The footballing Cole family has lost its patriarch with the passing of William Cole Sr

Vale William Cole Sr, the Pioneer Football Club legend who started a family playing dynasty that lasts to this day

The 1947 Pioneer premiership side. William Cole is fifth from the left in the back row.

WILLIAM (Willy) Cole, the last survivor of the 1947 Pioneer side that won the first three premierships in the Central Australian Football League, has died aged 95 after a long illness.

The patriarch of the Cole family that played important roles in several star studded Pioneer sides, Willy Cole returned to captain-coach the Alice Springs Eagles from working in the mines in Tennant Creek to win three more flags as a playing coach.

His heritage came from the Luritja tribal group on his mother’s side and Irish from his dad.

Born at Bloods Creek, south of Finke, in 1926, he moved to Tennant Creek as a youngster where he only played rugby league and cricket, the only sports on offer in the town.

The legendary Henry Peckham, who Willy Cole always said was the best Territory footballer he ever saw, was the man responsible for teaching the Alice Springs “Gap” Aboriginal players — mostly ringers and station hands training in elastic sided boots or truck drivers like Willy in hob nailed boots — how to mark and kick the ball in a dusty Gap paddock.

That was when Mick Costello officially initiated the birth of the Pioneer Football Club in 1947.

Willy Cole and his wife Eileen had 15 children, including 9 boys, all of whom played footy for the Eagles.

Pioneer has won 31 senior premierships, making them one of the most successful football club in the Northern Territory and Australia.

Willy won the CAFL’s best and fairest Minahan medal in 1957 at age 31, a feat his son Owen repeated in 1971 aged 18 before his 20-year-old grandson Joe Cole made it a family trifecta in 2008.

His other sons Wormy, Rossy, Maxie and Mickey all played NT representative football and were important cogs in the very successful Pioneer premiership teams in the 1980 and 1990s.

Another grandson, Michael MacLean, who focused more on basketball and rugby league in Darwin, played for the Melbourne Tigers and Cairns Taipans in the NBL before switching from basketball and rugby league to, remarkably, play in the Darwin Buffaloes’ last NTFL premiership side in 2005-06.

Joe Cole’s brother and another grandson, Richard, was drafted to Collingwood as a top 10 pick in the first round of the 2001 AFL Draft and later played 56 league games for Collingwood and seven for Essendon.

William Cole’s funeral service is set down for today (Thursday) at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Hartley Street from 10am.