THE SUCCESS THAT Arthur Summons’ Kangaroos of 1963–64 achieved in Britain was unprecedented. It was the first time in eleven tours that Australia had been able to win the Ashes in Britain. The only previous winning team, in 1911–12, was labelled Australasia and contained New Zealanders. The second Test win—celebrated as the ‘Massacre of Swinton’—created all sorts of records for points scored as Australia won 50–12. The ’Roos scored twelve tries that day. Personal point-scoring records also fell, most of them to Graeme Langlands, whose 20 points at Swinton was a new mark for an individual in a Test. He also passed 112 points for the tour, which made him already the leading Australian point-scorer on a tour of Britain. It was a champion team, loaded with champion players. For Arthur Summons, it marked the supreme achievement of a relatively short time at the helm of Australian Rugby League. In his book Straight Between the Posts, legendary broadcaster Frank Hyde summed up the effect Summons had on the tour. ‘My room at the Troutbeck was right above the lounge where captain–coach Arthur Summons used to gather his players for the team talks,’ Hyde wrote. ‘Summons’s addresses were positively Churchillian. He was an inspiring, articulate leader.’
ARTHUR SUMMONS
As we kicked off the Kangaroo tour of 1963–64, there were certain realities that I knew we would face. First up, we knew that if the English found themselves in trouble, or maybe even if they didn’t, they would be ruthless in the way they attacked us. There would be nothing soft about the football. They would want to disrupt us any way they could. We resolved that we would stand up to that. Second, I was convinced that if we were to win the Ashes we had to win the first two Tests.They would never let us win a decider. I know that sounds bad, but it was the way it was. Whatever the pressures that built upon their referees, subconscious or otherwise, they were always at their height in third Test deciders. There was a sort of subterranean patriotism that caused them to really believe that the sun never set on the British Empire, and their referees lived by it. So the first Test at Wembley became very important to us, and we set ourselves to win as if it was the only game, the ultimate decider.
One of the advantages of being a novice coach was that I relied heavily on recent lessons. In the series against England at home the previous year, Harry Bath had been our coach, and there was nothing Harry did not know about English football. He had made the point strongly that the only way to get on top of England was to contain them in the forwards, dominate them if you could, and worry later about letting the backs score tries. There had always been a natural inclination in Australian football to play what is loosely termed an attacking game. We interpret that as seeing fancy backs running and passing with abandon, and with the sort of talent we had in that team, the temptation certainly was there to play that way. But Bath had leaned more to the English view that smart attacking football starts with the forwards, with deft popped passes aimed at creating space, with fast-running forwards surging into gaps, with hard-nosed defence that denied momentum to the opposition no matter what.
That became my tactical approach from the first team meeting. I told them that no matter how good our backs were—and this team had the likes of Gasnier, Langlands, Irvine, Dimond and the powerhouse fullback Ken Thornett—the reason we had not beaten England for a long time was that we had never beaten them in the forwards. ‘That’s where we will take them on,’ I said. I appealed to the egos of proud men like Brian Hambly, Ian Walsh, Noel Kelly and Dick Thornett. The winning or the losing depended on them, I told them, and there was no avoiding that. Despite my early misgivings, I was pleased with the way the team responded to my coaching outlook. I had taken a lot of ideas from a lot of people, and I think they all understood that. I worked hard on thinking through our strategies and tactics, and I made it clear that the standards we set, once agreed upon, would be maintained. Discipline was important if we were to succeed, and I had determined that since I had been thrust into this job, I would not take a backward step.
It didn’t stop the local press hoeing in. They had picked up on the early discussion about co-opting Arthur Clues, and as the first Test neared there were plenty of stories about the Kangaroos not having the off-field coach they needed. Most of the papers picked up on this theme, claiming we did not have the moves or the tactics to score tries against solid English defences. For a while I felt my morale a little dented, since coaching was my responsibility and the theme here was that I was failing. Yet I didn’t feel that way. As a team I think we saw the whole debate as a campaign to destabilise us. The English had tried everything else, after all.There was plenty of biff in the matches, and the referees, to put it as diplomatically as possible, were less than sympathetic to us.
There was pressure at home too. Clive Churchill, who had coached the 1959 Kangaroos, had been considered the likely tour coach but was overlooked, presumably as a cost-saving measure following the financial failure of a South African visit to Australia earlier in the year. He expressed his disappointment at not being on the tour, and a lot of people supported him. I would have loved to have Clive there. But the fact was that he wasn’t there, and if I was in charge that was the way it would be. We resisted all attempts to include Arthur Clues or anyone else in our team group. By the time we had run in twelve tries in the second Test and secured the Ashes in England as no team had ever done before, I felt everything about us—coaching and tactics included—had been vindicated.
My own tour shifted direction a couple of weeks before the first Test when I damaged knee ligaments in a game against St Helens, then the most powerful of the English clubs. I was off the field halfway through the first half. There were mixed emotions that day. The injury clearly was not good news for me, despite the great optimism for recovery we always had in an era when diagnosis was more vague. But the Kangaroos won a very good victory that day, playing their best football of the tour at precisely the right time, and making it clear to everybody that the Test series was nowhere near the English fait accompli the local pundits had assumed it to be. Realistically, it might also have helped in that prolonged absence gave me the chance to concentrate solely on coaching, despite the fact that I was having non-stop treatment and training as best I could in an attempt to get back on the field. I finished up having to miss the first and second Tests. I returned to active duty a couple of games before the final Test, but I declined to put myself into that final Test team. The team, with Barry Muir at halfback and Earl Harrison at five-eighth, had played supreme Rugby League to win the first two encounters with England, the second of them by 50 points to 12. In no way was I going to upend it.
The first two Test matches worked brilliantly for us. We achieved the forward dominance we wanted, and the singular brilliance of our backs did the rest. The first was played at Wembley Stadium in London on a Wednesday night. It was the first Test match played under lights, and we won 28–2. Reg Gasnier scored three tries to add to the reputation he had won as a rookie on the 1959 tour. One of them was a 70-metre affair in which the ball travelled through half a dozen pairs of hands, but as always Gasnier’s unique acceleration and pace provided the finish. It was also Graeme Langlands’ first Test. Langlands had been chosen for the tour as a winger, though he had played most of his football to that point as a fullback. We also had Ken Thornett and Les Johns on the tour, each of whom would still be among the greatest fullbacks of Australian Rugby League, up there with the likes of Billy Slater despite the various changes in the game. Leaving Johns out was hard enough, but we just couldn’t leave Langlands out as well. So we tried him at centre, and he was an instant success. With Langlands’ giant sidestep, as well as his ability to read the play, and Gasnier’s change of pace and brilliant running, the Australian backs had a picnic.
As we had planned at our first team meeting, however, it was the dominance of the Australian forwards that laid the foundation of our Ashes triumph. In that first Test they were impregnable, their defence so relentless and so damaging that the Brits were unable to score a try—the first time that had happened to them since the famous SCG mud Test of 1950. Ian Walsh and Noel Kelly were magnificent in the way they directed matters. Peter Gallagher, Brian Hambly and Dick Thornett took a lot of stopping. Johnny Raper was simply Johnny Raper. He was everywhere, creating space for supports when he had the ball and dragging people down all over the park when they had the ball.
The emergence of Dick Thornett was one of the real successes of the team. A triple international who had represented Australia in water polo at the Olympics and won praise from the giant New Zealand Rugby forward Colin Meads as a high-impact Wallaby, Dick was in his first season of Rugby League. Thornett brought to the Australian pack the same sort of dynamic that Dick Huddart had given Great Britain as they stitched us up a couple of times in Australia the previous year. He was a powerful running forward, fast as well as big, and with a sense of timing that allowed him to hit the line at precisely the right time.
One of his breaks that covered 30 metres or more gave Gasnier a try in the first Test, and throughout the tour his power running added a string to our bow that the team would not have had without him. The Thornetts were an outstanding breed. I had toured with the eldest brother, John, on Wallaby tours of Britain and New Zealand, and before we left Sydney John had captained Australia to an historic drawn series against the South African Springboks. Ken at fullback had made a huge mark with Leeds in England, joined Parramatta, and provided serious thrust to the Australian side for the strength of his running. He scored a powerful try in that Wembley Test which was important to the outcome.
That Kangaroo tour, however, will always be defined by the events of November 9, 1963, in what has become popularly known as the Swinton Massacre. Our attitude to this second Test had not changed. If we were to take the Ashes home we had to win it, since we couldn’t rely on a third Test decider. We prepared accordingly, and on the day our team produced a performance of a quality that I doubt had ever been seen before and has perhaps not been matched since.That we scored 50 points, a record, and managed twelve tries, another record, says it all. Everybody was on song—the wingers Irvine and Dimond scored five tries between them, the centres Gasnier and Langlands two each. The forwards ran like the wind. It was Rugby League beyond the imagination.
But for all of this excellence, there was one performance that was without doubt the greatest individual performance I have ever seen on a football field. This was the effort of our lock John Raper. In defence he covered the field like a vacuum cleaner, scything down anything that looked like an England break. In attack he was everywhere, creating space for supports with neat passes, making breaks, joining raids . . . whatever needed to be done, Raper seemed to be there to do it. Often he turned up when there was nothing on, but still found some way of twisting the Lion’s tail. He had a serious hand in nine of the twelve tries, a decisive hand in many of them. Even by the standards Raper seemed to set as a matter of course, this was one out of the box.
England had their setbacks. In the first Test they lost five-eighth Dave Bolton midway through the first half, and in the second both centre Eric Ashton and the new five-eighth Frank Myler were first-half casualties, leaving them two men short in the age of no replacements. But nobody in England was offering any excuses after our second Test win.The general consensus was that it was no contest. Indeed, it seemed to us they could have played with eighteen men and we still would have thrashed them. The final Test was as we had always expected it would be. They brought in a new referee, one ‘Sergeant-Major’ Eric Clay, who proved a more formidable adversary for us than our English opponents.
As frustrations built, the game got a little out of hand. Barry Muir chased his opposing half, Alex Murphy, to kick him in the backside and got sent off. Barry was never the most discreet of individuals. The crowd thought his attack on Murphy a bit over the top, and started pelting him with fruit or whatever they could lay their hands on as he left the field. He responded by grabbing a water bucket and half drowning some of them. A subsequent all-in brawl saw Brian Hambly and the English prop Cliff Watson dismissed, and by the time it was mercifully over England had climbed back to win 16–5. At the after-match dinner, our manager Jack Lynch made the usual diplomatic speech. He thanked the English for the game and said it was nice to win the Ashes, and he added a quick review of the performance of Sergeant-Major Clay. He was less than diplomatic now, getting stuck into Clay’s performance in a way that brought some rebuke from our hosts. ‘About the referee you call Sergeant-Major Clay,’ he summed up at the end of a long tirade, ‘after today perhaps you should make him a Brigadier.’ We all applauded wildly, to the general consternation of the English.
We rounded off the tour in France, where the tendency to relax a little after the hard work of Britain is always a danger. We lost the first Test against a good French side, but straightened up after that and finished up winning the next two. I managed to return to the team for the last two Tests. As a player, injury had made the tour a bit of a disappointment for me. But the overall experience was unmatchable.