Italy may advance parental claims on Māori All Blacks Jack and Charles Sciascia, or the noble Caesar Mannelli, born in Udine in rugby’s Italian heartland, and laureate for the USA at the Paris Olympics. But organised Italian rugby did not really emerge until a late 1920s risorgimento under Stefano Bellandi, rugby player, football referee and manager at La Scala Opera House, who had played in the US Milanese team of 1911. He is considered the father of Italian rugby. Unfortunately, in its impressionable adolescence, his sporting child succumbed to the malign influence of Mussolini’s fascists, who admired rugby’s culture of physicality and ‘manliness’. It rather gives the game away that rugby’s first governing body formed in 1927 was called the Comitato di Propaganda. The first Squadra Azzurra would play Spain in Barcelona in 1929 and of course they now play with force and flair in Europe’s top-tier Six Nations Championship.
In California, rugby was almost forgotten. A United War Work campaign was due to start on 11 November 1918 with a benefit rugby match, which was eventually played in late February and received only perfunctory press attention. Even the Armistice itself, initially announced with banner headlines, rapidly lost the public interest compared to the long-awaited resumption of the annual American Football challenge between Berkeley and Stanford. This was the social highlight in the week of Thanksgiving, another unique American institution which rarely travels outside its borders:
Prominent folk from both side of the bay are eager to witness the first American game played between the two Universities since 1905 … there never has been an attraction offered since which could hope to interest Californians as did the old Stanford–UC games.10
The USA’s Olympic gold of 1924 was the last defiant bellow of a dying rugby species, largely consisting of converted gridiron behemoths. Stung by its treatment in Paris at the hands of the ungrateful French, American rugby finally retreated into its nation’s political and sporting splendid isolation – and took its ball with it. Its vast resources, markets and consumption meant that its booming economy did not need Europe’s problems, which, to misquote Rick, ‘don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world’. Domestic sports like baseball and football overcame their own outrages (baseball had its ‘Black Sox’ match-fixing scandal in 1919) and created new national superstars like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Red Grange. When you have the World Series, who needs the world? When its economic boom spectacularly collapsed, America withdrew further into introspection and licked its wounds until they healed and strength returned. It took an act of unparalleled savagery in 1941, behind its back at Pearl Harbor, to draw it again into tangled and violent global affairs and another four years of war.
Caesar Mannelli’s try was the last rugby score at an Olympic games. The USA will finally – if belatedly – relinquish its title as rugby returns in the Sevens format at Rio 2016. Unless, that is, we witness the mother of all rugby surprises. But its athletes are outstanding, its place in the Rugby World Cup is secure and growing numbers of exports to rugby heartlands will imbibe the culture and refinements of a complex sport, just as the grass roots of the domestic game will thrive again in America – as long as a Black eclipse does not blot out the sun. Transatlantic gridiron missions regularly fill Wembley. We must aspire in return to fill NFL stadia from Soldier Field to the Oakland Coliseum. Sorry, that should be the O.Co Stadium, sponsored and branded, as are all but six NFL stadia; what price one day the ‘ACME Rugby Stadium’ in suburban Twickenham? The Churchill Cup went to the USA, Ireland played in Houston (why not Boston?) and, yes, New Zealand took shock and awe to Chicago. Next we take Manhattan. American Football itself aspires to be an Olympic event, but will struggle, as the New York Daily News put it, in an unaccustomed style worthy of its patrician rival, in ‘overcoming the current worldwide competitive imbalance that is in favor of American teams’.11 It’s in the name, guys.
North of the border, Canadian rugby struggled against its climate and vast distances, as well as the rival Canadian Football League, and the fifteen-a-side game remained confined to provincial pockets of strength. The pressure from a newly cleaned-up and resurgent gridiron game south of the border was irresistible. In a rearguard action, a Canada Rugby Union was reformed in 1929. With the demise of rugby in the USA, it was forced to look across the Pacific. But the first official international for Canada, against Japan in 1932, had an inauspicious beginning; the team lost most of its rugby balls over the side of the ship en route, and once on dry land, both Test matches too. Rugby remained in Canada’s vast wilderness until 1965 when the Canadian RFU was reformed.
French rugby gained strength from its wartime trials against British imperial military teams. They won their first away match against Ireland in 1920 and won in Scotland for the first time in the following season, as well as doing the double against Ireland. But a violent flaw continued to disfigure their play – and the grandstand – as they took literally the dictum that ‘sport is war by other means’. In 1923 in Wales, the Irish referee McGowan had to ask French touch judge Cyril Rutherford, (despite his Scots origins he was a naturalised Frenchman and a key figure in the country’s rugby development) to translate his warnings to players guilty of dangerous tackles. 1924 saw the notorious Olympic final against the USA. In 1925 the France–Ireland clash was just that, with violence throughout; the referee was attacked by spectators, harping back to the treatment of Mr Baxter in 1913, which had led the Scots to cancel the fixture in the final season before the holocaust. A repeat performance was given in 1927: the Scottish referee, having disallowed a try by Jauréguy (who was a regular, if unwitting, centre of controversy), had to be protected by the players. In 1931, France was red-carded from the Five Nations for persistent offences, violent play and crowd misbehaviour. The cartoon pugilism of Asterix, not drawn until 1959, must surely owe something to early French rugby antics.
As the King’s Cup was being played, E.H.D. Sewell was already promising in his obituary volume that rugby would respond ‘if the Motherland calls again’: ‘Rugby Football will be the first to line out; bending forward eager for the moment the fight begins, and ready to “stick it”, come what may.’ William Massey addressed the New Zealand Parliament in September 1919: ‘I am not one of those who believe we have seen the last of war.’ Sadly, just twenty years hence, the Motherland would indeed call again.
If the greatest and bloodiest war yet known to man was not enough, some had to do it all over again in 1939. Bert Stolz of the USA finally got to fight in the Pacific. The charmed Australian Billy Watson survived when he had no right. Others lacked his bullet-proof luck. Two Irishmen who had played the 1912 Springboks, both now lieutenant colonels, died in the Second World War: John Berchmans Minch, RAMC, in India in 1942 and Joseph Clune, an army vet killed in the Mediterranean in 1943. Norman Wodehouse captained England to the first of their two Grand Slams before the war. He served as a gunnery officer on HMS Revenge at Jutland. In 1941, aged 54 and a vice-admiral in the Reserve, he was a convoy commodore (in charge of the merchant ships as distinct from the commander of the naval escort). His convoy was en route to South Africa when it was attacked by U-Boats; he ordered the ships to scatter as his armed merchantman, the Robert L. Holt, took on U-69 in a surface gun-battle. He was never seen again.
Rugby recovered in 1919 and again in 1945, and was itself part of the rebuilding process. The bond between the military and rugby remains close: in 2014, a serving soldier, Fijian-born Lance Corporal Semesa Rokodoguni, of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and Bath, represented England for the first time, the first serviceman to do so since Tim Rodber in 1999. On his first day in Helmand, ‘Roko’ saw a fellow soldier blown up by an IED. He told the BBC:
When you’re out on the rugby field and you get something wrong – miss a tackle, miss a chance to score – you can always come back and get it right next time. Out in Afghanistan, you can’t afford to make mistakes. Because a mistake might mean someone losing his life.
HRH Prince Harry, vice-patron of the RFU and an ardent fan,
was ‘discovered’ by the world’s media to be in Helmand province, serving with his Household Cavalry unit; footage was beamed around the globe of the warrior prince, kicking a rugby ball about with his comrades.
Rugby’s values, forged where men put themselves in harm’s way on behalf of their team, can again help heal the wounds of war. In Afghanistan, Asad Ziar of the Afghan Rugby Federation says rugby is closest in spirit and physicality to traditional centuries-old buzkashi, a cross between polo and rugby:
Men on horseback grab a goat from a chalk circle, carry it around a pole and drop it into another circle. No touch judges or referees. Sometimes there are teams, and sometimes there aren’t. Sometimes the field is 200 metres and sometimes it isn’t. Afghans are tough people and in a country where war has been a way of life for many decades, it can be said that buzkashi is the world’s toughest sport.
Rugby is also a tough sport, he says, which is why it appeals to young Afghans. But the difference is economic: the cost of rugby is a single ball for thirty players, not a horse for each player that costs upwards of £3,000. Ziar continues:
What we need is a pitch where we can open an academy to train players and newcomers, and organise competitions. Rugby is the newest team sport in Afghanistan and is only three years old. In the long term rugby can be a way of helping divided communities to focus on sustainable peace and reconciliation, and building international understanding and friendship.12
King George could not have said it better.
Notes
1 W.E. Henley, ‘Invictus’.
2 John Griffiths, Rugby’s Strangest Matches.
3 Bill Schreiner, quoted in Dobson, Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry.
4 Cape Times, 30 June 1919.
5 Cape Times, 13 September 1919.
6 New Zealand Herald, 17 October 1919.
7 The Referee, 20 November 1918.
8 La Stampa Sportiva, Torino, 3 April 1910. Not Racing Club as widely misreported.
9 The (mis)printed 1938 FIRA Yearbook includes the exotic but not very Italian Mac Cornac and Orinkewatez – more prosaically, MacCormac and Drinkwater.
10 San Francisco Chronicle, 24/29 November 1918.
11 Ralph Vacchiano, 2 March 2010.
12 Interview with Asad Ziar, CEO Afghan Rugby Federation, January 2015.
17
Rugby Remembers
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Henry Allingham, one of the last two veterans to pass away in 2009, said of the Great War: ‘Of course I remember. I was there. I have no choice but to remember.’ We, who were not there, do have a choice. We must choose to remember.
Peace in 1919 allowed public expressions of mourning, in place of wartime stoicism and stiff upper lip resilience under the burden of personal loss. A flood of emotion was released and channelled through ceremonies, memorials and monuments. The response, both private and public, was varied and complex, particularly from fathers, in an era of order, rectitude and masculine formality. Rugby has always been a game of proud dads on the touchline, from the back pitch to the exalted stadium. Just ask Andy Farrell or Mike Ford. It is one of the many ways we connect the grass roots to the international pantheon, from under-9s to Rugby World Cup finalists.
At school I wore the same rugby colours – pale blue paired hoops on a navy background – that J.R.R. Tolkien had worn in the 1910 1st XV: he was probably a better player, his book sales may be marginally ahead of mine and the shirt had been washed since his day. My dad watched me play in that shirt. We won some games and we lost some; I was in the 1st XV and it was the best time of my young life. South African-born Tolkien, who served with the Lancashire Fusiliers on the Somme, and had lost all but one of his close friends by 1918, did not write the line spoken in the film: ‘No parent should have to bury their child.’1 That was Peter Jackson’s screenwriter, possibly inspired by Herodotus, historian of ancient wars, who wrote, ‘In peacetime, sons bury their fathers, but in war it is the fathers who bury their sons.’2
John Birkett of Harlequins scored the first ever try at the new Twickenham in 1909, following in the footsteps of his father Reg in the first rugby international of 1871. Reg Birkett had died of typhoid in 1898, so did not see his son score that day, or captain England against Wales the previous year. Sad, yes, but there was nevertheless a natural order in peacetime. War and the death of so many sons, often with the violent severing of male lineage in families, was a terrible inversion of the natural order: fathers, mired in grief, struggled to cope.
Walter Dowson’s son, Humphrey, a Rosslyn Park forward, was articled to his law firm before going to war with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. In August 1915, he joined its 9th Battalion at the front after heavy losses – including Welsh wing Billy Geen – in action at Hooge. Humphrey won the MC at the Somme, but was declared ‘wounded and missing’ in action near Gueudecourt on 15 September 1916. Walter engaged in a correspondence of mounting despair: firstly with a friend at the War Office, to ascertain the facts of his son’s disappearance and in the faint hope that he might be a prisoner; then with an officer in the Buffs, who had buried a body that might – or might not – have been Humphrey’s, in a lull from battle.
The correspondence is remarkable for two reasons: a wartime postal service that exchanges four letters in as many days (and over a weekend too), and the compassion of Lieutenant Ivan Jacobs of the Buffs, who patiently tries to assist the grieving Walter with his own indistinct and traumatised memories from six months past. Dowson Senior was finally satisfied of his son’s identification, and informed the War Office that his son may be declared ‘missing believed dead’ at 27. Humphrey’s name was followed in The Times obituary column by Captain John Alfred Pym, ‘the well-known International Rugby Football player, killed in action aged 26’. England’s scrum half in 1912 miraculously returned from the dead to score two tries in the King’s Cup tournament and lived till he was 78. Such misreported fatalities must have first dismayed, then given false hope to parents like Walter. Certain of his son’s death, he died a year later of that mysterious but mortal condition, a broken heart.
Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton, Oxford Professor of Zoology, busied himself with a biography of his son Ronald, published in 1919. Professor Sir Oliver Lodge, another distinguished man of science, lost his youngest son Raymond in early September 1914 and turned to a spirit medium (as did Arthur Conan Doyle), who offered a precious glimpse of his son (and a few post-mortem anecdotes). His 1916 bestseller Raymond3 was reprinted six times in its first year and double that by 1919, devoured by desperate parents seeking solace without a grave. John Maxwell Vaughan, father of Barbarian Charles, who played alongside Mobbs in the wartime matches, had lost both his sons by the summer of 1916. Three years later, his grief unabated, the cattle rancher and tobacco farmer put in a retrospective claim to the War Office for Charles’s 1914 return steamer fare from Colombia to take up his position in the Reserve; it is a sum a prosperous man cannot possibly need. His letter is an agony of apologies, paternal pride and suppressed misery:
I do not wish in any way to press a claim, at the outside limited to his home fare of £40, because his desire to defend his country was as great as mine & no sacrifice could be too great. He fought well throughout, for he fell leading the attack on Hohenzollern Redoubt Sept 25 1915. I have since lost my second son Capt J.L. Vaughan, MC, after fighting a whole year at Ypres and later the Somme. Having done our utmost & having no more sons of military age, I now am going to Colombia to work again in place of those two brave boys and am only too proud to have the honour of being their father. Should there be the slightest difficulty about this indemnity, I would rather you put it aside.
Like so many others, his sons’ remains were never found – their names are on memorials at Loos and Thiepval. If Rifleman Jack Bodenham was waved off by his family at Barnes station in August 1915, where he entrained for Southampton, thence to France, it was the last
they saw of him. Vaporised on that sunlit Saturday morning in July 1916 at Gommecourt, he left little but a name on the Thiepval Memorial and cheery letters home.4 Of 109 fallen Rosslyn Park men forty-five have no known grave. For the next of kin there was often no body and no closure: men like Vaughan were lost in grief, while Walter Dowson lost his will to live.
Of course, women grieved too, and perhaps, without the terminal emotional handicap of maleness, were more open and direct in doing so. Grief, however, works in strange ways. In 1929, Harriette Raphael, mother of Lieutenant John Raphael, 18th KRRC (a battalion raised by his cousin), killed at Messines Ridge in June 1917, visited his grave in Belgium. ‘Jack’ Raphael was a brilliant sportsman at Merchant Taylors’ and Oxford, with an astonishing fourteen Blues across several sports. He won nine caps for England, captained Surrey at cricket and led a forgotten ‘British Isles’ tour to Argentina in 1910: organised by Major Stanley, it mainly consisted of uncapped Englishmen, with three Scots thrown in for ethnic diversity. Obituaries glowed:
A beautiful kick, a brilliant fielder and possessed of a good turn of speed, a fine natural player … On the cricket field and still more in the world of rugby football, a distinct personality. Everything he did created more than ordinary interest, his popularity as a man, apart from his ability, counting for much.
After the Final Whistle Page 29