In Black and White podcast: The slum ‘boss’ and footy great

She lived in the lawless shanty town where Docklands is today. He was a Richmond football great dubbed “Captain Blood”. But they forged an unlikely friendship. NEW PODCAST SERIES

A resident of Melbourne’s Dudley Flats in 1936. It’s now the home of the upmarket Docklands precinct.

“Captain Blood” was hard as nails on the football field, but the feisty slum “boss” who became his mate and occasional bodyguard was every bit as tough.

Flamboyant singer-turned-jailbird “Black Elsie” and Richmond great Jack Dyer formed a strange friendship of sorts when he worked as a policeman in West Melbourne in the 1930s while also playing football.

Elsie Williams lived in a ramshackle hut at Dudley Flats — where the Docklands are today — a wasteland that became a lawless shanty town during the Depression.

Dyer often rescued the violent drunk when she wandered out of the slum into civilisation and caused trouble for residents, escorting her back to her makeshift home.

In turn, Black Elsie would step in and defend her policeman “mate” when some of the scores of criminals, drunks and lost souls who lived at Dudley Flats threatened him harm.

In his biography, the late Tigers player and coach described Black Elsie as the “boss” of Dudley Flats, even though there were blokes “built like brick toilets”.

Dyer remembered Black Elsie considered him her “mate” and appreciated the way he treated her with dignity. In turn, she often gave him bags of mushrooms she had picked for him.

Jack Dyer in action.

Elsie Williams, aka "Black Elsie". Picture from Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp by David Sornig.

In one memorable incident, Black Elsie stepped in to protect him when a violent drunk, surrounded by a pack of hostile reinforcements at Dudley Flats, had gone “berserk” and had it in for Constable Dyer, who was armed only with a truncheon.

“We came face-to-face and he was going to kill me!” Dyer recalled in The Jack Dyer Story, by Brian Hansen.

“Suddenly, Black Elsie arrived on the scene … and screamed at him: ‘You leave Jack alone. He treats us decent.’

“About 40 of the Flats’ inhabitants had gathered … but Elsie was fiery. ‘I mean it — don’t you touch him!’”

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The lives of Black Elsie and other residents are explored in a recent book called Blue Lakes: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp by Melbourne author David Sornig.

Sornig believes the unconventional bond between Dyer and Elsie, a talented singer who fell on hard times and spent half her adult life in jail, reveal he saw her true nature.

A mug shot of Williams. Picture: Public Record Office Victoria

Dyer was a police officer as well as playing for Richmond.

“He would encounter her on the streets of North Melbourne and help her to get back down to Dudley Flats so she wouldn’t be picked up for vagrancy,” Sornig says.

“It seems as if during those walks they had together they would have great conversations.

“So I think what Jack Dyer probably saw in her were all the aspects of her humanity, so the violent parts and the shameful parts of her life, but also the really intelligent parts of her. The whole human I think he saw.”

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One of the last people to speak to Elsie before her death in 1942 was Melbourne’s Phyllis McIlvenie.

Like many of the local kids, Phyllis, then aged about 10, was terrified of Black Elsie after her mother warned her she had slashed the face of a tram conductor with a razor she kept in her stocking, and gone to jail.

Listen to Phyllis McIlvenie’s extraordinary interview in a new podcast miniseries, In Black and White, bringing to life the untold stories of Black Elsie and other forgotten Melbourne characters.