BRAVEHEARTS, TIGERS AND LIONS: SCOTLAND AND IRELAND IN THE POST-WAR YEARS
Scottish rugby union had made a tradition of being traditional. It had long opposed all attempts to relax the game’s amateur regulations. It suspected that international tours were a form of undercover professionalism – and refused to play the 1908 Wallabies and the 1924 All Blacks because of this. It was the last country to abandon the old 3-2-3 scrum formation and it wasn’t until 1932 that it allowed players to wear numbers on their shirts.
Such conservatism ran deep. Melrose lock-forward Frank Coutts recalled turning up for a national trial after the war and standing in line to be weighed. When it came for him to step on to the scales, he was asked for a penny to put in the weighing machine. Still believing that rugby was primarily a recreation for players, the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) itself did not even have its own offices; its secretary Harry Simson had to work from a local solicitors’ firm.1
Yet it was the conservative Scots who became the most innovative of the British rugby nations in the post-war years. In 1960 they became the first nation from the British Isles to undertake an international tour when they travelled to South Africa. The Test against the Springboks was lost by a creditable 18-10 but the tour was judged an overall success, inspiring England to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1963 and Wales to tour South Africa the following year.
More surprisingly, the SRU was the first to introduce leagues into domestic rugby, overcoming their fear that such a move would open the door to professionalism. In 1973 the club game was organised into six national divisions, with a network of district leagues below them. The inaugural title was won by Hawick, who went through the season undefeated until they lost their final match to the second-placed West of Scotland.
The reason for the SRU’s radicalism was easy to fathom. Between 1950, when a last-minute Allan Sloan try was converted in torrential rain by Northampton full-back Tommy Gray to give Scotland a 13-11 victory over England, they did not defeat the auld enemy for another 14 years. It was the last hurrah before a bleak decade and a half. Between 1951 and 1955 Scotland lost 17 consecutive matches. The lowest point was a 44-0 drubbing in 1952 by the touring Springboks, a match that went down in infamy as the ‘Murrayfield Massacre’.
To some extent the reason for the Scots’ decline was demographic. The rugby-playing population of Scotland, concentrated primarily among the former pupils of the country’s elite schools and in the Borders towns, had always been smaller than that of the other home nations. The expansion of grammar school and university education in England and Wales in the 1950s and 1960s, which increased the pool of players in those countries, meant that the Scots lagged even further behind. The Scots also suffered due to the legacy of their strict adherence to the letter of the amateur regulations. In a world where sport was becoming intensely competitive, the Scottish brand of amateur fastidiousness was somewhat counter-productive.
However, as the 1960s dawned the Scots were no longer perennially propping up the Five Nations table. Partly this was down to a willingness of the players to learn from their opponents, but it was also due to the Inter-District Championship, which had been introduced in 1953 as a tournament to bridge the gap between club rugby and the international game, starting to pay dividends.
A flavour of the possibilities that lay ahead came in 1958 when a dominant Scottish pack subdued the Wallabies by 12-8. But it wouldn’t be until 1964 that the flower of Scotland truly began to bloom again, when the Scots drew 0-0 with the touring New Zealanders, the only home nation not to lose to the All Blacks, won the Calcutta Cup for the first time since 1950, and shared the Five Nations Championship with Wales, their first taste of the title since 1938.
In 1966 and 1968 they again defeated Australia but the crowning glory was two victories against the Springbok tourists, 8-5 in 1965 and 6-3 in 1969. Perhaps most satisfyingly to those Scots who nursed ancient rivalries, England were defeated six times in eight meetings at the start of the 1970s, including a record-equalling streak of four consecutive victories from 1970.
As with England and Wales earlier, the Scottish side also began to benefit from an influx of players who had graduated from physical education colleges. Key men such as Ian McGeechan (who studied at Carnegie College in his hometown of Leeds), the inspirational prop Ian McLaughlan (Jordanhill College in Glasgow) and Jim Telfer (Moray House School of Education in Edinburgh) brought a level of sophistication to the side that allowed them to compete on equal terms with even the great Welsh team of the 1970s. All three would play for the Lions and provide an important legacy for the Scottish side.
Even the SRU came to recognise the importance of coaching, formerly viewed as one of slipperiest slopes to professionalism, and in 1971 it appointed Bill Dickinson, the coach of Jordanhill College, as the national team coach. But still beholden to the ambiguities of amateurism, the SRU gave him the title of ‘adviser to the captain’ and did not pay him a salary.
It would not be until the 1980s that the full fruits of Scotland’s new attitudes became evident. As in Wales, Scottish national feeling had grown since the 1960s. In 1967 Winnie Ewing had become the Scottish National Party’s first Member of Parliament and at the October 1974 general election the SNP won more than 39 per cent of the Scottish vote. The 1979 referendum had narrowly failed to endorse Scottish devolution but the social unrest of the Thatcher years in the 1980s exacerbated Scotland’s sense of alienation from its neighbours in the south. Reflecting this changing attitude, the Scottish side adopted ‘Flower of Scotland’ as their unofficial national anthem in the mid-1970s and in 1990 it was sung for the first time as the official anthem before Five Nations games. Scotland’s playing standards began to rise on the tide of nationalism.
Jim Telfer was appointed as Scotland’s coach in 1980 and set about building a team that would be professional in attitude, if not in monetary terms. In 1984 a sparkling Scottish side won the Triple Crown at a canter before coming face-to-face with an unbeaten France at Murrayfield in what was sudden-death play-off for the Grand Slam.
For the first hour of the match, it looked as if the French would take the title. A try from scrum-half Jérôme Gallion capped a period of back-line brilliance and at 9-3 the Scots were on their heels. Then Gallion was stretchered off after colliding with one of his own players. French indiscipline gave full-back Peter Dods, his right eye almost closed, the opportunity to square the match with penalties and then Finlay Calder, the stand-out among a pack that eventually dominated their French opposite numbers, delivered the coup de grâce. His try was converted and Scotland had won 21-12. It was their first Grand Slam for 59 years.
In 1986 Scotland shared the title with the French but Telfer had moved on and the end of the 1980s proved to be lean times. A disappointing first World Cup in 1987 saw them crash out 30-3 in the quarter-finals to New Zealand. The following year Ian McGeechan became national coach. It was to be a turning point for Scotland, for McGeechan himself and for British rugby as whole, as he came to be arguably the most influential coach in the history of British rugby at both the club and national level.
In 1990 McGeechan’s men strode through the Five Nations. France were put to the sword 21-0 at Murrayfield, a post-1914 record. But as Scotland strode, England rampaged, racking up 83 points in their defeats of the other three nations. The title would be decided when the two sides met in their final match of the tournament at Murrayfield, six years to the day since the men in blue won their last Grand Slam.
It was perhaps the greatest Scottish performance since the 1920s. Their forwards faced down one of the best English packs of all time – featuring Brian Moore, Peter Winterbottom, Mike Teague and a host of others who had never taken a backward step – repelling wave after wave of determined drives. Scotland led 6-0 but England scored the first try through Guscott though Simon Hodgkinson missed the conversion, as he would do with two later penalties. Craig Chalmers had a steadier day with the boot and at half-time Scotland had the noses in front by nine points to four.
The match was decided by an amazing turn of events at the start of the second half. Scotland’s kick-off sailed out of play on the full and England chose to put a scrum down on the centre spot. Richard Hill fed the ball and Moore raked it back quickly. But it was too quick for the England back row and the ball didn’t come out.
When the scrum was put down again, Scotland had the put-in. John Jeffrey picked it up from the base of the scrum, fed scrum-half Gary Armstrong who passed to Gavin Hastings to chip-kick into the corner for Tony Stanger to touch down. England only managed a solitary Hodgkinson penalty. When the New Zealand referee David Bishop finally blew his whistle for no-side, Murrayfield, Edinburgh and much of Scotland exploded with joy.
This was not just a win over England, not merely a Grand Slam triumph, it was a victory for the Scottish nation. At the end of a decade that had seen Scotland suffer more than most from social unrest and political neglect, politics, society and sport had come together in one incredible 80-minute period. It was a moment that would live on through the ages. And it would have to – because the magic of Murrayfield in 1990 marked not only the high point but also the end of a golden era of Scottish rugby.
From Kyle’s heroes to Celtic Tigers
If the years after the end of the Second World War were some of the darkest ever for Scotland, the opposite was true for Ireland. In the space of just four years from 1948 to 1951 the Irish team won the Five Nations Championship outright three times, one of which included its first ever Grand Slam in 1948. In the previous 65 years, they had won the championship outright on only four occasions. This was truly a team for the ages.
Captained by hooker Karl Mullen, Irish success was built on an aggressive, mobile back row of Bill McKay, Jim McCarthy and Des O’Brien. But the jewel was a young Ulster medical student, Jack Kyle. Kyle had the speed, the sidestep and the sensitivity to the rhythms of a match that allowed him to sniff out the merest whiff of a try-scoring opportunity.
Kyle was a fly-half who could not have played ten-man rugby even if he had wanted to. His instinct was to get the ball in his hands and challenge defenders to make decisions about how to stop him. And once they had decided, he would do the opposite. Kyle’s legacy would inadvertently be bequeathed in large part to Wales. He was the idol of the young Cliff Morgan, who modelled his game on Kyle’s, and trace elements of Kyle’s fly-half style could also be seen in Barry John and Phil Bennett. In 1951, Kyle scored a brilliant try at Cardiff Arms Park that almost took a second Grand Slam across the Irish Sea but the conversion was missed and Ireland had to settle for a 3-3 draw and a mere championship.
But the side that won the Grand Slam broke up quickly and the glory that they had earned slipped away. This was partly because the Irish were already an old side by the late 1940s – only three of the Grand Slam side were born after 1925. Eire had remained neutral during the Second World War and, unlike rugby in Britain, the game had continued more or less unaffected, allowing many Republic of Ireland players the opportunity to develop without the dislocations of war and reach their peak in the late 1940s.
Despite the continuing presence of Kyle until 1958, Ireland struggled to make an impact on the Five Nations. This was not necessarily due to a dearth of talent. From the mid-1950s, the side could boast outstanding wingers in Tony O’Reilly, who combined playing international rugby with revivifying the Irish butter industry by inventing the Kerrygold brand, and Niall Brophy, both of whom played for the Lions. Indeed, all three Lions’ tours of the 1950s were captained by Irishmen. But as with the Scots, the Irish had yet to enter the modern rugby world and stuck to a style of play that was known somewhat disparagingly as ‘all boot, bollock and bite’.
And despite the sporting unity that existed between the two nations in Ireland, tensions bubbled under the surface. Irish internationals had traditionally been played at Lansdowne Road, Dublin, the spiritual home of middle-class Irish Catholic rugby, and Belfast’s Ravenhill Park, the mecca for Northern Ireland’s middle-class Protestant rugby aficionados.
However, in 1954, the unity of the team was rattled when the 11 players from the Republic objected to singing ‘God Save the Queen’ before the Ravenhill match against Scotland. Captain Jim McCarthy informed the secretary of the Irish RFU that all 11 would not line up for the national anthems if the British national anthem was played for Ireland.
Realising that the players would not compromise, the IRFU met with the 11 dissidents on the morning of the match and agreed not only to the players’ request but also that no further internationals would be played in Belfast, a decision that no doubt also pleased the IRFU’s treasurer, who was not alone in realising that Ravenhill was far too small to accommodate the size of crowds now wanting to see Ireland play. Having scored a victory in the morning, the players took the field and beat Scotland 6-0.2
Irish society itself began to change in the 1960s, typified by Sean Lemass’s reforming government, and rugby, too, cast off some of its old conservatism. Coaching ceased to be a dirty word and Ireland toured South Africa in 1961 for the first time and then Australia in 1967. Although they continued to struggle in the Five Nations, the Irish defeated Australia four times between 1958 and 1968, beat the Springboks in 1965 and then drew with them in 1970, and lost by a single point to the 1965 All Blacks and earned a stirring comeback draw against them in 1973.
Politics once more intervened in 1972. On 30 January, the day after Ireland recorded a historic 14-9 win over France at the Parc des Princes, 13 people were shot dead by the British Army in Northern Ireland on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Britain and Ireland were thrown into turmoil, and Wales and Scotland both pulled out of their matches scheduled to be played at Lansdowne Road for security reasons. The Five Nations was suspended for the first time outside of the two world wars. The following year the title was shared by all five teams for the first, and only, time. Ireland’s 18-9 defeat of John Pullin’s England in Dublin is probably less remembered for the game than for Pullin’s after-match remark, ‘we may not be very good, but at least we turned up’.
The five-way tie in 1973 was the nearest Ireland had got to a title since 1951. The following year, they finally got their hands on the championship again. The decisive match came at Twickenham, when a free-flowing Irish side outscored England by four tries to one to win 26-21, the third of five successive victories over the English. The star of the match was Mike Gibson, a slight but devastatingly talented centre or fly-half.
Gibson had the pace to glide around would-be tacklers but also a clairvoyant’s ability to read the play and pop up in support of the merest half-break. As he proved on five British Lions tours, especially during the 1971 Test matches against New Zealand, he was the equal of any three-quarter in the world.
The brilliance of Gibson aside, it was the Irish pack, led by fellow Ulsterman Willie John McBride, that laid the basis for the 1974 championship, and it would be the pack that provided the thread of continuity between 1974 and Ireland’s next championship in 1982. Moss Keane and Fergus Slattery, two veterans of the McBride era, were the twin pillars of the 1982 pack, building the platform for the unerring kicking of fly-half Ollie Campbell that led to the Triple Crown going back to Dublin for the first time since 1949.
They repeated this again in 1985, although by this time Campbell’s boot had been replaced by that of Michael Kiernan. It was Kiernan’s cool head and steady eye that, with two minutes to go against England at Lansdowne Road and the game tied at 10-10, received the ball from a line-out and nervelessly slotted the ball between the posts to lift another Triple Crown.
It would be almost a quarter of a century before Ireland would rise to such heights again, although this would come in the brave new world of professionalism. Like the rest of the rugby world, the Irish were inching their way into the future. In 1978 the IRFU formed a Game Development Committee to spread the coaching gospel and, in 1991, the All Ireland League was created to raise the club game to the higher standards required for the increasingly competitive new age. As the Irish economy was becoming transformed into a free-market, low-tax ‘Celtic Tiger’, rugby followed in its wake.
Yet perhaps the memory of Irish rugby that would burn brightest from the last decades of the 20th century come not from the national side, but from a provincial side, Munster.
Ireland had never beaten the All Blacks; their 10-10 draw in 1973 was the nearest they had come. But they weren’t the only Irish side that the New Zealanders could not defeat that year. Munster also held the tourists 3-3. The 1978 All Blacks were a tougher proposition than their predecessors. They swept through the British Isles, defeating all the national sides and despatching their regional opponents. Apart from one.
On the last day of October 1978, 12,000 spectators crammed into Limerick’s Thomond Park to see if Munster could repeat their moral victory of 1973. But marshalled by Tony Ward, who vied with Ollie Campbell for the Irish number ten jersey, the red shirts of Munster ripped into their opponents, putting the All Blacks on the back foot from the kick-off. Christy Cantillon ran through the All Blacks defence to score a try. Ward’s conversion and a drop-goal gave Munster a 9-0 lead at half-time and then another Ward drop-goal deep into the second half sealed the game for a historic 12-0 win.
Superficially, it seemed like a victory for traditional local rugby values, but Munster coach Tom Kiernan, who had captained the Lions on the 1968 South Africa tour, had planned meticulously for the match. He intensified the side’s training regime to ensure their fitness, used videos of the All Blacks to study their tactics in detail and took the side on a four-match tour of London to prepare them. It was a foretaste of the technocratic and managerial rugby that was to come.
Yet the evening’s sporting drama was eclipsed that evening by personal tragedy. As Munster completed their final lap of honour that night at Thomond Park, captain Donal Canniffe was told that his father had collapsed and been taken to hospital. By the time Canniffe got to his car to go to hospital it was too late. His father had died of a heart attack while listening to the game on the radio.
Although for most of the post-war period Ireland and Scotland had to play second fiddle to Wales and to a lesser extent England in the Five Nations, when it came to the British Lions the Scots and the Irish had the upper hand, at least as far as captaincy was concerned. Ten of the captains who led the 13 Lions tours between 1950 and 1993 were either Irish or Scots.
Karl Mullen, the hooker who led the Irish through their glory years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, captained the first tour to Australia and New Zealand in 1950. The shared experiences of combat between 1939 and 1945 led to a greater feeling of Britishness in the post-war years. In 1947 the Rugby Football League had officially changed the name of the national rugby league side to Great Britain and similar sentiments were reflected in the enthusiasm of the players and supporters for the rugby union Lions.
Even for players from the Republic of Ireland, this transnational unity was appealing. Although many players in every Lions’ side shared a similar background of elite schools and university education, grudges and rivalries held over from matches sometimes presented problems. Carwyn James explained to his 1971 Lions how his vision of rugby multi-culturalism worked:
I don’t want Irishmen to pretend to be English, or English to be Celts, or Scots to be less than Scots. You Irish must be the supreme ideologists off the field and, on it, fighters like Kilkenny cats. You English, stiffen your upper lips and simply be superior. And you Welsh, just continue to be Triple Crown aspirants in your own cocksure, bloody-minded way.3
The 1950 squad was selected to represent the very best talent across the British Isles, unlike previous tours which had been chosen on the basis of availability rather than talent. The 1930 tourists had been required to possess a dinner jacket and a minimum of £80 cash on tour to cover their own expenses, and all pre-Second World War touring sides were weaker than the stronger home nations.
But with backs like Jack Kyle, Bleddyn Williams and Lewis Jones and forwards like Mullen and Wales’ Roy John and John Robbins, there could be little argument that this side represented the cream of British rugby union. After an encouraging 9-9 draw in the first Test against the All Blacks, the side succumbed to the greater power of the New Zealanders and lost the next three Tests. Although Australia were beaten twice as the Lions returned home, there was widespread disappointment with the tour.
The opposite was the case with the tour to South Africa five years later. It opened with a 23-22 British victory in front of 95,000 at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park. Neither side could establish dominance and they drew a thrilling series 2-2. This rising standard of British play was highlighted by the 1959 tour Down Under. After the now customary series win over the Wallabies, the Lions came face-to-face with the All Blacks. Or, rather, with Don Clarke’s boot. Although the tourists lost the series 3-1, they scored ten tries to New Zealand’s seven, for whom Clarke scored 39 of their 57 points. Most controversially, the Lions lost the first Test 18-17 despite scoring four tries to nil.
The 1960s were a lean time for the Lions. Other than against Australia, they did not win a single match during those years. Their tours became more famous for on- and off-field controversies than for their quality of rugby. Violence was an ever-present threat. Springbok centre ‘Mannetjies’ Roux broke Lions’ fly-half Richard Sharp’s jaw in the tourists’ match against Northern Transvaal in 1962, and the 1968 tour was marked by continuous ill feeling between the Lions and their hosts, not least because of the tourists’ loutish behaviour.
To some extent these national tensions reflected the changing political times. The old ties of the British Empire were dissolving. New Zealand had lost its traditional favoured relationship with Britain, as successive British governments sought to join the European Common Market, thus putting an end to the special economic relationship between the two countries. Tightening immigration controls aimed at curbing migrants from India and Pakistan also impacted on white New Zealanders, and Australians, who were no longer eligible for unrestricted entry into what once had been but no longer was the Mother Country.
The situation in South Africa was far worse. Following the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, South Africa had declared itself a republic in 1961 and been expelled from the British Commonwealth, which had been created in 1949 as a way of maintaining relationships between the countries of the former British Empire. Rugby became an arena in which political and national antipathies would be played out, on and off the field.
Violence also became an issue on the two greatest Lions tours, to New Zealand in 1971 and South Africa in 1974. Orchestrated by Carwyn James and blessed with a great Welsh back line augmented by Mike Gibson and David Duckham, the 1971 Lions had played brilliant rugby to win the series 2-1, alongside the drawn final Test.
Apart from the second Test defeat in Christchurch, they went through New Zealand undefeated to become arguably the greatest Lions’ team ever. But, forearmed by their previous experience on the 1966 tour, they were completely uncompromising. Carwyn James’ characteristically paradoxical instruction to ‘get your retaliation in first’ became their maxim.
That same lesson was applied with even more vigour three years later when the Lions returned to South Africa. Winning the series 3-0 alongside a drawn final Test, they literally fought their way to their first series win in South Africa since 1896, helped by the famous – or infamous – rallying cry of ‘99’ to signal an all-in brawl. ‘The Lions went through South Africa like latter-day Genghis Khans,’ wrote the normally unshockable journalist John Reason. ‘Some of the teams, like Orange Free State, [that] they left behind looked as if they had been in a road accident.’ On the eve of the third and deciding Test, captain Willie John McBride told the Lions ‘there is no escape. We will take no prisoners!’4
By 1974 Lions’ tours had become about much more than rugby. Tours had begun in an age when Britannia ruled the waves and sport was part of the cultural bond that held Britain and its colonies together. Now the Empire was dead, the nations of the Mother Country were pulling apart and the traditions of the past were being challenged around the world. And that included those of rugby union.