After the Final Whistle: The First Rugby World Cup and the First World War
256
After the Final Whistle: The First Rugby World Cup and the First World War
256Overview
When Britain's empire went to war in August 1914, rugby players were the first to volunteer: they led from the front and paid a disproportionate price. When the Armistice came after four long years, their war game was over; even as the last echo of the guns of November faded, it was time to play rugby again. As Allied troops of all nations waited to return home, sport occupied their minds and bodies. In 1919, a grateful Mother Country hosted a rugby tournament for the King's Cup, to be presented by King George V at Twickenham Stadium. It was a moment of triumph, a celebration of military victory, of Allied unity and of rugby values, moral and physical. Never before had teams from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Britain and France been assembled in one place. Rugby held the first ever 'World Cup' – football would not play its own version until 1930. In 2015 the modern Rugby World Cup returns to England and Twickenham as the world remembers the Centenary of the Great War. With a foreword by Jason Leonard, this is the story of rugby's journey through the First World War to its first World Cup, and how those values endure today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750965668 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 08/03/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
After the Final Whistle
The First Rugby World Cup and the First World War
By Stephen Cooper
The History Press
Copyright © 2015 Stephen CooperAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6566-8
CHAPTER 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.' 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'. 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.
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.
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.
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'. 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.
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.
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.
Rugby, however, had to fight for its place in the British Army: in 1906, there were 578 army soccer teams, with 180 in the Royal Navy. The inauguration that year of the Army–Navy Cup, albeit for officers only, increased participation and rugby grew from its handful of military teams. Successive national tours by colonial teams, starting with the All Blacks in 1905, further developed interest and a steady influx of public school-educated rugby-playing officers into the Regular and Territorial armies meant that rugby was firmly established in the military by 1914.
Sport served a deeper psychological purpose at the front. Volunteer civilians who had dreamed of bloodless glory at the drill halls before August 1914 found the reality of warfare so hideous that they had to seek escape in order to survive. Humankind cannot indeed bear so much reality. Behind the lines, they took refuge from their trench terrors in games which offered a comforting return to a world before war, and an ordered 'other life' where war did not threaten to drive them mad. According to historian J.G. Fuller, the soldier 'sought intervals of pleasure to relieve the suffering, and exercised ingenuity to create islands of sanity in the midst of the horror'.
Rugby was one such island. With its precise formations, set-piece confrontations, and disciplined rules, rugby restored a sense of order while its physicality and speed took men out of their troubled selves. Even 'Code Wars' served a purpose, as one Australian subaltern recalled:
The relative merits of Rugby, Australian Rules and Association were debated as keenly on the battlefields and back areas of France and Belgium as they ever were under the sunny skies of Australia ... the argument with the Kaiser was more easily settled than that one. The patronising manner in which a supporter of one particular game would ask another to 'come and see a real football match' was most amusing.
As the French say more elegantly, the more things change, the more they are the same thing. In the 1916 diary of another Australian, Tom Richards, one can hear the yearning for yesteryear mixed with the joy of release. When his 1st Field Ambulance played the 3rd they journeyed eight kilometres by wagon and crossed the River Lys on a raft to a pitch with football posts,
... but no other marks, neither goal lines nor sidelines as the grass was two feet long in patches ... the ball could not be seen and the men kicked yards away from the ball ... a fellow was laid out and none of our players noticed it ... A jolly good experience second only to the first match I saw in England when a hailstorm stopped the play and a ball went into the scrum alright and burst therein; the players could not make anything out of it.
Where indeed 'les neiges d'antan' of the rugby field? On the October eve of their transfer to the Somme, he watched 'the 12th Battalion A Company versus the Bombers' in an elegiac setting that reminded him of home:
The surroundings were almost Australian in their appearance. The playing field was roomy and the grass delightful both in its softness and colour. A rough hedge of hawthorn and fruit-bearing blackberry bushes protected one side and end, a row of tall majestic trees towered close to the other side and watercress banks of the river framed off the end.
The scene inspired in the soldier-players 'an unconscious undercurrent to urge on these valiant athletes to fight relentlessly for the honour, the prestige of each particular section'. And although reality will soon bite with the sharpest of teeth, there is a carpe diem. Inevitably in rugby – and without the need for Latin – there is also a whole load of banter:
Tomorrow they will be en route for the Somme and the greatest Hell ever thought of, greater even than man's imagination is capable of conceiving. But what care they for the morrow, let's first find out who are the best footballers while there is still time in hand ... No player dared make a mistake: in his mess he would obtain no peace for weeks should he fail to keep up his end.
Sport was a great equaliser between officers and other ranks, allowing both to forget themselves and their status for a brief while, yet maintain order and discipline through the rules and behaviour code of the game.
Even as prisoners of war, when they were no longer free to play in green fields, they improvised games in captivity on pitches far less attractive than Richards's water meadow. Douglas Lyall Grant, of London Scottish, two years a PoW, broke a rib playing rugger on the cinder surface at Gütersloh Offizierslager, and moaned like a schoolboy: 'It's rotten, I'm off games for a bit.' At Schwarmstedt, the pitch was even more hazardous:
The ground can hardly be called suitable, being only 50 yards long and 25 yards wide, while a pump and an electric light pole are obstacles to be avoided. However we had a good enough game with eleven a side and got hot dirty and scraped.
Improvisation occasionally brought retribution. At Magdeburg, playing in a cobbled courtyard with no leather ball available, officers used a bread loaf; the German guards resented this insult to their Brot and gave them all eight days in the cells. Further proof, if needed, that Fritz was not a sportsman and did not understand the importance of games or fair play. Such shortcomings, in the eyes of soldiers and press barons alike, were directly responsible for the current hostilities. Rugby was played on neutral grounds too: in April 1916, 'Engeland' and 'Schotland' played 'het beroemde Engelsche spel, Rugby Football' at Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Teams came from 1,500 Royal Naval Division (RND) internees at Groningen, after the disaster at Antwerp had marooned them ashore for four years.
International players were celebrities at the front as at home. Lieutenant Chater writes in some astonishment at witnessing a spontaneous Christmas truce in his sector of the line; he is more impressed at sharing a dugout with David McLaren Bain, 'the Scotch Rugger international, an excellent fellow', who would shortly be killed at Festubert. Even generals were caught under the spell of rugby's stardust, as Henry Grierson recounted of one corps commander who 'came to inspect our Battalion in the front line trenches' and found Edgar Mobbs, former captain of Northampton Saints and England:
When the GOC saw Edgar, he corpsed the meeting by ejaculating, 'By Gad, it's Mobbs. The last time I saw you, my dear chap, was when you and Tarr scored that remarkable try for England against the Australians – let's go into your dugout and talk over old times.' And so they did, and the Lt Gen never went near the frontline at all, but talked Rugger instead, to the total amazement of the Divisional Staff. But they didn't know that General Fanshawe was an old Blackheath player.
Just as Jonny is 'loved by the English, adored by the French', so too was Mobbs a century before, as rugby crossed the lines of language. Lieutenant Gurney, one of his Saints acolytes now serving under him, recounts a starstruck Frenchman exclaiming: 'C'est Monsieur Mobbs!' Gurney indignantly retorted, 'C'est Colonel Mobbs'. Back came the reply: 'Je le connais – rugby football – Bordeaux – I play against him.'
The cold statistics of war do not show a 'lost generation', a phrase coined by Gertrude Stein, not for those who died, but to describe the war-interrupted survivors drifting through the Twenties – the beautiful and damned of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. Over 8 million men served in the British forces and roughly 10 per cent of them died; this equates to between 1 per cent and 2 per cent of the population as a whole. Comparing census returns of 1911 and 1921 reveals a decline in the male population of military age of some 14 per cent. The influenza pandemic that raged globally through 1918 and beyond also took its own deadly toll of that generation, unusually striking the young far more than its customary victims of infants and the elderly. Death in war does not spread itself evenly; like life, death is not fair, but indiscriminate.
Disproportionate blows fell on tight-knit communities who joined up together and fought in the same murderous battles: 'Pals' battalions from Accrington and Barnsley or the Tyneside Irish and Scottish were more than decimated in 1916. But other sections of the population not so easily tagged with local labels suffered as much. If 10 per cent of all combatant men died, the death rate for line officers was double at 20 per cent. A gruesome feature of Rosslyn Park's death roll of 109 names is the number shot in the head. This is more than an occupational hazard of trench warfare, or the absence of top cover before the 'Brodie Bowler' helmet became standard issue in January 1916: it is because these were junior officers who led their men over the top and on patrol, peered over parapets, helped drag wounded soldiers to safety, only to be shot for their pains, or were picked off by snipers while checking on fright-weary sentries on their nightly rounds.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from After the Final Whistle by Stephen Cooper. Copyright © 2015 Stephen Cooper. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
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,