After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  Continual trench raids in March gained vital knowledge but cost 1,400 casualties. The fittest and most aggressive were hand-picked for these raids and naturally included rugby men; Major Russel Johnston of the Seaforths, a ‘Rower’ from the outset in 1908, led one of the first raids and was killed, aged 33. Only two days later, VRC suffered another loss: 12978 Lance Corporal Thomas Percy Woodward, son of club founder Reggie, and a bank clerk who had enlisted at 20 with the same local regiment in September 1915. He had already seen action on the Somme and was killed raiding on 3 March. Tommy, 21, was posthumously awarded the Military Medal for his actions during the raid.23

  After almost three weeks of artillery bombardment, a million shells passing overhead ‘like water from a hose’, at 0530 hours on Easter Monday 9 April,24 the barrage crept towards the Germans – as did driving sleet and snow – shielding 20,000 Canadians of the first wave. Three of the four divisions captured their part of the Ridge by midday, bang on schedule. The 4th Division battled on to take Hill 145, the highest feature of the whole ridge, on the afternoon of 10 April. Two days later the enemy pulled back and by nightfall on 12 April Vimy Ridge was in Allied, mainly Canadian, hands. Four more Victoria Crosses were awarded. The Vimy action captured more ground, more prisoners and more guns than any previous offensive. Victory was swift and the cost of 3,598 dead out of 10,602 Canadian casualties relatively merciful; earlier struggles at Vimy from 1914 onwards had brought over 200,000 Allied casualties.

  At home, the victory at Vimy, won by citizen-soldiers from every corner of the vast country, united Canadians in pride. Vancouver headlines lauded the ‘GLORIOUS PART PLAYED BY THE MEN FROM DOMINION: Famous Vimy Ridge the Scene of Many Gory Battles Was Stormed and Carried by Warriors from Canada’.25 And now those warriors were led by one of their own: General Arthur Currie, a former real-estate agent from Victoria, BC, took command of the corps. This military coming-of-age inspired a new spirit of nationhood.

  Four years of war would transform Canada from a colony into a nation, at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million casualties, one in four of them fatal. Canada’s war record earned it a separate signature on the Versailles Peace Treaty and a seat at the League of Nations. For its fighting rugby players, ‘combat without casualties’ awaited them on hallowed English turf at Twickenham. As a salutary reminder of the sacrifice of so many sons, the Canadian government maintains the most moving memorials on the Western Front, staffed by young volunteers at the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont-Hamel on the Somme and at Vimy Ridge. Walter Allward’s grieving monument was dedicated in 1936 by Edward VIII, practically his only official act, apart from the small matter of abdicating.

  As Gallipoli is to Australia and New Zealand, and Delville Wood is to South Africa, Vimy Ridge has become the symbol of Canada in the Great War. This is as much due to the memorial as the battle itself. Canadians continued to lead as Allied shock troops at Passchendaele, Amiens and the Canal du Nord. They entered Mons on the last day of war, and a Canadian soldier from Saskatchewan was the last to die before the Armistice hour.

  Today, Canadians prefer a military role as peacekeepers, standing between combatants to preserve peace. But the lofty ridge, soaring white pylons and solemn anniversary commemorations have seared Vimy Ridge into Canada’s consciousness.

  Notes

  1 By way of comparison, each English pitch today would have three men – or women – and a dog. I am indebted to Sam Cooper for the calculations: he does numbers, I do words.

  2 McGill lead by eighteen wins to fourteen since the fixture’s revival in 1974.

  3 Ashley Ford, Vancouver Rowing Club: 100 years of Rugby (Vancouver, 2008).

  4 San Francisco Chronicle.

  5 Jack Carver, A History of Vancouver Rowing Club, 1886–1980, (VRC, 1980)

  6 Vancouver Sun, 9 November 2014.

  7 [Canadian Field Comforts Commission], With the First Canadian Contingent (Hodder & Stoughton, 1919).

  8 John Maclaren, The Toronto World, 22 January 1915.

  9 Ibid.

  10 The Times, 14 December 1914.

  11 Colonel A.F. Duguid, Official History of the Canadian Forces in The Great War 1914–1919 (Ottawa, 1938).

  12 The Times, 14 December 1914.

  13 Royal Fusilier Maddock had retired from club rugby in 1913, was awarded the MC in 1918, but never recovered from a wound and died aged 40 in 1921.

  14 Arnold Huckett’s story is told in The Final Whistle: The Great War in Fifteen Players (Spellmount, 2012).

  15 Letter reproduced in With the First Canadian Contingent.

  16 John Prescott, In Flanders Fields: The Story of John McCrae (Boston Press, 1985).

  17 Helmer’s grave was lost; McCrae’s dressing station can be visited at Essex Farm Cemetery.

  18 With the First Canadian Contingent.

  19 Letter of 29 November 1914, quoted by E.H.D. Sewell, Roll of Honour.

  20 Sewell, Roll of Honour.

  21 The Province, December 1915.

  22 Province, December 1915.

  23 London Gazette, 17 April 1917.

  24 Thomas Nelson, Oxford Blue, Scottish internationalist and publisher, was also killed that Easter Monday on the Arras front. His friend John Buchan dedicated The Thirty Nine Steps to him in 1915, ‘in these days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the truth’.

  25 Vancouver Sun, 19 April 1917.

  7

  South Africa

  Let us live and strive for freedom

  In South Africa our land.

  South Africans in their thousands fought and died in the war. In contrast to its sister dominions, however, South Africa’s contribution as a nation was more diffused throughout the vast geography of the war and the infinite host of the Imperial forces. Over 146,000 men (20 per cent of its white male population) served in South African units during the war, fighting on three principal fronts. But there was no ‘Main Force’ that sailed as one like Australia’s, or a corps with division-strength set-piece battles to cement national identity like Canada’s. Their biggest unit in France was an infantry brigade. Of the 11,575 South Africans who lost their lives during the Great War, more than 3,000 served in Imperial units. If there was a signature moment of nationhood, then it was at Delville Wood in 1916; like the country itself, South Africa’s Great War was complex.

  This, after all, was a country whose Dutch farmers had been at war with Britain at the turn of the century, in between rugby tours given and received. Many of the British high command of the Great War, including Haig, cut their teeth in the Second Boer War; there is little evidence to show that this qualified them for twentieth-century industrialised European warfare. In fairness, however, man’s inventive use of technology for mechanised murder was advancing faster than a British military mind made complacent by Victorian peace punctuated by colonial skirmishes. In the absence of any military competence or concerted success against Boer irregular guerrillas, Britain resorted to brutal tactics in its ruthless suppression of rebellion against Empire. It was Lords Roberts and Kitchener, not the Nazis, who invented the civilian concentration camp; over 26,000 women and children died in inhumane conditions on the high veldt. The memory was still raw; fighting for Britain’s Empire in 1914 was not the immediate ‘no-brainer’ it was in other pink parts of the world map.

  There was something rotten too in the state of its soldiery. Before the Boer War, the British Army had become a disreputable refuge for scoundrels: forget the pantomimic Flashman, but remember Thomas Hardy’s Sergeant Troy. Lord Roberts and others, not least Lieutenant Colonel Guy du Maurier, returned from the Cape with unease about its fighting qualities, physical condition and ‘right stuff’ mentality. Roberts campaigned ceaselessly for military conscription in light of alarums from Germany that since the 1890s had filled popular fiction and newspapers, and even the new moving pictures. The British, however, have been suspicious of standing armies since Cromwell. After rugby’s New Zealanders and South Africans came to Britain in
the middle of the first decade and beat all comers – not narrowly but by wide margins – there were further rumblings of disquiet about the poor state of Edwardian manhood. The sensation of du Maurier’s 1909 invasion drama An Englishman’s Home did wonders for recruitment to the newly created Territorial Force. But the improvement of physical condition and nutrition in industrialised Britain took more than theatrical intervention.

  In 1917, Australian Tom Richards found himself watching a wartime game behind the front at Laventie in foul weather. He mused upon the contrasting physiques of the outdoors nations and the indoors labourers of industry:

  The contrast was very marked indeed. The more notice I took of it the greater and greater was my love of the Colonial and my mind refreshed as to the difference in appearance of African and English athletes as they stood facing one another in both South Africa and in England. Also the Australians when they faced the Englishmen and Welshmen in 1908.1

  Richards was at least qualified to judge having worked and played in most of the world’s rugby countries, not least for the touring British against South Africa.

  Diocesan College, known as ‘Bishop’s’, in Rondebosch, Cape Colony, had introduced the Winchester game (football with some handling) in 1861 and the first Cape rugby club, Hamilton, was formed in 1875. Bishop’s can therefore claim to be the cradle of South African rugby; it certainly chose its colour, when it lent its myrtle green jerseys for the first victory in the final Test against the British Isles 1896 Anglo-Irish tourists.2 The Stellenbosch club was formed in the predominantly Boer farming district outside Cape Town in 1883. As Briton and Boer migrated to the interior, the game spread through the Eastern Cape and Natal, and along the gold and diamond routes to Kimberley and Johannesburg.

  Rugby had become a common rallying point for the white races in the South African colonies since the missionary British tours of 1891 and 1896. After an inexplicable interlude where they shot at each other for three years – except for a truce offered by General Moritz at besieged O’kiep in order to play rugby – the British were back to play South Africa in Johannesburg only a year later in 1903 (and again in 1910). If we ignore (as the whites did, and far worse) the indigenous natives, the population was a complex mixture of English, Irish, French, German, Dutch and Afrikaners (oddly, the Scots names strewn over Canadian and New Zealand teams were not matched here). South African rugby teams reflected that and were also not above capping travelling mercenaries like Welshman ‘Birdie’ Partridge.

  Both British soldiers in occupation and Boers in prison camps in Ceylon and St Helena after the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog (‘Second Freedom War’) had enthusiastically embraced rugby as warlike recreation. There is even rumour of a first confrontation between New Zealander and South African as soldiers met at Johannesburg, Dave Gallaher among them. Afrikaners as a linguistic and cultural group were increasingly independent: rugby rapidly became the ruling passion of the Afrikaans speaker, in rejection of the Anglophone imperialism of cricket. The religious fervour of rugby fanaticism would come later. South African officialdom also held attitudes on amateurism (and far more sinister ones on race) that put them to the right even of the righteous Scots. Being the ‘right sort’ got the Springboks invited to Britain twice before the war, while the troublesome All Blacks and Wallabies had to wait to be asked.

  There had already been a stiffening of the Motherland’s rugby backbone by Cape imports to national teams: for England, Reggie Hands before the war and Jannie Krige just after it, and Stephanus Steyn for Scotland. In exchange, England’s Reggie Schwartz travelled in the opposite direction to play cricket for South Africa, and Cornish miner Maffer Davey captained Transvaal. The tradition continues with Catt, Stevens, Barritt, Abbott, Fourie and Botha, although the boat seemingly now sails only one way – but it does put in at France and Italy too. Hardly surprising then, that the same applied to the military in time of war. Many South Africans joined the British Army: 1912 Springbok captain Billy Millar was a Coldstream Guard; forward Toby Moll fought with the Leicestershires; Oxford’s Walter Dickson with the Argylls at Loos. In wartime, it was still working both ways: Newport’s Welsh 1909 Grand Slam winner, Lieutenant Philip Waller, stayed in South Africa after touring as a proto-Lion in 1910, and captained the Johannesburg Wanderers for three seasons; he was killed at Beaumetz-lès-Cambrai in December 1917 when a stray shell struck his car. His companion, Major Percy Fitzpatrick, CO of his 71st (South African) Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, was killed instantly; Phil died shortly afterwards. Percy’s father, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, first proposed the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.

  Education more than family roots drew young Cape colonials to Britain, and Cecil Rhodes’s eponymous scholarships helped sustain the traffic. Rosslyn Park has at least three from Cape Province on its memorial: Harold Broster, Gordon Bayly, briefly at Diocesan before coming to St Paul’s, and Charles Aubrey Vintcent. Named after his father’s Charterhouse school friend, one-time English cricket captain and future Hollywood actor C. Aubrey Smith, Vintcent came to study at Uppingham and Cambridge and won his rugby Blue. He joined the Rifle Brigade and was killed at Polygon Wood in April 1915. Jim Louwrens, the South African College scrum half of 1901, also appeared in Park and Middlesex colours. That only five Springboks are listed as fallen cannot be dismissed as a poor contribution; South Africans do not hold back, and the Western Province memorial carries 227 names. It is simply that its rugby players fought under many flags, with an estimated 3,000 in the RFC and its RAF successor alone. By the time the men of the South African Infantry Brigade arrived in April 1916 to join the 9th (Scottish) Division in France, some 7,500 of their countrymen were already serving in Imperial regiments.3

  One of them, Stephanus ‘Beak’ Steyn, from Moorreesburg, Cape Province, was an (Edinburgh) Academical, a Bishop and an Oxford Blue, on a coveted Rhodes scholarship, and centre alongside Poulton-Palmer for Oxford. Capped twice for Scotland and attested to King Edward’s Horse as early as 1910, he was embodied with them on 5 August 1914, before commissioning into the South African Field Artillery on 8 December. Typhoid laid him low in Salonika; on recovery he embarked for Egypt in August 1917 and went with 117th Brigade, RFA, to the Palestine front, where he was killed in action on the third anniversary of his commission, aged 25.

  South Africa had been the first to deliver a rude awakening to British rugby. The 1903 British tour under Mark Morrison met the first series defeat inflicted by a supposedly cowed adversary emerging from a war that had only ended a few months before. The shock could not be concealed by an excuse that these tours were not yet officially sanctioned by all four Home Unions, and so were not fully representative. Official nonsense. Two Test draws allowed the final match, won 8–0 by the home side, again wearing the lucky green jerseys of Old Diocesans, to decide the series. It was a tight margin but this was a shift in power on the sports field that presaged much greater change in the Empire; South Africa would not lose a Test series until 1956 in New Zealand.

  South Africans first travelled to Britain as Springboks in 1906, with the new badge on their green jerseys appearing on fields from Redruth to Pittodrie. Worried that the ‘witty London press’ might invent a nickname (like the ‘Myrtles’, from the distinctive green of their shirts) they chose the emblem of the small antelope typical of Africa; the press swallowed the bait, although they could not digest the correct Afrikaans plural of Springbokken. After the All Blacks indomitable 2–3–2 scrum and wing-forward of the previous year, British forwards now had to cope with the Boks playing a power game up front in 3–4–1. Led by forward Paul Roos, and starring centre Japie Krige, prolific try-scoring winger Bob Loubser and the place-kicking of Dougie Morkel, they stormed the country over a twenty-nine-match series, playing every three or four days. In the days before air travel, the boat home took eighteen days – enough time to have played another five games.

  They only lost to Louis Greig’s Scotland and Cardiff (who were down to fourteen men for the
second half) and drew 3–3 with England. On fourteen occasions, they blanked opponents including several county and regional sides, and most surprisingly, Wales, whose highly rated side was one of their best, enjoying a golden era of Triple Crown success. Even the South Africans were surprised at the ease of their 11–0 win over the Welsh, who had beaten the All Blacks, but simply did not show up on the field at Swansea. Reuters reported that:

  The victory created immense enthusiasm throughout South Africa. Crowds thronged outside the newspaper offices in all the towns and villages awaiting the progress of the game. The result was greeted with extraordinary gratification and surprise. Cheering crowds marched through the streets for hours afterwards.

  Captain Paul Roos, with his trademark ‘black ribbon round his forehead and over his ears’ instead of a scrum-cap, was carried shoulder-high from the field at Cardiff, considering it to be ‘the greatest honour of his life to be borne triumphant from the ground by supporters of his beaten opponents’. He had been elected as captain by his team-mates, had spoken at church meetings on tour, with his deep voice and ‘pronounced Dutch accent’4 and was apparently much admired wherever he went:

  A man of strong character, with high principles, he combines with the natural powers of command, a fine presence, a splendid knowledge of the game, and ready tact, thus gaining the respect alike of his own men and that of his opponents. It is these qualities which have gained him a place in the football world that no man outside England has ever attained, not even Gallagher [sic]. His control over his men, both on and off the field, his ability to say and do the right thing at the right moment, has rendered him exceedingly popular in England, and has conduced to the better understanding of the Afrikander [sic] character, and to increase the respect for the Afrikander nation as a whole.5