Once Were Lions: The Players’ Stories: Inside the World’s Most Famous Rugby Team

Once Were Lions: The Players’ Stories: Inside the World’s Most Famous Rugby Team Jeff Connor Martin Hannan Drawing on first hand interviews from more than 75 British Lions tourists since the golden age of the fifties, this book captures what it means to be a British Lions rugby player – the historic victories, the glorious failures and the stories surrounding the icons of rugby such as Edwards, Bennett, Hastings, Guscott, Dallaglio and Johnson.The British and Irish Lions are one of the most famous and recognised teams in world rugby.Every four years, the Lions – selected from the national sides of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland – head to the southern hemisphere to do battle with either New Zealand, Australia or South Africa. In Once Were Lions, acclaimed sportswriter Jeff Connor interviews a host of players – from the oldest surviving Lions from the 1946 tour and the icons of the game to those who have become mere footnotes in history – and draws out the compelling human stories from each Test series.It’s a book that captures the ups and downs of tour life: the pride of being a Lion, the numerous personal feuds and the many humorous anecdotes, taking in the historic wins and the ignoble losses. Many Lions had their lives enriched by having worn the famous red jersey; an equal number had their lives changed irrevocably in the opposite direction.Full of previously unchronicled stories – Des O’Brien was away from home for nine months on the 1946 tour which almost cost him his marriage; while in 1966 one well-known English winger ‘went off tour’ with a woman he met in a bar and reappeared only for the last two matches – the book concludes with the disastrous 2005 New Zealand tour and trenchant opinions from the players on the controversial Clive Woodward.Thanks to a host of amusing and heart-breaking anecdotes about life with the Lions, the book offers a fascinating insight into how touring, sport and life has changed in the last 60 years. ONCE WERE LIONS Jeff Connor & Martin Hannan CONTENTS Foreword by Finlay Calder OBE Preface The men who once were Lions Chapter 1-First twenty years of the Lions 1888–1908 (#ulink_a8b5f47a-0933-50c0-86a2-6d90085a1ed3) Chapter 2-Then they were Lions 1910–1938 (#ulink_0d607f9f-4a34-5d36-98e6-1cc8f52334e8) Chapter 3-Karl Mullen’s Happy Band Australia and New Zealand 1950 (#ulink_8984b232-3d30-5594-b727-5bdaf3417a0a) Chapter 4-Robin Thompson’s Quality Street Gang South Africa 1955 (#ulink_e7b4fd28-0d98-5f73-9072-a17935273032) Chapter 5-Ronnie Dawson’s Proud Squad Australia, New Zealand and Canada 1959 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6-Arthur Smith’s Big Boys didn’t cry South Africa 1962 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7-Mike Campbell-Lamerton and how the Lions were mauled Australia, New Zealand and Canada 1966 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8-Tom Kiernan’s Frolicsome Brigade South Africa 1968 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9-John Dawes and The Great Revival New Zealand and Australia 1971 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10-Willie John Mcbride’s Legends South Africa 1974 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11-Phil Bennett’s Bad News Boys New Zealand and Fiji 1977 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12-Bill Beaumont and The Bad Luck Tour South Africa 1980 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13-Ciaran Fitzgerald’s Men Cut Down New Zealand 1983 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 14-Finlay Calder: No Compromise Australia 1989 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15-Gavin Hastings and the tale of two tours New Zealand 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16-Martin Johnson’s Marvels South Africa 1997 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17-Scribblers for Martin Johnson’s Lions Australia 2001 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18-Speared by the all Blacks: Brian O’Driscoll New Zealand 2005 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19-Lions for ever (#litres_trial_promo) Index Roll of Honour and Archive of Results Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) FOREWORD By Finlay Calder OBE Captain, the British and Irish Lions in Australia, 1989 (#u08566c90-f7df-5e7d-9dd3-3ee52a0521da) On 15 July 2006, I sat in the Caledonian Club in London, surrounded by friends from the British and Irish Lions who had toured Australia with me some seventeen years previously. Rory Underwood apart, the rest of us had long given up on our youthful looks, and much water had passed beneath the bridge since those wonderful days back then. It was a night of great warmth, more than a few drams: an evening of mutual respect, trust and friendship. Before we said Grace, I suggested that in the intervening years, probably not one of us has escaped the passing of time. In truth, most of us at some stage must have trod a pretty uncomfortable path, whether that had been in terms of health, wealth or indeed happiness. But why should a British Lion be different from anyone else? The truth is of course, he is not, and just like everyone else, they are burdened with the trials that come along in this life of ours. To quote Max Ehrmann: Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born out of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. A night like that in London reminded us all just how privileged we had been in our lives to have come in contact with this wonderful pastime. This book, Once were Lions by Jeff Connor and Martin Hannan, perhaps underlines that although some may have suffered at times, all Lions, I’m sure, will have felt privileged to at least have been given the chance to have worn the famous red jersey in their rugby lives. Finlay Calder, January 2009 PREFACE THE MEN WHO ONCE WERE LIONS (#u08566c90-f7df-5e7d-9dd3-3ee52a0521da) There is no such thing as a ‘former’ British and Irish Lion. Like the kings and queens of Britain, once you are a Lion you always stay a Lion, except that you can never abdicate Lionship. That is entirely fitting, for to be a Lion means to be a king, if only of the wonderful, glorious, many-hued jungle that is rugby union. In this book you will find no references to ‘former’ or ‘ex’-Lions. To us, the men who once were Lions on the field have stayed Lions in name and status ever since. Since the day they pulled on the Lions jersey, through the many vicissitudes of life—in this book you will read of some who have suffered—they have carried the title of Lion. It is an honoured name, revered indeed. It marks out every one of those who once were Lions as a breed apart, special men, and no one can ever take the name away from them. Let us say at the outset that this is not a definitive history of the British and Irish Lions, nor is it meant to be. Works such as The History of the British Lions by Clem Thomas and his son Greg, and British Lions by John Griffiths, are the standard Lions histories and we are not trying to compete with them. Indeed we are indebted to Clem, Greg, John and all the many, many writers, journalists, biographers and memorialists who have chronicled the Lions in the past 120 years. This book is a history of a kind, though. It is the story of extraordinary men in circumstances which for many of them happened just once. It is tale of happy and sad experiences, all of them life-changing in a way, because once a man becomes a Lion, he is altered and exalted, and joins a roll of honour bedecked by comparatively few in rugby. There is no going back to being ordinary once you are a Lion. For that reason we have ignored an old convention that a person only really becomes a Lion when he plays in an international Test Match. For us, to be named a Lion it is enough that a player pulled on the jersey no matter the opposition—W.S. Gainsford was injured in the very first training session of the 1924 tour to South Africa, and never played for the Lions, but he was deemed worthy of selection for the tour so his name is on the Roll of Honour at the end of this book. Gerald Davies, who will manage the Lions on their forthcoming tour to South Africa, put it succinctly: ‘The Lions are the best of the best, and those who are selected for the Tests are the best of the best of the best.’ This account is in great part the players’ own history of the Lions. It is very much their first-hand story, told by the Lions themselves in a series of interviews given over the past few years to Jeff Connor and in 2008/09 to Martin Hannan. We conceived of this book as a written record of history provided by the Lions themselves, and that is why we mention the views of administrators, coaches and commentators, such as rugby correspondents, only when they are relevant to what happened to the players. It stands to reason that we have been unable to interview any Lion from before the Second World War. Where necessary—for instance in the first and second chapters—we have augmented their recorded views with contemporaneous reports. We have also taken on board the views and thoughts of some relatives of the Lions, on the entirely justifiable grounds that the men themselves are sadly no longer with us. For some of the Lions, assisting the authors of this book has been the first chance they have taken to talk about their experiences. Whether or not their words are controversial, let no one doubt the sincerity of their views. We are greatly indebted to Finlay Calder OBE for his support for this project from the outset. He has been a great friend over the years to Jeff Connor in particular, and you simply could not meet a more honest, modest and loyal a man. Almost twenty years on from his magnificent captaincy of the Lions in Australia, he remains one of the few men to bring back a winning series from the Antipodes. We are also indebted to all those Lions who agreed to be interviewed for this book. We know it brought back happy memories for the majority, and less happy thoughts for others. To them all, we extend our sincere thanks. We should say that no Lion has been paid for their contribution to this book. Instead, we are making a donation from the royalties to the Lions Trust, the excellent charity which works to look after the interests of all the British and Irish Lions. The more books that are sold, the bigger the donation, so please recommend this book to your friends. We trust that the players give some insight into the importance of the British and Irish Lions in world rugby. At first sight, the efforts of teams drawn from five nations in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland against the representatives of three English-speaking lands in the southern hemisphere might seem unimportant in the great sporting scheme of things. And more than a few misguided people have described the Lions in terms of an outmoded concept in this era of professionalism, the World Cup and annual tours by individual nations. If that is so, why do the Lions still matter to so many people? Touring to other countries is still very much a practice of rugby clubs everywhere, and perhaps the best experience an ordinary club member will enjoy. The Lions are the ultimate tourists, and as the players say, it is their great tradition and history which has made the Lions tours something of massive importance to millions of people, not least the thousands who follow them on their travels. There is also the small matter of bragging rights in world rugby, and as anyone who has ever played the glorious game will tell you, such rights count for much more than Mammon or trophies. In recent decades, apart from England’s World Cup triumph in 2003, long-term precedence in world rugby has lain south of the equator, which is possibly another reason why the performances of the British Lions against the might of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa still count for so much. The World Cup may now bring the greatest accolades, but for many people in these islands and among our southern cousins, the ultimate trial in rugby will always be one of the three main southern hemisphere teams against the Lions, that unique touring side that represents the best in British and Irish rugby. It is also why the International Rugby Board considers the Tests played by the Lions to be full ‘cap’ internationals and recognizes them as such in the record books. Anyone who doubts the importance of the Lions need only read the views of the players themselves to realize what it means to be involved in what they variously describe as the ‘ultimate’ or the ‘crowning moment’ of a career. We have also compiled some thoughts on the future of the British and Irish Lions. Based on our discussions with the Lions, we make suggestions as to how the great traditions can be carried on for another century. At the time of writing in 2008, the next tour to South Africa is already in the advanced stages of planning, and in Ian McGeechan and Gerald Davies we feel that the Lions Committee has found the perfect combination to coach and manage the tour. We wish them every success. We have also asked every Lion to whom we have spoken to nominate their choice of the best Lion in their own position and the person they consider as embodying the spirit of the Lions—the greatest Lion of them all. Obviously, very few people alive, never mind Lions, saw the early tours, so the choice was restricted from the first post-war tour in 1950 to the latest tour to New Zealand in 2005. Apologies to any claimants from before then. We are well aware that rugby people in different countries prefer to give different names to the various positions. For sake of convenience, we have used the English style of description, such as fly-half rather than stand-off, outside-half or first five-eighth. The form British and Irish Lions is also used throughout this book, even though that name was not formally adopted until 2001. Similarly, although the name ‘Lions’ was not minted until 1924, we have adopted the custom of referring to earlier tourists as Lions. It may not be historically accurate for the pedants, but it is now accepted usage. As is convention, we have referred to the various touring parties down the years by the name of the squad captain, thus Finlay Calder’s 1989 side. No doubt some coaches might think in terms of Carwyn James’s 1991 team or Ian McGeechan’s 2009 squad, but this is one book where players are given precedence. In similar fashion we have stuck to the official Lions Committee’s definition of what were formal Lions tours, although we make mention of ‘non-tour’ matches, such as the 1986 one-off game against the Rest of the World, and give details of the tours before 1910 when the first fully representative official tour recognized by the four home unions took place. In common with most authorities and historians, we do not recognize pre-war matches played in Argentina as being tours by the Lions, though the pre-2005 tour match against the Pumas is recognized as a full Lions Test and after their Herculean efforts in the World Cup, we do strongly feel that some way should be found of including the South American side in future Lions itineraries. It will not have escaped the notice of Lions fans that the 2009 tour to South Africa comes 99 years after that first official tour to the same country. The number 99 has become part of Lions folklore, and in this book you will learn precisely why. We would particularly like to thank everyone at HarperCollins for their unstinting support and professionalism, especially Tom Whiting who commissioned the book and Nick Fawcett and Colin Hall who edited and designed it. In the course of our joint researches, it is remarkable how many times we heard one word used to describe the Lions, both individually and as teams. That word was indomitable, and as Lions, many have displayed that quality both on the field and off it. These men once were Lions. To us, they still are Lions and always will be. Jeff Connor and Martin Hannan January 2009 CHAPTER ONE FIRST TWENTY YEARS OF THE LIONS 1888–1908 (#u08566c90-f7df-5e7d-9dd3-3ee52a0521da) The British Isles gave rugby to the world. Of that there is no doubt. The trouble is that, as with so many sports invented or codified in these islands, the world insisted on taking ‘our’ ball and running away with it. It happened fairly early in rugby union, when it soon became clear that France and a few Empire countries had mastered rugby and the pupils were only too anxious to teach the ‘masters’ a thing or two. Despite the present ascendancy of the southern hemisphere countries, the number of British and Irish ‘firsts’ in rugby constitutes a history to be proud of, including William Webb Ellis’s glorious disdain for the rules in 1833 which marked the beginning of the sport of rugby union; the first international played in 1871 at Raeburn Place in Edinburgh with Scotland beating England; both those nations competing for the first international trophy, the Calcutta Cup, in 1879 and ever since; the foundation of the first Unions; and the first schism over professionalism which led to the establishment of rugby league in 1895 in the guise of the Northern Rugby Football Union. The honour of being the first truly international ‘tourists’ did not go to any of the home unions, however. In 1882, a team from New South Wales in Australia crossed the Tasman Sea and played seven games against club and provincial sides in New Zealand. The concept of the rugby ‘tour’ was born. Six years later, in 1888, what has become recognized as the first Lions tour took place. It is remarkable to reflect that in that long gone heyday of amateurism, it was two professional cricket players doubling as sporting entrepreneurs, Arthur Shrewsbury and Alfred Shaw, who proposed and organized the first ever tour by a team from the British Isles. They had seen in Australia how popular matches against the England cricketing side had proved, and proposed to the Rugby Football Union that a similar exercise should be tried with rugby players from the British Isles. The latter part of Queen Victoria’s long reign saw the British Empire at its zenith. Migration to the Colonies by entire families was a regular feature of life in Britain, and certainly the nabobs of the Colonial Service and the various armed forces loved nothing better than to take their British traditions with them. So it was natural that the fast-developing and already very popular sport of rugby football should be exported to countries like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand where the climate suited the game. Attempts to establish rugby in other warmer colonies such as India largely failed—the Calcutta Cup is made of the melted-down silver rupees of the Calcutta Rugby Club which disbanded in 1878 after just five years of existence. The colonials, both immigrants and natives, considered themselves equal subjects of the Queen Empress, and liked nothing better than to prove their prowess against the ‘old country’ on the cricket pitch in particular. In retrospect, the two entrepreneurs were knocking at an open door when they decided to try and repeat the success of touring cricket teams with a rugby side. To promote their case, Shrewsbury and Shaw enlisted the help of a very popular sportsman, Andrew Ernest ‘A.E.’ Stoddart of Middlesex County Cricket Club and Blackheath Rugby Football Club, who was with them in the English cricket side in Australia and who would go on to captain England at both rugby and cricket. He was, by all accounts, a born leader of men. The politics of rugby organization at that time explain why the RFU’s permission was sought, rather than the International Board which had been formed by the then Scottish Football Union and their Irish and Welsh counterparts in 1886. The RFU haughtily refused to join the Board until 1890 and still saw themselves as the supreme body of world rugby. In truth, so did most people in the fledgling sport. Perhaps surprisingly, given its reputation for extreme conservatism at that period, the RFU gave a sort of tacit approval for the first tour, in so far as they did not try to ban it. They stopped well short of fully sanctioning the tour, however, and issued stern warnings about the issue of payment to the players—the promoters could make a profit, but the participants could not. Many Lions will tell you things have not changed. The RFU’s overriding concern about any such tour was a perceived threat to the amateur status of players. Driven by class considerations as much as anything, at that time the rules on combating professionalism were incredibly strict as the various rugby unions fought against even those who wanted to at least compensate players for loss of earnings. Anyone who took so much as petty expenses for playing rugby was summarily banned sine die, while a player could be deemed professional, and thus expelled from rugby, if he even took part in a game where any one of the other 29 players was being paid. It was massive discrimination against working people in an age when club and Union officials were uniformly middle or upper class and could afford their time off work. Politics, professionalism, arguments over expenses, debates going back and forth with the sport’s administrators—these themes will recur again in this book. Shrewsbury, Shaw and Stoddart employed an agent to find players in the then heartlands of the game, the Scottish Borders and the northern counties of England. Some 22 men signed up from ‘working class’ clubs such as Swinton, Salford and Hawick. Since the tour was going to last eight months, it is inconceivable that some form of compensation was not paid to men who, in some cases, surrendered jobs to take part. From the outset, an important principle was established. The tourists would be ‘British’ with, initially, players from England, Scotland and Wales. Shrewsbury and Shaw had realized that a team of such a nature would appeal to the large expatriate community in both Australia and New Zealand, Scots being particularly prevalent in the latter country. In the end, the party consisted of sixteen players from English clubs, four from clubs in Scotland, and one each from Wales and the Isle of Man, W.H. Thomas and A.P. Penketh respectively. Two of the Scots, the Burnetts of Hawick, became the first brothers to tour together for the Lions, while among the ‘English’ players were Irish-born Arthur Paul and Dewsbury’s Scottish exile Angus Stuart, so from the start the tourists really were British and Irish, though not yet known as ‘Lions’. At the last minute the RFU put the whole tour in doubt when one of the 22 tourists, J.P. Clowes of Halifax, was declared a professional and thus cast into the rugby wilderness. His ‘crime’ was to accept ?15 in expenses for his kit for the tour. And given the draconian ‘catch all’ nature of the rules on professionalism, every player who played with him or against him would face a similar sentence. The RFU Committee made their point clear in a statement recorded for posterity in the minutes: ‘The Rugby Football Union has decided, on the evidence before them, that J.P. Clowes is a professional within the meaning of the laws. On the same evidence they have formed a very strong opinion that other players composing the Australian team have also infringed those laws and they will require from them such explanation as they think fit on their return to England.’ That decision was announced just one day before the party was due to sail. The British and Irish Lions were almost strangled at birth by officialdom, and the whole affair heightened feelings on the issue of ‘broken time’ payments, among other things, which would lead to the foundation of professional rugby league just seven years later. Not for the last time, the world’s most famous rugby tourists had sparked controversy. Anxious not to slay their golden goose, Shaw and Shrewsbury reacted by pacifying the RFU while honouring their commitment to Clowes, who went Down Under with the party but did not play in a single match under rugby football rules—nice work if you can get it. The touring party left Britain on 8 March 1888, and returned on 11 November. In their time in Australia and New Zealand, the first Lions played 35 rugby matches, winning 27, drawing 6 and losing 2, scoring 300 points for the loss of 101. The tour was split into three sections, the first sojourn of 9 matches in New Zealand followed by 16 in Australia and then back to New Zealand for 10 games. The first ever match played by the Lions was against Otago in Dunedin on 28 April 1888, the score being 8–3 to the visitors. The honour of being the first team to beat the tourists went to the Taranaki Clubs of New Zealand, victors by a single point. Auckland was the only other home side to triumph, in the final match of the first leg of the tour. From then until they embarked for home, the tourists were unbeaten. It was a fine record, but much more important was the effect the tourists had on rugby in those faraway lands. The rules of the game were somewhat different in those days. A try, originally known as a touchdown, only gave a team the right to ‘try’ a conversion, which could earn the scoring side two or three points and was known as a goal. The confusion over scoring was because there were differences in the scoring system between various countries, with a penalty goal worth two or three points in some countries, and a drop goal worth up to four depending on where you were playing. The first standardized scoring across the rugby world did not arrive until 1891 after England’s RFU joined the International Board, when a try was set at two points; a ‘goal’, i.e. try and conversion, earned five points; a penalty was worth four; and a drop goal also scored four. There were also variations in the rules and refereeing standards and practices between north and south—another constant refrain that still bedevils rugby. In the early tours, the home sides made the adjustments to accommodate the tourists, who had developed forms of play which the other countries considered as breaches of the offside law. It was the Lions heeling from the scrummage that proved most controversial on the first tour, but the New Zealanders in particular soon became masters of this imported art. The first tourists had expected that Australia would prove the tougher part of the tour, but in the end it was New Zealand, where immigrants and natives alike had taken to the sport with great gusto, that proved a far more difficult territory. Their provincial sides in particular learned quickly from the visitors, not least the marvellous passing game among the backs. This was a revelation to the New Zealand teams, which had concentrated on the ‘dribbling’ game involving gangs of players moving the ball forward with their feet or with the ball ‘up the jumper’. Opinions vary as to how much the tourists imparted to their hosts—‘I challenge anyone to tell me what the 1888 side taught us’ wrote subsequent New Zealand captain T.R. Ellison, though one of his successors as captain, Dave Gallaher, wrote ‘the exhibitions of passing which they gave were most fascinating and impressive to the New Zealander, who was not slow to realise the advantages of these methods. One may safely say that, from that season, dates the era of high-class rugby in the colony.’ If Gallaher is to be believed, then the first tourists accomplished something wonderful for world rugby, as they played their part in helping to create the passion for good rugby which still permeates the sport in New Zealand. For their role in bringing about the players who became the All Blacks, those first tourists deserve our thanks, though not many of New Zealand’s humbled opponents over the years might agree. A triumphal progress, then, but one tinged with tragedy. In August, the captain of the side, Bob Seddon of Lancashire, was out rowing on the Hunter River in New South Wales when his scull capsized and he was drowned. He was by all accounts a popular figure, and his loss was deeply felt both by the tourists and their hosts—a memorial was erected to him in the nearby town of Maitland. Some 120 years later, it is well maintained by local enthusiasts. Seddon’s place as captain was taken by A.E. Stoddart, who went on to become the star of the tour with his all-round skills. As one of the triumvirate who had put together this first tour, Stoddart may well have made some money, but if so, he was not saying. When some of the tourists tired of their schedule, he also invited a friend from the cricket world to come and play for the Lions—which is how C. Aubrey Smith, the gentlemanly actor of Prisoner of Zenda fame, otherwise known as Sir Charles Aubrey Smith KBE, a future captain of England’s cricket side, became the only Hollywood star ever to turn out for the Lions. After all the travel—it took six weeks to sail there and back—the tourists returned to some plaudits for their pioneering efforts but also a strict ruling by the RFU. Every player who came back to Britain was forced to swear an affidavit on their return stating that they had not been paid for playing on the tour. The RFU were satisfied though suspicious, and one player did not have to sign—Angus Stuart stayed on in New Zealand and played for its national side in 1893 before returning to Britain and taking up rugby league as a coach. One final element of controversy emerged from that first tour, and the RFU at last found something to get really angry about. While in Victoria, the players took part in exhibition matches of football played under Victorian or what we now call Australian Rules. It was in these matches that C. Aubrey Smith made his appearances for the Lions, never having actually played rugby before. The surprising thing is how well the visitors managed, winning 6, drawing 1 and losing 11 of the 18 matches which undoubtedly lined the pockets of Shrewsbury and Shaw and may well have enriched some of the players. No one really knows what went on in the background, but as a touring entity, the side from Britain and Ireland was undoubtedly a profitable enterprise—for some. The seeds had been sown by these first tourists, and the full flowering of the touring concept did not take long to emerge. In 1891, with the full approval of the RFU, a second tour was planned, this time to South Africa at the invitation of the Western Province Union, the South African Rugby Board being still in its infancy. As before, it was a previous visit by an England cricket side which inspired the thought of a rugby tour, but in those days South Africa was probably bottom of the rugby heap. The matches were not expected to be close as South African rugby was so far behind that of Britain and Ireland. It was feared no one would want to see a mismatch, and Cecil Rhodes, one of the richest men in Africa and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony as well as an ardent imperialist, had to step in to underwrite the whole tour. The exercise thus became something of a missionary outing, with the tourists keen to show the colonials just how the game should be played, in the hope they would learn quickly and become stiffer opposition in years ahead. They certainly did that. With official sanction, and former RFU Secretary Edwin ‘Daddy’ Ash as manager, this time most of the tourists were better exponents of the game than their predecessors. Drawn entirely from England and Scotland, there were 9 internationalists in the squad of 21 players, with the remainder all from big clubs and a sizeable contingent from Cambridge University’s then dazzling squad. Students could also usually afford to take a long break from their studies, and it is obvious from the fact that so few ‘northerners’ appeared in the squad that the bitter struggle over ‘broken time’ payments—compensation for lost wages—was already affecting the selection policies. This tour introduced a new concept to world rugby—the international Test series. A team representing all of South Africa—though this technically was not an independent country in its own right—would play the Lions three times in the course of the tour, losing all three Test Matches. Despite the fears of disparity between the teams, large numbers came out to support the home sides, with 6,000 reported to have attended the first Test. There was also great excitement about the tour across South Africa, with the considerable political differences between the various regions such as the Cape Colony and the Transvaal being set aside for the duration. The statistics do not lie. The Lions went unbeaten through all 20 matches, notching 226 points for the loss of just 1, and that in the opening match against the Cape Town Club. It remains the most one-sided tour to date. Captained by Bill Maclagan, who had played 26 times for Scotland, the visitors were just too big and strong, too skilful and experienced, for the willing but technically unsound South Africans. In only one match, on brick-hard ground in Kimberley against Griqualand West, did the visitors feel in any real danger, the Lions eventually winning 3–0, though Stellenbosch in the final match actually held the visitors to just 2–0. A bigger problem for the tourists was the many days of backbreaking travel in horse-drawn vehicles between the various venues, as well as the generous hospitality of their hosts. Centre Paul Clauss described the tour as ‘champagne and travel’, and some fans would say that this succinct description of Lions tours has never been bettered. Without a doubt, the tour transformed South African rugby, not least because of a gift made by a shipping magnate. The party had travelled on the Dunottar Castle of the Union Castle Line, and its owner donated a magnificent trophy to be presented to the province that performed best against the Lions. The tourists selected Griqualand West, who became the first proud owners of the cup competed for by the South African provinces to this day and named after the man who donated it, Sir Donald Currie. More importantly, the South African rugby players took to heart all the lessons they had learned from the 1891 Lions. One of the Lions, the Rev. H. Marshall, wrote that the tourists had ‘initiated the colonists of South Africa into the fine points and science of the rugby game’. Maclagan and his men did their missionary work all too well, as subsequent touring parties would find to their cost. The third tour was again to South Africa, which could be reached in 16 to 17 days by boat rather than the 6 weeks it took to sail to Australia or New Zealand. Well organized and funded by the various provincial unions across South Africa, the 1896 tour was memorable for several reasons—it featured a sizeable contingent from Ireland for the first time, it included the first defeat of the Lions in an international Test, and the whole exercise officially made a profit, showing that the Lions were by now welcome visitors wherever they went. The touring party featured players only from English and Irish clubs and was missing those players from the northern English clubs who had ‘defected’ to rugby league on its formation in 1895. The choice of players for touring also reflected the massive infighting that had split the RFU from the SFU—the name Scottish Rugby Union was not adopted until 1924—and the Welsh Union over issues related to professionalism. The squad was captained by Johnny Hammond of Blackheath and Cambridge University, who at 36 was the oldest Lions captain to date. Irish vice-captain Tom Crean, already an internationalist with nine caps, actually led the side on more occasions, age presumably having withered Hammond. Though we will learn more about his heroic nature, Crean, it should be said, must not be confused with his contemporary fellow Irishman of the same name, who accompanied both Scott of the Antarctic and Ernest Shackleton on their Polar expeditions. One of the Lions tourists, Cuthbert Mullins of Oxford University, was actually a native of South Africa, and he later went back home to practise as a doctor. It is perhaps an insight into the inclusive nature of the Lions as representing all of Britain and Ireland that, on arrival in South Africa, the three Roman Catholics in the party—Crean, and Louis and Eddie Magee—wanted to attend Sunday mass rather than take part in an excursion. The management decreed that all religious people would be able to attend their various churches that morning and the excursion would start later. The Lions, it seemed, happily answered to a Higher Power. That Power looked kindly on them. The Lions went undefeated through the tour until the final game. They had beaten South Africa in three Tests, and won against every provincial side except one, Western Province, which gained a 0–0 draw. They had scored 320 points for the loss of 45, yet such apparently one-sided statistics hid the fact that South African rugby had vastly improved. In their final match in Cape Town, the Lions found out just how much the sport had moved on in South Africa. Wearing their famous green jerseys for the first time, South Africa were led by Barrie Heatlie, who rejoiced in the nickname ‘Fairy’—it is not known why. His side had developed their forward play to such an extent that the Lions buckled, and when the referee, Alf Richards, who just happened to be a former South African internationalist, ruled against the Lions’ favourite tactic of wheeling the scrummage, things began to look bad for the visitors. South Africa then gained a controversial try, not least because the scorer, Alf Larard, had been reinstated as an amateur on immigrating to the country from England where he had been involved in the row over ‘broken time’ payments which had led to the establishment of rugby league the previous year. Also, by a strict interpretation of the rules, the ball had been won from an offside position before being passed to Larard for his try, which was converted. The visitors mounted a late rally, but could not score. South Africa had beaten the Lions 5–0, and the victory caused a sensation across that country. The row over the debatable score rumbled on for days, and some would say has never stopped, as the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere nations still disagree over the laws of the game and their interpretations. We are indebted to Walter Carey, one of the tour party, for an insider’s account of the 1896 tour. He would eventually make his home in South Africa as Bishop of Bloemfontein and is most famous for coining the motto of the Barbarians: ‘Rugby is a game for gentleman in any class, but no bad sportsman in any class.’ Carey wrote that the tour had been ‘very happy’ and praised the ‘scrupulously fair’ play of the host teams. He added: ‘I hope and pray that South African teams will always play like gentlemen.’ His missionary zeal is perhaps understandable, given that he did become a clergyman. Carey also described the tour’s star player Tom Crean in glowing terms as ‘the most Irish, the most inconsequent, the most gallant, the most lovable personality one could ever imagine and made the centre of the whole tour’. Over the years the Lions have featured many such personalities, and a goodly number of them have been Irish. Sadly, within a few years of that happy tour in 1896, South Africa was torn apart by the Boer War. It seems almost incredible that so soon after their tour as Lions, several of the 1896 touring party were back as combatants. Two of them, Tom Crean and Robert Johnston, both won the Victoria Cross for acts of gallantry in that conflict—it was not just on the rugby battlefield that Lions were heroic. Crean in particular appears to have been practically born heroic. Blessed with good looks and a magnificent physique, Crean was what the Irish call a ‘broth of a boy’, who loved nothing better than good wine, good company of both sexes and plenty of singing. In short, an ideal Lions tourist. From Dublin, he had just qualified as a doctor in 1896 and he had already been decorated for heroism. At the age of 18, he received a Royal Humane Society award for saving the life of a 20-year-old student who had got into difficulties in the sea off Blackrock in Co. Dublin. He enjoyed South Africa so much he stayed on in Johannesburg and, in 1899, joined up as an ordinary trooper, seeing action at the Relief of Mafeking and being wounded in battle. Serving as a surgeon captain in 1901, Crean won his VC for continuing to attend to the wounded under fire. Presented with the medal in 1902 by King Edward VII, his citation read: Thomas Joseph Crean, Surgeon Captain, 1st Imperial Light Horse. During the action with De Wet at Tygerskloof on the 18th December 1901, this officer continued to attend to the wounded in the firing line under a heavy fire at only 150 yards range, after he himself had been wounded, and only desisted when he was hit a second time, and as it was first thought, mortally wounded. As if that wasn’t enough, Crean went on to win the Distinguished Service Order and commanded the 44th Field Ambulance brigade which served in the trenches in the First World War. He was again wounded several times. Sadly, his health failed as a result of his wartime injuries, and he began to drink heavily and developed diabetes. His private practice in London failed, and he was declared bankrupt shortly before his death in 1923, aged just 49. You will read in this book of how life after the Lions has often been an anti-climax for individual players, but that could not be said of war hero Crean. It was said at one time that the two most famous men in South Africa were Cecil Rhodes and Tom Crean. Crean’s heroism as a player and in combat were not forgotten—in the third of their special Boer War centenary commemorative stamps issued by the South African Post Office in 2001, he was one of two people honoured with their own stamp. Amazingly, the other Lion to win a VC, Robert Johnston, was a member of the same club as Crean, Wanderers. Born in Donegal, Johnston celebrated his 24th birthday on the Lions tour and he and Crean became fast friends. Indeed, they joined the Imperial Light Horse together, and served through various battles including Elandslaagte. It was there that Johnston won his VC. The citation read that at a critical moment when the advance was checked, Johnston ‘moved forward under heavy fire at point blank range to enable a decisive flanking movement to be carried out’. After initial treatment to his wounds, Johnston was transferred to a field hospital where the doctor who treated him was none other than Tom Crean. His friend’s treatment proved successful, as Johnston made a full recovery and after serving as a prisoner of war camp commandant, he lived until 1950. The unexpectedly long duration of the Boer War did not prevent a fourth tour taking place, though in 1899 the venue was Australia rather than South Africa. The squad was captained and managed by the Rev. Matthew Mullineux who had toured in 1896 and was then a member at Blackheath. Reverend Mullineux was perhaps not the best player around, never receiving an England cap, but he was at least a modest realist. In the first Test against Australia in Sydney, he could not perform to the same level as those around him, and having seen his team soundly beaten by 13–3, Mullineux promptly dropped himself. England international Frank Stout took over as on-field captain for the remaining three Tests, all of which were won by the Lions to give them the first Test series victory in Australia. The touring party featured representatives from all four home nations, but the star of the side was the sole Welsh international, Gwyn Nicholls of Cardiff, who brought a new dynamism to the position of centre. He ended the tour as top try scorer, with C.Y. Adamson of Durham gaining the most points thanks to his prodigious kicking. On a tour where the Lions won 18 of their 21 matches, scoring 333 points for the loss of 90, Adamson amassed 135 points by himself, a tour record that would stand for many years. It might seem incredible to modern sensitivities, but just a year after the cessation of hostilities in the Boer War, a Lions squad toured South Africa. The war may have split South Africa asunder, but it wasn’t going to get in the way of the national passion for rugby. And just as the spectacular victory of South Africa in the 1995 World Cup did much to heal wounds in the post-apartheid era, so did the 1903 tour help the normalization process after the Boer War. It also helped that, for the first time, a host country defeated the Lions in a Test series. Captained by Mark Morrison of Scotland, the 1903 Lions featured internationalists from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but none from England. Led by Morrison, the forwards gave a good account of themselves, though South Africa’s scrummaging power was beginning to become a mighty weapon. In the backs, however, only Reg Skrimshire of Wales could match the South Africans, whose passing and kicking skills had vastly improved even in the short space of four years. In the first Test in Johannesburg, South Africa were captained by Alex Frew, who had played alongside Morrison for Scotland in their Triple Crown-winning year of 1901. The Lions had suffered several reverses and injuries in the provincial matches before that first Test, and would go on to win just 11 of their 22 matches on tour. Both the first and second Tests were draws, which set the scene for a tense closing encounter in Cape Town. Digging out the green jerseys which they had worn in their first victory over the Lions back in 1899, the South Africans were well prepared, but became nervous when a downpour turned the pitch into a quagmire—conditions which were thought to favour the players of Britain and Ireland. Thousands of spectators watched from beneath umbrellas as South Africa persevered with their game plan, which involved their much better backs. Though the Lions had a try disallowed and there was yet more controversy over the winning try by South Africa, which came off a suspiciously forward pass, at the end most people agreed that the home side had thoroughly deserved their 8–0 victory. The green jerseys were there to stay on South African torsos and the Lions had suffered their first-ever series loss. It was not to be the last, but at least they had a swift opportunity to wipe the slate clean as the very next year saw a tour to Australia and New Zealand. The 1904 squad was again captained by a Scot, the remarkable David ‘Darkie’ Bedell-Sivright, a veteran of the 1903 tour and the only man from that squad to play again for the Lions the following year. Bedell-Sivright was a swarthy individual, a fearsome forward, and a real character on and off the field—he was alleged to have rugby tackled a cart horse. He once stated: ‘When I go on to the rugby field I only see the ball, and should someone be in the road, that is his lookout.’ He was very popular with the Australians and he loved them and their country, staying on for a year after the tour before returning home to study medicine. He was not enamoured of Australian referees, however. In the match against Northern Districts, Denys Dobson of Oxford University was sent off by the local referee, one Hugh Dolan. His offence was to say ‘What the devil was that for?’—a near-blasphemy to Mr Dolan who ushered Dobson from the field, thus making him the first Lion ever to be sent off. Bedell-Sivright intervened on behalf of his team member and the Lions left the field, returning after 20 minutes without Dobson but ready to thump the home side, which they did 17–3. In interviews after the match, the Lions captain explained his stance to reporters: ‘He [Bedell-Sivright] regarded Mr Dolan as an incompetent referee. The team had borne with his incapacity so long as it merely affected them in their play, but when he chose to take up a position which reflected on their personal honour, they thought it time to show their resentment.’ An inquiry was held by the New South Wales Rugby Union and no action was taken against Dobson for his ‘improper expression’. It was a whitewash by officialdom—and not the last time this would happen with the Lions. Bedell-Sivright’s side featured internationalists from all four home countries as well as two New Zealanders, medical students Pat McEvedy and Arthur O’Brien. Paddy Bush of Cardiff, a brilliant fly-half, marshalled the outstanding Welsh backs of the time. The Lions duly swept all before them in Australia, winning every one of their 14 matches, including the 3 Tests by a combined score of 50–3. It was a different story entirely in New Zealand, where the Lions cause was not helped by Bedell-Sivright breaking his leg in the first match at Canterbury. The low point of the tour was the only Test against New Zealand, in which the Lions suffered their first defeat by the nation who would come to haunt them in the decades ahead. It was a case of dominant home forwards beating inventive Lions backs, which would also be a regular occurrence in the history of the tourists. Captain Bedell-Sivright remarked patronizingly that the colonials would not dare to come to Britain: ‘you might succeed occasionally against local underdog teams…but would be out of your class against national combinations,’ he is reported to have said. How wrong could he have been. In retrospect, that 9–3 victory was the beginning of the rise of New Zealand rugby which would reach full glory the following year with the 1905 tour to the ‘old countries’ and the start of the All Blacks legend. Both the principals in that notorious sending off, Dobson and Bedell-Sivright, would meet strange ends. The former was killed by a charging rhinoceros in Africa in 1916, while Bedell-Sivright died from an infected insect bite during the Dardanelles campaign in the Great War. After tours in successive years, the next Lions did not leave home shores again until 1908, when Arthur F. ‘Boxer’ Harding, a 1904 tourist, captained the squad on its visit to Australia and New Zealand. In one way this was the least representative squad to tour in the 20th century, as only players from England and Wales featured. Scotland had fallen out with the RFU over the issue of New Zealand paying three shillings a day in expenses to its players on their 1905 tour to Europe. ‘There can be no halfway house in rugby football’, wrote J.A. Smith, the secretary of the SFU. The daily allowance made to the players is directly antagonistic to the true spirit of amateur Rugby football. The payment means that, in addition to every possible expense, including uniforms, laundry, entertainments, gratuities and medical attendance, each player has received at least one pound and one shilling a week for himself, and my committee consider that this payment is tantamount to professionalism in a very insidious form. The Scots made it clear they would not play against New Zealand’s ‘professionals’, and when England sided with the All Blacks, the SFU broke off relations with the RFU. Ireland also withdrew its cooperation on the same grounds. The 1908 Lions therefore played in jerseys made up of hoops of white and red, the traditional English and Welsh colours, and that is one of the reasons many books and commentators refer to this as the Anglo-Welsh tour. But they were billed as the British touring party, and the invitation and organization were done in the now customary manner, so Lions they were, though by all accounts there was not the usual atmosphere of friendliness in the camp. Selecting from just two nations and taking unproven players was to prove a pivotal point in the history of the British and Irish Lions. For after they returned a well-beaten side, the Welsh Rugby Union complained about the selection of players being for reasons of social class rather than distinction on the field. Two years later, that complaint would be formalized. Whatever the reason for their failings, it certainly seems to be the case that the squad was weak when you consider the 1908 side’s results. As well as two losses to provincial sides in Australia, they lost seven of their matches in New Zealand, including two of the three Tests against the All Blacks. To be fair, in the middle Test of the three, the Lions were unlucky to get only a draw, but Harding’s men apparently enjoyed too much of the lavish hospitality of their hosts and greatly underperformed in the final deciding Test, in which the All Blacks ran riot, scoring 9 tries and 29 points in all against none by the tourists. The 1908 Lions did not even go down fighting, but then there had been a strange atmosphere in the party ever since they had lost one of their best players in the middle of the tour. In the biggest scandal to engulf the early Lions, Frederick Stanley Jackson, a Cornish giant who played for Leicester, was alleged to have been a professional rugby league player called John Jones from Swansea. Jackson was a star player, a lethal goal kicker who had helped Cornwall to the county championship, which in turn gave them entry to the 1908 Olympic Games where the men from the Duchy won the silver medal, losing to Australasia, i.e. Australia and New Zealand combined. An Olympic medallist and one of the best-known players in the sport of rugby union involved in a murky business—not surprisingly, the newspapers had a field day, and the RFU had to act. A terse telegram was sent to tour manager George Harnett: ‘Jackson is suspended. Return him forthwith.’ The player set off for Sydney, leaving his close friend and fellow Leicester player and Lion, John Jackett, in tears on the quayside. Jackett himself had a notorious past which was already well known—a muscular Adonis, he had posed as a nude model, strictly for art’s sake of course. But Jackson never made it home. Instead, he was greeted by pressmen at Sydney, and categorically denied any knowledge of the charges against him. He then disappeared, only to resurface in New Zealand after the Lions had finished their tour. Jackson had gone back to find a Maori woman that he had met during the tour, and it truly was a love match—they had four children, one of whom, Everard, would become an All Black prop before losing a leg fighting in the desert campaign in the Second World War. Happy with his new wife in his new homeland, Frederick Jackson also played for New Zealand—funnily enough, at rugby league. He was capped for his new country in 1910 against the Northern Union, the then name of the British rugby league touring side, which beat New Zealand 52–20. Jackson lived until 1957, and despite research by his family, no one has ever been able to prove whether he was indeed either Jackson or Jones. The man himself never let on. The Jackson scandal was just one of several problems for the 1908 Lions. This debacle of a tour was to prove a catalyst for the biggest change in the set-up of the Lions. Before the next tour to South Africa in 1910, and stung by the fact that the ‘colonials’ had become the masters of world rugby, the four home unions took a hand and decided that, from then on, the tourists would represent them as fully as any side which turned out in the white, blue, green or red jerseys of their home unions. Players selected for Tests would also be recognized—by some people at any rate—as full internationalists. The British and Irish Lions were formally born, though not yet called Lions. CHAPTER TWO THEN THEY WERE LIONS 1910–1938 (#ulink_49dfee05-f4a9-57bc-941f-fa1f2c91f370) Right from the start of the ‘official’ touring party superintended by the joint Committee of the Four Home Unions, often known since then as the Lions Committee, there were arguments about selection. The Welsh Union, appalled at what had happened in 1908, called on their fellow unions to select the best available players ‘irrespective of their social position’. The Welsh Union was correctly suspicious that the other unions, dominated by middle and upper-class interests, might prefer ‘gentlemen players’ rather than good honest stock from the Valleys. As a result, and with the Unions now fully behind the tourists, the first official British and Irish touring squad was as strong, if not stronger, than any of the parties who had gone south of the equator before them. There was also recognition of the toll that injuries had taken on previous parties, as 4 replacements were later allowed to join the original 26 tourists. Of that 26, no fewer than 17 had already won caps for their country or would do so. The replacements were not too shabby either, as Eric Milroy, Alfred ‘Jim’ Webb and Frank Handford all represented Scotland, Wales and England respectively. Milroy suffered blood poisoning on the tour, which severely debilitated him; Webb switched to rugby league but went back to the mines; Handford enjoyed his time in South Africa so much that he emigrated there, as did fellow 1910 tourists Phil Waller and Kenneth Wood, neither of whom even bothered to go home after the tour. The much-travelled Tom Richards, who had been capped for Australia, was then working in South Africa, for whom he was nearly selected. On the basis that he had once played a season in England at Bristol, he joined the Lions. Photographs in a ‘Pride of Lions’ exhibition at Twickenham showed him in both Australian and Lions colours—nationality was apparently a moveable feast in those days. Richards would go on to play for Australia again and then win the Military Cross for his bravery in the First World War, but he died young from the long-term effects of mustard gas. Also gassed and decorated for heroism during the war was Stanley Williams, the brilliant full-back of the 1910 party. He was another Lion to be caught up in a huge row between administrators, the Welsh union objecting when England selected Williams despite him having been born in Monmouthshire, then playing for Newport and having taken part in an international trial in Wales. Perhaps sickened by the whole affair, Williams played just one season for England before retiring at the age of 25. The Lions had other stars, notably Charles Henry ‘Cherry’ Pillman of Blackheath and England who was reckoned to have single-handedly revolutionized wing forward play with his audacious and inventive skills. His new tactic of detaching from the scrum to challenge the fly-half changed the way the game was played. The visitors were captained by Dr Tom Smythe of Malone and Ireland, already renowned as a fine leader of rugby men who had been captain for Ireland against Wales earlier in the year, and who had also been a locum doctor in Newport, where the local club was in its pomp and supplied no fewer than seven of the 1910 Lions. These Lions were definitely an improvement on previous touring squads, but South African rugby had continued to develop, and in 1906 the original Springboks had toured Britain and Ireland, losing to Scotland but drawing with England and beating Wales and Ireland. Playing in their new colours of blue jerseys, white shorts and red socks, the Lions were unbeaten in five matches in Western Province but on moving north to Griqualand West, the Lions succumbed twice in a place where they had lost twice in 1903. And as on that previous tour, they also lost to Transvaal twice. The first Test in Kimberley was played without the injured Pillman and was lost 14–10, the first try being scored by Alex Foster who would go on to captain Ireland. The adaptable Pillman returned for the second Test, playing at fly-half, and completely dominated play in an 8–3 victory in Port Elizabeth. The Springbok captain Bill Millar was later moved to write that ‘if ever a man can have won an international match through his own inspired and lone-handed efforts, it can be said of the inspired black-haired Pillman’. No one could know at that time that the deciding Test in Cape Town would be the last played by the British and Irish Lions for 14 years. It ended in an ignominious 21–5 defeat for the visitors, who were hampered by the loss of their full-back early in the match—there were no substitutions for the Lions in those days. Cherry Pillman went on to inspire England to four successive international championships, which France had joined to make the Five Nations. All five of those nations would then be involved in the war that was supposed to end all wars. They would be augmented by many men from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, including a sizeable number of rugby players. In total, some 125 rugby internationalists from the eight major playing nations would pay the ultimate price in service of their country. Among their number would be several British and Irish Lions, including 1904 captain Dr David Bedell-Sivright, Phil Waller, Eric Milroy and Blair Swannell, who was awarded a posthumous Military Cross for his gallantry at Gallipoli. Yet perhaps the most extraordinary story of heroism by a Lion who toured in 1910 came some years after the war. Harry Jarman, a tough forward from Pontypool who played for Newport, sacrificed his own life to save a group of children at Talywain colliery in 1928. The children were playing on a colliery railway when Jarman, then working as a blacksmith at the pit, spotted some loose wagons heading for the youngsters. Without hesitation, he threw himself into the path of the wagons and derailed them, his consequent injuries proving fatal. Tackling a runaway train some 18 years after his tour, aged 45, and with nothing more than his own shoulders—in the long annals of their history, can there be any more outstanding example of the courage of a Lion? When rugby returned to a sort of normality after the war, clamour grew for the British and Irish unions to send a touring party to the southern hemisphere again. The next tour would be to South Africa in 1924, and from then on the tourists would bear their immortal name, the Lions. As with every other activity in the British Empire, after Armistice Day in 1918 the sport of rugby was determined to get back to its usual state as quickly as possible. In 1919, a team from the New Zealand forces triumphed against their opponents in Britain and stopped off to wallop several South African sides on the way home. The Springboks toured New Zealand and Australia in 1921, and the quality of their play was dazzling. But as in so many strands of life in Britain and Ireland, a return to prewar normality was just not possible for rugby in the home countries due to the colossal number of deaths and injuries sustained among a generation of young men. The number of internationalists killed during the hostilities—30 from Scotland and 27 from England alone—shows the scale of the losses. The worldwide influenza epidemic after the war also took its toll. It was going to take a good few years for a new generation to come through to replace those who had gone. The political situation in Ireland also caused problems. The 1920 partition of Ireland into the 26 counties of the Free State, later the Republic of Ireland, and the six counties of Northern Ireland, had been mirrored by rugby much earlier. In 1874, the Irish Football Union had been formed from clubs in Leinster, Munster and parts of Ulster, while the Northern Football Union of Ireland, founded in the same year, was an association of clubs centred mainly on Belfast. With Ireland still a single political entity under the control of Westminster at that time, the two associations amalgamated to form the Irish Rugby Football Union in 1879. When partition took place, the IRFU Committee resisted attempts to politicize rugby and took the decision—unpopular in some areas, too—that it would continue to govern the sport in all 32 counties. By and large, and despite many problems down the years, the IRFU has remained united in the cause of rugby for all of the island of Ireland. It remains an intriguing question, given the strong feelings that partition and subsequent ‘Troubles’ have evoked, as to whether the British and Irish Lions would have continued to represent all five nations in these islands had not the IRFU taken that momentous decision to stay united. Certainly, there would have been a lot less fun without all the Irish tourists. Arguably the greatest damage done to rugby union and to the Lions tours in the inter-war years came from the Great Depression. Money was scarce from the early 1920s onwards, and most players simply could not afford to take months off work, while employers became increasingly reluctant to give even unpaid leave of absence as this meant holding a job open for someone who might return from a tour with a serious injury, which was often the case in years to come. Other players took the money on offer from rugby league and switched codes rather than pursue caps and a tour with the Lions, which was really the only ‘reward’ that rugby union had to offer. When the Great Depression arrived from 1929 onwards, the situation worsened considerably, and not even a sport that was so resolutely middle-class in most areas of these islands could escape the ravages of economic turmoil. Less damage was done in the southern hemisphere, though in Australia the economic situation probably helped the professional version of the oval ball game, rugby league, to achieve the dominance over union which it still enjoys. Another problem was that the home unions still did not take the concept of a touring team entirely seriously. Their bread and butter was the international championship, which largely earned the money to bankroll the unions—there were no formal leagues in those days, and no television riches, and the Five Nations matches were for a long time the principal earners of cash. No one had any money left over to invest in a tour that was still seen as a luxury. These problems meant that in the 21 years between the wars, just three Lions tours took place, compared to four in eight years between 1903 and 1910 inclusive. The first post-war tour to South Africa in 1924 may have been disappointing in terms of results—they were the first tourists to have a win record of less than 50 per cent—but at least they did return with a priceless asset. No one seems entirely sure where the name ‘Lions’ came from. The official branding of the 1924 party and indeed subsequent parties was the British Isles Rugby Union Team, or BIRUT. The biruts? Fortunately, some ties made for the tourists had been embroidered with three lions—a heraldic device that bears a strong resemblance to the badge of the English football (soccer) team. The lions did not appear on the blue jerseys worn by the players in matches, and photographs quite clearly show that, for the 1924 Tests at any rate, the jersey badge was, as now, made up of the insignia of the four unions quartered on a shield. But the lions on the ties made an impression, and perhaps it was some bright spark in the party, maybe even the captain Dr Ronald Cove-Smith himself, who first suggested that the tourists were all lions. Or perhaps it was some long-forgotten press correspondent who wrote of ‘the lions’, and the name stuck, not least because it was so much better journalistically than ‘the biruts’. Some officials in the various Celtic unions thought it was a bit presumptuous to use a symbol traditionally associated with England—Scotland’s single lion is rampant, not couchant. Protests were made by administrators, but, for once, player power counted. The newly minted Lions were not unhappy with the nickname, even those from Ireland and Wales, whose emblems were a shamrock and a dragon respectively. By the time the 1930 tour came round, the nickname was so well established that the blue playing jersey was embroidered with three lions, just like the English football badge, and players were given a plentiful supply of lion brooches and pins to hand out to their hosts. Dr Cove-Smith’s Lions should have been the best ever to leave these islands. England had won the Grand Slam that year, their third in four seasons, and Scotland would do so the following year, and both those sides contained players who are now legends of the game. But in fact British and Irish rugby had fallen well behind the standards of the southern hemisphere teams, as would be proven when the All Blacks toured England, Wales, Ireland, France and Canada in late 1924 and early 1925, playing and winning four Tests and completing the 32-match tour unbeaten—hence their nickname of The Invincibles. The two tours overlapped slightly, but there was enough time between the final Test in South Africa and the Tests against the All Blacks for the Lions to arrive home and prepare themselves for another beating, this time in their own national colours rather than in the blue jersey of the British Isles Rugby Union Team. On a tour that, at one point, saw the Lions go eight matches without a win, the South Africans were to hand out rugby lesson after rugby lesson. The touring party was missing great players like Wavell Wakefield—later the first Baron Wakefield of Kendal, and the father of modern forward play as well as captain of England’s Grand Slam winners—and G.P.S. ‘Phil’ Macpherson, who would skipper Scotland to their first Slam the following year. But that was no excuse, as the full squad of 30, which included two replacements, contained 24 past, current or future internationalists. There were horrendous injury problems, however, many caused by the concrete-like surfaces of some of the South African pitches. Arthur Young, perhaps the finest scrum-half of the era and lynch-pin of England’s Grand Slam side, missed three of the Tests, while W.S. Gainsford was injured in the opening training session and sat out the entire tour. Ian Smith, the Australian-born Scottish winger who set an international record of 24 tries that stood until David Campese beat it, played only two Tests. Some players, such as Roy Kinnear—later a Scotland international and Great Britain rugby league cap, and father of the late well-known comic actor of the same name—managed to play in all four Tests, as did fellow Scottish cap Neil McPherson. McPherson’s story is illuminating about the attitude of officialdom in those times. Though he was actually born in Wales, he qualified to play for Scotland because of his Scottish parentage, though this meant many long arduous trips north for the young man who played for Newport. He made the mistake, however, of accepting the gift of a watch worth 20 guineas to mark Newport’s unbeaten season in 1922–23, and when the gift was made public, the supposedly whiter-than-white Scottish union banned him from the international side. In that 1924 party, Dan Drysdale, Doug Davies, Robert Howie, Arthur Blakiston, and Cove-Smith himself were the only other ever-presents in the four Tests. The first three would all play a vital part in Scotland’s 1925 Grand Slam, and Drysdale would later become president of the SRU, while Blakiston succeeded his baronet father and became Sir Arthur. There was also no reliable goal kicker, and Scotland’s full-back Drys-dale had a miserable time missing what would now be considered certainties. In his defence, he had to play on while injured, the ball was much heavier in those days, and its flight high on the Veldt has baffled many more kickers than Drysdale. A forward, Tom Voyce of Gloucester and England, took over the kicking duties and fared little better. Voyce, who would become president of the RFU in later life, also had to play out of position in the backs, this happening several times as the Lions numbers were depleted. Willie Cunningham, an Irish international who had moved to live in Johannesburg, was called up as a replacement from ‘civilian’ life—as would happen to the accidental tourist, Andy Nicol, in Australia in 2001. At one point in the match against the Border side in East London, the Lions were so desperate to make up numbers that a spectator called McTavish was pressed into action. Nothing more was known about him, and no more was ever heard about him, but there remains the intriguing possibility that out there somewhere are the descendants of an unacknowledged Lion. Dr Cove-Smith admitted that the injuries had all but overwhelmed his squad. Later he wrote: ‘Looking back, one cannot help but laugh at the subterfuges to which we were forced to resort to place 15 fit men on the field, and I have marvelled many times in retrospect that the fellows were able to put up such a good show in spite of all the handicaps.’ The Lions were also caught out by what some considered a piece of trickery by the Springboks. In order to combat the dynamic wing forward play of the Lions, South Africa’s Test side lined up with a scrummage in a 3–4–1 formation, the wing forwards binding their support to props rather than the second row, as opposed to the traditional 3–2–3 system. The Lions refused to adopt the advantageous new formation and duly paid the price as the South African defence became even more formidable. Forget these excuses, however. The fact is that the 1924 Lions were just not as good as their hosts, as the four Tests showed. The first Test at Durban saw the debut in the green jersey of the legendary fly-half Bennie Osler, one of the greatest of all Springboks. A prodigious kicker, Osler’s clearances from defence and his probing kicks in attack rendered many of the Lions strategies redundant. His drop goal was the difference between the two sides in that first Test, won 7–3 by the Springboks. ‘He kicked more than was warranted,’ was Cove-Smith’s later comment. The second Test at Johannesburg was played in front of a crowd estimated at 25,000, of whom a large number had forced their way in after being locked out when the ground reached its supposed capacity of 15,000—there was no longer any doubt about the popularity of matches against the Lions. It was no tense affair, however, South Africa recording their biggest ever win by 17–0. Having lost so heavily to the Springboks and having failed to beat no fewer than eight provincial sides, the Lions at least salvaged a draw in the third Test in Port Elizabeth. The series was lost, and insult was added to injury when the Springboks snatched victory with a late try in the final Test in Cape Town. The humiliation was complete, and the knives were out for the tourists back home—in the polite terms of the day, it was suggested by various complainers that the host unions’ generous hospitality had helped the Lions rugby to reach a nadir. In other words, far too much drink had been taken. W. Rowe Harding, the Welsh winger, later gave vent to his feelings about the tour and the Lions in general in his controversial book of 1929, Rugby Reminiscences and Opinions. ‘Many unkind things were said about our wining and dining, but that was not the explanation of our failures,’ he wrote, going on to blame instead the injuries, the long train journeys between venues and the hard grounds. But he then struck a more honest note. It is not difficult to analyse the reason for our failure. Dissipation has nothing to do with it…the real reason for our failure was that we were not good enough to go abroad as the representatives of the playing strength of these islands. It is not sufficient to send abroad some players who are of international standard and some who are second class. Every member of the team must be absolutely first class, or disaster is bound to overtake it. Harding then slammed the home unions for not taking the tour or indeed the southern hemisphere nations seriously enough: ‘There has always been too much condescension by the British rugby authorities about our attitudes both to our continental neighbours and the colonies.’ Having retired from rugby the previous year to pursue his career in law, Harding was free to castigate his targets in officialdom. It did his legal career no harm—he later became a judge—but the frosty atmosphere when he encountered the ‘blazers’ of the committee rooms can only be imagined. Harding, whose great-nephews Sam and Tom played top-class rugby in their native New Zealand and in England, was a man ahead of his time, and the next tour in 1930, a year after his words were published, would prove him all too correct. One footnote from that tour emerged in 2005, when a blue 1924 Lions jersey came up for auction, apparently the one exchanged with Alf Walker of the Springboks after the final Test Match. It was said to be in the same condition as it had been at the end of the match, though presumably it had been washed. The collar of the jersey was torn off—proof that the Springboks have never given any quarter. At the time that the 1930 tour was agreed, the finest side of that international era was Scotland, with rugby in the Borders enjoying a purple patch. The Four Home Unions Committee, which was responsible for selecting the touring party, apparently contacted 100 players about their availability for the trip Down Under, and a fair number of invitees were Scottish. But it was a sign of the uncertain economic times that only one Scot, Willie Welsh of Hawick and Scotland, felt able to travel. The Committee’s first choice as captain, England’s Wavell Wakefield, was unable to tour, as was their second choice, Dr George Stephenson, then the most-capped player in the world, whose record of 14 tries for Ireland in home matches stood until a certain Brian O’Driscoll came along. Doug Prentice of Leicester and England eventually took up the captaincy, and clearly did a competent job of administration, as some years afterwards he became secretary of the RFU. He was not so successful as a player, and omitted himself from three Test teams. The tour party still managed to comprise 29 players, of whom 11 were or would become England internationalists, with 6 Welsh caps, 5 Irish, plus Willie Welsh of Scotland. The star player was Welsh flanker Ivor Jones, who was nominated as ‘The King’ by the New Zealand press and public before Barry John was even born. Later president of the Welsh rugby union, Jones struck up a lifelong friendship with legendary opponent George Nepia. Another Welshman who impressed his hosts was Jack Morley, who would return Down Under as a professional with the Great Britain rugby league tourists in 1936. Fly-half Roger Spong usually formed a great partnership for England with scrum-half Wilf Sobey, but the latter was badly injured in the first match of the tour and missed the remaining matches in which Spong nevertheless excelled. Yet another of the touring internationalists was Carl D. Aarvold of Cambridge University and England, who later in life would be knighted and face opposition even tougher than the All Blacks—as Recorder of London he sat in judgement on the notorious gangster twins, the Krays. Other members of the party included Ireland’s George Beamish, a Royal Air Force pilot who later became Air Marshal Sir George Beamish, KBE, CBE, and Brian Black, who also became an RAF pilot and was killed in action in 1940. Alongside Aarvold at centre for all four Tests in the New Zealand leg of the tour was the then 23-year-old Harry Bowcott of Cambridge University and Wales, who would go on to be president of the WRU more than 40 years later. Thanks to his surviving to the great age of 97—he died in 2004—and his willingness to be interviewed by Lions historian Clem Thomas among others, Bowcott has provided us with real insight into what it meant to be a Lion in those days. First of all, he was adamant that selection for the Lions was a great honour and hugely exciting for the young men of the day, as there were few opportunities to travel Down Under in 1930. Though they had a surprising amount of freedom—there was only one manager, no coaches and such training sessions as they did were taken by captain Prentice—the players were strictly controlled in one way, namely their finances. Each player was allowed to bring ?80 spending money, which was handed over at the beginning of the tour to the formidable manager, James Baxter of the RFU. Players could draw their own money only by asking Baxter, who also doled out the daily allowance of three shillings per day—equivalent to 15p in modern money. Even that was paid in ‘chits’ of a shilling or sixpence at a time, as no money could be allowed to change hands for fear of breaching the professionalism laws. Meals and other costs were met from the tour budget, and of course, when they arrived at their destinations, the players rarely had to put their hands in their pockets—the hospitality of their hosts saw to that. Players also had to bring a dinner jacket, as formal dress was compulsory for the nightly dinners on board the good ship S.S. Rangitata, which took five weeks to reach New Zealand, sailing westwards through the Panama Canal and across the vast Pacific Ocean. Some of the players had to rely on their clubs to provide them with their formal wear, as the tour party consisted of men from all social backgrounds, though all were apparently well mannered. Yet none of the tourists took the financial inducements they could have earned as Lions. Bowcott summed up their attitude years later, saying: ‘I would have given up rather than play professional. I would never have taken the money.’ Team selection on that tour was by a committee of senior players with at least one representative from each of the home unions, though Bowcott admitted that Willie Welsh’s strong Hawick accent meant no one could understand him—perhaps the reason why he played only one Test. According to Thomas’s account of Bowcott’s memories while speaking in his eighties, there was one group of people who were not missed on the tour: There were, thank goodness, no pressmen, which was a wonderful thing, for we could do as we liked without looking over our shoulder. We were no better and no worse than the young men of today in our behaviour. We drank a bit and enjoyed female company, but we tended to carouse only after matches. Standards of behaviour were left to the individual. I will not say that the manager, Jim Baxter, could not care less, for he was a typical RFU man. It so happened they were all nice people. Baxter was to play a crucial and highly controversial role on the tour. There had been reports filtering back to the home unions that New Zealand’s approach to the laws had become lax, and confirmation came at half-time in the very first match against Wanganui, when the home side insisted on a break of ten minutes and a cup of tea. Baxter was apoplectic. The agreement between the Home Unions Committee and the New Zealand Union was that matches would be played under IRB laws, which clearly stated that no one could leave the pitch without permission and only in special circumstances. The home union gave way on that point, but did not kowtow to Baxter on their interpretation of the scrummaging laws which saw the All Blacks pack down in a 2–3–2 formation with two hookers up front and a spare forward known as a ‘rover’ who was used to put the ball into the scrum and savage the opposition half-backs on their put-in. That the rover just happened to be the All Blacks’ captain and best player, wing forward Cliff Porter of Wellington, who had also led the side on their 1925 ‘Invincibles’ tour, gave the New Zealand officials added impetus to defend their stance. To be fair, the laws at that time did not state how many players should make up a scrum, and the All Blacks continued to use the formation and the rover forward despite Baxter’s accusations of cheating; accusations he extended to the New Zealand interpretation of the ‘mark’, which allowed the call to be made when both feet were off the ground. Baxter kept his most vehement condemnation for the appearance of All Blacks in advertisements, an early form of sponsorship that caused bitter arguments between the home unions and their southern counterparts for decades. With a fine disregard for manners and convention, Baxter launched his onslaught at the post-match festivities after the first game against Wanganui. As Bowcott told Clem Thomas: ‘He slaughtered them in one of his speeches after dinner and one sensed that they became afraid of him.’ They were right to be so afraid. On his return to England, Baxter single handedly drove through a change to the laws so that in 1932 a three-man front row became compulsory, as is the case to this day. In a roundabout fashion, the British and Irish Lions had literally caused the laws of rugby to be altered. Some would say the change was not for the better, as the All Blacks reacted by creating a culture that was often too dependent on a rampaging pack as opposed to inventive backs. It worked pretty well for them though. Off the field, apart from the rows over the rules, the touring party was hugely popular, and were much in demand at various official and unofficial luncheons and dinners. They made a particular hit when visiting a Maori meeting house in Rotorua, where some of the Lions were decked out in traditional Maori dress. A photograph of the occasion shows them looking mostly nonplussed at their apparel. As they made their way round the country, with journeys made mostly by train, crowds would turn out to see the Lions at every stop. There was simply no understating the demand for the Lions. The 1930 Test series in New Zealand ended in massive disappointment after a cracking start for the Lions. Having lost only to the most powerful provinces of Wellington and Canterbury, the Lions arrived in Dunedin in fairly confident mood, and as always, raised their game for the full Test. A try in the final seconds gave the Lions victory by 6–3, and that after New Zealand’s George Nepia had hit the post with his conversion attempt following the All Blacks’ earlier try. It was the Lions’ first victory over New Zealand in a Test Match, but in one way the ‘All Blacks’ could maintain they were unbeaten—the home team had played in white jerseys to avoid a colour clash with the blue of the Lions. It was this shirt clash in particular that in later years saw the Lions switch to their familiar bright red jerseys, sufficiently different—especially in the age of colour television—from the black, green and gold colours of their traditional opponents. Despite a valiant effort after playing most of the match with 14 men, scrum-half Paul Murray having dislocated a shoulder, the Lions went down 10–13 in the second Test at Canterbury, Carl Aarvold’s second try scored from 40 yards out being described as one of the best ever seen at that famous ground. With the series nicely poised at 1–1, the Lions gave the All Blacks a real fight in Auckland, going down by only 10–15, Harry Bowcott grabbing the opening try. In Wellington, the fourth and final Test was watched by a record crowd for any match in New Zealand. Among the spectators was Lord Bledisloe, the Governor-General of New Zealand to whom the teams were introduced before the match. He clearly enjoyed his rugby, for the cup awarded in matches between Australia and New Zealand—which the good Lord presented the following year—bears his name. The series could still be drawn, but at the end of a tiring match and exhausting tour the Lions wilted in the second half and the All Blacks ran in six tries in all, winning by 22–8. Despite their Test losses, the Lions left New Zealand with the praises of their hosts ringing in their ears, particularly for their sportsmanship and stylish play. Mr Baxter of the RFU was presumably not included in those plaudits. The touring party then moved on to Australia and though they beat an ‘Australian XV’, the Lions lost the sole Test to the Wallabies in Sydney by the narrowest of margins, 5–6, and also lost to New South Wales. Such was their capacity for rugby, or maybe they just wanted a break on the way home, that the tourists played an unofficial match against Western Australia in Perth and ran up the cricket score of 71–3, a record points total that would not be exceeded for 44 years. As it was a ‘scratch’ match and did not figure in official records, Western Australia’s blushes were spared. Unfortunately for them, the blushes really did arrive in 2001 when the part-timers of Western Australia went down by 116–10. With the world’s economies in meltdown, it would be eight years before the Lions toured again, though both the Springboks and New Zealand came north earlier in the decade and thumped their opponents. A party of prominent rugby players from the British Isles visited Argentina in 1936, as had also happened in 1927, but neither of these tours is classed as an official Lions venture. That may be due to long-running snobbery about Argentinean rugby in that era—Scotland, for instance, would not award caps for matches against the South American country until the 1990s. Alternatively, it may reflect the realization that Argentina was no match for the British and Irish players who visited: they won all 19 matches, including 5 ‘Tests’, over both tours. With the giant steps forward taken in recent years by the Pumas, and with an under-strength Argentina having drawn with the Lions in a preparatory match for the 2005 tour, it’s interesting to think what might happen should the Lions now visit that country. After all, Argentina beat England at Twickenham in 2006 and reached the semi-finals of the 2007 World Cup by beating France and Ireland in the group phase and Scotland in the quarter-final. By popular demand in that country, South Africa was the venue for the 1938 tour, and the Lions went there despite the growing menace of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, a country where rugby union had its own federation of clubs from 1900 and which had played many internationals, including winning two against France, before the Nazis effectively killed off the sport because of its ‘Britishness’. Captained by Sammy Walker, later a much-respected BBC commentator and then a robust prop forward for Ireland, the party was once again be devilled by great players declaring themselves unavailable for the long tour south. The absentees included the Welsh wizard Cliff Jones, Scot-land’s Wilson Shaw and the mighty second row forward from England, Fred Huskisson. Injuries would also wreck many plans, with Haydn Tanner, Jimmy Giles and George Morgan all having to take a turn as a Test scrum-half, with Giles even turning out at centre. The Springboks, by contrast, were at full strength and were coming off the back of a tour to Australia and New Zealand where they had beaten the former country twice and had won their first Test series in New Zealand by two victories to one. The Springbok side included the great forward Boy Louw and was captained by Danie Craven who was well on his way to becoming a legend of rugby. They were hailed as the champions of the world, and no one could disagree that their record made them so. The Lions did have some very fine players, including Ireland’s Harry McKibbin, who would later go on to be the president of the IRFU in its centenary seasons; the outstanding Welsh hooker Bill ‘Bunny’ Travers; the prodigious goal kicker Viv Jenkins, later to become a superb writer on rugby; and Gerald Thomas ‘Beef’ Dancer, a belligerent prop who was the find of the tour but never actually played for England, as the war intervened before he could break into the team. There were also three serving police officers in their ranks, Welshmen Eddie Morgan and Russell Taylor, and Bob Alexander of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. By coincidence, the 1989 Lions also contained three policemen, Dean Richards, Paul Ackford and Wade Dooley. The early part of the tour was promising for the Lions, as they lost only to Transvaal and twice to Western Province. They arrived in Johannesburg for the first Test in confident mood, having gained revenge over Transvaal the week before. But with 14 of the Springboks who had bested New Zealand on tour, South Africa were ready to do battle to stay as unofficial world champions. In what many who saw and reported on it claimed to be the best match ever in South Africa, the Springboks and the Lions played marvellous running and passing rugby, the home side finally triumphing despite the visitors taking the lead three times. Four tries to nil tells its own story: the Lions points all came from penalties in a 12–26 defeat. The Springboks wrapped up the three-match series with a clinical 19–3 win in Port Elizabeth on a day when blazing sunshine sapped the Lions’ strength. But there was still honour to play for in the third and final Test in Cape Town and no one should ever underestimate the pride of Lions. In a thrilling match which went down to the final seconds when referee Nick Pretorius disallowed a Springbok ‘try’ for a forward pass, the Lions came from being 3–13 down at half-time to record a famous victory. The wind had been against them in the first half, but they took full advantage of the conditions in the second, and it probably helped that eight of the players were from Ireland and knew each other’s game well. It should be recorded that the Springboks themselves notified the referee that Charlie Grieve’s drop goal for four points had indeed crossed the bar. Bishop Carey’s prayers almost 40 years earlier that the South Africans would always play like gentlemen were answered on that day. The Lions had beaten the Springboks for the first time since 1910, and Sammy Walker was carried off the field in triumph after their 21–16 win. But there was no hiding from the fact that a Lions series had been lost again. There was little time for disappointment, however, as the players returned home to their own countries to await the visit of the Australian tourists in 1939. The Wallabies had been in Britain for just one day when war was declared on 3 September. They had the consolation of a reception at Buckingham Palace by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth before they embarked on the long and now much more dangerous voyage home. Organized rugby effectively ceased for the duration of the war, though many scratch matches were organized, particularly within and between the various Services. Even the rules on professionalism were set aside and players from rugby union and rugby league played together and fraternized. Almost all of that Lions party of 1938 saw their careers curtailed by the war. Bob Alexander and earlier Lions such as 1930 tourists Brian Black and Royal Tank Corps officer Henry Rew died as a result of wounds sustained in action, while Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, the fighting Irishman of the 1938 pack, won no less than four Distinguished Service Order medals, the Legion D’Honneur and Croix de Guerre. Amazingly, another Lions forward, Major General Sir Douglas Kendrew of the 1930s squad, equalled Mayne’s feat of winning a DSO and three bars—only seven men in history have achieved that quadruple honour, and two of them were British and Irish Lions. One of the most extraordinary of all the Lions, Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne in particular would become a legend of military history as one of the original members of the SAS. He was named after his mother’s cousin, Robert Blair, who also won the DSO before being killed in the First World War. Blair Mayne became a champion amateur heavyweight boxer and all-round sportsman, as well as a qualified solicitor, but it was rugby at which he excelled and he was soon selected for Ulster, Ireland and then the Lions. A year after his return from South Africa, Mayne, who had been in the Territorial Army, joined the regular army on the outbreak of war. After volunteering for the commandos, he saw action in the Lebanon in 1941, where he allegedly had an altercation with a senior officer after calling him incompetent. Fortunately, SAS founder David Stirling stepped in and recruited Mayne for his new long-range fighting force in the North African desert. Mayne was eventually promoted to colonel and commanded the 1st SAS Regiment. It was while he was serving in Oldenburg in Germany in the latter days of the war that Mayne single-hand-edly rescued a squadron of troops, for which he was recommended for a Victoria Cross. But his truculent attitude to authority probably cost him the highest medal of honour. Stirling said of Mayne: ‘He was one of the best fighting machines I ever met in my life. He also had the quality to command men and make them feel his very own.’ After the war, and suffering from the effects of a back injury, Mayne returned to Northern Ireland but had difficulty coping with civilian life and volunteered for a polar expedition to the Antarctic. His health deteriorated however, and he came back to his home town of Newtonards to a job with the Law Society. His back pain got to the point where he could no longer even play rugby. Nothing, it seemed, could match up to the excitement of his playing days and war service, and he began to drink more; it is said he would challenge every man in a bar to a fight, and beat them all. One night after a drinking session, however, he was driving home when he crashed his Riley sports car and was killed at the age of just 40. Mayne’s life has been the subject of several books, and a film has long been planned about him. In 2005, MPs attempted to have his Victoria Cross finally and posthumously awarded, but the Government turned them down. He is commemorated in his home town by both a statue and a road named after him. Mayne was by far the most famous of the 1938 Lions, but for all of them the world changed a year later with the start of the war. It would be 12 long years before the Lions would tour again. They would do so in a world transformed beyond recognition, where the concept of Empire would become outmoded and would be replaced by the gradual end of colonies and protectorate and the move to the Commonwealth. Nothing diminished in any way, however, the desire of the people of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to have the British and Irish Lions visit their countries. CHAPTER THREE KARL MULLEN’S HAPPY BAND Australia and New Zealand 1950 (#ulink_198ca16e-4585-5217-b78b-121876aad8ee) In the immediate post-war period, Great Britain, and to a lesser extent Ireland, had rather more to worry about than rugby. It was a time of strict austerity, and rationing still applied to many ordinary everyday items, including meat. The tight rationing rules apparently did not apply to cigarettes, as the 1950 tourists were given their supply free of charge for the entire duration of the six-month-long tour to Australia and New Zealand in which they played 30 matches, including six Tests. It was to be the last time the Lions travelled by sea to the southern hemisphere. They sailed out on the SS Ceramic via the Panama Canal, and came back also travelling westwards, so it could be said that they sailed around the world just to play rugby. On the way home though, they took a shortcut via the Suez Canal and Mediterranean Sea en route from Sri Lanka, where they had played an unofficial match against a team representing the former Ceylon, before stopping for dinner in Mumbai, then known as Bombay. More than a few of the players had seen service during the war or had undergone their two years’ mandatory national service in the forces, so they were used to being away from home for long periods. It was nevertheless particularly hard on newly married men or fathers with young children: ‘I had to leave an infant son behind and when I came back he was just so much bigger,’ as one 1950 Lion put it. Two great characters of rugby and stars of that tour—both now in their late eighties—recently recalled what they were doing in the greatest skirmish of them all: the Second World War. It says a great deal about Dr Jack Matthews and Bleddyn Williams—and indeed all the rugby players who served in the war—that so many were anxious to get back to playing the game after what had been an ‘interesting’ time for them. Jack Matthews, who is now 88, managed to do both war service and national service, as he explained: I was one of five children, with two sisters and two brothers, both of whom joined the army when war broke out. I was just starting to study medicine, but I wanted to join my brothers in action so I went off to Penarth without telling my parents and joined up as a fighter pilot. I trained for five months of a six-month course and we were being taught to fly a new type of Spitfire, when my CO came up to me and said ‘Matthews, you’re out.’ I said ‘Beg your pardon, sir, what have I done wrong?’ He explained that they had just heard from the Home Office that I was a medical student, and I was thrown out because it was an exempt profession. I spent the war qualifying as a doctor in Cardiff, but before I could finish, I was called up for national service. I said ‘Hang on, I’ve already done five months in the RAF, doesn’t that count?’ But Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn-Hughes, who was in charge of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and also ran the Barbarians, persuaded me not to go back to the RAF but to join the RAMC. I was captain of Cardiff at the time, and he was very persuasive in saying I could carry on playing at Cardiff as long as I played for the RAMC in the inter-services Cup. I did, and we won it. I have a wonderful photograph of Field Marshal Montgomery presenting me with the cup. Funnily enough, I don’t think the RAMC have won it since. During the war, Matthews kept fit partly by boxing for his medical school side, which travelled to St Athan to meet an RAF select in 1943. On that occasion his opponent was an American ‘guest’ with a knockout reputation—none other than Rocky Marciano, who would later become the only man ever to retire as undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Matthews managed to avoid being stopped by Marciano, something only six of the great fighter’s professional opponents achieved. Matthews eventually went on to complete his service in medicine with the RAF. His great friend Bleddyn Williams was also in the RAF, serving as a pilot, and performed the unique feat of invading Germany and playing for Great Britain at rugby in the same week. More than 63 years later, Williams tells the story of the last week in March 1945 with relish: After Arnhem there was a shortage of glider pilots so they were looking for volunteers from among us surplus pilots for the big push over the Rhine—it was ‘you, you, and you’, the usual way of volunteering, so I became a glider pilot. I had been picked for the Great Britain side which was due to play the Dominions in one of the morale-boosting international matches that were played occasionally during the war. The match was set for Leicester on the Saturday after I was due to land in Germany, which we duly did early that week in the massive push (Operation Varsity) to get our troops across the Rhine. On the Friday morning, the day before I was due to play for Great Britain, I was still in the camp in Germany, when my CO, Sir Hugh Bartlett, who later became captain of Sussex county cricket team, said to me ‘Aren’t you supposed to be playing at Leicester tomorrow?’ I replied that indeed I was, but I had been sleeping in a slit trench all week and was looking rather unkempt by then. All he said was ‘Pack your bags’. We were five miles inside Germany at this point, I should add. I got a ride in a jeep to the Rhine, crossed over in a empty DUKW (amphibious vehicle) and there was another jeep waiting for me on the other side which took me to Eindhoven in Holland where I got a lift in a plane to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. I was stationed in Essex at the time but waiting for me was the CO of the camp who grabbed a spare aircraft and flew me home. I wasn’t long married at the time and when I presented myself at the door of our digs my wife thought I was a ghostly apparition, because she had been told that there had been very few survivors of the attack. I spent the night, went up by train to Leicester the following morning and I played for Great Britain and scored a try in our victory. War was incidental to rugby football, you see. With two centres, one of whom had gone the distance with Rocky Marciano and the other who had invaded Germany, how could the 1950 Lions fail? Other former servicemen on the 1950 tour included Billy McKay, who had been a Commando and had served in the bloodiest conflicts in Burma, now Myanmar. Welsh scrum-half Rex Willis had served in the Royal Navy while Scottish captain Peter Kininmonth had seen action in Italy and as recently as 1947 had served on the Northwest frontier in Afghanistan. Ken Jones served as a sergeant in India, and his victory in the All-India Games in 1945 kick-started a sprinting career that saw him run for Britain in the 1948 Olympics and win a silver medal in the sprint relay—almost sacrilegiously for a Lion, he perhaps unsurprisingly recalled the 1948 Olympics as the highlight of his sporting career rather than his touring experiences. Of such tried and tested stuff were Lions made. The 1950 touring party was the first to be called the Lions by all and sundry, though they were still formally billed as the British Isles Rugby Union Team, and the initials BIRUT appeared on the tour blazer beneath the now accepted emblem of the four home unions’ badges on a quartered shield. A more obvious change—as mentioned earlier—was the adoption of bright red jerseys, prompted by the previous blue colours clashing with the black jersey of New Zealand. The Lions in Red were here to stay. The manager for the 1950 tour was a distinguished Royal Navy doctor, Surgeon-Captain L.B. ‘Ginger’ Osborne, then a selector for England and later a rear admiral. His good humour coupled with Mullen’s inspirational captaincy made this one of the happiest of tours. Indeed, we know just how pleasant an experience it was from first-hand accounts in a DVD documentary of that 1950 tour called The Singing Lions. ‘With all those Welshmen, what did you expect?’ as Jack Matthews put it. In the 1950 party, for the first time every player was an internationalist and all four home unions provided capped players. Although Wales’s captain John Gwiliam could not tour, there were eventually no fewer than 14 players from Wales, Lewis Jones joining as a replacement for the latter part of the tour. Jones would become known as ‘The Golden Boy’ of Welsh rugby but, as we will see, he would become involved in a controversy that split his nation asunder. The Welsh preponderance reflected the fact that the principality was enjoying one of its periods of domination over the other northern unions, having just achieved the Grand Slam. Great players like Williams and fellow centre Matthews—nicknamed ‘Iron Man’ by the New Zealanders ‘because of my tackling, I think’, he mused recently—and flying winger Ken Jones made the Welsh back line irresistible. ‘I once beat Ken in a 100m sprint,’ Matthews recalled, ‘and when my time was beaten later on, I had to remind the new record holder he was running in spikes and we ran in flat shoes.’ Other Welsh Lions of 1950 included the Terrible Twins from Neath, lock forwards Roy John and Rees Stephens, as well as utility forward Don Hayward, prop John Robins and fly-half Billy Cleaver. Hooker Dai Davies and flanker Bob Evans became vital team members while the ever-cheerful Cliff Davies provided the baritone for the Lions choir. Despite the tour having an English manager and selector, England had just three representatives, including captain Ivor Preece, which was not really surprising as English rugby was then in the doldrums, while Scotland had five and Ireland nine. ‘The Welsh and Irish got on great,’ said Williams, ‘but really we all gelled right from the start, all the nationalities, and maybe it was because so many of us had been used to getting along with strangers during our time in the services.’ The best known Scottish player of the day, the great back row forward W.I.D. ‘Doug’ Elliott, was invited to be a Lion but could not make the tour as he was a farmer and would miss the harvest, as was also the case with another Scottish invitee, Hamish Kemp. Doug Elliot did ask if he could join the tour for part of the trip, but was refused. The Lions Committee wanted total commitment in those days, and he never did make a tour. He was ‘a great character who was missed’, in Jack Kyle’s words. The leader of the Scottish contingent in 1950 was the barrel-chested flank forward Peter Kininmonth, while his fellow Scot, scrum-half Gus Black, was noted for his long and accurate passes which attracted the attention of an All Blacks team anxious to stop the Lions’ backs from cutting loose. It says everything about his destructive opposite number, Pat Crowley, that Gus Black survived just two Tests before giving way for the third Test to Gordon Rimmer, who in turn was injured during the game and replaced by the Welsh utility back Billy Cleaver, before Rex Willis took over at No. 9 for the final Test—Crowley destroyed them all. Both the team captain and its star player were Irish. A fine hooker, Dr Karl Mullen had been captain of Ireland’s Triple Crown-winning sides of 1948 and 1949 and was first choice to captain the Lions. Firm and fair and with a surgeon’s bedside manner about him, he would go on to become one of Ireland’s leading gynaecologists, and with his wife Doreen would be at the heart of Irish society for many years. Doreen died in 2008 and Dr Mullen is now living quietly in Ireland. Due to injury, Mullen missed a good number of matches but had a sound replacement as captain in Bleddyn Williams, while Dai Davies was such a success at hooker that Mullen stood aside for the team’s benefit even after recovering. Incidentally, both Davies and the lightning-quick flank forward Bob Evans were policemen, the latter an inspector with Newport C.I.D. All those young doctors and policemen—yet it was somehow a trouble-free tour… Bleddyn Williams would become one of the legendary figures of Welsh and Lions rugby, and at the age of 85 his memories of the tour and before are pin sharp. But he nearly didn’t make the 1950 Lions tour at all. As he recalled: In the final Welsh trial before the Five Nations in the early part of January, Malcolm Thomas, who also came on the Lions tour, and I were in opposition. He tackled me and my leg was caught in such a position that I tore the ligaments in my knee. I was in plaster for some time, and though they picked me for the Lions, I still had to prove my fitness, which I managed to do in a match for Cardiff against Bath. The great thing for me was that we went out by boat taking more than five weeks so that I was able to do all sorts of exercises with weights and by the time we reached New Zealand I was in pretty good shape. It also helped that we had so many doctors and trainee doctors around—Jack Matthews was a qualified GP, and Jack Kyle and Bill McKay qualified later, while Karl Mullen became a gynaecologist and Ginger Osborne was a dentist. I got injured against Otago and missed the first Test, but it was only a pulled hamstring though I made it worse by playing on with the injury—there were no replacements then, of course, and you stayed on the field unless you had to be carried off. That old law will mystify modern rugby fans used to the ‘revolving door’ replacements of modern matches, but Jack Matthews remembers that ‘no substitute’ rule ruefully: ‘On the tour I think we finished with only 14 men on the pitch in about 20 to 30 per cent of the matches we played. You just had to carry on.’ Matthews himself was almost the victim of some skulduggery by an alleged Irish selector, who threatened him with expulsion from the Lions. On the morning of our 1950 Triple Crown game against Ireland, I went to ‘spend a penny’, so to speak, and this fellow just said ‘If you play well today you won’t make the Lions tour, as I’m a selector and will see to it.’ I ignored him and went out and played my usual game. We won 6–3, and I never heard another word. One of the ‘doctors in the making’ on that tour was one of Ireland’s all-time greats, fly-half J.W. ‘Jack’ Kyle, whose inventiveness sparked many a try-scoring move by the backs. Kyle and his fellow Irishmen proved a big hit off the field, and combined with the lads from the Valleys in many a singsong. ‘We had won the Grand Slam in 1948,’ recalled Kyle, ‘and Wales had just won it, so naturally between the two countries we had the bulk of the party.’ Kyle’s experiences of being selected were typical of the time. As a medical student at Queen’s University in Belfast, he had already played for Ireland and was reckoned to be the outstanding fly-half of the day. He had hopes for receiving the selectors’ call but in the end found out he had been chosen for the tour from a newspaper. ‘My father, who was also John Wilson Kyle like me, was reading the Belfast Telegraph when he noticed a report saying ‘the following have been selected…’ and there was my name,’ said Kyle. ‘I know plenty of Lions who found out the same way. In those days there was absolutely no question of any money or benefits accruing from playing rugby. My dad frequently said to me ‘You’re not going to earn your living from rugby, son, you had better pass your exams. When he read of my selection, fortunately I wasn’t in the house. He read out the report and noted the fact that I would be away for six months and miss a full term, and then turned to my brother Eric and said ‘Does that brother of yours ever intend to qualify?’ I actually did take a few books and hoped to get advice from the other doctors on the tour like Karl Mullen, but I can’t remember doing much reading and we only had one session where Karl tried to teach me a bit about midwifery and gynaecology. That may have been the only occasion when midwifery was learned on a rugby tour. As for gynaecology… As a qualified GP, Jack Matthews’ position was much worse—he had to pay a locum thousands of pounds to fill in for him while he was away so that he didn’t lose his practice. Matthews said: ‘My son was two at the time, and my wife said I could go on tour, but she wanted a maid to help out at home, so I had to pay for her, too. And all we got was seven shillings a day expenses and we even had to buy our own blazers.’ The clothing allowance was also frugal—a Lions tie and two BIRUT badges which the players had to sew on themselves. Jack Kyle did acquire something substantial from that tour—a brother-in-law, Noel Henderson, who was a student at Queen’s alongside Kyle and Bill McKay. ‘He was a very good centre who greatly strengthened our defence—he was always criticizing me for not getting up on my man, saying things like “Does the out half [fly-half] intend tackling his opposite number by tomorrow?”’ Kyle had to forgive him later: ‘After all, he married my sister and they had four daughters.’ Coming from lands beset by shortages and rationing, the Lions took full advantage of their hosts’ generosity, and in turn they proved to be wonderful ambassadors for the sport in Britain and Ireland. The sparkling play by the backs in most matches and their sportsmanship in all of the games was rivalled only by their obvious enjoyment at the many receptions and outings laid on for them in New Zealand in particular. ‘We had a wonderful time,’ recalled Matthews. ‘The people in New Zealand were often more British than the British, and were always asking us how things were “at home”, even though they had never been there.’ The Lions played a full part in the social whirl that surrounded the tourists, as Matthews remembered: There were no pubs as such, and people just took us into their homes where we ate and drank merrily. Often they would take us out to hunt wild pigs—fortunately they also brought along professional hunters. I remember when we visited the Maori settlement at Rotorua and it was quite a sight to see our lads up there dancing with the Maori. The pace was also leisurely largely because of the way the Lions got around: ‘We would travel by bus or train, never by aeroplane,’ recalled Bleddyn Williams, ‘and would train on school grounds. We had no coaches so Karl would look after the forwards and I would take charge of the backs. Afterwards we would have to give a little talk or answer questions from the pupils.’ Both he and Jack Matthews are adamant about the source of most of the questions—‘The girls, no doubt about it,’ said Matthews. ‘They really were very interested in all aspects of the game.’ So there you have the true secret of the All Blacks’ success—wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters all keeping the men on their toes. Jack Kyle recalled that the four national captains—Karl Mullen, Bleddyn Williams, Peter Kininmonth, and Ivor Preece of England—did the selection chores: ‘We went out without coaches and, to be frank, it was quite a leisurely affair at times. ‘We had plenty of time to see the sights and scenery and at the age of just 24, being carefree and away with a crowd of chaps with nothing to do but play rugby and enjoy ourselves, it really was quite something, a tremendous experience.’ That 1950 visit is still called the ‘Friendly Tour’ in New Zealand, as much for the style of play exhibited by the Lions as by their undoubted social charms. ‘It was all arranged beforehand,’ revealed Bleddyn Williams some 58 years later. ‘We threw the ball about because we all agreed that we wanted to entertain the people who came to see us, and we felt we did that.’ The appreciation of the backs in particular was shown by the fact that Kyle and Jones were named as two of the five players of the year by the Rugby Almanack of New Zealand. Due to injuries, other backs distinguished themselves in unaccustomed roles, with Scottish fly-half or centre Ranald Macdonald making an impact as a winger. Sadly, however, the results of the Test Matches against New Zealand brought only a small degree of contentment to the Lions. Having started off with three easy victories, the Lions were humbled in the first two difficult provincial games against Otago and Southland, before travelling to Dunedin for the first Test. The match against Otago in particular saw the Lions come up against that province’s fierce rucking game that was to become such a feature of rugby in the land of the long white cloud. A hard fought and highly creditable draw in Dunedin, where the Lions led until late in the game only for New Zealand captain Roy Elvidge to score a converted try, was followed by three defeats to give the All Blacks another series victory. The second Test was lost 0–8 in Christchurch, where the Lions were reduced to 14 men when flanker Billy McKay was forced off with a broken nose and concussion. McKay was obviously a forgiving sort—he liked New Zealand so much that he emigrated there after qualifying as a doctor. Scores of 3–6 in Wellington and 8–11 in Auckland show just how close the Lions came to matching their opponents, especially in the latter Test. Bleddyn Williams still recalls the best try of the tour in that match. We were 11–3 down and right on our goal line when I said to Jack Kyle, the finest fly-half I ever played with, to get the ball out quickly as we were going to run it. The ball went from Rex Willis to Kyle but it never reached me because behind me was Lewis Jones who nipped in and intercepted it, running up to their full-back and passing to Ken Jones and we scored at the other end of the field. Fred Allen, who later coached the All Blacks, says to this day that it’s the best try they have ever seen at Auckland. From the kick-off I nearly scored a try but Peter Henderson, who was an Olympic runner like Ken Jones, caught me and pinned my arms in the tackle. He later told me it was the best tackle he had ever made. The All Blacks themselves had been whitewashed 3–0 by South Africa the previous year—so how good did that make the Springboks? The Lions would have to wait five years to find out. By common consent, the problem for the 1950 Lions was that, apart from the first Test, their forwards could never quite match the All Blacks in gaining and keeping possession. Perhaps only Roy John of Neath, Ireland’s Jimmy Nelson and Peter Kininmonth of Scotland were physically able to compete with the opposition in the Tests. Some observers say that had the superb Lions backs been matched with New Zealand’s forwards, it would have created a dream team the like of which had not been seen in world rugby. As it was, those peerless backs Kyle, Matthews, Williams and Jones had to make do with considerably less possession than their opposite numbers. The results from that period in New Zealand show that when the Lions backs got plenty of possession against the lesser provincial sides, such as Wanganui and Taranaki, they scored a barrowload of points, winning 31–3 and 25–3 respectively against these two sides. Indeed, the Lions won every non-Test Match after their defeat by Southland. Against the mighty rucking pack of the All Blacks, however, they were forced into defensive duties in the main, and though they usually coped admirably, no side on the back foot can hope to keep out New Zealand permanently. ‘We did play good rugby,’ recalled Matthews. ‘I was lucky enough and fit enough to play in all six Tests, and there were all these good players around me. We only just lost the series against the All Blacks by a few points over the course of the four games, and I’ve had many letters from New Zealand saying that our 1950 Lions were the best rugby-playing side that ever went there.’ Waving a fond farewell to their conquerors, the Lions moved on to Australia where again the hosts were magnificently hospitable and the rugby was rather less difficult. The backs feasted on much greater possession and ran in a total of 150 points in 6 matches. The first Test in Brisbane was comfortably won by 19–6, with Lewis Jones scoring 16 points with a personal ‘grand slam’—all the possible scores of a try, conversion, drop goal and penalty featured in his haul. The second Test in Sydney was even easier, with a scoreline of 24–3 in favour of the Lions. Their Australian copybook was blotted, however, with a lacklustre performance in the final match against a New South Wales XV who surprisingly won 17–12. Perhaps all those long days of travelling, not to mention the hospitality Down Under, had taken its toll. Despite the final setback and the losses in New Zealand, the tour was judged a massive success, not least because the Lions had boosted the public image of the sport. Karl Mullen’s words at the start of the tour summed up his squad’s approach and resonate down to us today as embodying the proper creed of the Lions: ‘We are not after records of matches played and won. We want to see the game played for the game’s sake and to give you good football. We will be only too happy if you beat us in a good football match.’ Sadly, not too many coaches and captains would dare to utter such sentiments in our winner-takes-all society of today. Bleddyn Williams and many of his band of Welsh colleagues from that 1950 tour eventually did gain a measure of revenge over New Zealand, Wales beating the All Blacks during their tour of the northern hemisphere in 1953. Some 54 years later, he remains the last Welsh captain to have led his men to victory over the All Blacks. Williams would later become a company director and wrote on rugby for The People newspaper for 32 years as well as making countless broadcasts. To their credit, both Williams and Matthews and their fellow Lions never turned their back on the Welsh Golden Boy, Lewis Jones, who committed the Great Sin of signing up as a professional less than two years after the Lions tour, joining Leeds for a then record fee of ?6,000. Immediately ostracized by rugby union, Jones was was banned from having any contact with all clubs worldwide—he could not even buy a drink in a clubhouse for fear of ‘tainting’ a club. Many Welsh players and officials refused to speak to him, due more to fear of being expelled themselves rather than any personal animus against Jones. His defection to rugby league at the age of 20 caused great controversy in Wales, particularly as he had been the Golden Boy of the sport. The headlines were blaring and most indicated that Jones’s decision had been a betrayal, though many pundits pointed out that his move had been inevitable given the fantastic money on offer. The hypocrisy of the rugby authorities concerning professionalism was exposed as well. In those days, the very mention of being involved with rugby league scouts could see you declared persona non grata in Union circles, as Bleddyn Williams recounts: ‘It happened to George Parsons before the Victory International against France in 1947. He was kicked off the train while travelling to play for Wales because he was alleged to have been seen speaking to a rugby league scout. He eventually had to turn professional, and played almost 300 games for St Helen’s.’ The charge of hypocrisy arose from the fact that everybody in rugby union knew that it happened. Two of the 1950 tourists—Bleddyn Williams and Jack Matthews—are happy to admit that they discussed terms with rugby league clubs, though they eventually rejected offers. Williams said: It happened during the war when I was about to go to America for pilot training, and in wartime there were fewer restrictions on mixing with league so I ended up at Salford and Wigan just trying to keep fit. My brother had played for Wigan before the war and the club manager obviously knew who I was. They offered me ?3,000 on the spot to sign for them and I had to point out that I couldn’t serve two bosses and was off to America in any case. When I came back they offered me ?5,000 and then ?6,000, and I gave them first refusal if I changed my mind, but in the end I just didn’t want to do it. Matthews was also ‘tapped’ by rugby league clubs: ‘I had offers galore, but my parents wouldn’t look at it. It wasn’t for me but I didn’t blame anyone who went “up north” to join rugby league as they didn’t have any jobs, then. I wasn’t against that at all, but league wasn’t for me because they were two different games.’ Williams concurred: ‘I am glad I didn’t take the money and thus miss the 1950 tour, because I am very, very proud of being a Lion.’ As for the ostracization of Jones, both Williams and Matthews consider that it was shameful. ‘It was ridiculous that he couldn’t even go back and visit his old friends,’ said Williams. ‘Just ridiculous, but that was the way it was.’ Matthews agreed: ‘We looked after any Cardiff player who went north and came back, even though they tried to bar them from the clubhouse. It was all a lot of rubbish.’ Lewis Jones lives in Leeds and has kept his ties to that city’s club for which he starred for many years. The members of Gorseinon rugby club in his home village paid him the tribute of naming their new clubhouse after their local hero, and Jones himself came to open it in early 2008, making a welcome public appearance in Wales. More than 50 years on, all has long been forgiven and forgotten, but as we shall see in subsequent chapters, joining rugby league was still seen as treason for many years after the Golden Boy made his move north. The Lions’ attitude to those who left the union fold is proof that the companionship forged on those tours with their long sea voyages was unbreakable. Williams and Matthews, for example, have remained lifelong friends and both have been honoured by the Queen. Jack Kyle has always been grateful for being a Lion, but points out the main difference between then and now was not just money but the players’ attitude to the sport: The fact that we had a career was more important than rugby. If you had a bad game and had an exam coming up afterwards, it soon got your mind off your game and onto the important stuff. In today’s professional world there would be a video analyst and a coach discussing your game and where you went wrong. The most we ever got if we lost was ‘Hard luck, chaps, you did your best.’ I have made and kept many friends through rugby and there’s no doubt being a Lion enriched my life tremendously and opened doors for me. To give you an example—I worked in Indonesia as a surgeon from 1962 to 1964 and my wife and I went up to Hong Kong for a holiday and were staying at the Repulse Bay Hotel. We had just got in and were unpacking and the phone rang. It was a guy from the local rugby club inviting me along to their meeting that night. I said ‘How did anyone know I was in Hong Kong?’ as I was pretty sure no one knew we were going there. He said ‘The customs officer at the airport is a rugby man and spotted your name on your passport.’ Those chaps were wonderful to us for the whole holiday, taking us for meals and arranging cars for us. That’s the kind of thing that has happened to Lions over the years. That 1950 band of happy Lions seems largely to have been blessed with success in later life. Ivor Preece enjoyed a long career with Coventry RFC, where he was both captain and president. He died in 1987. Billy Cleaver rose through the mining industry to become deputy director of the National Coal Board in South Wales. Defying stereotypes about rugger lads, Cleaver had a lifelong interest in the arts and became vice-chairman of the Welsh Arts Council. He died in 2003. Ken Jones lived until he was 84, having retired from rugby in 1957 when he was the record Welsh cap holder. The following year he had the honour of carrying the baton containing the Queen’s Speech at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff. ‘What kept you?’ said Prince Philip, after Jones took a wrong turning. Peter Kininmonth returned from the Lions tour with a most spectacular find: his wife Priscilla, who was on board the ship which took them home. Kininmonth had a distinguished career in financial services before turning to a second career on his wife’s farm where he became an award-winning master cheesemaker. He died aged 83 in 2007. Several of the 1950 Lions attended his funeral. John Robins became a leading figure in physical education, and went on to coach the Lions in 1966—more about that later. He ended his professional career as director of PE at the University of Wales in Cardiff. He died in 2007. Fellow Welsh cap Bob Evans achieved high rank in the police and was a stalwart for Newport all his life until his death in 2003. Doug Smith would become one of the most successful managers in Lions history—again more about him later. Grahame Budge, who died in 1979, left a rugby legacy to his family which endures—his granddaughter Alison Christie has been capped 61 times for Scotland. The most extraordinary story of the 1950 Lions, one which they have kept to themselves assuming they know all about it, did not emerge until after the death of Don Hayward in 1999. No one should pretend that the Lions have been innocents on their tours, and there are countless tales of liaisons between tourists and women—some of them even of ‘a certain age’—over the decades, though most are treated under the unbreakable code of rugby omerta, which states roughly that ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’. Not all such dalliances involved sweetness and romance, it must be said, but none had a happier ending than Hayward’s tale. The Welsh forward had loved his time Down Under in 1950 so much that he emigrated there, after meeting and marrying his wife Linda in 1952. He returned briefly to play rugby league for Wigan in the mid-1950s when his wife became ill. On returning to New Zealand, Hayward opened a butcher’s shop in Wainuiomata, a suburb of Lower Hutt, though he later moved to Otaki. Linda sadly died, but Hayward remained in Otaki with his son Gareth. One evening in October 1993 a knock came at the door of their house. On the doorstep stood 42-year-old Suzy Davis and her partner Tony Sims. They asked if he was Don Hayward, a member of the Lions tour party, and after being invited in, Sims blurted out: ‘Suzy thinks you are her father.’ Indeed he was. Hayward had met Suzy’s birth mother, Iona Potter, for just one night in Dunedin during the tour in 1950. He never knew that the then 29-year-old Potter had become pregnant and given birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Victoria before being put up for adoption and acquiring the name Suzy Davis. It wasn’t until the age of 35 that Davis began the search for her real parents. Showing all the determination her father had displayed on the field, she spent years patiently combing through records until she found her mother, who had two other children from a subsequent marriage and who confirmed that her father had been a rugby player from Wales, though she could not remember his name. Davis combed through rugby books and found pictures of the Welsh contingent in the 1950 Lions. Revealing her story in 1999, she told the Evening Post in Wellington: ‘I remember looking and looking at the photo to work out which one it might be.’ Her birth mother was reluctant to say more about her illicit liaison in 1950, but after she contracted terminal cancer, Iona told Suzy that her only memory of the tall Welshman she had met in Dunedin was that he was a train driver from Pontypool. Armed with this information, Davis tracked down Hayward with the help of sportswriters. His first reaction was: ‘My God, I have always wanted a daughter.’ A paternity test proved conclusively that he was indeed the father. For the remaining five-and-a-quarter years of his life, Don Hayward cherished Suzy, and she grew close to the father she had never known. Ironically, for years she had passed his butcher’s shop daily on her way to and from work as a teacher, and had never known that the man behind the counter was her dad. But then, they did things differently in the 1950s. That tour to New Zealand and Australia would be the last time that the British and Irish Lions would be forced to spend many weeks on a ship travelling back and forth to the southern hemisphere. By the time of the next tour, the age of the passenger aircraft had been well and truly established. The world was changing and modernizing, and so was the sport of rugby, albeit under much protest and at a snail’s pace. CHAPTER FOUR ROBIN THOMPSON’S QUALITY STREET GANG South Africa 1955 (#ulink_23a4a179-5f8c-5969-b4c8-afd962178d37) The 1955 tour to South Africa was the first to see the initial journey south undertaken by air, albeit in a propellor-driven aircraft rather than one of the new-fangled jets of the time. But the accolade of being the first Lion to fly south had gone five years earlier to Lewis Jones, the Welsh full-back who made the then long and hazardous journey to New Zealand to replace George Norton who was injured early in the 1950 tour. Now known universally as the Lions, the tourists were eagerly awaited in South Africa. Having whitewashed the All Blacks in a four Test series in 1949, and having toured Britain, Ireland and France in 1951–52, completing the Grand Slam against the Five Nations and the Barbarians—Scotland in particular were humiliated 44–0—and losing only one of 31 matches, the Springboks rightly considered themselves to be the champions of the world. Their devoted fans wanted them to prove it against the Lions, while the whole rugby-mad country was simply brimming over with excitement at the arrival of the tourists for the first time in 17 years. It was also the first tour to be heavily covered by the press, a few of whose representatives, most notably former Lion and all round-sports-man Viv Jenkins, travelled constantly with the party—Jenkins eventually wrote a book about the tour. The first newsreel films of matches were shown in British cinemas, helping to build public awareness of the Lions, while from the likes of Jenkins, Clem Thomas and Cliff Morgan we have been handed down highly readable accounts of the tour. In short, the 1955 tour is the first where most of the action on and off the pitch was well documented. The captain for the tour was again an Irishman, Robin Thompson of Instonians and Ireland, and though his playing ability was criticized, most notably by Clem Thomas, his quiet assuredness and capacity for hard work were undoubted, while he was desperately unlucky to be injured in the second Test. The vice-captain was the Scottish full-back Angus Cameron, but a knee injury curtailed his contribution. The manager was a large Belfast man, Jack Siggins, who had no hesitation in laying down the law to what was deliberately a young party. Siggins felt that only athletic youthful types would be able to cope with the conditions in South Africa, and discouraged the selectors from picking anyone over the age of 30—he originally wanted 27 as the cut-off age—with only Trevor Lloyd of Maesteg and Wales being past his 30th birthday. Bryn Meredith of Newport was the first-choice hooker in the squad. He recalled: There were great players like Jack Kyle, Jack Matthews and Bleddyn Williams who could have played, but the manager didn’t want anyone over the age of 30. He made his decision and that was the end of that. But we still had a team of great quality. Personally, I was surprised to be chosen. When you start off you never think you’re good enough for your village side, then you never think you’re good enough for your country and who was I to think I was good enough for the Lions? I was a schoolmaster at the time and how else was I ever going to go abroad to play rugby? So when I heard I was selected I was always going to go and that was that, even though I was just married at the time, and my wife Betty had to go and live with her parents while I was away. It can’t have been too bad for her—we’re still together all these years later. The result of the age limit was that young stars emerged and made themselves famous on that tour, with the two best known being Cliff Morgan of Wales and Tony O’Reilly of Ireland. The former would become a much-loved broadcaster and senior figure in the BBC, while the latter, who celebrated his 19th birthday on the tour, became a very wealthy businessman and owner of newspapers, who organized, and paid for, reunions of the Lions from his era. The exploits of the handsome and witty O’Reilly as a Lion and afterwards in business could fill a book by themselves, and Bryn Meredith credits the Irishman with helping to maintain the strong squad atmosphere that persists among the surviving 1955 Lions: ‘He is the one that has kept us together, organizing the reunions and taking us to see the 2007 World Cup Final. I don’t think the modern professionals will be doing that sort of thing in years to come—these days they want paid for crossing the road.’ O’Reilly may have been the individual star, but on that 1955 tour the dominant figure was Cliff Morgan, who led by example and brought his keen intelligence to bear on tactics. Dickie Jeeps, one of the great characters of rugby union for nearly 60 years, recalled that he got his place in the Test team, despite being second or third choice scrum-half, because Morgan wanted him alongside: I hadn’t even played for England by then, but Cliff was a great player and fortunately for me he liked the way I played, passing the ball to the front of him so he could run on to it. It meant that Trevor Lloyd rarely got a game, and I was so concerned for him that I went to see Jack Siggins to ask that Trevor should play. He just growled ‘I manage this team, not you,’ so it was hard for Trevor as he only played in about five games. Morgan, the excellent English centre Jeff Butterfield, and O’Reilly were the fulcrum of a superb set of backs whose dashing play impressed their hosts throughout the almost four-month-long tour. Morgan repeatedly gave committed displays of controlling rugby in the No. 10 jersey, while O’Reilly dazzled on the wing or at centre, where he played in the final Test, with the flying Welsh sprinter Gareth Griffiths—a replacement for the injured Arthur Smith—and Cecil Pedlow sharing the wing duties as necessary. Butterfield had an important role to play on the tour. Jeeps recalled: Danny Davies from Cardiff was the assistant manager, but he was a quiet man, shall we say. Jeff Butterfield was a fitness fanatic, and he used to take the training and I can tell you, we trained harder on that tour than any other. We were pretty fit anyway, though I remember my father, who had fought in the First World War and been wounded, telling me when I was first selected for England that he was still faster than me. So we had a race—and he won! The forwards were more than useful, and for all four Tests the Lions had the same men in jersey numbers 1 to 3, with Bryn Meredith flanked by Swansea’s Billy Williams and Neath’s Courtenay Meredith making up an all-Welsh front row—the only tour since the war where one country has supplied the hooker and both props for all the Tests. Fellow Welshman Rhys Williams and captain Thompson usually provided the boiler room, with Scotland’s Jim Greenwood the only ever-present flanker in the Tests. Hugh McLeod was a tough prop forward from the Borders who might well have made the Test team and indeed would do so in 1959, but he lost out in 1955. ‘I had no difficulty accepting the manager’s decision to select the Welsh guys in front of me,’ said McLeod. I had just completed my national service—indeed I got away five weeks early so I could join the tour—and in the army you learn that orders is orders, and there was no arguing once the decision had been made. The fact is that I felt lucky to be on the tour at all. If it had not been for my mother and my future wife I wouldn’t have been able to go on the tour because it was a rule that you had to have ?40 in your wallet and that was a lot of money in those days. You also had to supply all your own gear except for a tie, and it was thanks to them that I was able to go. McLeod did acquire something on tour—a nickname: ‘That fellow O’Reilly was awful quick with the gab, and the first time he saw me I was wearing my tracksuit with the legs rolled up about my knees. “Look,” O’Reilly said, “it’s an abbot”, and the name stuck from then on.’ There were plenty of colourful figures on the tour, not the least of whom was an ordained army chaplain, the Rev. Robin Roe of Lansdowne, London Irish and Ireland, who would go on to win the Military Cross for his bravery while serving with the Lancashire Regiment in Aden in 1967, when he rescued soldiers from a blazing lorry under heavy gunfire. The medal citation read: ‘His courage and example in the face of danger has been outstanding and his infectious enthusiasm and confidence under all conditions has been an inspiration to the whole Battalion.’ A Lion even when he was wearing a dog collar—what manner of men were these? Of them all, the Rev. Roe had perhaps the most misgivings about touring a land already disfigured by the apartheid policy of the ruling National Party with its Afrikaaner majority. Most of the Lions were not in the slightest politically minded, but a few such as Roe were troubled by what they were going to encounter. Yet he and the others decided to go, if only to see for themselves what the morally repugnant system was like. Meredith said: We didn’t know what apartheid meant, but you soon realized that it meant that blacks went one way and whites another, and that there was demarcation everywhere. It didn’t affect us much because we only met the people that wanted to meet us anyway, but it was certainly an eye-opener when sometimes a black man would come up and start talking to you for two minutes and then he would say ‘I had better go now because someone might think I’m accosting you.’ I remember a boxer coming to talk with us and he said ‘I’d better go now in case I get accused’, and off he went. Apartheid was one reason why the tour got off to a surprising start for the participants. They had gathered at Eastbourne College for pre-tour training and a get-together when a Foreign Office mandarin gave them a strong lecture on the ban on associating with non-whites. In particular, he stressed that on no account was there to be any sex with black or mixed-race people as that was a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment. It was a rude awakening about the realities of apartheid. One of the perhaps forgotten men of that tour was Scottish lock forward Ernest Michie, who has rarely given interviews about his days as a Lion, but was happy to speak for this book. He said: ‘I missed out on the Foreign Office speech because I was a couple of days late in joining the party due to having to sit my final exams at Aberdeen University. But I remember the message loud and clear—don’t talk about politics and be pretty circumspect about who you speak to.’ Michie is disarmingly modest about his achievement in being selected: I had played for Scotland but I was very surprised to be chosen. The University side was on a tour to London, going by bus which took about 20 hours because there was no motorway in those days. We stopped every so often for a cup of tea, and at Watford or somewhere I was dozing on the bus when one of the chaps, Doug Robbie, who is now a doctor, came back from his cuppa and said ‘Your name’s in the list of British Lions.’ I said to him. ‘Don’t be daft,’ and I really didn’t believe it until we met up with the London Scottish boys who included Dr Doug Smith, who had been a Lion in 1950 and would manage the 1971 Lions. He assured me it was true, so I began to believe it then. Michie really began to believe it when he made his first-ever flight on an aeroplane, from Dyce Airport near Aberdeen to London to join the squad. At Eastbourne, the squad not only got their instructions from the Foreign Office but manager Siggins also handed out strict instructions on behavioural standards and gave out the rules on cash—they would be allowed just five shillings (25p) per day pocket money. In the event, some of the Lions augmented their income by selling their complimentary match tickets, and such was the demand for Test tickets in particular that some went for ?50 each. That was strictly against the rules on amateurism, but either a blind eye was turned or Siggins knew perfectly well what was happening and ignored it. Dickie Jeeps said: ‘There was indeed a black market in tickets, especially for the Tests where they could have sold the tickets ten times over. But by the time the first Test came around you would have made some friends, and that’s where most of the tickets went, though there was undoubtedly a sale of tickets which nobody admitted to.’ The Lions themselves came up with the most famous code of tour etiquette, which has been known to touring Lions ever since as Lloyd’s Law. During a team meeting with Siggins, Welsh scrum-half Trevor Lloyd suggested that if a player was lucky enough to get himself a girlfriend, no other player should attempt to muscle in, and all of them agreed to it. Some would suggest that Lloyd’s Law did not prove to be binding on subsequent tour parties. The Lockheed Constellation aircraft which was to be their ‘safe’ conveyance to South Africa played its part in the early adventures of the tourists. The Lions had to board and disembark a couple of times before taking off from Heathrow, and for those who had never flown before, such as Welsh back row forward Russell Robins, already jangled nerves were stretched taut. More than 50 years later he recalled: ‘I’d never been on a plane before in my life and was beginning to feel nervous about it.’ The journey via Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda took 36 hours, but the Lions were at least able to stretch their legs while the Lockheed was refilled with fuel and that most important of cargoes: booze. On the flight between Khartoum and Nairobi, the captain encountered difficulties with the aircraft, which was being dragged down at the tail and veering in flight. Leaving the cockpit, he went to the rear where he found 20 sizeable young men crammed into a space designed for half-a-dozen people. The Lions were having a party, and how were they to know about such things as ‘trim’ and weight distribution? Ernest Michie confirmed: There was nobody else left on the plane but us by that time. We were all moving about chatting to each other and having a drink and I don’t think the captain could work out what was going on as the plane became a bit unstable with the surge of bodies to and fro and back and forward. He came back to see what was happening, and found that hardly anybody was sitting in their own seats. He politely asked that, if it wasn’t too much trouble, could we sit in our seats now and again? On arrival at Johannesburg in the middle of the night, the Lions were amazed to find a huge crowd waiting to greet them. ‘I honestly think there were 10,000 people there to greet us,’ said Jeeps. ‘It was packed, and was the first time we realized what we were getting into.’ Cliff Morgan had anticipated a welcoming party, though not a crowd of that size, and had appointed himself choirmaster, helped by Tom Reid of Ireland. Under Morgan’s tutelage, the Lions had learned the old Afrikaaner folk song ‘Sarie Marais’ with its jaunty chorus that translates into English as ‘O take me back to the old Transvaal, where my Sarie lives, Down among the maize fields near the green thorn tree, there lives my Sarie Marais’. The Lions gave voice in Afrikaans and were an instant hit. Meredith said: ‘The people took us to their hearts, and decided we were the best ever touring side even before we played a game.’ As always, getting the men of five different nations to gel together was a crucial part of the tour. ‘If truth were to be told,’ said Ernest Michie, ‘the Irish and the Scots seemed to get on very well, but there was a preponderance of Welsh players in the squad and they tended to keep to themselves a little bit.’ Farmer Jeeps has a more pithy description: ‘The Welsh stuck together like shit to a blanket, as we said plenty of times on that tour.’ Yet gel they did, helped by Siggins’ decision to rotate room-mates every few weeks. In order to help that bonding process, the 1955 Lions also set out on their first public duty the day after they arrived—a supposedly leisurely round of golf. Once again, thousands of South Africans turned out to welcome the Lions, though what it did for their nerves on the first tee can only be guessed at. The Lions soon found out just how different rugby was in South Africa. The forwards were dragged into the sort of physical encounters they had never experienced before, but usually won sufficient ball for the Lions’ superior backs to show their paces. The sheer quality of the Lions’ play entranced their South African hosts, who nevertheless did not stand back in admiration. Hugh McLeod said: ‘I loved the hard ground, but a lot of the guys didn’t. There was no such thing as an easy game in South Africa, no matter who you were playing. They were big guys and always at you. But the harder the game, the more I liked it.’ On a tour again beset with injuries, Clem Thomas developed appendicitis, had the necessary operation, and was back playing within five weeks. Arthur Smith, the flying Scottish winger, was not so lucky, playing in only four matches after breaking a bone in his wrist—his turn would come seven years later. Like Smith, the walking wounded were plentiful. The Rev. Robin Roe played matches at hooker with two cracked ribs. Reg Higgins tore ligaments in the first Test and missed half the tour, while Rhys Williams had two front teeth knocked out against the Orange Free State but played on as his incensed colleagues took their opponents apart with the best form of revenge, winning 31–3. It was after that match that the Lions also took measures to protect themselves against ‘cheap shots’, as Thomas described them. ‘It became necessary to have a fixer to stop such unprovoked attacks’, wrote Thomas in the History. ‘I was made the avenging angel. Tony O’Reilly would come up to me and say “number four” or whatever, and I was supposed to go in and mete out punishment at the next opportunity, preferably at a nice loose maul. I don’t know how I got such a difficult job!’ The Lions were learning fast about the South African approach to rugby, and it soon became clear that, in the Tests, if the forwards could raise their game to match the Springbok pack, the backs could finish the job. South African rugby might well be of a different order to the homegrown variety, but it did not make it necessarily better. The clash of cultures off the field was just as pronounced. Clem Thomas recalled being presented with the skin of a freshly shot leopard, and later on in the tour a farmer presented him with a lion cub. ‘Siggins insisted on me donating it to a local zoo, which I did with some relief’, wrote Thomas. As Bryn Meredith put it, ‘there’s no point in going 7,000 miles and not seeing some of the country’ and by the time they had finished the tour, the Lions had covered more than 10,000 miles within southern Africa, including Rhodesia. All are agreed that a two-day visit to Kruger Park, the national wildlife reserve and safari centre, was the highlight: ‘Travel was a bit primitive, but Kruger Park was a wonderful experience—I’ve been back three times since,’ said Dickie Jeeps. It was early on in the tour that a certain player did a disappearing act, having fallen in love with a local girl. His name has never been revealed and, true to their ties of brotherhood, even 50-odd years later his identity is still kept a secret. Apparently he really was injured, but not as badly as was made out and the only disease he was suffering from was lovesickness. The Romeo went off with his Juliet and missed several games as a consequence. He did eventually return to the party, and the cover story of his ‘injury’ held not only then but still does. ‘What went on tour stayed on tour, even though he went off tour,’ as one 1955 Lion put it. ‘Anyway, the rest of us were just jealous.’ Dickie Jeeps had not long been married to his first wife, Jean, but does not blame his touring for the fact that they eventually split up: It wasn’t the tour or anything that happened on it; it was me. I did meet a girl after the first Test in 1955 and it was all perfectly innocent. She liked dancing and I liked dancing, but nothing else happened. And would you believe it—the first time I went into the Mayfair Hotel in London after being selected for England, there she was, working as a receptionist. The Lions lost their opening match to Western Transvaal 6–9, before a run of ten victories and another loss to Eastern Province took them to the first Test in Johannesburg. Ernest Michie recalls that the Test side was decided pretty much in advance, but there was competition to be named as a reserve. ‘In those days you would be named as a reserve but would only play if a member of the Test team dropped out before the match, as there were still no substitutes or replacements allowed during the match,’ said Michie. There were four second row forwards in the squad and one of them was the tour captain, so that meant there were three of us going for one place. I was named as first reserve but never got to play, and it was the closest I ever came to making the Test team. In any case, I got to ‘play’ in one sense, because I had taken my bagpipes with me on the tour and I played the team onto the pitch for that first Test. The match has gone down in history as one of the greatest internationals ever played. The Lions won 23–22 in front of a world-record crowd of 95,000, plus at least another 10,000 who got in by dubious means. Dickie Jeeps recalled how one stand was given over to black South Africans, and they roared their support for the men in red rather than green. Jeeps explained: ‘Many of them had got in over some scaffolding and it was absolutely packed. I was told many years later that Nelson Mandela had been in among them. It was good to have their support.’ The manner of the victory was very pleasing, the Lions playing running rugby and coming from behind, while also playing the second half of the match with 14 men after Higgins retired injured. A brilliant try under the posts by Cliff Morgan saw the Lions forge ahead and further second-half tries by Jim Greenwood and O’Reilly put them 23–11 up, only for South Africa to draw within a point with a late try. The Springboks goal kicker Jack van der Schyff stepped up to take the conversion which would decide the outcome: ‘I remember we were all standing under the posts,’ said Dickie Jeeps, ‘just watching and waiting, while Billy Williams stood there with his hands together saying, “the Lord will keep this out, the Lord will keep this out”’. Divine judgement or not, the conversion was missed, and the Lions had won a Test in South Africa for only the third time in the 20th century. Danie Craven was the dictatorial coach of the Springboks and his reaction was one of fury at his side’s complacency. He dropped five of the team including goal kicker Jack van der Schyff who had missed the late conversion—he never played for South Africa again. The Boks went all out for revenge and got it in some style, outclassing the Lions 25–9 in the second Test. The third Test proved crucial to the success of the tour. Angus Cameron’s injured knee caused him to be left out and replaced by Doug Baker, while Clem Thomas came in for his Lions Test debut. Captain Robin Thompson also missed the match through injury. His place was taken by Irish giant Tom Reid, who formed a partnership with Rhys Williams that proved crucial on the day. In his History, Thomas related a bizarre event in training before the vital Test: ‘Danie Craven, obsessed by the idea that the British press were spying on him, took his players off the field and, when they had gone, took them back again for a session under bright moonlight.’ The press dubbed it ‘the moonlight sonata’. It did the Springboks no good. Inspired by new captain Morgan, in the heat of Pretoria, the Lions took on the South Africans up front and won the toughest exchanges of the tour. Rhys Williams and Reid dominated the line-out, and even though badly injured, Courtenay Meredith stayed on the field and contributed to the forwards’ dominance. Meredith’s tongue had been almost severed, but despite being in agony, he insisted on being stitched up to play on, and was later re-stitched in order to play in the final Test as well. Bryn Meredith said: ‘The Springboks are always big and physical, but we decided to take them on up front that day. It was one of the hardest matches I’ve ever played, but we had a good pack and good backs and we were determined to win.’ Jeeps commented: ‘You had to put up with the hard tackles and the bad ones, but that was part of the game, and anyway, we were as hard as they were.’ The Lions had also decided to change tactics behind the scrum, kicking rather than running the ball, and as a result there were no fewer than 63 line-outs in the match. The switch worked, and though the victory was narrow at 9–6, it was nevertheless deserved, not least because Butterfield had scored the only try of the game. With Morgan in control of the match, even Danie Craven had to admit that his beloved Springboks had been second best on the day. According to Meredith there was ‘one hell of a party’ that night. No matter what happened, the Lions could not lose the four-match series, but by then they were exhausted and injury-ridden. Cliff Morgan had picked up an ankle knock but such was his importance that he would have been selected with any injury short of an amputation. The position of the captain was less clear. Robin Thompson’s fitness after injury was under considerable debate, but the man himself maintained he was fit enough to play, and later described it as ‘just another Lions myth’ that he had forced his way back into the team. Shortly before his death in 2003, Thompson nailed the ‘myth’, saying: Before the final Test the selection team of manager Jack Siggins, vice-captain Angus Cameron, Cliff Morgan and myself sat down. I said that I was fit and would like to be included. There were no qualms, no raised eyebrows; the trio were in full agreement. But after the game I got some very bad press. They said I had forced my way onto the team even though I was still carrying an injury. Where all that came from I just do not know. It was no surprise when a fired-up South Africa hit the tired Lions with everything plus the kitchen sink in that final Test in Port Elizabeth. Tony O’Reilly broke his shoulder scoring the second of the Lions’ two tries—it was his 16th of the tour, a new Lions record—but these achievements were scant consolation as the Springboks ran in five tries of their own for a 22–9 victory that squared the series. Only now has Ernest Michie revealed the ‘hex’ which may have afflicted the Lions that day: Cliff Morgan was very superstitious, and with us having won the first Test after I’d piped them on, he didn’t want us to take the field without me playing the pipes. But I was rooming with Johnny Williams who was a bit of a prankster, and who couldn’t resist trying to have a go at playing my pipes, which were all set up and ready to go. Unfortunately he knocked the reed out of the chanter so I couldn’t play them and couldn’t lead out the team in the last Test. I remember Cliff Morgan moaning ‘we’ll lose, we’ll lose’. The series may have ended in a draw, but it was a victory for the quality of the Lions in one respect. One South African commentator wrote that his country owed ‘a manifold debt to the British Isles rugby touring team. They have rescued our rugby from becoming a matter merely of boot and brawn.’ As they had done on arrival, the Lions serenaded the large crowd that turned out to witness their departure. They left for home as one of the most popular touring parties ever to visit South Africa, their stylish play having entertained more than 750,000 spectators at their 25 games. To their amazement, on arriving in London after stopping off to play and beat an East African XV in Nairobi, the Lions were given a heroes’ welcome. The players did not know that, back home, the press coverage had been devoured by the rugby community in Britain and Ireland, and that newsreels of their matches had been popular in the cinemas. The 1955 Lions enjoyed varying degrees of success in their lives after the tour. Dickie Jeeps went on to make two more tours with the Lions and later became chairman of the Sports Council—as we will see in chapter ten. Ernest Michie’s international career was cut short by the diktat of the Scottish Rugby Union. He returned from the tour to National Service and then got a job with the Forestry Commission in Nottingham. While there, Michie turned out for Leicester, but the SRU had taken drastic action to counteract Scotland’s poor form in the early 1950s and had insisted that only ‘home-based’ players or those playing for London Scottish would be considered for selection. Michie was summarily dropped—even selection for the Lions was no guarantee of success against the short-sighted-ness of the blazerati of those days. Michie went on to enjoy a long career in the Forestry Commission and he and his wife Sybil, a nurse he met before the 1955 tour and who waited patiently for him to return, now live in Inverness. Rhys Williams beat Michie to that second row place in the 1955 Test side. He would tour again in 1959, and go on to become one of the most respected figures in the administration of Welsh rugby, as well as a top official in the principality’s educational sector. But his connection to South Africa, minted in 1955, cost him dear. He would have become president of the WRU had he not visited South Africa as part of its board’s centenary celebration in 1989. Instead, after controversy broke out about the visit, Williams resigned his national position. He died in 1993. Tom Elliot and Hugh McLeod, of those great Borders rivals Gala and Hawick respectively, became lifelong friends. McLeod said ‘He was a great guy, even if he was a pailmerk’ (an affectionate derogatory name for a resident of Galashiels). They never made the Lions Test team together but starred for Scotland for several years, becoming famous for their pre-match wrestling ‘warm up’ routine. Elliot became one of Scotland’s most respected farmers, and was awarded an MBE for his services to the industry. He died in 1998, while Hugh McLeod still lives in Hawick and is a stalwart of the town’s club, where he was once president and for which he famously absented himself from his honeymoon to play for. The Lions of 1955 have had diverse careers. Jim Greenwood captained Scotland to a revival in the late 1950s before becoming one of the most respected coaches in the northern hemisphere and passing on his expertise to several future Lions while working as a lecturer at Loughborough College. Frank Sykes, the England winger, emigrated to the USA where he had a long and distinguished career as a teacher, latterly at Cate School in California where he even managed to encourage pupils into the delights of rugby. He now lives in Washington State. One Lion who caused great controversy was none other than the captain. Robin Thompson provoked anger and fierce debate when he signed in early 1956 for Warrington, where his brother was a doctor. As had happened with Lewis Jones in 1950, once again a Lion was ostracized from rugby union. Sadly for Thompson, his playing career was cut short by a bone disease at the age of just 25, and he also endured a heart attack in his early forties, followed by several more after that. Thompson nevertheless became a respected rugby pundit and was inducted into the Rugby Writers’ Hall of Fame shortly before he died in 2003. Other 1955 Lions have had to endure dire ill-health in later life. Cliff Morgan enjoyed a stellar career in broadcasting and became one of the best-known voices on television and radio, most memorably being the commentator for the legendary Barbarians versus All Blacks match in Cardiff in 1973. Behind the scenes, Morgan became head of sport at the BBC, while his vocal talents were always in demand on radio. Most cruelly, when he was afflicted with cancer some years ago, his treatment required the removal of his larynx, and that wonderful voice has been silenced. Yet he still maintains his interest in sport and his former colleagues from his home on the Isle of Wight. ‘What has happened to Cliff has been terrible, simply awful, especially when you consider that speaking was his way of life,’ said Dickie Jeeps. ‘But he is still in touch with letters and cards, and they are always so well written.’ It is always tragic when a physically fit person succumbs to dementia, and that is what happened when Alzheimer’s Disease afflicted one of the most popular of the 1955 Lions. Former England scrum-half John Williams was diagnosed with the disease at the age of 68, and his family have suffered a nightmare ever since. His wife Mary went public with the details in a very moving ‘first person’ article in the Daily Mail in an attempt to show how victims of Alzheimer’s are often misunderstood and mistreated. Mrs Williams, who herself has survived a double mastectomy for breast cancer, told how the man the 1955 Lions knew as fun-loving Johnny the prankster had become a violent, forgetful, moody individual who had regressed to childhood. He would hit her, and seconds later act as if nothing had happened. When her son from her first marriage, Jonathan, was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 41, Williams would try to understand but seemed incapable of sympathizing—a classic symptom of the disease. Eventually Mary could no longer care for him at home and he had to be hospitalized. She wrote: It’s almost impossible to equate the ruggedly handsome, energetic sporting hero I fell in love with and the broken man who cannot even remember his own name. This kind, generous and good man is now held for his own safety in the secure unit of a hospital specializing in patients with mental illnesses. My husband, who is now 76, is incontinent and unable to feed or wash himself. The dementia has made him so aggressive towards me and others that for months he was detained under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act—an extreme law giving doctors the authority to hold and treat a patient. The Williams family also faced a long and heartbreaking fight to get his care paid for, as was his right under the National Health Service rules. The Lions Trust stepped in with a ?10,000 donation to help pay for his care, but Mrs Williams faced losing her home until legal pressure and the Daily Mail Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jeff-connor/once-were-lions-the-players-stories-inside-the-world-s-most-fa/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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