After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  Another member of the Originals, Ernie Booth, who stayed in England and played for Leicester, wrote: ‘Dave was a man of sterling worth … girded by great self-determination and self control, he was a valuable friend and could be, I think, a remorseless foe. To us All Blacks his word would often be “Give nothing away: take no chances”.’ Since 1922, the Gallaher Shield has been Auckland’s premier club competition; the Dave Gallaher Cup is awarded to the winner of the first Test between New Zealand and France in any calendar year. Of the five Gallahers who served, three were killed in France. Dave is buried at Nine Elms Cemetery, Poperinghe, where his headstone bears the fern.

  Twelve others who wore the black jersey in Tests would also die, four of them in a fortnight at Messines; with Gallaher, this made one in ten All Blacks from the previous decade. As a group, they present a telling picture, with many differences from their equivalents in other national teams. Of this thirteen who died, all but one were ‘other ranks’. Nor were they callow youths in their teens or early twenties but grizzled veterans with an average age over 32, only four being still under 30.

  When war exploded in Europe in August 1914, New Zealand’s first act of war was bloodless, seizing German Samoa as a ‘great and urgent Imperial service’ to the Mother Country. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Logan and a 1,419-strong advance party of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF), including six nurses, landed at Apia on 29 August without resistance. Logan proclaimed a New Zealand-run British military occupation and raised the Union flag. The new administration was later blamed for mishandling the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed a fifth of the local population, and its eventual forty-eight-year rule was rarely popular. But it did provide a legacy of fine Samoan-origin players in black shirts, from Bryan Williams, Frank Bunce and Jerry Collins to Ma’a Nonu, Julian Savea, Jerome Kaino and Sonny Bill Williams of the current generation.

  After Samoa, there were no easy games. New Zealand rugby’s contribution to the ‘Great War for Civilisation’ was soon acknowledged by ‘Quidnunc’ of the Canterbury Times, who avowed in 1915 that ‘the dash and ginger that characterised the bayonet charges of the New Zealanders in the trench-lined hills of Gallipoli were undoubtedly largely due to the rough-and-tumble training of the football ground’. He continues:

  It is certainly a fact that the football clubs of this Dominion have been first-rate recruiting grounds for the Expeditionary Force and its Reinforcements. All over the country … the call to arms has drained the clubs of their best men. From South Otago, not one club in that district can raise a team this season for flag matches. This is a matter in which the followers of the game may well take pride: the fewer players there are left while the war lasts the greater the honour for what may be called New Zealand’s national pastime.14

  This is not just the war-cry that ‘Rugby Players are Doing their Duty’, as trumpeted in the British recruitment poster; this is an entire population sacrificing its passionate devotion to their national sport to the pursuit of war. By 1916, rugby in New Zealand was at a standstill ‘except for those games confined to players under military age and reinforcement drafts’.15 New Zealanders already in Britain joined up immediately. George Chapman, Waitaki High and Otago University, won three Cambridge Blues, and played for the London Hospital and the Barbarians. As an RAMC medic he was killed, aged 27, by a shell as he attended the wounded in May 1915, at Ypres. He had already been decorated in December by the French ‘Pour Courage et Dévouement’, for saving a life in rough sea off Boulogne. Before the war, journals like the Otago Witness filled many column inches following the fortunes of New Zealand’s rugby exports in hospital and club teams, and more than one international side – Adams and Palmer, Kiwis from Otago University, were both capped for England. For a small nation of 1 million inhabitants, already defined and united by love of rugby, it was inevitable when casualty reports started to wash over the news pages that whole communities would grieve for their rugby boys. In wartime, players who were revered celebrities were also personal friends or even relatives to writers, spectators and townspeople, and would be widely mourned.

  There was deep sorrow in Wellington at the death of Roy Lambert with the Auckland Regiment at that fatal first landing. In the column by ‘Drop-kick’ there is heartfelt affection:

  To many members of football clubs in Wellington, the reality of war will be brought home with distinctness even greater than before by the death of Roy Lambert, a player admired and liked by all. This is the first death of a really prominent footballer in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force … he was not a graceful player, for he was tall and had an awkward appearance. In taking the ball he appeared uncertain, but he always managed to stretch his limbs to the requisite length and surprise the men who expected him to miss … Lambert’s reputation for clean, sportsmanlike play was of the best, and this made him doubly popular.16

  The same column also regrets the death of ‘Private Day (Wellington Infantry Battalion) who died of wounds received in the Dardanelles fighting, and was a keen footballer in the Wanganui district’. Private Edmund Fahey, of the Otago Battalion, and ‘a man of herculean build’ is reported wounded at Gallipoli, as are ‘Private McQueen, the Otago ’Varsity front-ranker of last season’ and his fellow prop Lieutenant Nisbet, ‘wounded practically in the same forward rush on the Turkish lines’. The language of rugby is already the language of warfare, as whole teams go to war like the ‘Pals’ battalions of England’s industrial towns:

  First off the football ground and first into the field of battle, Pirates have sacrificed their first grade team to the nation’s cause, and still more of the Blacks are going to the front to join those already there. E. Currie, A.E. Duncan and C. Jamieson left on Saturday with Lord Liverpool’s Own for Trentham, where a number of Pirates have been in training for some time ready to depart with the next reinforcements. Prominent amongst these is the old Pirates forward Smeaton, who has received a commission in the battery, and Roy McKellar, wing threequarter and brother of Gerald, ex-New Zealand, ex-Wellington and Otago forward.

  Note here that the sacrifice is to the ‘nation’s cause’: New Zealand was fighting its own battles, not those of some remote empire. They began by volunteering, but as in Britain (and unlike Australia) conscription was introduced in 1916. Some 124,000 men served – nearly half the eligible males – of whom 100,000 went overseas with the NZEF. Even the hats they wore were symbols of their home landscape (and prevailing climate): the ‘lemon-squeezer’ hat was modelled on the outline of Mount Taranaki, and allowed water to run off, as useful in Flanders as it was in New Zealand.

  As with clubs, so with families: another famous rugby family was waved off to war. Billy Stead, the master tactician of the Originals tour, was Māori:

  The well-known Stead family of footballers in Southland will be well represented in the firing line shortly. N.L. Stead, a Southland representative, brother of W.J. Stead, the All Black, is the latest to enlist. A cousin of the once-famous New Zealand five-eighths is also about to join the reinforcements, while another member of the family is already at the front and reported wounded in the Dardanelles operations.17

  The New Zealand Māori carried their traditions and heritage into the trenches: NZEF Captains Pirimi Tahiwi and Roger Dansey of the Ngāti Tūwharetoa tribe introduced the bloodcurdling haka ‘Ka Mate’ to the Gallipoli trenches. Away from the front in Malta, Dansey and friends relaxed by vanquishing the British in trench-digging contests. Dansey was accustomed to bloody violence even before the war: he had been so badly spiked in the first game of the 1910 Māori tour to New South Wales – with All Black Māori Stead and George Sellars – that he did not play the rest of the series. The death at Chunuk Bair of Corporal Philip Manu Blake (another Māori Australian tourist in 1913) in the same action as Sergeant Albert ‘Doolan’ Downing (the first All Black to be killed), doubtless added edge to their haka performance. The ‘cannibal war dance’ struck terror into the Turks listening just yards away; if they had been foolish enough
to watch, they would have been scared to death – or picked off by snipers. Just think of that when next inclined to dismiss the All Black haka as pantomime cabaret.

  Downing, so passionate about rugby that he wore a tattoo of the Ranfurly Shield, played for the All Blacks thirty-one times, including five Tests. Early on 8 August, his A Company, Wellington Infantry, occupied a Turkish trench on the crest of Chunuk Bair and dug a supporting trench behind it. The Turks’ dawn counter-attack saw the Wellingtons and British break and run but not, according to Lance Corporal Hill, before Downing had distinguished himself in a bloody bayonet charge. The crest was lost and fighting continued on the downward slopes. Men dug trenches behind the original support line as it filled with dead and wounded; they hurled back Turkish grenades and even threw stones. For twelve hours the Wellingtons, reinforced by the Auckland Mounted Rifles, fought off Turkish attacks. By nightfall Downing was dead: witnesses stated that he was ‘blown to pieces’.

  Chunuk Bair proved the last resting place of another All Black, Henry ‘Norkey’ Dewar, a machine-gun sergeant with the Wellington Mounted Rifles, who had played alongside Downing and George Sellars against the Wallabies in 1913. But it was another ridge, Belgian Messines, in June 1917, that was to claim four more men of the black shirt and silver fern among New Zealand’s 3,660 casualties. On the opening day of an attack heralded by nineteen massive mines exploding along the ridge, the youngest, Private Jim Baird of the ‘Unlucky Otagos’, died of multiple shrapnel wounds, aged 23. On the same day George Sellars, a double try-scorer in America, was killed carrying a wounded comrade to safety. The next day was the last for Southland farmer Jim McNeece, another Otago private, who had packed down behind Downing in that last Sydney Test, as the first contingent of British soldiers crossed the Channel to face Germany. From Taranaki, the Wellingtons’ Lance Corporal Reg Taylor, a try-scoring back-rower on his 1913 debut against Australia, survived only two more weeks.

  By now the big offensives were numbered: it was time for Third Ypres. Another Māori All Black, Charles Rangiwawahia Sciascia, seventh son of an Italian lighthouse keeper and Māori mother, left New Zealand in 1914 as a private with the Main Force. He rose to the rank of sergeant, fighting for five months at Gallipoli before being sent to the Western Front, where he was awarded the Military Medal, the gallantry decoration for other ranks. His eldest brother, Corporal Jack Sciascia, who played alongside him in the red-and-black of the Māori18 had been wounded and gassed at Messines in 1916. Just a few miles away, at La Basse Ville on the River Lys, on the last day of July 1917, the 25-year-old Charles went into action with his Wellington Regiment in the unseasonal but torrential summer rain that started that day and carried on like a New Zealand winter.

  Four days earlier, 1st NZ Infantry Brigade had attacked the village, which had been heavily shelled by artillery. Under cover of a new barrage they secured the village, but the small garrison left in occupation was soon driven out by a strong counter-attack. A second attack was launched at 0350 hours on the closing day of the month: the concerted roar of artillery along the fifteen-mile front began the Third Battle of Ypres, with Passchendaele ridge as its first objective. Strong resistance in La Basse Ville was overcome, and this time counter-attacks were repulsed. Charles was reported missing, his body never found; five months after his death, a nephew he would never see, born on 23 December, was named Frank La Basse, after his uncle’s last known resting place.

  Charles was not the only rugby man to fall that day. It is no coincidence that Official Histories picked out sportsmen of all ranks and communities of the New Zealand population:

  La Basse Ville claimed many athletes. Never more would Gordon Kinvig, that sterling athlete, take his place on Wellington football or cricket fields. Here Wellington-West Coast Company lost Sergt. C. Sciascia, M.M., a well known Horowhenua Māori footballer, and a gallant soldier, while a few days later, that doyen of Māori footballers, Lieut. A.P. Kaipara (Pioneers), was killed in the same locality.19

  ‘Kinny’ Kinvig was a five-eighth and utility back for the Oriental Club and gained representative honours in both rugby and cricket for Wellington in the same year. Autini Kaipara played for Poverty Bay for seven years and captained two Ranfurly Shield challenges against Auckland as well as playing for North Island and the touring Māori in 1910 and 1913; the Sydney Bulletin called him ‘as sharp as a needle and as slippery as an eel’, and he was also nicknamed ‘India Rubber Man’ or the ‘Wizard’. Decades after his death, he was revered as ‘one of the greatest five-eighths New Zealand has produced’. Invalided home from Gallipoli, he spent a few months recuperating in Rotorua, then rejoined the 1st Māori and was posted to D Company (of course), New Zealand Pioneer Battalion. Whilst wiring posts in front of La Basse Ville on 3 August, he was killed by a shell fragment: like George Sellars at Messines, he was carrying a wounded man, his batman Te Tui, to safety. Sergeant C.W. Tepene,20 another Māori, who toured the Americas in 1910 and would play again in Britain, was more fortunate in his bravery, winning the Military Medal ‘for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’. The citation for this rare ‘lucky Otago’ stated:

  On 29 September 1918, at Bon Avis Ridge [near Cambrai] he led his platoon with great dash and skill against the enemy machine gun positions putting several of these out of action and capturing many prisoners. Later, when consolidating in an exposed position though himself wounded, he risked his life in rescuing a wounded comrade under heavy rifle fire and machine gun fire. He was an example of what a platoon commander should be and inspired everyone with whom he comes in contact.21

  The fighting spirit of the New Zealand Division, and the bond with their distant land and family, was sustained in no small part by the game they loved at home. In 1917 Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Plugge was appointed as divisional sports coordinator. Like the Australians, NZ units played each other at rugby whenever there was a lull in the fighting, and strings were pulled to get the best players. Māori Tom French – the first player sent off at Eden Park, for fighting an opponent who fancied his girlfriend – was transferred from his Māori battalion to the 1st Auckland, allegedly through the influence of Gallaher, who had coached him at home and wanted him in his trench teams. Extra spice was added by ‘international’ challenges, although they were sometimes less than evenly matched. Australian Tom Richards, watching a game at Laventie, south of Ypres, pitied the frail Welshmen facing the magnificent Māori:

  The Maoris were in the field waiting quite a long time for the Welshmen. While they were waiting the Colonials looked physical giants compared to the lean and wiry Welsh. There were other features in the appearance of the two teams that bothered me quite a while – the great self-possession and confidence of the Maoris, also their straight built bodies and big limbs; while their opponents seemed stage frightened and their awkwardly put together forms bent with hard work and cramped by confinement at the workshop benches.22

  The NZ Division even met a French military XV in a wartime ‘Test’, played for a ‘Coupe de Somme’ in 1917. The 40–0 rout was the more embarrassing for the French as it was supposedly witnessed by a crowd of 60,000.23 But, relishing the opportunity to pit themselves against senior rugby nations, the French took heart in an improved performance the following April, played in a carnival atmosphere after America’s entry into the war. At the Olympic velodrome, Bois de Vincennes, the close margin of defeat 3–5 was no dishonour. Bordeaux forward Jean-Jacques Conilh de Beyssac, briefly of Rosslyn Park while studying philosophy in London, and capped five times for France before the deluge, played both matches. As a tank commander he would die two months later when his Schneider, nicknamed ‘Ace of Spades’ – the death card – took three direct hits; the wounded lieutenant died in an ambulance on the way to hospital at Compiègne, a name of echoing significance in November.

  Taranaki sapper Charlie Brown was one of a handful to play for the All Blacks either side of the war and was even invited, as a pakeha,24 to represent the Māori against Australia in a 1913 benefit
. He played both French games for the NZ Division side and was scrum half in the NZ Services side which played in Britain and South Africa in 1919. War over, he picked up the oval where he had left off, resuming his All Black career in 1920. Flanker Sergeant Arthur Wilson, another pre-war All Black, also played at Vincennes; although an exceptional player, his unexceptional name did not stand out in this game, but that would change a year later.

  Such was the English appetite to see the men in black that in early 1917, it was announced in London papers that ‘the authorities have permitted a number of New Zealanders to leave the front and play a brief series of games in this country for the benefit of the Red Cross’.25 The Times reported that ticket applications were already being taken.26 But with the annual spring offensive in mind, the generals were loath to lose crack colonial fighting troops and the tour was quietly cancelled. Men returning to England for rehab or unable to fight again did play, however. A team selected from troops convalescing at Hornchurch hospital played sixteen matches in 1916 and lost only two.

  Some had only temporary respite, before returning to France. One damaged officer, Lieutenant Harvey Chrystall of the Royal Naval Division, mentioned in despatches at Gallipoli, was glad of the opportunity to play rugby again: ‘I shall very much miss the pleasant Saturday afternoon recreation; the games have got me thoroughly fit in wind and limb, after being a physical wreck through shell-shock and given up by the doctors.’27 These players were not always well-equipped: it was hard enough to get uniforms that fitted, let alone sports kit, and most rugby at the front was played in what they stood up in. Journalists watched ‘teams of convalescents … some of them playing without boots’, but the contests were immensely popular, attracting crowds of seven or eight thousand.