Recently, the Hawks Museum received an autograph book that features a page devoted to signatures of the 1944 playing group. 

27 players signed, including Jimmy Bohan, Jack Barker, Stuart Hamilton, Ken Slater, Bob Williams and Laurie Peters.

Of great interest is that this book also features the Club flag and what we think is the first known illustration of the Hawk in the club colours of brown and gold.

There is ongoing debate on who came up with the name ‘The Hawks’. Coach Roy Cazaly made it public in 1943, prior to the Mayblooms taking on Essendon in Round 2, that from that day Hawthorn would be known as the Hawks. 

Cazaly stated that he wanted all players, ‘to live up to that name by being ready to fight hard, swoop and carry the football away with pace and dash forward to the goal’. 

The Mayblooms tag annoyed him. To Cazaly, it suggested that Hawthorn was soft and that, ‘sometimes, we were beaten before we went out onto the ground.’  By July of that year, the newspapers were using the word ‘Hawks’ in headlines.

HFC Hall of Fame Inductee, Bert Hyde, the last link to the 1925 team until his death in October 1989, was emphatic that the affectionate nickname the ‘Mayblooms’ was in use internally when the club made the transition from Association ranks to the League. 

From 1927, the term ‘Mayblooms’ was also given when describing players development in the 2^nd18 or new recruits to the Club as they ‘Maybloom’ for the senior team.  

This term was adopted by the football press when reporting match results and, by the early 1930s, the Hawthorn Football Club became known as the Mayblooms. 

This term of endearment lasted to 1943 when the Hawthorn adopted the Hawk as it’s mascot.

The Hawk has since appeared in many forms with the ‘WEG’ Hawk drawn by the eminent cartoonist Willian ‘Bill’ Ellis Green perhaps the one treasured by many Hawk fans. 

WEG’s depictions of his premiership posters for The Herald newspaper - 1961, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991 and 2008 are highly prized. 

WEG would later draw a set of images for the Hawks Museum for footy cards to mark the Captain’s Pie Night in 1998. 

Since Green’s passing, Mark Knight has continued the tradition of Premiership Posters, executing the famed 3-peat posters.  George Haddon and John Rogers are two other cartoonists who executed marvellous images of the Hawk, with Rogers renowned for drawing the wonderful player images for a calendar produced by the Club in 1988. 

If any passionate Brown and Gold fan has an early image of the Hawk, please contact the Hawks Museum.