After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  The blood of many mates at Gallipoli was laid at Britain’s door; surely the rankers in the Dominion teams would not have missed this supreme chance for a quiet word in the ear of the officers facing them (even if one was a man of God, the Reverend Bill Havard, of Oxford and Wales, chaplain to the Guards Brigade). The Mother Country front row could not have been a happy place.

  Matters almost got out of hand in the match against Australia at Welford Road. Wing forward Sergeant Bradley, a North Sydney rugby league player, so annoyed the crowd with his obstruction of scrum half Pym that there were calls for him to be sent off. This would have been unprecedented in a representative match in Britain – although Syd Middleton’s disgrace was probably invoked by those with memories of 1908 – and would have disturbed the harmony of the Imperial celebrations. The referee tried to defuse the tension by putting the ball into the scrum himself, a stratagem that was later repeated when France played Scotland in 1920. Ironically, New Zealand, arch-exponents of the wing forward’s dark arts, formally proposed this in August to the RFU. In the wake of endemic crooked feeding, there are calls for it again.

  The contents of King George’s chalice may have soured over ensuing decades, as the tight Victorian bonds of Empire loosened into a Commonwealth of Nations. Not until 1939 was the next Wallaby side invited to Britain; unfortunate timing, as the second war erupted before a game was played. But guess who’s still coming to the Rugby World Cup party in 2015? In a century of astonishing political and technological change, more global strife, and the rise and collapse of Reich and Soviet, the Commonwealth is an underrated achievement. Consider the changes in Russia’s century: nine months before the King’s Cup final, the Russians murdered their royal family at Yekaterinburg. Revolution and upheaval has seen a procession from Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin to Putin; a colossal empire was set in concrete until, almost overnight, its walls crumbled and fell. Yet in 2015, we still have a United Kingdom (phew), King George’s granddaughter sits on the same throne, while her daughter and grandsons take their box-seats as enthusiastic rugby fans and patrons.

  It was a good moment, too, for the RFU to score some points. Historian Tony Collins has pointed out that from 1895 to 1914, rugby was in anything but union: almost continual crisis prevailed. League had split rugby at home and down under; Scotland clashed with anyone and everyone over professionalism; and Australian and New Zealand Unions openly challenged the RFU’s authority. Only the South Africans seemed to play ball in the approved amateur way – which is why they were invited back before the war. In 1914, the RFU had initially instructed clubs to keep playing but admitted defeat in the face of wholesale enlistment and cancelled the season in September. Rugby enthusiasts like Tom Richards found a game at the front whenever they needed it, but by 1917 the official ball of the British Army on the Western Front was round, each company being issued with a football. Mythology has since accreted around the 1914 Christmas Truce and footballs kicked from trenches at Loos and the Somme, although the best story – sadly neglected – was the April Fool football ‘bomb’ dropped over a Lille airfield in 1917 which sent Germans scurrying for cover – until it bounced.6 With twenty-seven wearers of rugby’s red rose now lying amongst the poppies in Flanders’ and other fields, the RFU felt justified in reasserting the ‘national value of Rugby Football’.

  In another gesture of goodwill uncommon for the rugby authorities, a truce was declared and an olive branch extended to the professional League code. Out of practical necessity in wartime, Northern Union players had been ‘amnestied’ (as if they were outlaws) and allowed to play under ‘proper’ Rugby Union rules; Ben Gronow and Harold Wagstaff were prominent stars in the Army Service Corps team, which bore Mobbs’s disapproval. This condescension was now extended by a dispensation for the King’s Cup, albeit only for players still in the forces. Pointedly, only one League player was actually chosen.

  RFU minutes show that New Zealand would also propose a relaxation of amateur regulations in August 1919; the RFU’s pre-determined attitude in March was that ‘they shall not pass’ and it was not about to soften its stance by admitting League undesirables to the showcase event. But nonetheless an eighth ground was added – in the north. Allowing men to play (in theory) was one thing, but holding a rugby union match for the King’s Cup in enemy territory was another. But this was not Bradford Northern or even Horton Park Avenue, a former bastion of League, now in Association hands, but Lidget Green, home of Bradford RUFC (where Yorkshire would later play the NZ Services). But it happened on 9 April (after a postponement of two weeks due to heavy March snow), with the mighty antipodean clash of Australia and New Zealand.

  Australia’s skipper was Lieutenant William ‘Billy’ Watson, who came up through the ranks. He ended his first war with MC and Bar and DCM on his chest and would add the DSO at Kokoda, New Guinea, in his second. Born in New Zealand, he was a 1912 Waratah who toured the Americas and faced the All Blacks in 1914. He enlisted on 8 August and so was ‘not available for selection’ in the last hurrah of Test rugby in Sydney the following Saturday. He served as a gunner at Gallipoli, then moved to the Western Front, where he was promoted to sergeant, won his DCM at the Somme and was commissioned in September 1917. Wounded in Flanders mud in November, he recovered and went on to win his MC in the push to victory that began at Amiens in August 1918. He just had time to add the Bar: at Foucaucourt on 27 August, Watson worked his way forward through enemy fire and directed three batteries to eliminate enemy machine-gun posts. He captained throughout the King’s Cup; that he was on a rugby field at all in 1919 was a miracle.

  The uncompromising Watson played in the front row, no place for the faint-hearted. But he would have suffered excruciating agonies in the scrummage, as he was covered in purulent sores resulting from a mustard gas attack in October. Major Matthews had to lance these festering wounds with a sterilised penknife before Watson took to the field, bleeding before first contact – read this at The Stoop and weep. Despite the pain, he would have the rare pleasure of turning over the Trans-Tasman arch-rival by a narrow 6–5 score, in their last game at Bradford. It was the only loss for the New Zealanders. Their soldiers had fought side by side in the ANZAC Division at Gallipoli, and then the ANZAC Corps in France; now it was back to serious business. In July 1920, this lieutenant made of tough stuff would again be captain, this time of a NSW representative Test side, effectively Australia, as the Queensland Union was still suffering from shell-shock and had not yet reformed. His AIF full back, Captain ‘Jackie’ Beith, hooker Quartermaster Sergeant Bond and wing forward Private Quinn would stiffen the spine of the NSW team; normal peacetime service was resumed, however, with a 26–15 defeat by the All Blacks.

  Wing threequarter Sergeant Dudley Suttor played all five games of the Cup tournament with Watson. The New South Welshman, ‘the crackerjack player of the side’, was overlooked for the 1912 American tour. Such were the tensions in NSW rugby that his home town of Bathurst immediately seceded from Union in protest and swung over to League. ‘Dud’ toured New Zealand with the Waratahs in 1913. He won his international cap and was the leading try-scorer in the series with seven tries: ‘Suttor as a winger is the ideal, a man who shoots off the mark like lead out of a Winchester, fast as zebra, and generally a reckless, daring smashing player.’ A driver in the Australian ASC, he saw service in Egypt, France and Belgium, and then in the Trench Team. He was no ‘dud’ in the King’s Cup, the prolific wing sharing honours with flanker Sergeant Bradley as top try-scorer.

  A squad of some fifty players in the Australian XV, and the Reserves captained by Peter Buchanan of the Trench Team, trained at Chiswick in London. Warm-up matches included their own Flying Corps (shot down 50–0 in Gloucester) and Leicester County. They returned to Leicester for their first game against the Mother Country, played in front of 9,000 (not far off the Welford Road capacity at the time). As if to remind them of France, the March weather was bitterly cold. Although it was ‘evenly contested’, they lost 3�
�6 due to a ‘lack of combined effort’ – Goddard’s earlier apprehensions confirmed. But a changed team, with Wally Matthews behind the scrum, turned it round against South Africa at Newport, with Suttor and Bradley scoring. Unaccountably, they then slipped up against the RAF, losing 3–7 at Kingsholm.

  The Royal Air Force was newly formed in 1918 from a merger of the Army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Their rugby side did not have ace Cyril Lowe, the coruscating 5ft 6in England winger and dogfight scourge of the Germans with nine kills,7 and ‘a demon at dropping goals’ at Dulwich. But they did have wing forward William Wavell Wakefield, just 20 years of age, in the first two matches. His youth had saved him from frontline immolation and his war, by his own admission, was largely spent in flying training and playing rugby at Cranwell and United Services. He would go on to captain England to consecutive Grand Slams in a 1920s heyday (as well as eleven years a Harlequin, an MP for almost thirty and subsequent ennoblement as Baron Wakefield of Kendal). He made his international debut against Wales in 1920, before going up to Cambridge and two Blues, the second as captain. His athleticism (he was RAF 440 yards champion) allowed him to redefine the loose forward role akin to that of a fighter pilot, hunting down stand-offs and making flying runs in support of the threequarter line.

  Wavell Wakefield was at Scapa Flow with the Fleet when ‘ordered to report to the Air Force Rugger side’,8 the highest ranking side of all – every one of the fly-boys held a commission. The RAF did, however, break ranks by including Lieutenant Billy Seddon, the only rugby league player in the tournament, at full back; Wakefield’s insistence was vindicated when Seddon scored their winning four-point drop goal against Australia. Wakefield’s first sortie as skipper was to take the nucleus of the side to France and Belgium in search of any RAF players stationed there who might have been overlooked. They practised against other units with little joy; the harsh winter meant living in freezing huts and playing on equally frozen ground. Instead, they tried, with little success to fend off the new enemy of influenza, which had already claimed England’s Schwartz just a week after the Armistice, and would take its toll of the team in training and, by Wakefield’s account, in their first below-par encounters with New Zealand and South Africa.

  Wakefield recruited at a high level: Scots internationalist Flight Lieutenant Archie Symington was a man who had fought a busy war. Wounded at Bethune in 1914 with the KRRC, he was mentioned in despatches in 1915 and awarded the MC in 1916. A gas victim, he was discharged from service but rejoined into the RFC. Another clutch of Scots included George Thom, later capped in 1920, Robert Simpson, and Gerald Crole, Edinburgh Accie and Oxford Blue. Crole joined the 2nd Dragoon Guards, before transferring to 40 Squadron, RFC, winning an MC in September 1917 before his kite was pranged in October, forcing him to sit out the war as a guest of the Kaiser at Holzminden PoW camp.

  Wartime flying attracted an international brigade of adventurers who lived short lives and died far from home. In Gainsborough cemetery in Lincolnshire, where the RFC Home Defence squadrons buried the pilots who plummeted to earth in their frail machines, Rosslyn Park aviator Jack Harman lies next to three Canadians, two New Zealanders, one South African and an Argentinian. The RAF’s rugby crew was fortified by ten South Africans, including the 1912 Springbok Godfrey ‘Bay’ Wrentmore and Cecil Thompson, DFC. ‘From our point of view’, wrote Mellish, ‘it was a pity the RAF entered on its own as it meant several excellent players were lost to the South African side.’

  The youthful Wakefield was thrust into the whirlwind of Dominion rugby on a rapidly ascending learning curve. The New Zealanders ‘showed me the value of physical toughness and of keen following and backing up’. He was ‘impressed by the size of the South African forwards and the difficulty of getting the ball in the line-out’, and England’s Barry Cumberlege, playing for the Mother Country, ‘whipped the ball off my feet when I had gone away for a long dribble, for I was not used to meeting fullbacks of his class’. Wakefield was learning at the feet of masters; the foundations of his England success were laid ‘in these matches, which really gave me my first taste of representative football. I had a chance to put my theories into practice and I learnt a great deal.’ Although his RAF team crashed and burnt in three of their games, most heavily against the Mother Country, 29–6, they did shoot down both Canada and Australia.

  One unexpected RAF player was James Ira Thomas ‘Taffy’ Jones, a pre-war Carmarthen Harlequin.9 At 22 the Welsh pilot had almost as many decorations as he had kills: he finished the war as Lieutenant (acting Major) Jones, DSO, MC, DFC and Bar, MM – 74 Squadron’s leading ‘ace’ with thirty-seven victories in just three months. He was in every sense a tough bastard (his illegitimacy was a secret he kept all his life):

  My habit of attacking Huns dangling from their parachutes led to many arguments in the mess. Some officers, of the Eton and Sandhurst type, thought it was ‘unsportsmanlike’ to do it. Never having been to a public school, I was unhampered by such considerations of form. I just pointed out that there was a bloody war on, and that I intended to avenge my pals.

  Whilst on leave he went to watch the RAF play New Zealand at Swansea on 3 March. As the team was a man short after South African Eugen Norgarb was felled by influenza, he was persuaded to play on the wing. ‘Capt Jones, the Carmarthen man, did a lot in defence but was “starved” by his centre’, reported the Swansea Post as the New Zealanders won 22–3. The Wanganui Chronicle was more critical: ‘Their passing was haphazard, and the marked neglect of their right-winger, Jones, certainly robbed them of more than one excellent chance to score.’ It was his only game in the tournament. He then went back to war in Russia.

  The Canadians went about recruiting their team in a less scientific manner. Welsh-born sapper Jimmy Pritchard, who played for the Winnipeg Welsh before enlisting in the 101st Battalion, recalled in 1974:

  While walking by the sports field at Shoreham one morning, I saw a rugby practice and as I approached a group of soldiers who were watching, one of them said to me: ‘Jimmy, where have you been? I’ve been looking for you. Do you want to play rugby for Canada in the tournament?’10

  The speaker was Bob Lewis, Canada’s team manager, against whom Jimmy had played in 1914 and not seen since. Pritchard joined his squad at its Metropolitan Water Board base in Honor Oak; he was given a brand new jersey by the army. As a left-winger starved of the ball, he was unimpressed by his centres who, ‘never passed and always got tackled when they tried to run through our opponents’. After some crushing preliminaries, including a 43–0 hiding by Pill Harriers at Newport, they were first up for the Cup at Portsmouth against the mighty New Zealanders (albeit fielding their 2nd XV) The Times, with its customary condescension, damned them with faint praise in its match preview:

  The Canadians are improving very rapidly, but they are not a great side. Their real value is a missionary one, for it is hoped that they will instil into Canadians the value of the game which, despite climatic conditions, ought to be a real Canadian game.11

  They kept the score to a creditable 11–0 loss. A scoreless draw at Honor Oak against United Hospitals did not bode well for the game against South Africa at Swansea. Snow fell before the game to make them feel at home, but to little effect: nine tries (including seven bombs from Captain H. Mills and Lieutenant W.J. Mills) were conceded in a 31–0 battering, on a day when the imposing Canadians dominated the scrummage but little else.

  Their Twickenham debut came against Australia. Two Davies brothers, Sammy and Dai, both sergeant majors and friends of Pritchard from Winnipeg, filled the half-back berths for Canada. The sparse crowd of 4,000 rattled in the cavernous stands, a sad comparison with the 25,000 Scots packed into Inverleith the same day to watch New Zealand beat the Mother Country. The king was down with the flu and their royal audience was Princes George and Albert.

  With the Canadians wearing numbers, but unnumbered on the card, the Australians numbered on the card, but wearing no numbers, and both
teams sporting blue, if of different shades, some time elapsed before the spectators could feel any confidence in their knowledge of the players.12

  If royalty found the spectacle bewildering, think of the poor referee. But there was one spectator highly popular with the soldiers on the pitch: Princess Mary. The veterans might recognise her profile from the brass tins they had received at the front. Over 426,000 ‘Princess Mary’s Gift Boxes’ were distributed at Christmas 1914: it was her idea, when just 17, ‘to send a Christmas present from the whole of the nation to every sailor afloat and every soldier at the front’. Another 1.4 million were distributed throughout the war, although production was delayed when a shipment of brass went down with the torpedoed Lusitania in May 1915. The ‘Gift Box for the Troops’ was filled with tobacco, a pipe or cigarettes (acid-drops for non-smokers, spices for the Indians), pencils, a Christmas card and a picture of the princess herself. Now they had a chance to thank her in person.

  As for the rugby match, the result was as disappointing for the Canadians as the attendance, with another 38 unanswered points in the debit column. The Canadians proved the whipping boys of the tournament with no wins and a points difference of 110 (a solitary try by Lieutenant E.W. Watling against the RAF saw them take a short-lived lead). Rugby historian Owen Owen (so good they named him twice) was kindly in retrospect: ‘although the Canadians lacked the long experience of the others, they proved no mean opponents’. Their Forces team ended its chastening overseas rugby adventure with losses to Llanelli and Gloucester, but two tries in each match were seized upon as signs of progress.