Edwin, like his father, was an older soldier who wore two medals from his service in Afghanistan, and now returned to war with the 8th Welsh Regiment. Frederick was discharged from the 7th Welsh through ill-health. Charles, Private 14164 of the 5th Battalion, South Wales Borderers, was killed aged just 20, on 12 November 1916, as the Battle of the Somme finally thrashed itself to a standstill, with both sides exhausted and floundering in winter mud. The battle would be officially ‘closed down’ a week later with over a million dead or wounded on the two sides. Haig insisted in his post-match despatch that ‘Verdun had been relieved; the main German forces had been held on the Western Front; and the enemy’s strength had been very considerably worn down. Any one of these three results is in itself sufficient to justify the Somme battle.’ Modern military historians compete to agree with his self-justification; Charles, who is buried in Pozières British Cemetery, Ovilliers-la-Boisselle, might have another view, but remains silent on the matter.
His older brother, Lance Serjeant (Corporal) 290054 Stanley Gronow was 26 and married to Winifred, so had moved from the family home at No. 18, just across the street to No. 25. Unlike kid brother Charlie, Stanley returned home: he is buried with thirty other Commonwealth War Graves dead at Bridgend Cemetery. It was some small consolation to his wife and widowed mother. Both Charles and Stanley are commemorated on the Cenotaph at Dunraven Place, Bridgend. Stanley is also on the exquisite Celtic Art Nouveau memorial plaque at Nolton Church, Bridgend, to thirty-six men of the parish who fell in the Great War (for some reason, Charles is not). Stanley’s name was also read out by Mr W. Bradshaw, President of Bridgend RFC, at its August 1919 Annual Meeting (‘five years next Monday since the last’) among their twenty-five fallen, including their most famous son and first mentioned son, Dick Thomas. Also mentioned that day was Stanley Thomas, killed with the Canadian Highlanders at Ypres, who played for Bridgend and Llwynypia, before emigrating to Canada.
Stanley Gronow served with the 7th Welsh Regiment and played rugby for its D Company rugby team, formed mainly of Bridgenders. Whilst in training in Scotland, they played a first match against Montrose Academy on 9 October 1914. It was a ‘grand day’ as they won 17–3: ‘Montrose are a smart team but it was the dummy pass that beat them.’7 It was a shell fragment that beat Stanley almost four years later: he died aged aged 26 at St George’s Hospital, London, on 4 July 1918, having been wounded in the Kaiserschlacht spring offensive.
William – Private W.J. Gronow, or ‘Bill, as he is familiarly known in football circles’ – was vice-captain of Bridgend FC. A Rhondda collier on his enlistment, he served with the South Wales Borderers’ 4th Battalion and was awarded the DCM in 1916,8 proudly reported by the local press: ‘Footballer D.C.M. Distinction for Former Bridgend Player’. In his later account of his 1915 Dardanelles campaign, Wilfred Jesson of Sherborne School, a Rosslyn Park and Surrey half back and county cricketer for Hampshire, related an unexpected reunion at Gallipoli with William:
… Pte Gronow, a huge Welsh miner with whom I had come in contact on the rugger field more than once, and such meetings one does not forget. I asked him whether he felt like rugger and he grunted there would be some dirty rugger work if he got amongst them and I knew he spoke true.9
Bill’s decoration and leadership qualities saw him promoted to sergeant and he didn’t stop there: he was commissioned as a lieutenant and awarded the DSO and an MC and Bar.10
If Bill had the distinguished military career, it was his brother Ben who was the rugby superstar. Ben Gronow, a stonemason with huge hands, was born in 1887 and began his rugby career with Bridgend Harlequins, following a well-worn path to the senior Bridgend Football Club. In 1908–9, he captained them and made sixteen appearances for Glamorgan County. At Newport in December 1909, the full back so impressed the selectors with his size and goal-kicking in his trial that he was picked for the forthcoming game against France – as a forward. Not yet 23, he played with Pritchard and Waller at Swansea on New Year’s Day 1910, scoring a try in the 49–14 victory. The next game up was away to England and the inauguration of Twickenham as an international ground, after Harlequins and Richmond had first tested its turf.
The date was 15 January 1910; a capacity crowd of 18,000 was a third of the number that Swansea or Cardiff could command, but it did include George, Prince of Wales, shortly to be king. The settled Welsh had not lost in the championship for three years. Scots referee James Dallas had been in charge on the day they beat New Zealand. England had eight new caps and their fifteenth man, centre Bert Solomon, arrived from Cornwall in the nick of time by the delayed milk train. The mercurial Harlequin Adrian Stoop won the toss and elected to receive the kick. Ben Gronow of the magnificent boot, launched the ball into the air. It went not to the forwards charging down the touchline, but straight to Stoop; instead of returning it, as everyone expected, he set off on a long diagonal run. As he reached the Welsh 25, he kicked cross-field behind their backs; Gent picked up the bounce and four passes later, Chapman touched down in the corner. No Welsh hand had touched the ball. England won the game 11–6, their first victory over Wales in twelve years and a tectonic plate had shifted in British rugby.
Ben completed the championship season, but another earthquake shook South Wales as he went north, for a fee of £120, to play League for Huddersfield. On 3 September 1910, he made his debut against Ebbw Vale (when the Welsh team was part of the Northern Union) and won his first rugby league international cap when Wales played England at Coventry. Ben went on to 395 appearances for Huddersfield, scoring 80 tries and kicking 673 goals, for a tally of 1,586 points. He was part of the 1914–15 ‘Team of All Talents’ under Harold Wagstaff which won all four trophies: the Challenge Cup, Rugby League Championship, Yorkshire League Cup and Yorkshire Cup in wartime.11 As with Association, League professionals carried on while Union enlisted; but in 1915 Ben, with Wagstaff, joined the war effort in the Army Service Corps (Motor Transport) at Grove Park and rose to sergeant. His ‘active service’ initially consisted of rugby in London for Major R.V. Stanley’s conquering ASC side, unbeaten except by a United Services team packed with internationals. If Edgar Mobbs was critical, there was risk of even harsher words from heroic brother William, Ben finally went overseas in charge of a transport depot at Ypres. He survived to play on after the war, for Huddersfield and a small-town club, Grenfell in Australia, before retiring.
On 17 January 1919, as the oval ball again appeared on Welsh fields, a single game salvaged another season lost to war. Bridgend & District played a ‘Picked Military Team’ in aid of the Bridgend Reception Fund to celebrate the return of the troops. Both William and Frederick Gronow took the field; Charles and Stanley watched from the grandstand in the sky.
For Wales, the last words rest with another dual-code international player from Bridgend. Gareth Thomas, above all a proud Welshman, deeply moved by Mametz Wood, said: ‘It all comes down to duty, loyalty and other old-fashioned values. Just because it is the old way doesn’t mean it is the wrong way.’
Notes
1 D.E. Davies, Cardiff Rugby Club History and Statistics 1876–1975 (Cardiff RFC, 1975).
2 National Archives WO 95/2561/3.
3 Owen Sheers, ‘Mametz Wood’.
4 Gareth Thomas and Michael Calvin, Proud (Ebury Press, 2014).
5 Sewell, Roll of Honour.
6 Beware misreporting that he was killed at Guillemont, where King and Slocock died in August.
7 W.A.D. Lawrie, The First 100 Years: History of Bridgend RFC (Lawrie, 1979).
8 Cambrian Daily Leader, 4 February 1916.
9 Unpublished account, courtesy of Ann Gammie.
10 Otago Witness, 27 December 1918.
11 David Gronow, 100 Greats: Huddersfield Rugby League Football Club (The History Press, 2008).
12
France
Allons enfants de la patrie
La jour de gloire est arrivée.
The world knows the Basque city of Bayonne for two local specialities
to which it has given its name: one is its justly famed and delicious jambon de bayonne; the other is the notorious and less palatable baïonette, which gave a savage edge to the trench fighting of the Great War.
The ancient port of Bayonne is situated at the confluence of the Nive and Adour rivers; these waterways were vital to its early commercial success, including the armaments industry that created the bayonet. By the end of the nineteenth century, rowing was more exercise than commerce, and a sporting club dipped its less deadly blades in the rivers for recreation. In 1904, the rowers decided, like their Vancouver counterparts, to keep themselves fit in the winter months by playing rugby; like the Canadians, these oarsmen kept the same name for their rugby section – Aviron Bayonnais. Among them was Fernand Forgues, French rowing champion in 1905, who had helped to found rugby club Olympique in neighbouring Biarritz in 1904. Two years later he joined the new club at Bayonne.
Tucked into the southwestern corner of France, 40 kilometres from the Spanish border, Bayonne could hardly be further away from Paris if it tried – being fiercely Basque, it probably has. But on 20 April 1913 provincial Aviron Bayonnais came to the capital to play Sporting Club Universitaire de France (SCUF) for the French rugby championship. Competitive rugby was a comparatively recent affair: the first championship in 1892 was a straight Parisian challenge between Stade Français and Racing Club, refereed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who went on to bigger things. This was the same year that Rosslyn Park became the first English club to play on the Continent, defeating Stade; rugby tours crossed the Channel with increasing frequency, spreading the popularity of the ‘English’ game.
The provinces had broken the hegemony of Paris when Stade Bordelaise (SBUC) won in 1899, the first year the championship was opened to clubs outside the capital. SBUC from Bordeaux were a dominant force in the first decade, winning five ‘boucliers’,1 but Lyon and Toulouse also carried the title south; these were all major cities compared to Bayonne. Crowds had grown from 2,000 in 1892 to ten times that for the 1913 championship final. The Springboks had attracted 20,000 to Bordeaux at a time when French soccer internationals in Paris drew only 4,000 spectators; the crowd’s understanding of the game did not always match their enthusiasm.
SCUF were favourites in 1913, having been losing finalists in 1911 and boasting five capped French players, albeit that ‘one-cap-wonder’ Joé Anduran, a Bayonne-born hooker, was among them. His art gallery happened to be near the Gare du Nord as the French found themselves a man short on the way to Swansea in 1910 to play Ben Gronow’s side; Anduran was ‘selected’ on the spot by Cyril Rutherford for his only cap, on New Year’s Day. The Aviron Bayonnais captain on Final day in 1913, seven years after he joined the club, was Fernand Forgues. His pedigree was impressive with nine caps at flanker for his country (he would win eleven in all, two as captain); he had already faced Scotland, Wales and the Springboks, at Le Bouscat, Bordeaux, that season.
The Stade Yves du Manoir at Colombes was his lucky ground: it was here that he had made his debut for France on the triumphant day in 1911 that they first won an international, against Scotland 16–15. He would never be on a winning French side again, and the lucky Colombes charm ran out in his last game against Poulton-Palmer. Or perhaps it didn’t. Forgues would survive the war to become chairman of Aviron (and three-time pelota champion of France in his forties) and win Bayonne a second title as coach in 1934. But his brother and fellow prop, Jean-Charles, was killed in action in 1918, and another brother, Jules, followed in 1919 from influenza. Six team-mates died, of whom three were French caps, all with visible Basque roots: Maurice Hédembaigt, Emmanuel Iguiñiz and François Poeydebasque. Albert Chateau (or Chatau) struggled on with his wounds until his death in 1924. Aviron Bayonnais’ is the story of the proud rise of a small-town team and the correspondingly deep pain it suffered in the Great War.
Three frères Forgues appear in a postcard of the 1912–13 team: Fernand, Jules and Jean-Charles. Jules and Marcel (a fourth brother who played in Aviron’s two-time championship runners-up after the war) reveal another intriguing trait in French rugby’s development: the British, or specifically, Welsh connection. Jules played for Penarth and Marcel later for Swansea and Cardiff, but there was more to it than that. In the same photograph sits a player captioned ‘Roé’. Despite his frenchified surname, he was a Welshman called Harry Owen Roe; the ‘panache from Penarth’ was the secret of their success on the road to the Colombes final. The Welsh shipping clerk and compact stand-off (he was 5ft 7in) was recruited in 1910 by Fernand when visiting brother Jules, who was working and playing rugby in Penarth; Harry arrived to be player/coach at Bayonne in 1911, aged 25, and only retired when he was 44.
He brought in his trunk a manual by Cardiff and Wales star centre Gwyn Nicholls: The Modern Rugby Game. From its pages he drew a playing style of ‘total rugby’ where backs and forwards combine, which had been the signature of Wales’ Golden Decade. He noted the dexterity and ball skills of the local basquais pelota players, and youngsters who practised bullfighting by dodging young bulls; he instructed his new charges that there were to be no rucks or mauls, but a fifteen-man handling game. It became known as the La Manière Bayonnaise. Or in Basque, Le Manie Galois – the ‘Welsh Way’.2 The brothers Forgues, like Gallaher and Stead before them, would publish the secrets of their open passing game for all to read, if not always to follow.
There was a commercial exchange that sustained the Roe move: prized Welsh coal was need by Bayonnais metalworkers at Boucau to smelt iron ore from Bilbao; the pine forests around Bayonne provided resinous pit-props that did not rot in the damp South Wales coalmines. Harry and Jules arranged the contracts and the shipping. Harry met and married a local girl and settled down, playing again after the interruption of war. Despite Roé’s newly acquired accent, in forty years, he only ever got to grips with one new language, which was Basque rather than French.3 He was certainly not up to writing a coaching manual about his methods.
The Bayonnais swept all before them, racking up 600 points in the 1912–13 season; in the qualifiers that led to Paris, they scored 171 points to 6 against. The playmaker Roe had topped the scoring tables, and was renowned for his drop goals. The SCUF Parisians clung on for 13–3 at half-time, but were washed away by a wave of tries in the second half, which showed ‘stunning brio, amazing audacity and staggering skill’, according to Gaston Lane.4 The 31–8 final score included six tries from forwards Jules and Fernand, Eugene Ellisalde, Paulin Bascou and Jean Domercq, with winger Victor Labaste scoring one for the backs. Harry Roe converted four of them. One of many souvenir postcards printed of the successful team acclaimed them Les Gallois de France – the Welshmen from France. For Aviron players like Felix Lasserre and Jean Domercq, fortunate enough to survive the coming conflagration, Roe’s coaching would give them a versatility that would prove invaluable to their careers.
The year 1913 had started less triumphantly for Forgues, and one game exposed a flaw that would bedevil French rugby, but not on the pitch. With his international cap on, Fernand had faced Scotland on New Year’s Day at Parc des Princes, the fourth meeting between the two and his second. The Colombes encounter of 1911 was still France’s only Test victory; a partisan home crowd of 20,000 hoped for a repeat performance. The French, under the captaincy of Gaston Lane, played well, and Forgues’s pack had the better of the second half, but they did not take their chances. They were improving by the year, but still lacked composure.
The referee was James ‘Bim’ Baxter of Birkenhead Park, an England cap in 1900 and RFU President in the twenties. As 1930 Lions manager in New Zealand, he would loudly condemn the All Blacks’ rover role perfected by Gallaher: it was subsequently banned in 1932. He frequently penalised the French; the crowd, more passionate than knowledgeable about the game, became restive. As his whistle finally blew for a 21–3 defeat, spectators stormed the pitch. Some of the Scots were hit by flying stones, Baxter himself was attacked and at least one assailant arrested by gendarmes.
<
br /> Condemnation of the crowd’s behaviour came swiftly, not least in France. The French Union deplored the incident and sent an emissary to the International Board in Glasgow with a formal apology. The Scots were unforgiving, and refused further matches. In a letter to Cyril Rutherford (ironically a Scotsman), secretary to the Union Sportive Française des Sports Athlétiques (USFSA), it was noted in particular that the pitch invaders were not solely those in the cheap seats. The two sides did not meet again until after the war; the Paris mob would find new targets in 1924.
France wept for 1.4 million men who died in their Grande Guerre, almost twice as many as Britain. French international rugby teams were hard hit: their 1910 quinze against Wales at Swansea lost six men, as did the Colombes XV that succumbed to Poulton-Palmer and Lowe. In all twenty-one capped players were killed, a high toll when we consider that France only began playing international rugby in 1906 against the All Blacks and had capped only 114 players by 1914. Almost a fifth of les bleus were ‘napoo’, as Tommy would have it. With death came the consolation of glory: the ‘omnisport’ Racing Club de Paris lost 215 members, but collected 34 Médailles Militaires, 95 Légions d’Honneur, 405 Croix de Guerre and 1,200 citations (French mentions in despatches). In March 1918 alone, its former 1st XV members collected 56 citations.
The first capped Frenchman to be killed was Alfred Mayssonié, known as ‘Maysso’, a founder member of Stade Toulouse, as Forgues was at Biarritz and Bayonne. This generation of players was building French rugby from its very foundations: it was still young and an enfant terrible tendency would creep in both on and off the field. That so many senior figures were killed in wartime may partly explain its troubled adolescence in the 1920s. Maysso was the first player from Toulouse to be capped, in 1908, and played Wales – Gronow, Pritchard, Waller, Maddocks et al. – at Swansea when France were first officially admitted to a ‘Five Nations’ championship in 1910.
After the Final Whistle Page 21