New podcast: The Essendon Football Club trainer who was a quack doctor, drug fiend and serial crook
Long before the 2012 Essendon doping scandal, one of the football club’s first trainers became a quack doctor who injected patients with fluid from crushed animal testicles to boost testosterone levels. NEW PODCAST LISTEN NOW.
Black and White
Don't miss out on the headlines from Black and White. Followed categories will be added to My News.
One of the Essendon Football Club’s first trainers was a quack doctor, con artist, drug fiend, rapist, burglar and suspected murderer.
The colourful life of Carl von Ledebur is the subject of the latest free episode of the In Black and White podcast.
Von Ledebur claimed to be a doctor and injected the pulverised testicles of animals into patients, supposedly to boost testosterone and other hormones.
The strange story has come to light thanks to Melbourne writer and historian Michael Shelford delving through old police files and newspapers.
“I think he’s one of the more horrible characters I’ve ever come across,” says Shelford, the creator and guide for Melbourne Historical Crime Tours.
“But it doesn’t make him any less entertaining from a historical point of view.
“Mostly I think he was a psychopath.”
Carl von Ledebur, also known as Charles Rowell, arrived in Melbourne in 1883 carrying a sword on his hip, bragging that he hailed from a wealthy, aristocratic German family.
By the time he was hired as the trainer for Essendon in 1891, he had already served significant jail time for burglaries.
Shelford says it was before the era of coaches, and trainers were a new concept.
“You could almost say that in some ways he had some of the roles that a coach would have today,” he says.
Von Ledebur presumably did a decent job as trainer, because Essendon’s 1891 team won their first ever VFA premiership under his care.
But von Ledebur apparently continued his criminal caper while trainer at Essendon, and was arrested three weeks after the final game that year for repeatedly stabbing an Essendon shopkeeper during a bungled late-night robbery.
Luckily for him, a jury found the shopkeeper’s wife’s identification unreliable and he was acquitted.
His name cleared, von Ledebur continued as trainer at Essendon, who won three VFA titles in a row in 1891-1893 under his care, and a fourth in 1894 after he left.
After leaving, von Ledebur immediately set up a thriving business in Tasmania as an “electrotherapeutical medical practitioner”, adding “Dr” to his name.
“That was actually treating people’s various ailments through electricity – galvanic batteries, giving them shocks, running electric currents through their bodies,” Shelford says.
While it’s unclear if von Ledebur conducted his controversial “medical” treatments on Essendon players while trainer at the club, Shelford suspects he did.
“I would assume that he was probably using something similar with the Essendon team as well,” he says.
Soon afterwards, von Ledebur started spruiking a strange new treatment for disease – “hypodermic injection of organic liquids extracted from glands”.
Animals’ testicles were pulverised with a mortar and pestle and the resulting fluid was then filtered and injected into patients.
PLAY TODAY’S NEW FREE EPISODE OF THE IN BLACK AND WHITE PODCAST ON VICTORIA’S FORGOTTEN CHARACTERS TO LEARN MORE.
And listen to our previous podcasts including the story of Australia’s Willy Wonka, or try the piano prodigy who became a “musical spy” in World War II, or the one-legged gang called the Crutchy Push that menaced Melbourne’s streets.
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here or Spotify here or on your favourite platform.
Check out In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday to see more stories from Victoria’s past.