When C.J. Dennis’s verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke was launched in 1915, it went off “like a packet of firecrackers”, as the book’s illustrator observed.

This gently humorous story about a larrikin in love gave the nation something to smile about during the horrors of World War I. It sold 1,000 copies a week for its first year and quickly became Australia’s best-selling book of verse, a title it still holds.

The bloke in this Australian classic is Bill, whose infatuation with Doreen transforms him from tough larrikin to doting husband and father, (without improving his language). Part of Bill’s appeal was his turn of phrase – “stoushin’ Johns” for fighting police or “moochin’ round like some poor barmy coot” to describe his aimless, lovesick wandering.

Until Dennis’s book, larrikins had been generally regarded as street thugs. By popularising a larrikin with a softer side and a good heart, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke helped open the way for Australians to embrace the term more widely.

Bill later featured in Raymond Longford’s classic silent film version of the book, as well as plays, another film, musicals, a TV adaptation and several Australian Ballet productions. Dennis, who died in 1938, consistently said this character was based on a real person. But he never revealed who.

Now, with tenacious detective work, independent researcher Gary Fearon has tracked down the original Sentimental Bloke. Fearon invited me, as Dennis’s biographer, to collaborate on an article about the model for the bloke, forthcoming in the Victorian Historical Journal.

Dennis’s inspiration for his character was, in fact, an itinerant horse trainer and sometimes labourer named William Edward Mitchell. He had a police record for drunkenness, gambling, fighting and abusive language. And while the fictional bloke chose respectability and found domestic bliss, there was no such happy ending for Mitchell.

Dennis told interviewers the idea for the character came from a rough horse trainer he met in 1909 when he was a struggling freelance poet living in an abandoned sawmiller’s hut in Toolangi, outside Melbourne.

A young man arrived and briefly trained a couple of mediocre racehorses on a neighbouring farm. The poet enjoyed his extensive slang and tales about “the Chinese joints and two-up schools of Little Bourke Street”.

According to Dennis:

the trainer fell genuinely in love with the farmer’s daughter, and one day when the farmer caught him kissing her down in the stable he promptly kicked him........

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