ARTHUR SUMMONS
Kangaroo tours over the years have carried a reputation that is colourful yet largely mythical. Stories of naked men in bowler hats parading around the north of England, as was alleged to have happened in 1967, may or may not be true. But they have perpetuated a vision of Kangaroo tours as wild and woolly affairs, where standards are pretty loose. I certainly never found it that way on our tour of 1963–64. Sure, there were some pranks, and certainly there were times when the boys had a little more to drink than was good for them. But what else do you expect with young men locked away on a windy hill in Yorkshire, seemingly miles from anywhere, in a hotel that should have been condemned? It was a boring existence, yet at no time did I ever feel that our team overstepped the mark. In fact, in senior players like Ian Walsh, John Raper, Reg Gasnier and Noel Kelly, I would say we had very sound individuals who supported me whole-heartedly and made sure the tour achieved for us what we wanted to achieve. We would not have won otherwise.
Mind you, at times it was a close-run thing.When we arrived at the Troutbeck Hotel in the little town of Ilkley, on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, my first decision was aimed at establishing the discipline I knew was vital to the tour. Given some experience at home, and given the legend he already had built around himself, I considered it important to keep Johnny Raper on a short leash. So as we allocated the room list, I arranged to have John as my room-mate, where I could keep an eye on him. I wasn’t sure how he would take it. He might well have considered that I was treating him as an errant schoolboy, and reacted accordingly.
‘That’s terrific, Arthur,’ he said when I gave him the news. ‘Can I take your bags up for you?’ I was a bit nonplussed at such amiable behaviour, but he lugged all the bags—mine and his—up to our room as I made sure everybody else was comfortable. When I got to the room Raper had claimed the double bed and was lying there with a big grin on his face. He had consigned me to the stretcher-like single bed tucked away in a corner. No flies on Rapes. He knew exactly how the system worked, and he thought it much better if it worked principally for him. Captain–coach or not, I did not see the point of arguing. He had got me fair and square at our first entanglement, and I begrudgingly admired him for that. As the tour wore on, Raper and I became very happy room-mates, and his bubbly nature contributed every bit as much to the tour as his football did.
I was obsessive within myself through those early days and weeks to make sure I kept a firm hand on things, without smothering the boys’ natural exuberance. It was a fine line. Reg Gasnier was rooming with the big Wests winger Peter Dimond, who he did not really know all that well except as a violent opponent who would hit him with a stiff-arm tackle whenever he could catch him. By the community average, Reg was Mr Immaculate, and he let me know he did not particularly fancy a Western Suburbs biff artist as a room-mate. I quietly explained to Reg that Peter was a very nice man, as was he, and that I thought they would get on just fine once they got to know each other better. Dimond, of course, was a total gentleman off the field, one of those white-line-fever types who turned into something else when he was on it. I explained to Reg that if he really wanted to formalise the complaint he should talk to the managers, and that if a ticket home was required for him they would arrange it. Gasnier and Dimond shared the room. They became great mates, and the football they played together on the left side of the field throughout the tour was magic.
That room, however, was a magnet for some of the less refined members of the party. Gasnier was an ordered, neat sort of person who would consider it a failing if his tie was crooked. Most of the boys were hardly obsessed with tidiness and treated their rooms as wayward teenagers would. Clothes would be flung anywhere and everywhere. Some of them decided it was time Reg learned to be a little more relaxed about such things, so with Barry Muir in the lead they corralled a sheep from the back of the pub somewhere and wheeled it into Gaz’s room. They left it there. When Reg got back, the sheep had nearly demolished the place. Reg was seriously displeased. Dimond didn’t let a lot worry him, but he was a bit shirty about the clean-up job as well. Muir and his miscreant mates were beside themselves with laughter.
For the captain–coach, managing these things was a constant dilemma of judgement and balance.The Troutbeck was a shocking place to live, and its remoteness meant it was boring. If the lads didn’t have something to laugh about they would have turned nasty, and that’s when real trouble is at hand. Everybody understood that, and once we had helped Gasnier and Dimond clean up their room, it was something we could all laugh about. A modern team would never countenance the sort of conditions under which we lived. The furniture was old and unsound. At one stage Dick Thornett simply sat down and his chair disintegrated under him.
The best training run we did was the flat-chat race up the hill to the pub after our workouts, because we knew only the first three arrivals would get a hot shower. The incentive for that was huge. A cold shower in Yorkshire in winter is not something that finds its way into travel brochures. Worse still, the manager of the place was a humourless bloke who treated us like squatters. We were always getting bills for breaking things when the fittings were on their last legs, and the meals were always chicken done this way and that in a manner that might have found its way into a tyre factory. One of the travelling correspondents was Mike Gibson, at the very start of an illustrious career. He started one story for the Daily Telegraph about the boredom of the place with the news that ‘The darts don’t stick in the dartboard any more,’ such a workout had the board been given. For me, it was a far cry from the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair, where we had stayed in five-star comfort on the Wallaby tour a few years before.
Such an environment inspired some innovative thinking. Leeds was eleven miles away, and getting there was not easy. So the boys clubbed in and bought a couple of old bombs that were well and truly on their last legs but good enough to last a few weeks and provide some mobility. They became a treasured link with the bright lights of Leeds, not that there were too many bright lights even there. But at least there was civilisation, and that was a start. The cars rattled and shook and some of the driving was less than sedate, but everybody survived and the mobility made a difference to general morale. Cars became a tradition after that on future Kangaroo tours, even when the team stayed at the big casino-hotel in Leeds and lived in comparative luxury. More than one of those old bombs in later years finished up in local waterways when their job was done.
Keeping things on the straight and narrow was a constant challenge and required some diplomacy. One of the routines I organised was an occasional walk on the moors that lapped against the hotel. It was not the most exciting of activities, but in the absence of much else it was a good way to get the team together and, importantly, to get them out of the pub and away from the grinding boredom of the place. Still, convincing them of the wisdom of a stroll around the countryside was no easy task. At a team meeting before one of these treks, Ian Walsh announced that he had sore shins and wouldn’t be going. There was no doubt that Ian did indeed have sore shins . . . rival hookers took great delight in kicking the daylights out of them in the wild scrums that were a tour staple. But right or wrong, I interpreted his public announcement as something the rest of the troops might see as open defiance.
Walsh was the vice-captain on tour, captained the team in all the Tests of the English section while I was out of action, and did a sterling job on all fronts. He played tough, uncompromising football that was an inspiration to all around him, and when the tour post-mortems were done he was given widespread acclaim for the pivotal part he had played in our success. But something told me I had to stand and be counted over the walk on the moors, and I insisted he come. There was a brief but tense standoff. Had he mentioned it to me privately it would not have been a problem, but a lot of them were less than excited by the prospect of a country walk, and if I yielded to Walsh I might have had a rebellion on my hands. Ian was fine. He turned up at the appointed time and my authority was preserved—most of it, anyway. As Walsh sat and waited for us to leave, Barry Muir and his irascibles were nowhere to be found. Arthur Sparks and I scoured the hotel. We hauled them from under beds and out of cupboards and various hiding places they had found to tease me. We all set off for the moors laughing. The whole thing was a bit like playing fish, knowing when to pull hard on the line and when to let it play out a little.
One of the systems we used on tour to maintain reasonable order and efficiency was the appointment of ‘duty boys’, whose responsibility it was to see that each day’s program went according to plan. A key part of this was getting people out of bed and ensuring they were on time for team events. For one of the club games, the duty boy was Graham Wilson.We usually used a non-player as duty boy on match days, but somehow he got the job for this particular day despite the fact that he was to play the game. When we got on to the bus to head off for the match, the usual loiterers were missing, so Graham as duty boy went off to find them. He got them all back to the bus, and off we went. It wasn’t until we arrived at the ground that we realised we were short a second rower. Graham had gone back for a final check of the hotel, and we had taken off without him. He had to chase us in a cab. Fortunately all the towns where we played in the north of England are fairly close together, but it was a hefty fare just the same, and Graham was less than happy.
Another of the roles that I found fell to the captain–coach was that of counsellor. Mood can be a serious indicator of trouble on tour, and keeping tabs on signs of distress was imperative. At one point I noticed that Ken Irvine had gone into his shell a bit. He was morose at times, and it seemed clear that something was worrying him. ‘Is everything OK at home, Kenny?’ I asked. I had had enough experience myself of the trials of separation from loved ones to know that a downer on tour was mostly based in the difficulties of being away from home. Ken explained that he was worried about his wife, whose letters had made clear she was pretty lonely and was finding the long tour hard to handle. I volunteered to ring Val for him and see how things were, but Ken said he would ring that night. He did, and just the sound of each other’s voices helped. He was fine after that and had a wonderful tour. Often it was that simple, but I found it important just the same to keep an eye out for the telltale signs of homesickness or worry about those at home, because nothing can undermine a tour more quickly.
After the serious business of England, our three-Test sojourn in France felt more relaxed. This was always a danger at the end of an England campaign. The French are an erratic lot when it comes to Rugby League, but they can play some magnificent football, especially when they get the wind in their hair and decide to chuck the ball about. And their referees are totally unpredictable. Let your concentration drop against the French and you can find yourself in serious trouble on a number of fronts. Yet as we soaked up an entirely different culture, it was inevitable there would be some let-down after winning the Ashes. A few of the boys wanted to take some days off and go to Spain for a bit of a holiday. I told them that would be fine so long as we won the first Test. We lost. Spain was off the agenda. They all accepted that, and when we won the next two Tests it seemed worth it. It would have been an awful result if we had let defeat by the French tarnish what we all regarded then and now as the greatest tour of them all.