed a per hectare sewerage fee on the property based on the total area of land we owned. We were planning to build the club on an area of about 8 hectares. Most of the land was flood-prone, so you couldn’t build on it anyway. But we were hit with this huge bill, based on 86 hectares.
We had to negotiate to defer the payment, but this also became an issue. Even though we eventually came to an agreement, there are still people on Council who believe that Panthers ripped off the Council over that sewerage fee. Under the circumstances, that’s quite laughable
These issues illustrate the complexity of the negotiations and the differing perspectives that would continue to shape relations between the Club and Council.
There was one more monumental event for the Penrith Leagues Club in the seventies.
In 1971, the club became aware of a property on Mulgoa Road that was for sale for around $2 million. It was nearly 100 hectares, with large sections of swampy dairy farmland. Parts of it extended all the way to the Nepean River.
In Cowan’s eyes, Mulgoa Road was destined to be a major link in the future. The part of the property fronting Mulgoa Road, about 10 hectares, had already been zoned for residential development. Because of the residential zoning, he saw the purchase as a low-risk strategy, although it would be a massive investment for such a small club. The land would provide enormous development options for both the registered club and the football club. He became a passionate advocate of acquiring the property.
When he first floated the idea of buying the Mulgoa Road property, most people thought he was crazy. The price on the property was $2.25 million, not an amount that could be shrugged off easily. It had to be financed and the Club’s bankers refused. Undaunted, Cowan negotiated to transfer financial dealings to another bank where the management could see that the Club was going places and was worthy of support.
The criticism came from many quarters. One local newspaper ran the headline, “Roger’s Pipe Dream”.
‘People called it Frog Hollow’, says Don Ellks, one of the senior managers at the time. He says people were either laughing or sceptical. ‘It was very difficult to convince the Board, but Roger persisted and eventually won out. It showed enormous vision when he was being ridiculed from every quarter.’
Don Feltis, later a director at Panthers, was at the time a member of the police force in Penrith. He remembers a police inspector friend telling him the purchase was the worst decision the Club ever made. ‘It’s too far out of town. No-one is going to go that far to go to a club.’
Anyone who has ever visited Panthers’ Penrith club, exiting the M4 and travelling along Mulgoa Road, will know that the club is the focal point of a thriving commercial centre outside the city’s CBD.
But in 1971, once it left Penrith’s main street, Mulgoa Road was little more than a country road. It paralleled the Nepean River, heading out in the direction of Warragamba Dam. Along the way it passed through Wallacia, with its impressive Tudor-style hotel, seen by some at the time as an alternative to Medlow Bath’s Hydro Majestic for honeymoons and romantic trysts.
Former director Tom Wilson agreed that many people thought Roger was mad when he proposed the purchase.
But they thought he was mad about a lot of things. At one time we went and had a look at Australiana Village, out along the Hawkesbury near Windsor,when it came up for sale. We looked at buying other land in Penrith too, but at the time we thought it might be overextending. But Roger could see how that whole area was going to go ahead.
Phyllis Cowan remembers that Jamison Park — now one of Penrith’s major parklands with playing fields and recreational areas — was also considered by Cowan as a possibility to expand the club. It was covered in thick scrub and even further out of town.1
There was a lot of discussion about the land purchase, Max Connors recalls.
Many people in town were against it and some on the Board were not sure. But Roger was very persuasive, he saw it as a great opportunity.
Barry Hubbard said the criticism came from locals, club members and from Council. People were saying,
Why on Earth would they want to buy that swamp? You’ll never be able to build anything on it.
The view from corner of Mulgoa & Jamison Rds looking west. (Unknown source.)
After about four months of deliberations, the Board finally agreed to the purchase.
Penrith Rugby League Club 1973 Annual Report – middle page spread. Main image shows the Mulgoa Rd property with various points of interest. The smaller images are an early aerial shot of Penrith Park and an artsis impression of a club design. Click image to enlarge.
Hubbard’s first visit to the property did not go well. He had seen the property from the road, but once the decision was made, he and another director, Murray Clarke, decided they wanted a closer look.
We were in Murray’s four-wheel drive. We drove in about 100 metres, and the car was up to its axles in mud. “You’d better get out and have a look”, Murray said. I stepped down, and I was up to my knees. We eventually got the car out, and I went back to the club to clean myself up before I went home.
The boardroom had its own bathroom, so Hubbard decided to wash his trousers in the basin. It was the classic scenario of ‘one of these days, you’re going to get caught …’ . When sprung by the chairman, in his boxers, doing his laundry in the washbasin, he explained that he had just inspected the club’s new site.
Phyllis Cowan says she could never have imagined in 1971 what the Club would become. She could see the drive her husband had, though.
I think that Roger knew, right from the start. And I think if he was still there, he’d still have the same dreams and visions. He was always very conscious of what it was doing for Penrith, that it was putting the area on the map. His sense of community was very strong. Even in the early days he often talked about Penrith becoming a major centre in the state, and how the Club could help.
Pat Sheehy has been on Penrith Council since 19872, he says:
Panthers has been an asset to the city of Penrith for the very simple reason that people found out where we were. So, we benefited as a community by that exposure – and that advertising didn’t cost us anything.
The relationship between Panthers and Council has at times been symbiotic, and at others almost parasitic, says Sheehy.
What stage it was at depended on where you were standing. Often Panthers thought that we were the greatest mongrels on Earth, and just as often council thought the same about Panthers.
But the two have worked together on many community projects and are always ready to forget their differences in times of local crisis, such as bushfires and floods.
Council was particularly opposed to the development of a club on Mulgoa Road. One of the reasons given was the land’s proximity to the Jamison Hospital and the noise that a new club might generate. But the current club was quite close to the town, in what was essentially a residential area. Ellks says the neighbours were already starting to complain about the noise, and there were some problems with young people hanging around in the street. The Club was growing, so the complaints could only increase.
Although he wasn’t on council at the time of the purchase, Sheehy was living and working in Penrith, and has heard much of the history from council colleagues.
Roger had the vision for that land long before anyone else ever saw it. All the pundits around town were saying, “What do they want to move there for? It’s on the edge of bloody town, no-one’s going to go there”.
He was able to cut through a lot of the wowserism that was current in council in those days. I would think that most councillors were middle-aged men in grey suits, who were not really into the whole club scene.
And he had no background in clubs – it was quite brave. What he was seeing was enormous potential, where most of us were still seeing the country town where we’d grown up. He had this whole concept of what Panthers could become, which I don’t believe was shared by many people. He certainly had to convince the board – and he didn’t get a lot of support from the people on council at the time.
Yes, he was definitely seen as an upstart. Especially wanting to set up this huge expanse of club-land. They thought he was biting off more than he can chew, driving too far, too quickly. To some extent, I think the belief – and hope – in council was that this bloke will end up being put in his place.
That thinking was to continue, at least in some quarters, over the entire Cowan years at Panthers. One particular aspect irked Cowan for the rest of his life — how Council managed the disposal of two roads on the Station Street property. For further background seeBeyond the Book — Negotiating with Council: The Station Street Road Closures.
With the purchase of the Mulgoa Road property going ahead, Roger Cowan faced the prospect of raising the money to develop the site. Cowan came up with some unusual ideas about how to do it, says Tom Wilson.
Anyone who knows Penrith knows that there’s vast deposits of sand and gravel under the land all along the river, right through to Castlereagh. The quarries on the northern side of the city have been operating for many years. One of Roger’s early concepts to finance the development was to mine some of the blue metal under the new site. The idea was to sub-contract the work out to BMG, who would take it over the river to Emu Plains and process it.
The concept did not get very far. There was no way it would ever be approved, given the position and the need for thousands of noisy trucks plying back and forth on the edge of town, holding up traffic on the narrow bridge across the river. But he said it was typical of Cowan’s style, to look beyond what’s in front of your face and see what could be.
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Jamison Park already included playing fields, the scrub referred to here was at the southern end of the Park. ↩︎
Pat Sheehy retired from Penrith City Council in 2008. He passed away in 2025. ↩︎
The removal of Merv Cartwright (Secretary) and Ron Partridge (Treasurer) from their respective roles with the Penrith District Rugby League Football Club occurred against the backdrop of a broader and more complex set of issues than is immediately apparent in the main narrative.
While Cartwright became the central public focus of the dispute, the Board’s concerns also extended to the financial administration of the football club more broadly, including the role of Treasurer Ron Partridge.
Contemporaneous Board papers and meeting records from the period indicate a growing concern among Directors regarding both the financial management of the Club’s football operations and the processes by which financial commitments were being made.
At the centre of these concerns was the relationship between the Licensed Club — which generated the revenue — and the District Rugby League Club, which was responsible for football operations. While this arrangement had supported the Club’s early growth, it also created a structural tension: financial responsibility and operational control were not always aligned.
By the late 1960s, the Board had become increasingly uneasy that commitments were being entered into without sufficient oversight, and in some cases without formal authority. This was not framed as a single incident, but as a pattern that had developed over time.
Internal analysis presented to the Board suggested that the Club’s financial position was more fragile than it appeared. Liabilities associated with player payments, bonuses and sign-on fees were, in the Board’s view, not being fully or consistently reflected in financial reporting. When assessed against normal operating income, there was concern that the Club could not meet its existing commitments without significant restraint.
These concerns were reinforced by a pattern of escalating expenditure. Board discussions from the period refer to sharp increases in allocations to football operations, alongside uncertainty as to how those figures had been determined. Directors questioned both the reliability of the budgeting process and the basis upon which commitments had been made.
In response, the Board moved to assert clearer control over financial decision-making. Proposals and subsequent resolutions emphasised that:
no contracts or financial commitments were to be entered into without explicit Board approval;
committees operating within the football structure were to act within clearly defined limits;
and all funds were to be subject to centralised oversight and reporting.
These measures were not presented as routine administrative adjustments, but as necessary steps to address what was seen as a deteriorating financial and governance position.
At the time the NSW Rugby Football League (NSWRFL) was responsible for the debts of all District Clubs — and should Penrith Rugby League Club Ltd (Licensed Club) stop funding the Penrith District Rugby League Football Club (District Club), the Board was confident it would not prevent the District Club from operating. It could, however, trigger intervention by the NSWRFL as administrators of the Penrith District Club.
Within this context, the recommendation to cease funding unless Secretary Merv Cartwright and Treasurer Ron Partridge resigned can be understood not as an isolated or sudden decision, but as the culmination of these concerns. This was not an easy decision for the Board, a fact reflected in the final paragraph of the Board Resolution.
Penrith in the 60s was, in many ways, still a country town. Some of the trains were still steam hauled, and holidaymakers would pass through on their way to the Blue Mountains – or stop off and catch the Bales’ bus out to one of the many guesthouses at Wallacia, some ten miles out of town.
Through 1963-64, Roger Cowan continued teaching while acting as honorary treasurer of the football committee. What started out as an amicable relationship with Merv Cartwright gradually deteriorated into frequent clashes.
The registered club’s main function in those days was to finance rugby league.
In 1964, the registered club committee had agreed to a football budget of £10,000 and player contracts were agreed within that budget. Payday for the players was planned for the traditional end of season picnic on the banks of the Hawkesbury River — Bungool1.
When Cowan went to the club administration to organise the cheques for the players, he was informed that they didn’t have the money. He had no warning of the problem. Merv Cartwright who sat on the registered club committee and was also secretary of the football club, would known much earlier that the Club was in financial trouble — yet the football club had been allowed to proceed on its merry way without any warning.2
Before this Cowan had never thought about getting into club politics. It was this failure — the inability to meet its obligations to the players — that first motivated him to stand for election onto the committee of the licensed club – ‘to understand how £10,000 could be promised and not paid’.
He was elected, and soon after asked to take on the role of treasurer. It quickly became apparent that the club had virtually no systems of control. Dishonesty was widespread, enabled by the absence of basic procedures.
I started to look into why the club wasn’t making any money. We were losing money hand over fist. The bank was threatening to take action.One of the first things I did was to install control systems for poker machines. This included a monthly analysis of each of the 26 machines to ensure they were operating within carded percentages.
I also put as much time as I could into getting some systems operating. There was no system for stock control, no cash systems, there was nothing. I began with cash systems. We started to count the money, and balance it against the cash register tapes, and so on. Basic stuff, but it had never been done.
Cash control was a simple system before then. When trading finished for a shift, the cash would be taken to the vault and tipped into a large container with all the cash from other cash registers. Nobody checked the cash register tapes to see if there was a balance. Each morning the money in the container would be counted and banked.
Rumour has it that one employee boasted that he never bothered taking less than a twenty pound note when he wanted some cash. He bought a new car in less than 12 months working as a bar steward. After getting a system started, I came in one Sunday morning and discovered a £1,700 discrepancy between the cash register tapes and the money we had. That was a lot of money in those days for such a small club.’
At a special meeting, the board decided that the Secretary-Manager Rocky Davis wasn’t managing things properly, and asked for his resignation. There was no suggestion of dishonesty, only mismanagement.
The Club immediately advertised for a replacement. But the small size and low profile of the Club meant that the quality of candidates was not very high. After three months of advertising, they had still found nobody suitable. In the meantime, Cowan continued holding things together in his spare time – evenings and weekends – and continued to improve the systems.
I was doing the job anyway, as well as teaching. I was convinced in my own mind that I could put systems in place to make the place work. So I just said to the committee one night, “I’m prepared to resign from teaching. I’ll take the job for a trial period if you want to give it to me. And I’ll give you a guarantee that if I’m not making a profit within three months, I’ll resign and you can keep looking”. I agreed to commence on a very low salary.
That was October 1965. The Board agreed, and Cowan remained in the position continuously for almost 40 years.
There is a logical question here, of course. Here is a young man – 29 years old, married, four young kids. He’s a schoolteacher, which is a reasonably secure job for life. He suddenly decides to turn his whole life upside down. There is no contract, no security of tenure – just ‘give me three months to make a success of it. If not, I’ll go’.
Phyllis Cowan says it was the challenge.
He loved school teaching, he was an excellent teacher, but he didn’t like the system. I don’t think he wanted to be doing that for the rest of his life. Many people advised him against it at the time. But he always could have gone back to teaching, she said –- it was easier back then.
It was the challenge that attracted him, and kept him there, she said. He was being successful, the club was making money, it was growing, and he was introducing all these new measures. She spoke of a couple of nights in the early days when he took a blanket and pillow and sat on a roof where he could watch for the people that he knew were stealing stores from the club.
Under Cowan’s stewardship, the club began to more stable financially. The systems he implemented, some while acting as treasurer and others when he took the management role, had already begun to have an impact on the profitability of the business.
Within a year, the club had moved out of the red. For the first time, it had the financial stability needed to think beyond survival.
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Bungool’s location was at Cattai on the Hawkesbury River where Riverside Oaks Golf Resort is today. ↩︎
This failure became evident at the end-of-season Bungool picnic, when players could not be paid in full. See Beyond the Book:The Bungool Picnic. ↩︎
Founding figure in Penrith rugby league; Secretary, Penrith District Rugby League Football Club (1967–1970)
Mervyn Earl Cartwright was one of the key figures in the early development of rugby league in Penrith. A local player, administrator, and advocate for the game, he played a central role in the campaign that led to the Penrith Panthers’ admission to the NSWRL competition in 1967.
He served as the club’s inaugural secretary and was widely recognised as a driving force behind rugby league’s establishment in the district.
Role in the Narrative
Merv Cartwright appears in the early phases of the Panthers, Passion and Politics narrative as a key figure in the club’s formation and early direction.
His contribution sits primarily within the “growth” stream of the story — the push to establish Penrith as a first-grade rugby league presence. At the same time, his period of influence overlaps with the emergence of tensions between football ambition and financial governance — a theme that would become increasingly significant as the club developed.
Background
Born: 1927 Died: 2011
Cartwright grew up in the Penrith district and was closely connected to local rugby league from an early age.
• Played junior and senior football in the district • Became club secretary in the 1950s while still a player • Continued as Secretary of the Penrith Rugby League Football Club from 1967 to 1970 • Returned to Club governance as a Board Member 1992 – 1998
He was one of the signatories to the formation of the Penrith Rugby League Club Ltd in 1967 .
Recognition by Panthers • Life Membership, Penrith Panthers (1955) • Merv Cartwright Medal is awarded to the best player each season (named 2012) • Named a Panthers Legend (2026)
Relevance to Events Described
Cartwright was a driving force in the campaign to bring Penrith into first-grade competition. He played a visible role in promoting the club, including maintaining a strong media presence during its early years .
During his time as secretary, the club operated in an environment where expectations between football operations and financial governance were not aligned. By the end of the 1960s, these pressures had intensified. Expenditure on football activities exceeded agreed limits, and tensions developed between football operations and the licensed club board over financial oversight and decision-making.
In 1971, Cartwright resigned from his role as Secretary of the Football Club. The circumstances surrounding his resignation were more complex than this summary suggests, particularly in relation to the Club’s financial position and governance arrangements at the time.
This conflict echoes through later sections of the Panthers, Passion and Politics narrative.
Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 