After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  What the panegyrist does not mention is the Devon game of 17 October. With 18,000 watching at the Plymouth County Ground, the visitors refused to take the field: they had belatedly noticed half back Jimmy Peters. The local club favourite had twice been capped for England earlier that year,6 partnering the great Adrian Stoop and scoring his first international try against France. The problem for the Springboks was that he was black, born in Salford to a West Indian father; they refused to play if he was on the pitch. They were forced to relent by their own High Commissioner and Plymouth’s mayor, who feared a riot if the match were cancelled.

  The world had indeed gained a ‘better understanding of the Afrikander character’, but would do little about it, both in 1906 and again in 1919, as we shall see. Roos’s own 1931 account whitewashed the incident:

  How pleasantly the Tour passed over from first to last. What hospitality we enjoyed, even in private homes. Never could a team wish for better treatment, both from governing bodies and from spectators, than was accorded to us. Coming as it did just after the Anglo-Boer War, the 1906 team probably played no small part in healing the breach and restoring pleasant relations.7

  As captain that day, he must carry some stain on his ‘strong character, with high principles’ and, unlike Gallaher, martyred in war, is largely unremembered outside his own country.

  Although Oxford University made the Springboks feel more at home with six of the dark blue scholars hailing from South Africa, Roos was injured during that match. Against Gloucester they faced the ubiquitous Tom Richards: on form alone for the Mines and Transvaal, he had been certain to make the tour party but was ruled ineligible because he had not been in South Africa long enough to qualify as a resident. For dessert, they polished off France 55–6 in an unrecognised game at Parc des Princes. The tourists had racked up 608 points in total with only 85 against.

  One ill-fated Springbok tourist was Adam Francis Burdett of Bishop’s, the Villagers club and Western Province. He was described by tour chronicler E.J.L. Plateneur as ‘a hard working forward, who is seen to most advantage in the open, where his very clever footwork and pace render him always prominent. He is a good tackler, like most of the Diocesan College forwards.’ His tour selection came as a surprise, but ‘in England he has justified his place, playing some really good games, particularly in the [two] Internationals in which he took part’.8 Burdett joined up on the outbreak of war and served in Tanganyika with the South African Service Corps, supplying the long campaign against the cunning German commander Lettow-Vorbeck. In disease-ridden East Africa, it was malaria not a bullet that felled him and so many others: he was shipped home to recuperate, but died just seven days before the war ended. Perhaps the saddest footnote to his life is that when his tour colleagues Billy Millar and Paddy Carolin furnished Sewell with information for his Honour Roll, they overlooked Burdett.

  In 1910 King George V took the throne. On 31 May, the Union of South Africa brought its four colonies under one British flag, with General Louis Botha, former Boer commander, as its first prime minister. It failed to unite the people: blacks were excluded from any constitutional decision-making; Afrikaner discontent continued to simmer. The British rugby players returned under Dr Tom Smyth in the same year that Captain Scott set off for the Antarctic; they were plagued by injury problems, and lost the series but, unlike Scott, they returned home. Yet again, the roving Tom Richards proved that if there was a rugby party in the world, he would be at it, joining the British team as a replacement, under the banner of Bristol. Cherry Pillman was the dominant player for the tourists, revolutionising South African ideas of wing-forward play, taking the place-kicks and even inspiring unexpected victory in the second Test from the number 10 slot. A new system was introduced, honed by Adrian Stoop at Harlequins and for England, whereby the previous left and right half backs now played with one closer in as ‘scrum half’ and the other standing off a little, hence the name. In those days, however, and even now, there were few stand-offs who stood 6ft 3in like Pillman.

  Douglas Morkel again proved himself prodigious with the boot: ‘he wore red stockings, and a penalty might produce the uncanny spectacle of Douglas sniping at our posts from his own twenty-five yard line’. The series decider in Cape Town saw the British well-beaten; it also saw the arrival of yet another Morkel, William Herman – known as ‘Boy’, to distinguish him from William Somerset, ‘Sommie’, who had been a Boer PoW and toured in 1906. To the British press, Boy was a ‘Prince of Forwards’. For South Africa he was a player with a bright future that many others would not have, surviving the war to captain the Springboks in 1921. One touring British forward, Harry Jarman of Wales and Newport, would die a hero, not in wartime but in peaceful 1928, when he threw himself in front of a runaway coal truck heading towards a group of playing children.

  The 1912 tour of Britain by the Springboks saw Billy Millar return, this time as skipper, although he was the last player selected and not a popular captain, either with their hosts or his own team, being thought too fiery. Not only was Millar fortunate in being favoured with two tours, but he was lucky to be playing at all:

  He was badly wounded during the [Boer] war, and, on returning to Capetown convalescent, his great recreations were walking, mountain-climbing and shooting. It was in these exercises that he acquired the stamina, and gained the bodily strength which stood him in good stead at Rugby football.9

  He would have his fill of war, fighting with the Coldstream Guards in this second conflict, until he was taken prisoner – his right arm broken – during the Battle of Hazebrouck in April 1918, as the German Spring Offensives pushed to end the war. He was sent to a camp at Stralsund on the Baltic; of seven battalion officers captured on that unlucky 13 April, he was the only one to be repatriated before the Armistice. It is not known if he did this by escaping, or by Red Cross intervention.

  Other familiar names returned, including scrum half Fred ‘Uncle’ Dobbin and forward Dougie Morkel. In the manner of a poker game, the 1906 tour had bid three Morkels; the 1912 Boks raised it to four Morkels and also saw three Luyts. White South Africa was a tight-knit society, with family clans running production lines of great rugby players over generations: in 1914 there were no fewer than twenty-two Morkels playing first-team rugby. Seven were in an all-conquering Somerset West team, which supplied thirteen players to Western Province, including all seven Morkels.10 Somerset West was such a rugby town that, in the days of slow trains and no telephones, its team was despatched to away games with carrier pigeons to bring back the result, which was posted in the town’s hotel lounge.

  When war broke out Sir Abe Bailey, diamond tycoon and financier, was planning a single-family Morkel rugby tour of England, with a twenty-third – the 12-year-old Denis, a future South African cricketing star – as team mascot; the Kaiser’s little game fatally interfered with Bailey’s plans. But the family name up in English lights in 1912 would be (ahem) Luyt: for the first time, three brothers – Richard, John and Fred – would play together in an international. The sheer volume of Springboks called Morkel, Luyt, de Villiers or du Toit over a century and more should not blind us to some of the finest individual rugby names. Who cannot love Long George Devenish? Or Spanner Forbes, Saturday Knight (a 1912 tourist) and the immortal Ebbo Bastard – the only mystery here being what his enemies called him.

  The 1912 Springboks followed the pattern set by their predecessors: twenty-seven matches over fourteen weeks, losing only to Newport, Swansea and a London XV. Swansea also played the name game, with four Williamses and two Morgans, but they were not (close) family. A crowd of 35,000 turned out on Boxing Day at a sodden St Helen’s to see captain Billy Trew mastermind a ‘Whites’ victory, despite being down to fourteen men for twenty minutes after an injury. South Africa played a London XV in front of 20,000 at the ‘National Ground’ for the first time as, according to a young Basil Liddell-Hart, a teenage Daily Telegraph rugby correspondent without by-line, ‘everyone was agreed that Twickenham is the only place
in England for big matches’. That Welsh rugby fervour could, however, double the size of crowds says much about both Wales and Twickenham.

  The Londoners were largely drawn from Harlequins (Adrian Stoop’s brother, Tim and Ronald Poulton-Palmer in centre harness) and Blackheath (both Pillmans), the two aristocrats of capital rugby. They also included two Guy’s Hospital doctors, one from the Bank of England club and naval cadet W.J.A. ‘Dave’ Davies, a future England star at stand-off. Outlying Twickenham was still unable to host a dinner, so the visitors received the hospitality of the Blackheath pack, both on the pitch (losing 8–6) and at dinner afterwards. Nevertheless, they pulled off a first Grand Slam of Test victories by a touring side: grievous Dublin damage was done to the Irish by 38–0 at Lansdowne Road, and Poulton-Palmer’s try in the finale at Twickenham was the only Test score against them: lock Arnold ‘Saturday’ Knight presumably lived up to his name in the celebrations.

  The Morkel who made his name on this Springbok expedition was Jan Willem Hurter, known as ‘Jackie’, a ‘very quiet, unassuming fellow, a man of few words’,11 who let his rugby do the talking. The outside centre played all five Tests, scoring four tries, including a brace against the Irish. Against Llanelli at Stradey Park, he chipped over the threequarters, caught the ball on the full and repeated the trick on the full back, scoring under the posts to win the game by a single point. Brother Gerhard was behind him as a faultless full back, with cousins ‘Boy’ and Douglas up front. Jackie and Dougie shared all the points in the 9–3 victory over England.

  During the war, Jackie served as a mounted trooper in Van Deventer’s Scouts. Like Burdett, he succumbed to illness, this time dysentery, in the East African campaign, and died on 15 May 1916. Politics were never far away in any discussion of South African rugby, then as now. Sewell, in his admiring 1919 obituary of Jackie Morkel, could not resist a backhanded slap at the Boers when he wrote:

  He has upheld in the worthiest possible manner the teachings of the Rugby game, which cannot, unfortunately, be written of all British subjects of Dutch descent, and his case will stand for all time as a shining example to his countrymen.12

  Jackie Morkel is buried in Dar-es-Salaam War Cemetery, just yards away from Gerald ‘Tommy’ Thompson, his great friend and Western Province and 1912 Springbok team-mate, who had ‘played like one possessed and as though the Irish XV were like a lot of unpractised schoolboys’ in Dublin, but was killed by a bullet at Katanga. Neither lost a Test; both lost a young life. As for ‘British subjects’, Sewell was already behind the curve of a world in transformation.

  In a final fling on the way home, the Springboks’ steamer called at Bordeaux, where they beat France at Le Bouscat, 38–5. In this unofficial game, Douglas Morkel dropped a goal from his own ten-yard line; a Frenchman ran from the crowd and kissed him. French crowds of the day rarely showed such cordial hospitality. It was the last game of a long tour; claret was liberally taken at dinner on the Route du Médoc. In January 1913, they could not know this was the last international for Afrique du Sud for many years. For Septimus ‘Sep’ Ledger, who elbowed his way onto the score-sheet amongst the Morkels and Luyts, this was his last ever, as claret would again flow in France, in a fatal attack by his South African Infantry regiment on the village of Roeux in April 1917.

  In August 1914 President Louis Botha and Defence Minister Jan Smuts, another former Boer military leader, took the Union of South Africa into war in support of Britain with a Defence Force founded only two years beforehand. Their troops seized the German protectorate of SouthWest Africa by July 1915. Many Afrikaners opposed war: Germany had aided them during their Freedom War (and secretly agitated ever since). An attempted coup in September 1914 failed when Christiaan Beyer – an Afrikaner hero from the Boer War – was killed by police, and a later armed uprising in the Orange Free State and Transvaal was also suppressed. Continued resistance was finally quashed by mid-1915, although Botha’s National Party only narrowly held on to power at a general election.

  In the meantime the South African Infantry Brigade was assembled for overseas service. Comprising four regiments – 1st Regiment from Cape Province, 2nd from Natal and Orange Free State, 3rd Transvaal and Rhodesia and 4th the South African Scottish (wearing the Atholl Murray tartan) – it mustered 160 officers and 5,468 other ranks when it docked in England in November 1915. Supporting units of artillery and medics, without which infantry cannot fight, were added to the strength. Frank Mellish joined the artillery with Reggie Hands, ‘a charming, rather dreamy fellow who gave the impression that he had been caught up in the war, but was not particularly interested in it’. Reggie’s brother ‘Pam’ was ‘more of the swashbuckling type; it was no surprise when he was transferred to the British Army, and won a DSO and Bar’. Dr Alex Frew, capped three times for Scotland while an Edinburgh student and South African captain in the first 1903 Test against Britain, was in the Medical Corps. For the many rugby players in the brigade’s ranks, they were surrounded by familiar symbols: their cap badge was a springbok head, with the motto ‘Union is Strength – Eendracht Maakt Macht’. The Scottish even took with them a springbok mascot, called Nancy.

  Naturally, one of their first acts was to look for a rugby game: they found one as early as 6 November 1915 against the Welsh Division in Aldershot, and South Africa’s medics played the RAMC two days later. On the 20th they played the Barbarians, billed as an ‘International Services XV’ and skippered by Harold ‘Dreadnought’ Harrison (who would command Hands and Mellish’s Heavy Artillery), at Richmond, ‘in aid of the Comforts Fund for Colonial Troops’. This was the first Barbarian outing since the April defeat of Wales (whose Clem Lewis and Billy Jenkins now featured, along with Birdie Partridge, the Welshman with the South African cap), and the last in wartime, as so many were now in France. C.F.S. Nicholson, who would later write a history of South African rugby, played that day, but there were no pre-war stars, with the exception of a single Springbok, ‘Sep’ Ledger, the try-scorer in Bordeaux. Sergeant Ledger would cross to France with his 2nd Regiment on 25 July 1916, missing the carnage of Delville Wood. He would survive until the Battle of Arras in April 1917, where they attacked over exposed ground at Fampoux. John Buchan recorded in his Official History:

  The result was a failure. A gallant few of the South Africans succeeded in reaching the station … where their bodies were recovered a month later when the position was captured … before the attack was brought to a standstill, the casualties of the 2nd Regiment, who went in 400 strong, amounted to 16 officers and 285 men.13

  Sep Ledger was among them, but his body was never recovered, and his name is carved on the Arras Memorial. As are 35,000 more.

  During their training at Bordon Camp, rugby was never far from their minds, and was closely followed in the press at home: almost every week a game was reported involving South African troops from varying units.14 The South African Heavy Artillery (SAHA) was not a nickname for their pack, but a successful team who took on – and beat 21–5 – the Army Service Corps (Motor Transport) XV with its Northern Union stars. In March 1916, they also inflicted a first defeat in twelve games on the New Zealand HQ side at Queen’s Club, drawing 5,000 spectators. The SAHA side included England internationalists Harrison and Hands. More games followed against the crack ASC team and the New Zealanders, but by autumn there were no unit representative teams as they had all gone ‘overseas’. The continuing South African rugby contribution came from individuals: in Ireland, Dougie Morkel, he of the howitzer boot, played for the Curragh camp against Dublin Garrison; Billy Millar arrived to join the Coldstream, and led the Public Schools’ Services XV, organised by Rosslyn Park, in victory over the Canadians, the Welsh Guards and a 58–0 thrashing of the RFC. In late 1917 and during 1918, there were enough reinforcement drafts and rehab cases to play matches against (among many) United Services and the Canadian Army Pay Corps, while Springboks stars like Millar and ‘Bay’ Wrentmore, or C.F. Krige, brother of Japie, made regular appearances for hospital or services si
des. Lieutenant Walter ‘Wally’ Mills of Western Province and the Welsh exile William ‘Taffy’ Townsend also saw action for them on the rugby field.

  Although the brigade was trained for service on the Western Front, it was first sent to join Imperial forces in Egypt, engaging the Senussi and Ottomans. A crisis was averted after mascot Nancy walked off into the desert; a Scottish patrol was sent out to lure her back with the siren call of the pipes. Nancy reappeared, the campaign was successfully concluded (the Hague convention did not forbid cruel use of bagpipes against the Turk) and by 20 April 1916 the brigade had disembarked at Marseilles to enter the European theatre. The Battle of the Somme began in sunshine on 1 July 1916 and ended in November mud; as part of 9th (Scottish) Division, the South African Brigade moved into the front line on 2 July and on 4 July relieved the 89th Brigade at Glatz Redoubt, near Montauban. Four days later, elements of the brigade were in Bernafay Wood and supported British attacks on Trônes Wood. Its first week in hell cost the brigade 537 casualties. But the devil had much worse in store.

  On 14 July the entire brigade of 3,153 men attacked Delville Wood, an important salient protruding into the enemy second line. For six days it was subjected to an onslaught of such ferocious violence that the wood itself vanished, smashed to splinters by high-explosive shelling from both sides, as British artillery rounds fell short. The infantry ran out of ammunition, and resorted to savage hand-to-hand combat with bayonet, rifle-butt and knobkerrie; only 142 souls emerged from the shattered stumps when they were relieved by the Suffolks and Berkshires on the 20th. Eventually 780 men regrouped to answer the roll call; South African Brigade casualties numbered 1,709 wounded and 763 dead (457 killed in action, 120 died of wounds and 186 missing, presumed dead). From its parent 9th (Scottish) Division, Lieutenant Eric ‘Puss’ Milroy of the Black Watch, Scottish captain in that terrific last Calcutta Cup at Inverleith in 1914, was also lost in the devastation. The ‘Devil’s Wood’ had taken the foremost as well as the hindmost.