Alf “Spokes” Pedley was an all-round sportsman over many years, with his achievements lauded in the Queensland Times on 14 August 1948. He took up competitive swimming in 1909, and years later came third in the Queensland one-mine championship at the age of 34. He was runner up in the 1st AIF Division field athletics championship 1918, having placed in every event he participated during the meet. Pedley was occasionally seen in the boxing ring and on rugby union fields, but soccer was his main sport.
He was first seen playing soccer for his local club Booval Stars, before moving to the Dinmore Bush Rats junior grade team by 1914 and continuing to be a prolific scorer for many years after the war. His fitness, as reported by the Queensland Times, was attributed to a daily routine of a five-mile jog broken up with “a sharp sprint for 30 or 40 yards, physical jerks, a brisk walk, deep breathing for about 400 yards then back to the jig-jog and a repetition of the formula.
He enlisted at the age of 21 in September 1916 and was assigned to the 9th Battalion. He was one of several Ipswich soccer players in the battalion, including Alf Law, Jimmy Conway, Dave Neilson and Alf Perrett and Pedley’s elder cousin Joseph. His nickname of Spokes was given as a youth as a logical progression of earlier nickname “Peddles (pedals) of a Bike”. It so stuck that he was known as Corporal “Spokes” Pedley in the official history of the 9th Battalion.
Pedley’s war record is relatively empty. He arrived in France in May 1917 where he remained until being wounded in action in August 1918, likely near Amiens. Evacuated to England, he was promoted to Corporal and returned to Australia in July 1919, but not before he was selected to represent the 3rd Brigade against a Belgian team on 11 May. Pedley resumed with the Bush Rats immediately after the war, before joining his cousin Joseph Pedley at Bundamba Rangers in the early 1920s. In 1922 he was selected for the Ipswich and West Moreton team which defeated the touring New South Wales state squad. Such was Pedley’s form in the win, he was selected for the Queensland team in the second inter-state match of the series but the game through injury.
He finally earned state honours against New South Wales on 11 August 1923, starting in a 5-3 loss. Pedley next appeared for Queensland against a Navy team in April 1924 and kept his spot against Canada in June. He was not selected for the tour of NSW that year and would not return to the Queensland team until 1928, when he played the first game of the series against the visiting NSW side. Pedley returned to Dinmore Bush Rats in the mid-1920s and captained the team to the Tristram Shield in 1928. Other than a season at his youth club Booval Stars in 1930, Pedley remained with the Rats until 1933.