John Loh, one of the great characters of the club's formative years, died early this week (27/11/2003).
John arrived at the Royal Park Reds, as we were first known, at the start of our second season in 1980. He was well known on the Melbourne left and union scene as an activist in the Victorian Builders Labourers Federation rank-and-file group, which had supported Jack Mundey's model of militant democratic unionism and opposed the bureaucratic tactics of the infamous Norm Gallagher. John was an "Aussie original", thin with curly brown hair, a laconic way of speaking and a wit as dry as a bag of unmixed concrete. He thoughtfully brought with him a complete second XI, "the mountain men" as he called them, a collection of union activists and other ratbags who had played together on a social basis, though many would have starred in our nominal "firsts".
John was their natural leader, and his side was implacably loyal to him as skipper, most refusing all our blandishments to "come up to the firsts". A shrewd character, he was hell to negotiate with over team selection, although there was always the consoling thought that we only had to do it once a fortnight; the bosses on his building sites had to negotiate with him every day. True to his anarcho-syndicalist principles, John stepped down from the captaincy after a couple of seasons in favour of a rotational system where every player captained for a game. The system failed miserably, but it did unearth a fine successor to John whom no-one had previously thought of in Peter Persson.
John was given to flashes of quixotic inspiration. At our one and only attempt at a presentation dinner, he threw a hundred years of cricket tradition out the window and rather than present his stars with gaudy trophies for the mantelpiece, gave them each a bouquet of flowers.
As a cricketer, John was the archetypal Reds middle-order bat. His innings promised much but were invariably cut short, often by his unrequited love affair with the drive wide of mid-on. By dint of sheer perseverence, he turned himself from an end-of-training net bowler into a very handy off-spinner with over 100 wickets to his credit. All were taken with a quirky goose-stepping delivery stride that gave his bowling action the jerkiness of a 1930s wind-up toy.
When the club split amicably in the mid-1980s over selection policy, John naturally remained with the Royal Park Reds at Poplar Oval as one of their elder statesmen while we in the Reds headed off to Fawkner Park. John was probably the first Red to have the pleasure of playing in the same team as his son when Joe joined him at Poplar Oval.
On the union front, John recognised the Victorian Labor government witchhunts of the 1980s against Norm Gallagher and the BLF for what they were, and became a prominent BLF organiser, facing serious charges along with John Cummins and John Sitka as they fought to keep the union alive. John possessed an intelligent sense of his audience, and was one of the best presenters on 3CR's builders' labourers program. Tony Roberts, another Reds stalwart of the 1980s, now edits many union journals at Publicityworks and reckons that John's entertaining contributions to the CFMEU journal were always a blessed relief from the sludge served up by many union officials.
We have heard that John died at his home in Northcote, his body being found by his longtime mate John Cleary. We don't yet know the cause of his death. Our sympathy and best wishes go to Laila, Joe and all of the Royal Park Reds.