Three inches of snow at Bradford postponed the Australia v New Zealand fixture for two weeks and the tight schedule forced the match to be played midweek on 9 April, only four days – and a 200-mile train journey – after the trouncing of ‘hopelessly outclassed’ Canada at Twickenham in front of the princes. At full-time at Twickenham, their Highnesses came onto the field to speak to Watson’s Australians and ‘spent some time in conversation with the players. The Prince of Wales is a very popular man with the Diggers.’13 The stadium, the royal presence and ten tries in ‘really first-class football’ clearly inspired them as they travelled north to play their black-shirted bogey-men.
As a microcosm of Empire, the teams revealed much about the rugby caste system in their respective societies. The New Zealand skipper, Regimental Sergeant Major James Ryan of the Otago Infantry, had under his rugby command two officers, eight sergeants and seven capped All Blacks, including his 1914 captain. Six more would wear post-war black caps, with Private Belliss captaining the ABs in 1922 and Gunner Alf West touring Britain as breakaway forward with the 1925 ‘Invincibles’. Rank and status did not matter: Ryan was the man for the job and RSMs are leaders of men. These were the boys who lived, and they had earned the right to choose who led them on the rugby field. The patrician Mother Country by contrast fielded twenty officers (including the reverend captain), one company sergeant major and not a single private soldier.
Ryan was one of the luckier of the ‘Unlucky Otagos’, serving throughout the war. One of seven brothers to play for the Petone club, he was 18 when he first wore black on the Wellington wing in 1905, the first of his eleven seasons for the province as a versatile, play-anywhere back. He added the silver fern to his jersey with the national side in 1910 and toured Australia in 1914. In France, he had played for the Trench Team before crossing to England and the Inter-Services team captaincy. Like the Canadian Davies boys, he had family for company – brother Eddie, otherwise Bombardier Ryan, played as ‘a pacy threequarter’. Eddie’s hearing was permanently damaged by an explosion (an occupational hazard in the artillery) but did not stop him appearing for the All Blacks in 1921.
By this stage of the tournament, New Zealand had defeated all four of their opponents, including the host Mother Country, which had won its other three. Their Twickenham encounter with South Africa on 29 March was the first official meeting of the two titans of twentieth-century rugby (if we discount Gallaher’s rumoured exploits against the Afrikaners on the veldt), although claims can be argued for their opener against the RAF and its ten South Africans. South Africa’s own first game was also against the RAF and featured ‘Boy’ Morkel and Sergeant Wilhelm ‘Bingo’ Burger from the 1906 tour (rumoured to be a Saracen while in England after the tour). Despite the almost constant wartime games and a comprehensive series of selection trials and warm-ups, C.F.S. Nicholson wrote that the South African team was:
not evenly balanced and there were far too many changes that prevented teamwork and cohesion … we had a good leavening of Internationals, but several were just of good senior club standard. The team generally were good on the attack, but the defence was far from satisfactory, and some of the tackling was crude in the extreme.14
He singled out ‘Buller’ Scully, Frank Mellish and Boy Morkel for praise, but ‘sound’ was the best he could summon for other players. Morkel had been the star of the 1912 Springboks in Britain, but was handicapped by the flu; forward Mellish would stay on in Britain and win six caps for England during the winter of 1920–1. After trials (with firm friend Wakefield), he received a brief note, inviting him to a bring-your-own-shirt party:
‘You have been selected to play for England against Wales at Newport on Saturday 20th January at 2.30 p.m. England plays in white. Herewith a rose for your jersey.’
That was all. You wore your own club stockings, you bought yourself a pair of white pants and a white jersey and you got your girlfriend to sew on the rose. The cryptic message went on to say that if you required transport you were to inform the Secretary of your home station and he would send you a third class return ticket. And that I think is the charm of amateur rugby … we expected and were pleased to make some contribution towards our fun and enjoyed it a great deal more by doing so.
On his return to a southern winter in South Africa, he walked straight into the Springbok side about to depart on its first tour to New Zealand. He has the unique distinction of representing two countries in the same year in 1921.15
On 29 March, a beautiful spring day with a stiff breeze, 10,000 (mostly soldiers) watched ‘easily the most brilliant exposition of Rugby yet seen in the competition’16 against New Zealand on a firm field at Twickenham. The lengthy Times report noted: ‘Save for one brief period until the end of the first half, the game was in New Zealand territory, but in this period New Zealand scored.’ Sound familiar? The New Zealand forwards ‘handle the ball like backs … very clever in picking up and barging through in the loose. These hurricane methods are especially useful near the line.’17 They triumphed 15–5. Frank Mellish met King George for the second time: the previous occasion had been when, wounded and in recovery, he received his Military Cross. His ragged army uniform gloves let him down:
A great weight was on my shoulders and I felt sure he would judge and size up South Africa by the way I comported myself … His Majesty put out his hand to greet me and I shot out mine and all four fingers and thumb left their cramped cubby-holes and shot out also … he was convulsed with mirth and if he did say anything, it was lost on me entirely.
A year later, on the pitch at Twickenham, they shook hands again, without gloves: ‘You and I have met before. Let me think. Ah, yes, the Palace, was it not? I think you made me laugh.’
This was Spring Offensive time in the last four seasons. On 9 April 1917, the Battle of Arras, involving troops from all the combatant rugby nations, had opened; it was the day that Scotland’s Tommy Nelson died. The same day in 1919 was also the anniversary of the death of All Black Hubert ‘Jum’ Turtill, left behind by the Originals but capped once against Australia in 1905. He had then toured Britain with the professional League side derisively termed the ‘All Golds’; banned for life from Union, he came to England in 1909, ran a pub and played League for St Helens. He joined the Royal Engineers, survived Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele, but finally took a hospital pass from a shell at Festubert in 1918. As for the men who survived France to earn selection for this new rugby revival, they might say (albeit improbably) with Robert Browning, ‘Oh to be in England now that April’s there’.
A victory for New Zealand against Australia at Bradford on 9 April would leave them unbeaten and clinch the King’s Cup outright. The game seemed a foregone conclusion, especially after an earlier NZEF double when both Southern Hemisphere First and Reserve XVs met on the same February day at Richmond. But this time the improving Aussies were hitting their straps and had other ideas; a curiously tender Achilles heel – when it comes to crunch knockout ties – would first be exposed in the otherwise impenetrable New Zealander hide. Australia’s team also included the much-travelled and decorated Lieutenant Danny Carroll, 1908 Wallaby and Olympic champion, and dual-country rugby internationalist, a ‘ringer’ drafted in from the US Army. He already had one try to his name from the Canadian rout.
Australia’s 6–5 win in front of 7,000 people who were, in Goddard’s view, ‘treated to the finest game of the series’, was not only a highly satisfying end to their campaign, but forced their opponents into a final decider on 16 April against the Mother Country at Twickenham. The Australian forwards outplayed their vaunted opponents in Bradford, with Lance Corporal Thomson and Sergeant Egan crossing for unconverted tries. The expected second-half counter-offensive from the black jerseys came with a Storey try converted by Stohr, but by the whistle, Australia were again camped on the New Zealand line, forcing them into defensive heroics.
One imagines that a copious amount of ale was taken in Bradford that night; if there was any hangover, they
swiftly recovered to chalk up another 460 kilometres by train to Exeter and defeat Devon just three days later, as rugby’s circus moved on. Danny Carroll returned to his American regiment. The round-robin Inter Services league competition was completed and two teams had finished even on points. For those who enjoy fine dining at a league table, here it is:
1919 Inter-Services Tournament18
P
W
L
F
A
Pts
New Zealand
5
4
1
58
17
8
Mother Country
5
4
1
81
27
8
Australia
5
3
2
58
23
6
South Africa
5
2
3
65
43
4
Royal Air Force
5
2
3
37
69
4
Canada
5
0
5
3
113
0
Notes
1 Goddard, Soldiers and Sportsmen.
2 On 26 January 1926 in Soho; colour came two years later.
3 See www.britishpathe.com.
4 Now World Rugby.
5 The Times, 22 March 1919.
6 Coventry Evening Telegraph, 16 April 1917.
7 Lowe’s England record of eighteen tries was not surpassed until 1989 by another RAF pilot, Rory Underwood. He was also (one of many) rumoured to be the model for Captain W.E. Johns’s Biggles.
8 Wavell Wakefield and Howard Marshall.
9 Gareth Morgan, ‘Taffy’, 14–18 Journal (Australian Society of World War 1 Aero Historians, 2012).
10 Interview with Doug Sturrock, Winnipeg, 30 July 1974.
11 The Times, 4 March 1919.
12 The Times, 7 April 1919.
13 Goddard, Soldiers and Sportsmen.
14 Essay in Ivor Difford, History of South African Rugby (Specialty Press, 1933).
15 Mellish also managed the 1951–52 Springbok tour of Britain.
16 Athletic News, 7 April 1919.
17 The Times, 31 March 1919.
18 New Zealand finished top by virtue of defeating the Mother Country.
15
Endgame
A band of angels coming after me
Coming forth to carry me home.
The stage was set for a crowd-puller at Twickenham, lately a horse paddock, now the theatre of rugby dreams. A ticket for one of the best seats in the prosaically named ‘Stand B’ (East) cost the princely sum of six shillings (30p). On 16 April, it was too a dream confrontation: the Mother Country hosts against the indomitable New Zealanders. Again it might seem that television scriptwriters were at work before their time.
The alternative narrative, nicely interrupted by Australia, would have seen the Silver Ferns crowned King’s Cup winners in Bradford, with the British Army team left to play a hollow rubber against the South Africans at Twickenham three days later. For their pains, on the day of the final, those pesky Aussies found themselves far to the west in Plymouth, where they defeated the Royal Naval Depot.
Even the British weather relented for the Twickenham showpiece. Four days previously, the New Zealand B team had played Coventry after heavy rain had turned the pitch into a quagmire memory of Flanders; Corporal Tureia was unable to lift an attempted conversion kick from the mud. Now an exciting game was in prospect in fair conditions. In those amateur days, of course, it was taking part in the competition that mattered, not the winning. But no one had told the New Zealanders that.
On Ryan’s team were five mates from that last All Black Test in Sydney of 15 August 1914. Dick Roberts of Taranaki had captained the All Blacks; as Rifleman R.W. Roberts of the NZ Rifle Brigade, he would now be the team’s try ace, crossing the whitewash seven times in the tournament, and a crack-shot with the boot too, with five conversions. Private Michael Cain of the Otagos was again in the pack. One forward, listed as plain Sergeant Arthur Wilson was, more fully, Nathaniel Arthur ‘Ranji’ Wilson; his nickname derived from the Anglo-Indian cricketer Ranjitsinhji. He was born in Christchurch to a New Zealand mother and West Indian father, and was an All Black from 1908 to 1914; his name would later make another dark mark in rugby history, but not by his own doing.
Sapper Jim Bruce and Corporal Jackie O’Brien, Auckland and Divisional Signals, at full back (but wearing number 1 in the upside-down manner of a Southern Hemisphere nation) toured but did not play that last Test. With Doolan Downing and Jim McNeece, whose bleached bones now lay scattered on the arid slopes of Chunuk Bair, they had all dashed off after their victory to catch the steamer home before the wartime curfew closed Sydney Harbour. We can guess how Ryan’s motivational team talks went.
The Mother Country had stacked the deck for the tournament, with twenty-two of their twenty-eight squad players being internationalists, all from the officer class. Only one who made the selection for the New Zealand game, CSM Jones, was not an officer. Twelve of the side for this final game were full caps and they included the two try-scorers from England’s 1914 victory over Wales by the ‘small and artistic margin of one point’,1 ‘Bruno’ Brown and ‘Cherry’ Pillman. Back then they were young rugby players at Blackheath FC, now they were warriors who had seen the worst of war.
Brisbane-born Rhodes Scholar and RAMC surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel Leonard ‘Bruno’ Brown, MC, won eighteen England caps over eleven years on either side of the conflagration. From his debut with Jack King (and alongside Pillman) at Swansea in 1911, he made a huge impact on the international game during his long career. He captained England against Wales in 1922, represented NSW on the RFU committee 1922–49, chaired the Dominions Conference in 1947, and obtained International Board status for Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. He was RFU President in the 1948–49 season and helped found the Australian RFU on 26 November 1949. Did his outlook spring from his birth or six games in the King’s Cup?
Photographic omens did not bode well for his survival to perform these good works: in England’s line-up for both the French and Scottish matches of that 1914 season, he sits flanked by Poulton-Palmer and Francis Oakeley, both killed in the first year of war. Three more players from Edinburgh would die early: ‘Bungy’ Watson in the North Sea, and two Durham school mates, Dingle at Gallipoli, and the last, Alfie Maynard, at Beaumont-Hamel in November 1916, just after ‘half-time’ in the Great War for Civilisation. This tells of the energy with which rugby players rushed early into the fight: Brown was one of only three Calcutta Cup forwards, with Pillman and Joseph Brunton, to survive four years of war to play together again for the King’s Cup. Six souls from English rugby’s last peacetime hurrah of April 1914 in the Grand Slam over France would ‘always have Paris’; even if four had no grave.
Charles Henry (so ‘Cherry’, naturally) Pillman, an exciting wing forward for Blackheath, made his England debut under the captaincy of Adrian Stoop, on the day Ben Gronow kicked off at Twickenham. In the pack with him was fellow debutant Leonard Haigh of Manchester, who was late to rugby after school, late to his first cap at 30 and too late for active service, sadly dying of pneumonia while in training with the ASC in 1916. Cherry, like Brown, won eighteen England caps, and toured South Africa with the British tourists under Dr Tom Smyth in 1910 (with William Tyrrell, Scot Eric Milroy and ‘Bristolian’ Tom Richards). The hard sun-baked ground suited his turn of speed; he scored fifty-nine points until injury interrupted his tour. But he returned with a match-winning performance – playing at fly half – in the second Test against the Springboks at Port Elizabeth. Boks skipper Billy Millar commented, ‘If ever a man can have been said to have won an international match
through his unorthodox and lone-handed efforts, it can be said of the inspired black-haired Pillman’. He returned to Britain as leading scorer with sixty-five points – six tries, three penalties and nineteen conversions and resumed a similarly free-scoring England career.
In 1911, he crossed the whitewash twice against France, but was overshadowed by Douglas ‘Daniel’ Lambert’s record twenty-two points (the hulking speedster Lambert was a bête-noire to the French, having scored five tries on his debut against them in 1907). Cherry was almost ever-present for his country until a bittersweet moment in 1914. Against Scotland (in what turned out to be his last game) he broke his leg and was replaced for the finale against France by his younger brother, Robert. This was Robert’s only cap: the war would not only interrupt his rugby career but would cut short his life, in July 1916 near Ploegsteert, where his captain of the day, Poulton-Palmer, already lay in his grave. For Cherry Pillman, never would a broken leg be suffered with such mixed feelings; if you had to lose your England place, you would want your kid brother to take it. Captain Pillman, MC, of the 4th Dragoon Guards would find some little consolation in knowing that Robert had not only died for his country, but played for it too. Lambert had also died in France, with the Buffs at the Battle of Loos in 1915, shortly after marrying his childhood sweetheart. He left a son who neither knew him, nor was able to cry at his father’s grave: Daniel’s remains were never identified. How many of these memories welled up at Twickenham for the boys who lived?
Full back Barry Cumberlege, who taught Wakefield a thing or two, was the ‘first’ new cap for England after the war. If we accept the numerical/alphabetical system currently in vogue for heritage and shirt-embroidery reasons, his England 545 cap on 17 January 1920 came after a six-year interval since the debut of 544 Alex Sykes in pre-war Paris. Eleven brand new caps were added that day against Wales at Swansea – a sign of war’s impact – with Jock Wright being number 555 by virtue of his surname. William Wavell Wakefield, with his full complement of initial Ws, just pipped him to 554 that day.2
After the Final Whistle Page 26