After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  In another symbolic act, perhaps inadvertent, every soldier with a rainbow-ribboned Victory Medal pinned on his chest also owned a piece of that victory – in his own name, which was engraved on the bronze rim. Curiously, other ranks received theirs automatically while officers had to apply – a clerical nicety, but perhaps an early indication of a decline in deference. Although a welcome fit for heroes was rarely forthcoming, the demobbed private wanted his share of the spoils and would increasingly agitate to ensure he got it. The war had done much to shake the already fragile foundations of traditional British society. Estates crumbled and were sold to pay onerous death duties, and the landowning classes yielded the last of their economic grip to the industrialists and professionals. Deference had been challenged, if not banished, by the enforced parity and proximity of trench life. This was as true for individual soldiers as it was for entire dominions, who now had more of a say and less need to defer to the Mother Country. To some degree, the 1920s in Britain saw a determined drive to restore the old order and values. In the background lurked the spectre of Russia’s 1917 revolution and the murder of its Romanov royal family. The hierarchy of God, King and Country was threatened and the rise of the working classes was viewed with suspicion, even fear, by the establishment, with the General Strike of 1926 seen as tantamount to bloody bolshevism.

  The development of leisure and sports was symptomatic, as ‘bread and circuses’ must be provided to keep the working class millions happy. That opium of the masses, association football, grew unstoppably. So the middle classes took the view that, if you can’t beat them, then choose another game. Rugby in England and Scotland spread its public school roots to become the ball of educated, professional suburbia; Welsh rugby, on the other hand, consolidated its working-class appeal and increasingly aligned the country’s national identity with the game, worshipping a trinity of ‘Pit, Pitch and Chapel’ with deep fervour. As the forces of reaction responded, many more advances made in wartime were reversed. Women had worked, won the vote and successfully played wartime football (but not rugby, to my knowledge). But men returning from the front wanted their jobs back – and their balls – and women’s sport returned to politeness and the tennis lawn.

  The revival of rugby was a reassertion of pre-war values, never more so than in the talismanic meetings of its most august institutions. The first Varsity Match after the war was marked by an exchange of gentlemanly behaviour which recalled the chivalry of medieval jousts, let alone Edwardian Albion or Pall Mall club land. Oxford’s Eric Loudoun-Shand, a Scottish internationalist before he won his pre-war Blue, and a wartime Barbarian with Mobbs, wanted to play again for his university. There was one small snag: he had graduated in 1914 and was no longer in statu pupillari. But this was a detail to a man with an MA Oxon and an MC with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

  He addressed his dilemma to the Cambridge captain, J.E. ‘Jenny’ Greenwood: they were Dulwich friends in its ‘Famous Five’ of future internationalists in an unbeaten school XV of 1909 that included Cyril Lowe, fellow Scot Grahame Donald and Irishman W.D. ‘George’ Doherty. This gang of five also played in the 1913 Varsity Match: more miraculously, all five survived war. Six years later – and the worst part of a million men dead – Greenwood had the prerogative to deny Eric’s request. He of course declined to exercise it: the two played as opposing skippers, once again in front of the rugby fanatic King George. Whether the monarch actually saw any play remains a mystery, as Queen’s Club, with its notorious Kensington micro-climate, was fogbound for the entire match.

  If this seems less of a restatement of values than a reconnecting of the old-boy network, there’s a painful twist: Loudoun-Shand played the match with an arm so badly damaged by his wartime wounding that it eventually had to be amputated. The storyteller in me wonders if that is why the only photograph shows the king firmly shaking Greenwood’s hand, while Eric holds back. Or is it simply that Cambridge bookended their empty wartime rugby trophy shelf with another win, by 7–5 that December day and Greenwood, the victor, shook hands first? (Of course it is.) The resilient Loudoun-Shand had ‘previous’ as a wingless wonder, as noted by Henry Grierson who, with Greenwood, played against him in the 1910 Freshmen’s Varsity Match: ‘Eric Shand had two fingers broken early but played on and told nobody. But that’s the sort of lad he was and is.’ From that game also, wistfully summoned from an age of innocence, Grierson recalled ‘little H.W. Thomas of Wales who was killed in the War, and P.C.B. Blair [Scotland], also dead.’

  In the autumn of 1919, London Scottish, in common with other clubs, prepared for the resumption of the domestic rugby calendar. Of those who had played for the club before hostilities began, only twenty-nine reported for duty. A club which had once easily fielded four teams now lacked the playing strength to make up two full XVs. In time, new recruits came along, as they did every year. Frank Deakin, who played with Poulton-Palmer in that last game at Nieppe, helped re-establish Moseley following the inactivity of the war years and a bad patch after hostilities ceased; when Moseley celebrated its centenary in 1973–74 he was still there. But the losses for every club, and for millions of families, were hard to bear.

  Fittingly, in the new era of peace, the post-war Five Nations series resumed diplomatic rugby relations between Scotland and France, played with an appropriate sense of new beginnings on New Year’s Day 1920, at the Parc des Princes. War had bizarre side-effects: nineteen players were debutants, hard proof of the ravages that bomb and bullet inflicted on pre-war selections. Every player on the field had his personal war story, even Scot Charlie Usher, who spent most of it behind the wire of a prison camp. The Scots fielded Usher, Sloan, Gallie and Laing from the King’s Cup Mother Country side, as well as Thom and Crole, like Usher a wartime prisoner, from the RAF team. The French selected eight soldiers from their King’s Cup side, ample evidence of the new synergy of rugby and military.

  The thirty players on the pitch could muster only fifty-five eyeballs between them, as fully five men had one eye missing from the war: flanker Jock Wemyss, lock ‘Podger’ Laing and at scrum half, Jenny Hume for the Scots; flanker Robert Thierry and prop Marcel-Frédéric Lubin-Lebrère for the opposition. After Hogmanay the night before, it was a small miracle that Wemyss, Hume and Laing could see at all. Just as remarkably, one-eyed Laing kicked between the posts to convert Crole’s try for a 5–0 victory. The tie was christened by the French press ‘le match des borgnes’ – talk about leaving it all on the field for your team; if the two sides got blind drunk at the post-match banquet in Paris, then surely five men were kings in that land. Two Cyclopeans, Wemyss and Lubin-Lebrère would have a famous rematch in 1922, officiated by former England lock, Harold ‘Dreadnought’ Harrison, which curious tale is best-told in John Griffiths’s perennial stocking-filler.2

  Two weeks after the Armistice, the Welsh Football Union declared that ‘all clubs are now at liberty to arrange Inter Club games’. Welshmen could once again feast on the bread of heaven after four years of famine. Field Marshal Haig even granted leave to several Welshman to allow them to play the New Zealanders in two unofficial games over Christmas. Official Test rugby returned to Wales as early as April 1919. After victory over France at Twickenham, NZ Services entrained for Swansea, enticing a crowd of 35,000 to take Monday off work. There was WFU muttering about guarantees that the New Zealand soldiers were amateurs, ‘just as though it matters a damn whether they are amateurs or professionals when they have come all this way to fight and die for us’, protested one officer in Truth magazine. As far as the Welsh were concerned, this was the All Blacks, back after fourteen years: six of the NZ team had Test experience and they wore the black jersey to prove it. Wales awarded official caps against this military side and fielded thirteen uncapped players, a sign of either wartime tragedy or further WFU comedy. Their whole XV had played in a game between a Welsh XV and 38th (Welsh) Division only two days earlier.

  Memories of 1905 added edge; once again a single score made the difference. New
Zealand shaded a poor match, two penalties to one, by 6–3. But international rugby was back in Wales. The next would be in 1920: at Colombes, before the French game a huge wreath was dedicated ‘to players who fell in the war for freedom’. Players and officials later visited the open wound of the ravaged Somme battlefield on a Thomas Cook’s tour.

  Ireland’s uneasy peace had been broken by rebellion in 1916. There would be another war, this time between Republicans and Britain, after Sinn Féin won a landslide election in December 1918 and declared Irish independence. An Irish Civil War then followed. Peace would not return until after an Irish Free State was established in 1923. King George V again played a significant role, with a June 1923 speech in Belfast (written by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts) urging ‘all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment, and good will’. Another rugby fan, Éamon de Valera, had already been the first president of the Republic.

  Against this background, rugby only gradually returned in 1919 with Leinster and Ulster schools and universities to the fore (including a Trinity South Africans team). In 1920 a weak Ireland side bolstered by the brilliance of Dickie Lloyd only narrowly lost to England. Troubles continued and the island remained divided, at times violently so, over the century. Internationals were played alternately in Belfast and Dublin; they have now settled into a new glass cathedral where Lansdowne Road used to be. But on a handful of occasions every year, the men of its four provinces again stand shoulder to shoulder and Ireland is united by one rugby team.

  The New Zealand Services team now effectively crowned as ‘world’s best’ returned home via South Africa, where it ‘was deservedly most popular, consisting as it did of keen unassuming players who played football of a high order’. The tour simultaneously gave a ‘much needed impetus and fillip to the game’3 and condoned the deep racial fault line in South Africa that inevitably surfaced in its sporting confrontations with other nations, with the Jimmy Peters incident in Devon being the first rugby example. The South African Rugby Board (SARB) discovered that the New Zealand team included Māori soldiers. They narrowly passed by 8–6 a motion seconded by Bill Schreiner, to cable his own father, William Philip Schreiner, South African High Commissioner in London:

  Confidential if visitors include Maori tour would be wrecked and immense harm politically and otherwise would follow. Please explain position fully and try arrange exclusion.

  William Schreiner the elder was a liberal and believer ‘in equal rights to all civilised men south of the Zambezi’.4 He would not have had a problem with Māoris touring, thinks South African historian, Floris van der Merwe. What father thought of son is not recorded; he died on 28 June, the same day the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

  Charlie Brown, scrum half and honorary Māori, captained the side in South Africa. Sergeant Ranji Wilson and genuine Māori, Corporal Parekura Tureia, both in the King’s Cup squad, were quietly excluded: Tureia was reported, ludicrously, to have ‘missed the steamer’ to Cape Town. His name means ‘to fight a battle’, which he would do once more in the Second Great War. This time he was ‘permitted’ to land on African soil where, as a captain in the New Zealand Infantry, he was killed in the Egyptian desert in November 1941. Those eight men of the SARB did him an eternal injustice.

  As for Ranji Wilson, King’s Cup winner and twenty-one times an All Black, the Natal Witness reported with some excitement his later arrival in port at Durban (different city, different troop transport) when his team had already played ten of fourteen matches:

  The Pacific Islander, Wilson, just arrived from England, is perhaps the greatest player in the Service team and it would be a good thing if his inclusion could be arranged. He was a very popular player in the Home matches.

  Ranji never got off the boat. His team played fifteen matches without him, won eleven, drew one and lost three and were praised by Percy Day, their South African manager, as ‘a gentlemanly, sportsmanlike body of footballers … Being all ex-soldiers, their teamwork and team spirit were alike admirable, and they blended into a most workmanlike side’, although there was some unnecessary Imperial snobbery about the team ‘being composed mainly of men of the rank of sergeant’. One is reminded of how well the SARB got on with England’s RFU Committee – they were both sleepwalking through a world radically changed by war. Nonetheless the Cape Times concluded:

  The value of their visit will be reflected in our football ere long … and this will be to the advantage of the game, for theirs is more enterprising than ours … that their forwards are magnificent in attack and in defence is undeniable – they have taught us almost more than we can hope to learn.5

  More good came ‘in a great revival of rugby in South Africa, and schools that had previously played the Association game intended to take up Rugby’.6 In a final farewell on their return home in October 1919, the Services team, although still carrying injuries from the hard African grounds, beat Auckland 19–6. In May 1920, they reunited, this time with Ranji Wilson again, to end their campaign on a high note with a 23–8 victory over Wellington, as part of the celebrations in honour of the visiting Prince of Wales.

  An official invitation to South Africa to tour New Zealand was issued in 1921 and a titanic rivalry was groined from war. South Africa would learn quickly on the rugby field; off the field, it would be long, painful and violent. On that tour they first played (and narrowly beat) the Māori. A journalist cabled home:

  Bad enough having play team officially designated New Zealand Natives. Spectacle thousands Europeans frantically cheering on band of coloured men to defeat members of own race was too much for Springboks, who frankly disgusted.

  The players quickly disavowed their misattributed views: on the pitch there was only respect, but an unholy conspiracy of journalists and rugby politicians sparked a smouldering ember into flame. The tone was set for decades. Significantly, it was a rugby match against New Zealand – and a famous photograph of Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar, both in the number 6 Springbok jersey – that came to symbolise a new South Africa, as much as a new rainbow flag and an anthem in four tongues.

  In Australia, the League–Union split was if anything more severe than the Northern Union breakaway in 1895. There is still today a class antagonism that breaks out occasionally into virulent correspondence. Most of the 1908 touring Wallabies had defected on their return, taking their Olympic gold with them, and formidable administrators like Wallaby Ted Larkin did much to smooth the rocky road for the fledgling code. Remember, in 1916, Tom Richards had reflected morosely in the dugout with some Welsh drinking buddies that ‘Australian rugby is professionalised and dead’. Like Association in Britain, League in Australia attempted to keep going during wartime and although celebrated Kangaroos and lesser lights fell with their Union brothers at Gallipoli and elsewhere, League was able to emerge from the conflict quicker and stronger. For Union, the casualties of war and the impact of League struck a double blow.

  In November 1918, the New South Wales Rugby Union wired to its fellow unions:

  Greetings on the cessation of hostilities. We are proud of the part Rugby Unionists have played in the war. Though the war work of Rugby Union footballers was magnificent, and the game will be taken up again with hundreds of grand fellows gone to their fathers, the old game itself had to fall back in public eye, save when the schools were on the field, and it will require all the enthusiasm and business push to rehabilitate it in anything like the flourishing condition of a few years back.7

  In 1919 the AIF military side (‘the Diggers’) returned home and played several matches in a bid to revive rugby at home. Their last as a team was in August at the Sydney Sports Ground when they defeated a national Australia side 22–6 to press acclaim:

  The final between the Diggers and Our Boys resulted a ding-dong struggle during the first half, but in the second spell the fighting boys … charged the line re
peatedly, and had all the best of the game. Suttor electrified the shivering barrackers with his dashing sprints goalwards.

  The AIF rugby was ‘tough and vigorous’, rooted in a belief in handling and running the ball, not hoofing it. This set the style for the famed Waratahs running game that finds its legacy in Australian back play today. Restarting the game in New South Wales, however, was tortuous, and was not helped by a seven-game pasting by the 1920 All Blacks, on their regular mission to grind weakened opponents into the dirt. Victoria and Queensland did not regroup until 1926 and 1929 respectively.

  Then began the resurgence: 1929 was also the year when the famed green-and-gold was adopted, and a tour by the newly lionised British the following year gave a shot in the arm to Union rehabilitation. The inaugural Bledisloe Cup of 1931 sharpened the old rivalry with the black-jerseyed neighbours that had begun in 1903 in front of 30,000 at Sydney’s Cricket Ground. In 1933 Wally Matthews, AIF team manager in 1919, took the Wallabies to South Africa; they lost the series but upset the form to win two Tests against the mighty Springboks. Arguably, Union in Australia has never recovered from the hiatus of the Great War and today stands as its third code in terms of popularity, after Aussie Rules and League. Remarkable tribute to the depth of sporting talent in this nation then, that the ‘third string’ has pulled off two World Cup wins against its global rivals.

  In Italy, the infant rugby was stifled soon after its birth by a war which ravaged the landscape of the northern region, which was then rugby’s cradle and is still its main playground. British expatriates in Genoa, French students at Milan University and Italian migrant farm-workers returning from France had all independently imported the game of fifteen. Two early exhibition matches were played over Easter 1910 in Turin by SCUF from Paris8 and Servette of Geneva, a club now irredeemably lost to football in the lair of FIFA; the Unione Sportiva Milanese team, founded by Piero Mariani, played the first competitive match in terra Italia against the French Union Athlétique Voironnaise in 1911,9 in their bianconero quarters, and another against Chambéry in 1912. Mariani was an engineer who had emigrated to France, but returned for military service. These games were all hastily organised, sparsely attended and without cohesion; the Club Rugby di Torino, hosts to that original exhibition, disbanded after a single match against footballers Pro Vercelli. After 1912, while training continued, there were no competitive games. When war came to Italy in 1915, many of the foreign mercenaries assembled for the Milanese team returned to fight for their country of origin; their French captain, Gilbert, was killed at Verdun.