SPRINGBOKS, ALL BLACKS AND THE POLITICS OF RUGBY
They were international rugby union’s Romulus and Remus. The British may have invented the game, but South Africa and New Zealand transformed rugby from a trial of strength and skill to a test of national fitness, political advantage and diplomatic influence.
Richard Seddon, New Zealand’s prime minister at the time of the 1905 All Black tour, basked in its reflected glory so much that he became known as the ‘minister for football’. Paul Roos, the Afrikaner captain of the 1906 Springboks, was assiduous in his use of rugby to bring together Afrikaans- and English-speaking South Africans, and himself became a National Party MP in 1948.
Since their first meetings in the 1920s the two nations had quarrelled and disagreed like the mythical Roman twins. But unlike the Romans, neither one could kill off its rival sibling and rule alone. Both needed each other – and, as the second half of the 20th century would demonstrate, the rest of the rugby union world would become equally dependent on them.
The All Blacks’ home defeat by the South Africans in the 1937 Test series left a deep scar on the psyche of New Zealand rugby. Its confidence and natural sense of superiority had been dealt a grievous blow. Revenge had to be taken, but the outbreak of war in 1939 led to the cancellation of the 1940 tour to South Africa. New Zealanders would have to wait more than a decade for the opportunity to put the record straight.
When the All Blacks finally arrived in South Africa on 29 April 1949 after a 26-day voyage across the Indian Ocean, anticipation could not have been higher. The success of the 1945–46 New Zealand Army team had laid down a challenge to the South Africans, not just for the unofficial world championship but also by the manner in which the game was played. Could the controlled forward game of the Springboks overcome the attacking verve of the New Zealanders, eight of whom were veterans of that 1945 team?
The All Blacks were extremely confident, so confident in fact that the New Zealand Rugby Union had arranged for Australia to visit New Zealand at the same time as the South Africa tour – and had scheduled the first Test match against the Wallabies in Wellington on the same day as the third Test against the Springboks in Durban. This could only be either a daring piece of bravura or a stunning act of hubris.
From the start of the tour the All Blacks appeared unsettled. In the matches before the first Test, the All Blacks lost two and drew one. The first match against the Springboks was going to be tight.
The All Blacks jumped out to an early lead, thanks to a try by winger Peter Henderson, but five penalties to prop Okey Geffin gave the Springboks a 15-11 win. The All Blacks had been outscrummaged, their inexperienced half-backs could not supply enough quick ball to the backs and the ominous presence of South African number eight Hennie Muller snuffed out almost all of the New Zealanders’ set-piece moves.
Things then went from bad to worse. An exhausting train journey to Rhodesia for a two-match series saw the first lost 10-8 and the second drawn 3-3. On the way back the All Blacks’ train crashed and, although no players were injured, one of the crew was killed, despite being attended by New Zealand centre and medical doctor Ron Elvidge.
On their return to South Africa, the 12-6 loss in the second Test confirmed that the All Blacks were no match for their opponents’ scrummaging technique. If New Zealand rugby had honed its attacking technique over the previous decade, South African rugby had refined its scrummaging to an even greater extent. The New Zealand forwards simply could not cope with the Springboks’ scrum. In perhaps the most humiliating episode in All Black history, their coach, 1905 All Black Alex MacDonald, asked his opposite number, Danie Craven, to help the New Zealand pack get to grips with the intricacies of the 3-4-1 scrum.
It made little difference. The third Test was lost 9-3 and the fourth 11-8 in a similar fashion to the first, with a New Zealand try being cancelled out by Geffin’s kicking. The frustrated New Zealanders began to grumble that the South African referees were favouring the home side. Ninety-three penalties were awarded to the Springboks in the New Zealand half in the four Tests, eighteen on or inside the 25-yard line. Of the 63 won by New Zealand in the South African half, only one was on the 25-yard line.
Of course, as Danie Craven pointed out, the Springbok dominance of the scrum meant that the All Black pack probably gave away more penalties when under pressure in their own half, but the New Zealand Rugby Almanack was not convinced. ‘The continued inflicting of penalties is disturbing and requires some explanation,’ it said worriedly.1 The Almanack also raised the perennial criticism that rugby union’s scoring rules meant that the side scoring more tries, as the All Blacks had done in three of the Tests, could still lose to the side that kicked the most penalties.
But the reality was that the All Blacks had been out-thought and out-fought. Alex MacDonald was by common consent out of his depth as a coach and the players had arrived in South Africa unfit and unprepared for what was to come. The 4-0 defeat in the Test series was in no small part due to the overconfidence and lack of planning of the NZRU.
And for those who thought that things could not get any worse, they did. A week after the South Africans completed their whitewash, the Wallabies secured their second consecutive win over the All Black team that had been left behind, giving Australia the parallel Test series 2-0. In the matter of just two months, the mighty New Zealand had been humbled by South Africa, Australia and even Rhodesia.
As in life, so in sport. Hubris had brought New Zealand rugby union to its lowest point ever.
‘Kill or be killed’
There are few things more motivating in life than humiliation. New Zealand rugby in the 1950s was driven by the overwhelming desire to undo the ignominy of the 1949 whitewash. When the 1950 British Isles side, the first rugby union tourists to be nicknamed the Lions by the press, the first to wear the now distinctive red shirt and the first to be picked entirely on merit, visited New Zealand they were narrowly but convincingly defeated 3-0 after drawing the first Test 9-9. A little Kiwi pride had been restored.
Three years later the All Blacks made their fourth tour of the northern hemisphere, winning three of the five Test matches but losing to Wales for the third time and, for the first time, France. But although there was some concern about the losses, by the time the tourists arrived back in New Zealand, few were interested in looking back. All eyes were now fixed on 1956 and the return of the Springboks.
The South Africans had also toured Britain and France in 1951, winning all their matches except a midweek fixture against a London Counties representative side, and achieving a Grand Slam in international matches, in the process destroying a hapless Scotland side 44-0 and sweeping away France 25-3. The results were not surprising, but the manner of the victories was. For although the Springboks’ strategy was, as ever, to dominate their opponents in the forwards, the aim was now to provide a platform for the backs to cut free. Nine tries were scored against Scotland, four against Ireland and six against France. In the 1953 series against the visiting Wallabies, the Springboks scored 15 tries in winning the series 3-1.
The high point of the Springboks’ new-found attacking effervescence came during the 1955 British and Irish Lions tour. The tourists possessed one of the finest sets of attacking players ever assembled. England’s Jeff Butterfield, Wales’ Cliff Morgan and Ireland’s Tony O’Reilly were arguably their countries’ greatest players in their positions. The tour would be one of the most memorable in rugby history.
The Lions went into the first Test at Ellis Park in Johannesburg with a run of 11 straight wins under their belts. The game see-sawed with the Springboks establishing an initial 11-3 lead. Then, in the second half, the course of the game flipped over completely and, inspired by Cliff Morgan, the Lions raced out to lead 23-11. By then, however, they were down to 14 men after English flanker Reg Higgins was stretchered off early in the second half.
Driven forward by 90,000 South African voices yelling them on, the Springboks sensed blood and fought back. Marshalled by scrum-half Tommy Gentles, at around five feet three inches tall one of the smallest men ever to play Test rugby, the home side took full advantage of the tiring seven-man Lions’ pack. With the match well into injury time the Lions were clinging on at 23-19 but, as the referee looked to his watch, the Springboks created an overlap on the right and debutant right-winger Theunis Briers touched down halfway between the touchline and the posts.
Full-back Jack van der Schyff lined the ball up for the conversion and the win. A veteran of the 1949 All Black whitewash, Schyff had already kicked four goals that afternoon and this was well within his capability. But the ball went wide. The Lions had won and a dejected Schyff, shoulders hunched and head down, found himself on the front page of every South African newspaper the following morning. ‘Shame!’ was the headline in one. He never played for the Springboks again.
South Africa were in a different mood for the next Test and scored a record seven tries to steamroller the Lions 25-9. They dominated the set pieces and their three-quarters ripped the British defence to shreds, with Tom van Vollenhoven on the left wing scoring a hat-trick against a nonplussed Tony O’Reilly.
There was more drama to come. In the third Test the Lions played a tight, controlled game in which their forwards for the first time established continuous dominance over their opponents. Cliff Morgan became a paragon touch-finder – there were 65 line-outs in the match – and the predominantly Welsh pack did the rest. A Jeff Butterfield drop goal saw the Lions go into half-time 3-0 ahead, and it was his try that proved decisive in the second half, giving the British Lions a 9-6 win.
They were now just one match away from being the first touring side to defeat the Springboks in the 20th century. The first 40 minutes in Port Elizabeth went the way of the previous Test match, with a tightly disciplined forward display giving the Lions a 5-3 half-time lead, but after the break the South Africans switched up a gear and ran in four tries to tie the Test series with a convincing 22-8 victory.
It was not merely a great series. If it confirmed South Africa as still the game’s dominant power, it also demonstrated that the best of British rugby union could now compete at the very highest international level. It also suggested that the All Blacks, who had lost to South Africa, Australia, Wales and France in recent years, were quite probably merely the world’s third best side.
New Zealanders could not allow such a state of affairs to last. Therefore, when the Springboks finally arrived in New Zealand in June 1956 the prize was far greater than mere rugby rivalry: New Zealand’s national pride was at stake. The tour became the concern of the press, the Church and parliament. Newspapers obsessively reported the Springbok trials, hoping to gain an insight of what the All Blacks would have to face. School assemblies discussed the prospects of the tour and instructed their young charges on the vital importance of the Test series.2
The arrival of the tourists was greeted with the same enthusiasm as for a royal visit. A three and a half hour welcoming procession greeted them for the first match in Waikato. When the team’s special train arrived in Wanganui, the Springboks ‘turned their procession in vintage cars and fire engines from the railway station to their hotel into a riotous comedy’, with Western Province lock Jan Pickard squirting the admiring crowd with a water pistol.3 Over the course of the four-month-long tour, roughly a third of New Zealand’s population of two million went to watch a tour game.
The 40,000 who crammed into Dunedin’s Carisbrook stadium for the first Test witnessed a tense and brutal match that was decided by an interception try from All Black winger Ronnie Jardon. Despite finding himself outnumbered by Springbok attackers on the left, he was able to grab an indecisive pass from Dawie Ackermann to race half the length of the field to score. Despite South African dominance in the scrum, the New Zealand forwards convincingly out-rucked their opponents, something that would become a feature of the tour.
The 14-10 scoreline told only half the story. The All Blacks finished with 14 men, while the Springboks had only 13 players on the pitch when the match ended. Hard play had become indistinguishable from foul play. Even the provincial matches had become vicious encounters, with each New Zealander seemingly desperate to prove that it was his individual responsibility to take revenge for the 1949 humiliation. National honour and personal pride appeared to be one and the same.
The atmosphere became so hostile that shortly before the second Test Springbok manager Danie Craven informed the New Zealand Rugby Union that his team would be cutting the tour short and returning home after the match. An 8-3 victory in Wellington persuaded him to change his mind, but the Springboks became increasingly irritated not just by the violence of their opponents but also by what they saw as unsympathetic refereeing and hurtfully partisan crowds.
If Craven thought his threat might encourage the NZRU to rein in their players he, and particularly his front-row forwards, were sorely disappointed. Within minutes of the third Test kicking off in Christchurch the All Blacks signalled that they were going to put an end to Springbok forward domination by sheer physical intimidation.
The man who was primarily responsible was the former amateur heavyweight boxing champion of New Zealand, Otago prop Kevin Skinner. Called back into the side to stiffen the forwards, Skinner punched both South African props, Chris Koch and Japp Bekker, so hard that they were knocked to the ground. Skinner was unapologetic for the rest of his life. ’Once you pull on the Silver Fern, if you’ve got anything in you at all, that should give you all the kick you need,’ he told the journalist Warwick Roger years later. ‘You were, after all, in a kill or be killed situation.’4
The intimidation worked and the All Blacks took an 11-0 half-time lead. But the Springbok forwards were not going to lie down. They clawed their way back into the match and, with 20 minutes to go, the score was 11-10. Yet the All Blacks had the measure of their opponents and two tries in the last five minutes sealed a 17-10 New Zealand win. At 2-1 with one match to go, the Test series could not be lost. But not losing was not enough for wounded New Zealander pride. Victory was essential.
The fourth Test at Auckland was once again a ferocious, brutal battle. The 61,240 spectators who squeezed into Auckland’s Eden Park were no less committed to victory than the players on the pitch. When Danie Craven walked out for a pre-match pitch inspection he was greeted by the thunder of hostile boos. Once again, the All Blacks lost the scrums but dominated the rucks, and this would prove decisive.
A penalty from full-back Don Clarke gave New Zealand a 3-0 half-time lead, but the decisive and series-sealing try came five minutes after the break. Springbok scrum-half ‘Popeye’ Strydom lost the ball in a tackle and New Zealand hooker Ron Hemi dribbled it forward. Number eight Peter Hilton-Jones kicked it on, South African full-back Bassie Viviers failed to gather the ball and it popped up into Hilton-Jones’s hands for him to touch down. Clarke converted and then kicked another penalty to make it 11-0. Roy Dryburgh scored a converted consolation try in the dying seconds but the game finished 11-5 in the All Blacks’ favour.
New Zealand had won the match, the series, the unofficial world championship and, most important of all, regained its national self-respect. But they had won no friends. Contrary to decades of tradition, not a single player on either side swapped a jersey at the end of the game.
Unfair play
The ferocity of the rugby on the 1956 tour was not simply a result of the two teams’ desperation to win the series: it was also a reflection of two insecure and fearful nations, societies that had both been built on the domination of those with darker skins. For although both sides claimed that rugby had united their nations, the truth was often the opposite.
In 1948 the predominantly Afrikaner National Party won power for the first time in South Africa. It immediately began creating an apartheid system, which segregated the races, removed civil rights from the non-white population and punished those who transgressed its strict racial hierarchy. Most of these measures merely formalised practices or extended legislation that had been introduced under British rule, but the National Party claimed apartheid would lift Afrikaners to their rightful place in the world.
This rhetoric seemed to be confirmed in stunning fashion the following year when the Springboks whitewashed the 1949 All Blacks. The bond between Afrikaners and rugby union had grown increasingly strong in the interwar years and the dual political and sporting victories of 1948 and 1949 melded rugby and Afrikaner nationalism into one indivisible whole.
For rugby union, the racial discrimination that had been an informally accepted as part of the game now had the sanction of state policy. So when the NZRU selectors chose the 1949 touring team, it was once again an all-white side: no Maori players were chosen for the tour, despite widespread protests in New Zealand. For the NZRU the rugby bond they shared with the South Africans was more important than racial equality.
In contrast to the 1949 All Black tour, there were almost no protests in 1956, such was the suffocating hold that the desire to beat the Springboks had over the New Zealand nation. Only the Maori Women’s Welfare League raised their voice in opposition. Yet the issue of race would not go away. Although white New Zealanders liked to proclaim that their country was free of racial prejudice, this was far from the truth.
Maori were at the bottom of the social and economic ladder, treated, at best, with patronising condescension. The famous journalist and broadcaster Winston McCarthy, the voice of New Zealand rugby union thanks to his iconic commentaries on All Black matches, could casually write that watching Maori players ‘for the first or second time is like trying to pick out a particular sheep in a flock. They all look the same.’5
The Springboks did play the Maori representative team in 1956, the first time since the controversial 1921 match, surprisingly winning 37-0 in Auckland. Decades later the Maori full-back that day, and future Anglican bishop, Muru Walters, claimed that the side had been told to lose the match by the Minister for Maori Affairs, Ernest Corbett. Walters said that Corbett had told them a Maori victory would mean that the All Blacks would never be invited back to South Africa.6
The 1956 Springbok tour was the last for almost 40 years that took place without open political controversy. The increasing repression taking place in South Africa as apartheid laws were extended led to the emergence of an international anti-apartheid movement. So when in the summer of 1958 the NZRU announced it would tour South Africa in 1960, it was rocked by a wave of protest. More than 160,000 New Zealanders signed a petition organised by the Citizens’ All Black Tour Association (CABTA) backing their slogan of ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ and thousands of others marched in the streets. George Nepia sent a message to the CABTA saying, ‘Best of luck. Let me know if you need a full-back’.7 But the NZRU, backed by the government, refused to reverse its whites-only policy.
Not even events at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960, when South African police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180 men, women and children, caused the NZRU to change its mind. In response to nationwide protests, the National Party declared a state of emergency, arresting 18,000 people and banning the African National Congress. Two months after the Sharpeville massacre the All Blacks arrived to begin their third tour of South Africa.
The Springboks shut out the All Blacks 13-0 in the first Test, but the boot of Don Clarke proved decisive in the second when the All Blacks won 11-3. The third Test was drawn 11-11 after Clarke kicked a last-minute sideline conversion of a Frank McMullen try and so the series went down to the wire in the fourth Test at Port Elizabeth. The match, and the series, was only settled by a try to Transvaal flanker Martin Pelser.
In 1965 the Springboks visited Australasia, losing both Tests to Australia and three of four against the All Blacks. It was the most disastrous Springbok tour ever. The free-flowing rugby of the 1950s had long gone – as the political storm over apartheid intensified, it seemed that the team was taking its revenge on a hostile world by playing the dourest rugby possible. South African rugby could no longer pretend that it was not political. Its identification with the apartheid regime, whether symbolically or explicitly through the words of its players and officials, meant that the Springboks flew the flag of racism wherever they went. As Danie Craven explained, ‘the Springboks are frontline soldiers and as such they must maintain open lines of communication between our country and other rugby countries’.8 And until the protests became too loud to ignore, the rest of the rugby union world remained silent.
The IRB’s response to South Africa’s expulsion from the British Commonwealth in 1961 was to say that it gave them ‘great pleasure to convey to South Africa the view shared by all the member countries that the change would not make any difference whatever in regard to South Africa’s position in rugby’.9 South Africa’s exclusion from the 1964 and 1968 Olympics and the increasing international pressure to boycott sport with the apartheid regime had little impact on rugby’s administrators.
Rugby union had become inextricably entwined with international politics – and for the next 25 years they would shape the internal politics of rugby.