After the Final Whistle Read online

  Praise for:

  After the Final Whistle: The First Rugby World Cup and the First World War

  ‘In his award-winning The Final Whistle, Stephen Cooper concentrated on the extraordinary contribution his club Rosslyn Park made to the Great War by telling the story of 15 players who didn’t come back. Now in After the Final Whistle Cooper broadens the scope massively and looks at the “rugby soldiers” of every Allied nation involved. It’s an extraordinary and inspiring tale and concludes, after the Armistice, with teams from those military forces celebrating peace by going head to head in what many would describe as the first World Cup.’

  Brendan Gallagher, The Rugby Paper

  ‘A timely reminder of that fierce spirit which makes us all proud to be a part of rugby.’

  David Sole, former Scotland rugby union captain

  ‘As a rugby player and singer, it is impossible not to be moved by these powerful stories of rugby men in harm’s way. It is comforting to know that they did not die in vain and their nations’ anthems live on. There is silence in the stadium before I perform and then the eruption of sound in the thousands. Team-mates and supporters sing together, it is an incredibly powerful thing. Reading these stories now, gives each anthem a deeper meaning, it gives us our own identity.’

  Laura Wright, internationally renowned soprano,

  rugby player and official RFU anthem singer

  ‘A triumph: a proper accompaniment to the Rugby World Cup … further proof of the glorious civilising influence of Rugby Union.’

  Justin Webb, journalist and BBC Radio presenter

  More praise for:

  The Final Whistle: The Great War in Fifteen Players, Times Rugby Book of the Year 2013

  ‘This haunting and beautiful book … tells the story of men from one rugby club but it is a universal narrative of heroism and loss. He writes superbly and has produced a book of commendable scholarship. I cannot recommend it enough.’

  Fergal Keane

  ‘A fresh and fascinating take on the impact of the Great War, with a novel and moving focus.’

  Ian Hislop

  ‘Sensitive, original and profoundly moving’

  Sir Anthony Seldon

  ‘An inspired idea to link rugby and the Great War in this way – it brings home the pathos of these ardently lived lives … an original and illuminating approach to this endlessly fascinating subject.’

  Edward Stourton

  ‘Stephen Cooper has written a book of beauty and sadness … People use the word hero to describe sportsmen but the guys in this book are true heroes. A fantastic and inspiring read from the first page to the last.’

  Jason Leonard, Lions & England

  ‘… a book of stunning quality … a team-full of heartbreaking stories, each going in different and fascinating directions; poignant and powerful.’

  Alan Pearey, Rugby World Magazine

  ‘A fitting tribute not simply to 15 individuals cut down in their prime, but a paean to all those who died in the First World War.’

  Mark Souster, The Times

  For Clark and Ken Miller:

  Men of rugby and flowers of Scotland, cut down early.

  In Acknowledgement

  Like my first, this is a work of personal passion, not of historical erudition. It does not aim to be comprehensive and readers may regret the exclusion of many worthy players and stories; if so, you have my apologies. There are more detailed books in the bibliography if you wish to delve deeper. My thanks go to Jo De Vries and Donald Sommerville for their patience and expertise in improving this one.

  In researching this book, I found that national identity mattered less than being part of a worldwide rugby family, then as now. Welshmen coached French teams and played for South Africa, South Africans played for England, Englishmen for Australia and Australians for Britain and the USA. It’s a circle of life where mud is thicker than blood.

  I am therefore grateful to an international rugby family who have adopted, tolerated and helped me. If I have overlooked anyone, I am mortified. From England: Michael Rowe, Mike Hagger, Richard Steele and Deborah Mason at the World Rugby Museum, Twickenham. Ian Minto, James Corsan, Nigel Gooding, Colin Veitch, Paul Brennan, David Bohl, Kate Wills, Allan Fidler, Kath Middleditch, Sam Cooper, Ian Metcalfe, Graham McKechnie, Jon Cooksey, John Lewis-Stempel, Gordon Brown, Ian Watmore, Jason Leonard, Bill Beaumont, Richard Daglish, Ron Hall, John Robertson, Jonathan Bunn, Shane Record, Ben Cooper, Roy Barton, Simon McNeill-Ritchie and Patrick Casey.

  From Scotland and the exiled diaspora: Hugh Barrow, Paul McFarland, Sandy Fitzpatrick, Mark Taylor, Simon Wood, Ross Cameron, Andy Mitchell, Hugh Pym, Alan Weir, Richard McBrearty. From Canada: Cameron Tompkins, Keith Jolly, Allan Willox, Doug Sturrock. From Wales: Gareth Thomas, Gwyn Prescott and Brynmôr Evans.

  From New Zealand: Stephen Berg at the NZ Rugby Museum, Bettina Anderson, Clive Akers, Owen Eastwood, Alan Sciascia, Windsor Jones and Nicola Barrett at National Army Museum Te Mata Toa, Chris Clews and Susan Thomas of Ponsonby. From Australia: Gareth Morgan.

  From Italy: Angela Teja, Elvis Lucchese, Luciano Ravagnani, Alberto Cellotto. From Ireland: Sharon Heffernan for her cover picture of son Fionn at Cill Dara training, Ciaran O’Mara. From South Africa: Paul Dobson, Nicky Bicket, Lady Maggie Robinson, Sir Peter Robinson, Floris van der Merwe, Tanya Whitehead.

  From France: my guru, Frédéric Humbert, and from Afghanistan: Asad Ziar.

  Lines from A.P. Herbert’s ‘Beaucourt Revisited are quoted by kind permission of the Executors of the Estate of Jocelyn Herbert, M.T. Perkins and Polly M.V.R. Perkins. The extract from ‘Mametz Wood’ from Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers (Seren, 2005) is reproduced by permission of the author, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, London W11. Extracts from Greg Growden, Wallaby Warrior: The World War I diaries of Australia’s only British Lion, Allen & Unwin, 2013, are used by permission. The extract from Mick Imlah’s London Scottish (1914) from The Lost Leader (2008) is copyright the estate of the author and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  In 2015 we will celebrate rugby’s values with an event that has its origins in war. We also commemorate the men whose sacrifice in that war a century ago, and others since, allows us the freedom to celebrate our game. In a detail buried in the bibliography, Australian captain ‘Paddy’ Moran’s Viewless Winds was published in 1939 by Peter Davies Ltd. This was Peter Llewellyn Davies, who was awarded the Military Cross in the Great War. J.M. Barrie publicly identified him as the source for the name of Peter Pan, although his brother George, killed with the Rifle Brigade in 1915, was perhaps more the model for The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

  This label of ‘the original Peter Pan’ haunted Davies throughout his life, which ended under a train at Sloane Square. In 2013 Charles Spencer, reviewing John Logan’s play Peter and Alice, observed that Ben Whishaw’s performance suggested ‘a man irretrievably damaged by his experience of war, and who has painfully and repeatedly learned that the only reason boys don’t grow up is because they die’.

  Indeed.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title

  Dedication

  In Acknowledgement

  Foreword

  1 On Rugby Fields the Whistles Blow

  2 The Last of Peace

  3 Scotland

  4 Australia

  5 New Zealand

  6 Canada

  7 South Africa

  8 United States of America

  9 England

  10 Ireland

  11 Wales

  12 France

  13 No Side

  14 The Return of the King

  15 Endgame

  16 Aftermath and Recovery

  17 Rugby Remembers
>
  Bibliography

  Plates

  Copyright

  Foreword

  by

  Jason Leonard, OBE

  This year we welcome the nations of the world to our country for the world’s greatest celebration of rugby. England again hosts the Rugby World Cup for the first time since 1991, an occasion I remember well. Much has changed in our sport since then, not least the advent of professionalism; an event that started in the amateur era of 1987 is now the third largest sporting festival in the world.

  But some things have not changed: I am pleased to say that rugby’s values are as strong now as they were then. Those values of teamwork, respect, discipline, sportsmanship and enjoyment have always been there; they have made our game stand out, which is why we now talk about them openly and proudly.

  For me, it was a revelation to find that those values were hardened in the most testing of times during the First World War, the great global conflict one hundred years ago that we commemorate today. It was a time of tragedy – and there are many tragic stories here – and it was a time of profound heroism and brave endurance. Rugby played its part at home, at the front and even in prison camps; it is no coincidence that once the horror was over, the instinct was to celebrate with a rugby tournament – the first ever team world cup.

  This book demonstrates what all rugby lovers have known for many years, that there is more to rugby than what happens on the field. There is a way of life that comes with it; and a way of thinking that believes in honour, sacrifice, pain and love of team mates and country. We can never compare sport with war, but we can perhaps discover here the wellspring of those beliefs.

  I am honoured to have won 22 of my England caps at four Rugby World Cups, including a memorable November day in 2003. I am privileged to welcome the rugby world to contest another great battle in 2015; but I also ask you to remember the players from a century ago who made the ultimate sacrifice in that most brutal of wars. And remember too that, in the worst of times, they found enjoyment in our great game.

  Jason Leonard, OBE

  President, Rugby Football Union

  1

  On Rugby Fields the

  Whistles Blow

  Twickenham: Friday 18 September 2015

  A whistle sounds at 20.00 GMT at Twickenham to start England’s first game of the 2015 Rugby World Cup against Fiji. It is heard around the world.

  Let us go back 110 years.

  Crystal Palace: Saturday 2 December 1905

  Welsh referee, Mr Gil Evans begins the first meeting between white-shirted England and the All Blacks. He also officiates when Cardiff RFC successively play the All Blacks, the South Africans in 1907 and Australia in 1908; to celebrate this treble, Cardiff present Evans with an engraved sterling silver ‘Acme Thunderer No. 58’. This passes on to countryman Albert Freethy, who uses it to referee the 1924 Olympic Games rugby final in Paris.

  Twickenham: Saturday 3 January 1925

  At the second encounter of All Black and all-white, Albert has the whistle again. When neither captain can produce a coin for the toss, he flips a florin lent by supporter Hector Gray, who later engraves it with a rose and fern; Freethy blows the Thunderer to dismiss New Zealand’s Cyril Brownlie, the first player sent off in an international Test.

  Eden Park: 22 May 1987

  By now the sterling silver is nicked and worn with age; every surface is engraved with its history, like battle honours or a trophy. Australian referee Bob Fordham whistles for the start of the first modern Rugby World Cup. The florin has been tossed, and the trusty Acme has blown to kick off every one since.

  RC Compiègne, France: Sunday 25 October 2009

  On the edge of the Compiègne forest, where the Armistice was signed in 1918, is a rugby field. Two teams of 14-year-old boys surround a memorial bearing fifty-eight French names, all killed in the Great War; the visiting side from England remembers 109 from its own club. On this Sunday morning, before their game, a whistle signals a minute’s silence.

  These young tourists from Rosslyn Park, immortal in their teenage rugby swagger, know little of the fate of Australia’s Jim Martin at Gallipoli, Horace Iles from Leeds or John Condon from Waterford, Ireland, at Ypres: all died at their tender age of 14 in that war. But they listen solemnly to a French Army officer who tells them that ‘rugby and warfare share a common language, but – il nous faut souvenir, enfin – they are very different’.

  Rosslyn Park, London: Saturday 29 March 2014

  A trench whistle starts a match of centenary remembrance, played in baggy cotton jerseys, some splendid facial grooming and under pre-war Laws. This whistle was taken in 1916 from the body of an officer in the Yorkshire Regiment by a German soldier; it was later returned to the regimental museum by his descendants and still bears the scar of a shrapnel splinter.

  The shared language of rugby and warfare still prevails today, a century after the war which first connected them, as rugby’s latter-day scribes conjure the stark imagery of conflict. An untried England team under new coach Stuart Lancaster opened their 2013 campaign away to an experienced Irish side; unfancied, they came away from atrocious Dublin weather with an unexpected 12–6 win. One journalist wrote: ‘These are no mere kids who need the roar of a Twickenham crowd to encourage them to puff out chests. These are guys for the trenches, steely and trustworthy.’1 One hundred years later, the rugby field shares a common lexicon with the battlefield.

  My generation can still hear in its mind’s ear the sonorous burr of Bill McLaren, ‘voice of rugby’ and former artillery gunner, describing the boot of Gavin Hastings as ‘mighty like a howitzer’.2 The Times reported ‘aerial bombardment’ when Wales played New Zealand in 1935; passes are ‘fired’, stand-offs launch ‘torpedo’ kicks, and scrum-halves ‘snipe’ round the blind side. Where did it come from, this language bond between rugby and warfare? And how is it that a century later the imagery born of the Great War is still deployed (see what I did there?) to add colour and drama to sports reports? It is not, heaven forbid, lazy journalism but something deeper, more intuitive, and an echo of shared values.

  My conclusion is this. There are many sports that carry danger and physical risk for individual competitors, notably anything to do with horses and cars. Boxers, of course, willingly climb into the ring for a beating, and sadly even cricketers now face untimely death at the crease. Uniquely, however, in team sports rugby players deliberately and consistently, and without the protection of helmets or padding, put themselves in harm’s way on behalf of others – on behalf of the team and in its common cause. This is what soldiers also do, and their comradeship sustains them far more than patriotic ideals or mission statements, or even Kevlar. Perhaps this explains the unconscious bond between rugby and soldiering and, in consequence, an almost symbiotic vocabulary.3

  In a far better-qualified view, Australian Army chief General Sir Peter Cosgrove put it more explicitly:

  There are similarities between the harsh and lethal demands of warfare and the thrill we get from a full-bodied contact sport like rugby. The thing about rugby is that it does prepare people to keep going under severe stress when things they have to do are extraordinarily hard.4

  Cosgrove was not the first military commander to draw the parallel. Admiral Lord Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet in 1914, concurred:

  Rugby football, to my mind, above all games is one which develops the qualities which go to make good fighting men. It teaches unselfishness, esprit de corps, quickness of decision, and keeps fit those engaged in it.5

  After the war, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig declared that team sport required ‘decisions and character on the part of the leaders, discipline and unselfishness among the led, and initiative and self sacrifice on the part of all’. It was his belief that ‘the inspiration of games has brought us through this war, as it has carried us through the battles of the past’.6 The Scotsman reported the views expressed at the Scottish Football Union’s AGM in October 1914:

 
The quick decision necessary to take an opportunity, the dash, the self-restraint, and the consideration for the opponent were most valuable training for both soldiers and sailors, and … was demonstrated by the fact that whenever this country has been at war Rugby men in large numbers went to the front.7

  Paddy Moran, Australian captain in 1908, recalling the ‘higher plane of organised roughness’ of university rugby, noted:

  When I read of [First Sea Lord] ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s remarks while head of the British Navy, ‘the essence of war is violence; moderation in war is imbecility’, I thought his saying could well have been adapted to the Rugby Football of my own time. It was however largely a good-natured violence. Two commandments on which you were judged and condemned: Thou shalt not squib and Thou shalt not squeal.8

  Rugby roughness gave them an appetite for the fight. The rugby writer, Edward (universally known as E.H.D.) Sewell recounts that one New Zealand officer ‘lying smashed by Turkish bullets in hospital assured me that one of his chief troubles on Gallipoli was to keep back the Rugby players. Out of every twenty “first into” the Turkish trench, eighteen were Rugby men.’ Even allowing for the popularity of rugby in New Zealand, this seems statistically unlikely, but we get the point.

  In 1916, the Arrow in Australia paid tribute to rugby’s wholehearted response to war:

  The only bright spot in all this, apart from the fact that the Allies have the Germans hard on the defence, is that the response by rugby footballers has shown that their game is as fine a preparation for war as anything in the line of sport the world has invented. The response has come from all grades of players, from the juniors to the first graders of ordinary powers to the representative men, and to the men who have retired from play for many years. It is a great thing to dwell upon in this hour of the world’s carnage.

  Rugby and the military were already linked before the First World War. The Calcutta Cup, the oldest trophy in international rugby, originated from the army: stationed in India, the 3rd East Kent Regiment (The Buffs) and 62nd (Wiltshire) Regiment established rugby at the Calcutta Club. However, when The Buffs were posted out of India in 1876, enthusiasm for rugby waned and reduced membership forced the club to disband. From the 270 silver Indian rupees left in the kitty, a cup was made with its distinctive design, three cobras as handles and an elephant atop the lid. In 1879, the Calcutta Cup was presented to the RFU to be competed for annually by teams from England and Scotland. The first match, in 1879, was a 3–all draw; it was on 28 February 1880 that England became the cup’s first winners in Manchester.