After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  Rugby, however, had to fight for its place in the British Army: in 1906, there were 578 army soccer teams, with 180 in the Royal Navy. The inauguration that year of the Army–Navy Cup, albeit for officers only, increased participation and rugby grew from its handful of military teams. Successive national tours by colonial teams, starting with the All Blacks in 1905, further developed interest and a steady influx of public school-educated rugby-playing officers into the Regular and Territorial armies meant that rugby was firmly established in the military by 1914.

  Sport served a deeper psychological purpose at the front. Volunteer civilians who had dreamed of bloodless glory at the drill halls before August 1914 found the reality of warfare so hideous that they had to seek escape in order to survive. Humankind cannot indeed bear so much reality. Behind the lines, they took refuge from their trench terrors in games which offered a comforting return to a world before war, and an ordered ‘other life’ where war did not threaten to drive them mad. According to historian J.G. Fuller, the soldier ‘sought intervals of pleasure to relieve the suffering, and exercised ingenuity to create islands of sanity in the midst of the horror’.9

  Rugby was one such island. With its precise formations, set-piece confrontations, and disciplined rules, rugby restored a sense of order while its physicality and speed took men out of their troubled selves. Even ‘Code Wars’ served a purpose, as one Australian subaltern recalled:

  The relative merits of Rugby, Australian Rules and Association were debated as keenly on the battlefields and back areas of France and Belgium as they ever were under the sunny skies of Australia … the argument with the Kaiser was more easily settled than that one. The patronising manner in which a supporter of one particular game would ask another to ‘come and see a real football match’ was most amusing.10

  As the French say more elegantly, the more things change, the more they are the same thing. In the 1916 diary of another Australian, Tom Richards, one can hear the yearning for yesteryear mixed with the joy of release. When his 1st Field Ambulance played the 3rd they journeyed eight kilometres by wagon and crossed the River Lys on a raft to a pitch with football posts,

  … but no other marks, neither goal lines nor sidelines as the grass was two feet long in patches … the ball could not be seen and the men kicked yards away from the ball … a fellow was laid out and none of our players noticed it … A jolly good experience second only to the first match I saw in England when a hailstorm stopped the play and a ball went into the scrum alright and burst therein; the players could not make anything out of it.11

  Where indeed ‘les neiges d’antan’ of the rugby field? On the October eve of their transfer to the Somme, he watched ‘the 12th Battalion A Company versus the Bombers’ in an elegiac setting that reminded him of home:

  The surroundings were almost Australian in their appearance. The playing field was roomy and the grass delightful both in its softness and colour. A rough hedge of hawthorn and fruit-bearing blackberry bushes protected one side and end, a row of tall majestic trees towered close to the other side and watercress banks of the river framed off the end.

  The scene inspired in the soldier-players ‘an unconscious undercurrent to urge on these valiant athletes to fight relentlessly for the honour, the prestige of each particular section’. And although reality will soon bite with the sharpest of teeth, there is a carpe diem. Inevitably in rugby – and without the need for Latin – there is also a whole load of banter:

  Tomorrow they will be en route for the Somme and the greatest Hell ever thought of, greater even than man’s imagination is capable of conceiving. But what care they for the morrow, let’s first find out who are the best footballers while there is still time in hand … No player dared make a mistake: in his mess he would obtain no peace for weeks should he fail to keep up his end.

  Sport was a great equaliser between officers and other ranks, allowing both to forget themselves and their status for a brief while, yet maintain order and discipline through the rules and behaviour code of the game.

  Even as prisoners of war, when they were no longer free to play in green fields, they improvised games in captivity on pitches far less attractive than Richards’s water meadow. Douglas Lyall Grant, of London Scottish, two years a PoW, broke a rib playing rugger on the cinder surface at Gütersloh Offizierslager, and moaned like a schoolboy: ‘It’s rotten, I’m off games for a bit.’ At Schwarmstedt, the pitch was even more hazardous:

  The ground can hardly be called suitable, being only 50 yards long and 25 yards wide, while a pump and an electric light pole are obstacles to be avoided. However we had a good enough game with eleven a side and got hot dirty and scraped.12

  Improvisation occasionally brought retribution. At Magdeburg, playing in a cobbled courtyard with no leather ball available, officers used a bread loaf; the German guards resented this insult to their Brot and gave them all eight days in the cells. Further proof, if needed, that Fritz was not a sportsman and did not understand the importance of games or fair play. Such shortcomings, in the eyes of soldiers and press barons alike, were directly responsible for the current hostilities. Rugby was played on neutral grounds too: in April 1916, ‘Engeland’ and ‘Schotland’ played ‘het beroemde Engelsche spel, Rugby Football’13 at Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Teams came from 1,500 Royal Naval Division (RND) internees at Groningen, after the disaster at Antwerp had marooned them ashore for four years.

  International players were celebrities at the front as at home. Lieutenant Chater writes in some astonishment at witnessing a spontaneous Christmas truce in his sector of the line; he is more impressed at sharing a dugout with David McLaren Bain, ‘the Scotch Rugger international, an excellent fellow’, who would shortly be killed at Festubert. Even generals were caught under the spell of rugby’s stardust, as Henry Grierson14 recounted of one corps commander who ‘came to inspect our Battalion in the front line trenches’ and found Edgar Mobbs, former captain of Northampton Saints and England:

  When the GOC saw Edgar, he corpsed the meeting by ejaculating, ‘By Gad, it’s Mobbs. The last time I saw you, my dear chap, was when you and Tarr scored that remarkable try for England against the Australians – let’s go into your dugout and talk over old times.’ And so they did, and the Lt Gen never went near the frontline at all, but talked Rugger instead, to the total amazement of the Divisional Staff. But they didn’t know that General Fanshawe15 was an old Blackheath player.

  Just as Jonny is ‘loved by the English, adored by the French’, so too was Mobbs a century before, as rugby crossed the lines of language. Lieutenant Gurney, one of his Saints acolytes now serving under him, recounts a starstruck Frenchman exclaiming: ‘C’est Monsieur Mobbs!’ Gurney indignantly retorted, ‘C’est Colonel Mobbs’. Back came the reply: ‘Je le connais – rugby football – Bordeaux – I play against him.’

  The cold statistics of war do not show a ‘lost generation’, a phrase coined by Gertrude Stein, not for those who died, but to describe the war-interrupted survivors drifting through the Twenties – the beautiful and damned of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. Over 8 million men served in the British forces and roughly 10 per cent of them died; this equates to between 1 per cent and 2 per cent of the population as a whole. Comparing census returns of 1911 and 1921 reveals a decline in the male population of military age of some 14 per cent. The influenza pandemic that raged globally through 1918 and beyond also took its own deadly toll of that generation,16 unusually striking the young far more than its customary victims of infants and the elderly. Death in war does not spread itself evenly; like life, death is not fair, but indiscriminate.

  Disproportionate blows fell on tight-knit communities who joined up together and fought in the same murderous battles: ‘Pals’ battalions from Accrington and Barnsley or the Tyneside Irish and Scottish were more than decimated in 1916. But other sections of the population not so easily tagged with local labels suffered as much. If 10 per cent of all combatant men died, the death rate for line officers was
double at 20 per cent. A gruesome feature of Rosslyn Park’s death roll of 109 names17 is the number shot in the head. This is more than an occupational hazard of trench warfare, or the absence of top cover before the ‘Brodie Bowler’ helmet became standard issue in January 1916: it is because these were junior officers who led their men over the top and on patrol, peered over parapets, helped drag wounded soldiers to safety, only to be shot for their pains, or were picked off by snipers while checking on fright-weary sentries on their nightly rounds.

  There is no statistical analysis of rugby players who died. Nor would it be possible to define the sporting allegiance of the 888,246 British and Commonwealth soldiers represented by a blood-red sea of ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower of London. Those who both played and died for their country are the most celebrated. By my count, 137 capped players died in this war from Britain and its Empire, France, USA and even Argentina:18 its side that played the British in 1910 lost forward Frederick Sawyer at the Aisne in 1917.19 But time and again, when photographs are shown, or stories are told of fifteen men together, or a game of thirty, there is a consistent fraction: ONE THIRD. Rugby players suffered a death rate between 30 per cent and 35 per cent.

  Let us inspect the anecdotal evidence at school, club, or international level: Rosslyn Park lost 109 of some 350 who served, six from its 1910 XV photo; six of the XV of teenage Battersea schoolboys at Emanuel School in the 1914–15 season and six of their counterparts at Edinburgh Academy, or eight from its 1905 championship-winning side. Five Blues from Oxford’s 1910 Varsity team perished, six of the French side at Swansea that year, and eleven from Scotland’s clash with South Africa in 1912 (nine being Scots). Always a third or more.

  The sorrowful roll call continues. Eight from Glasgow Academicals Football Club XV in its final pre-war season; six from that season’s Liverpool FC, one of the greatest rugby club sides ever, with three national captains, two of them destined to fall in action; seven from 1913 French champions Aviron Bayonnais and from their Perpignan successors, five of the Barbarians side against the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) at Richmond in 1915, including three international threequarters. And so on. Statistics are not everything in life – proverbially, they come a poor third to lies and damned lies. But in death, the ‘killer stat’ – ONE THIRD – will shake his bloody locks and haunt the many rugby teams of this book.

  The Five Nations finale of April 1914 was poignant: it was the last peacetime international in Europe before the conflagration, with death’s shadow hovering over eleven doomed English and Frenchmen. The March Calcutta Cup game in Edinburgh was even harder hit, with twelve gladiators about to die, a misfortune of 40 per cent: Scotland would lose seven of its flowers; five Englishmen would wither in the earth, including the tallest poppy, Ronald Poulton-Palmer. Most tragic is an unlucky thirteen scholars destined to die from a 1912 Varsity Match that featured nine internationalists and twenty-eight who fought.

  Despite this litany of death and injury, rugby emerged reinvigorated; it got up off the floor after a multitude of crushing tackles and went at it again. After the fighting was finished, soldiers once more played rugby in 1919; they celebrated their victory and survival – and the memory of team-mates – with a unique festival: the first ever rugby world cup. This book tells that story.

  During the war, the No. 58 Thunderer was the standard issue whistle for artillery crews, warning them to keep clear of the recoil, before it returned to its peacetime role on the sports field. For the record, when the whistle blew in 1905, the All Blacks won 15–0. Twenty years later, down to fourteen men after Cyril Brownlie’s dismissal, they still beat England 17–11 to the silvery sound of Freethy’s blast. In 1987, when the same whistle first blew for the modern Rugby World Cup, hosts New Zealand went on to beat Italy 70–6 in Auckland. This black pattern with a silver accent will be broken when England kick off against Fiji at Twickenham on Friday 18 September 2015. But the century-old whistle will add to the mystique of a sporting celebration that was first born out of a terrible war

  In 2009, Rosslyn Park’s U14 lads went on tour and played les gars from RC Compiègne; the result and score will forever stay on tour, as it must. And in 2014 at Roehampton, as we remembered 109 men who made the ultimate sacrifice, no one was counting the score – not even the actuary who ran touch.

  Rugby won the day.

  Notes

  1 Daily Telegraph, 11 February 2013.

  2 McLaren served in Italy in the Second World War, and was at Monte Cassino.

  3 I am grateful here for a conversation with my friend Roy Barton; if you don’t agree, it’s his fault.

  4 MC in Vietnam, Chief of Defence Staff 2002–05; Governor-General from 2014.

  5 E.H.D. Sewell, The Log of a Sportsman (Unwin, 1923).

  6 Gary Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches (Macmillan, 2000).

  7 9 October 1914.

  8 Moran, Herbert, Viewless Winds – being the recollections and digressions of an Australian surgeon (P. Davies 1939).

  9 Fuller, J.G., Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies (OUP, 1991).

  10 Ibid.

  11 Growden, Greg, Wallaby Warrior: The World War 1 Diaries of Australia’s only British Lion (Allen & Unwin, 2013).

  12 John Lewis-Stempel, The War Behind the Wire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014).

  13 The famous English game.

  14 Henry Grierson, The Ramblings of a Rabbit (Chapman & Hall, 1924).

  15 Lt Gen. Edward Fanshawe, who took over V Corps from his brother Hew, sacked by Haig for daring to defend a scapegoat.

  16 Some 3–6 per cent of the world population died in the epidemic: 17 million in India, 400,000 in France and 250,000 in Britain.

  17 The Final Whistle, listed eighty-seven names in 2012; twenty-two more have been discovered since; history may be in the past, but it is not fixed.

  18 Gwyn Prescott’s list is the best, but I have added George Pugh, Australia and Paul Fauré, France.

  19 Lt F.W.C. Sawyer, Royal Engineers, killed 4 April 1917.

  2

  The Last of Peace

  Oh, we don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go, For your King and Country both need you so.1

  It was an August Bank Holiday weekend.2 As cricket-lovers at the Oval watched a young Jack Hobbs stroke his way to 226 against Nottinghamshire, the cries of the newsboys around the ground were ominous: ‘MOBILISATION OF THE FLEET’, ‘GERMANY IN THE NORTH SEA’ and – in Cockney tones – ‘SPRECHEN SIE DEUTSCH’. On Saturday morning, Ronald Poulton-Palmer had reported for duty with his 4th Royal Berkshire Territorials as they prepared to leave for their annual fortnight’s camp near Marlow. But there was an expectation of more news: France, Germany and Russia were already at war.

  Just fourteen weeks earlier ‘R.P.P.’ had been at the Stade Olympique at Colombes near Paris, captaining England to a successive Grand Slam, and scoring four tries in the process. This was a flourish to the nominal Home Nations ‘championship’ of those amateur days, as the French were still finding their feet in international rugby. Indeed, France and Scotland did not meet that year: their previous match in Paris had degenerated into a riot, and the scandalised Scots declined to host the French in genteel Edinburgh.

  There had been little to choose between England, Wales and Ireland, although the real thriller was the Calcutta Cup in Edinburgh when the unfancied Scots ran England close, forcing them to hang on for a narrow win by a single point, 15–16. England claimed the Triple Crown and went to Colombes for the coup de grâce. Ireland and Wales contested second place, each having beaten Scotland. The game in Belfast was brutal, as the Welsh pack justified its reputation as ‘The Terrible Eight’. Several stoppages delayed play as bleeding men were treated for injuries. A torrid private battle took place between Welshman Percy Jones and Irish pack-leader William Tyrrell, which went way beyond Moran’s ‘good-natured violence’; in later years, after bloodier slaughter put rugby brawls in perspective, Tyrrell – by now Air V
ice-Marshal Sir William Tyrrell, a grandee of the Irish Rugby Union – specifically asked to sit with his erstwhile adversary Jones at a post-match dinner. They did not talk about Fight Club.

  France, like Scotland, had lost all their games. But they scored first and were in the contest till the break when England led 13–8; in the second half the white shirts ran away to win 39–13. On top of R.P.P.’s four, Cyril Lowe, a wing considered too small by some at 5ft 6in, scored a hat-trick; he played twenty-five consecutive matches and was for long years England’s record try-scorer. Of the thirty players who took the field, eleven were killed in the war. For England, surgeon James ‘Bungy’ Watson died when a torpedo sank HMS Hawke; Francis Oakeley drowned as a submariner; Jimmy Dingle fell at Gallipoli; Arthur Harrison earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for his action at Zeebrugge in 1918; Robert Pillman and Poulton-Palmer died in Flanders. On the French side the fallen were Marcel Burgun, who was shot down, Jean Larribau, Emmanuel Iguiñiz, Paul Fauré, and Jean-Jacques Conilh de Beyssac. Of the six Englishmen, four have no known graves, the bodies of three naval officers Watson, Oakeley and Harrison lost in the North Sea, and Dingle in Turkey. The pair with the dignity of a headstone, Poulton-Palmer and Pillman, are six kilometres apart at Ploegsteert, Belgium.

  At 11 p.m. on 4 August, Britain’s ultimatum expired and a state of war was declared with Germany. The next day dawned in Sydney twelve hours before it did on the Greenwich Meridian. The touring All Blacks played a Metropolitan XV at the Sydney Sports Ground. A message in stark capitals was placed on the scoreboard: WAR DECLARED. Ironically, the match proceeds were designated for sending an Australasian team to the Olympics planned for Berlin in 1916; many athletes, by then known as Anzacs, were still making strenuous efforts to get to Berlin in the summer of 1916, but were unavoidably, often permanently, detained by events at Pozières. Instead of funding an unlikely Olympic challenge, the New South Wales Rugby Union duly noted that ‘much activity was devoted to the recruitment of members for the Expeditionary Force’. Ten days later, the kick-off for the last Test between the Wallabies and All Blacks was moved to 2 p.m. so the New Zealanders could board their ship home, which under new wartime regulations had to be out of Sydney Harbour by sunset, or be made to wait at the dock until next sunrise.