After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  Marriott’s company was never incorporated; the workings of committees may be tolerated as a necessary evil in peacetime, but rugby players preferred to follow charismatic leaders to war. One such leader was Edgar Mobbs.

  If one man epitomised rugby’s contribution to the war effort, it was Edgar Roberts Mobbs. This tall, powerful winger with seven England caps had captained his country once (‘the Ultima Thule of any Rugby player’s ambitions’, he told the Boy’s Own Paper) but held his home town crowd at Northampton Saints in thrall for seven years and 177 tries as its leader; Saints were not the power they are now, and many viewed Mobbs as ‘carrying the team on his shoulders’. His East Midlands Counties was the only provincial side to beat the touring Australians and he had the personal satisfaction of England’s first try against Australia.

  Too old at 32 for a commission when Kitchener made his first call for 100,000 men in August 1914, Mobbs enlisted immediately as a private soldier. Like some energetic feudal squire, he set about raising a company of 264 like-minded local sportsmen, which became D Company, 7th Northants, known as ‘Mobbs’ Own’ – readers may remark the thread of rugby-playing D companies woven through these pages. ‘On 14 September, he marched away from the Northampton barracks at the head of the company he had raised, to entrain for a military camp’, wrote Sewell. Despite the private taking a presumptuous lead, he was not formally commissioned until the end of training.

  George Percival, fourteen years a diminutive Saints scrum half with ‘attitude’ (goes with the job), played under Mobbs and followed his call. The recruiting sergeant thanked him politely, but pointed out he was too short. Percival protested: ‘My captain said to come and join up, so here I am.’ The language became more Anglo-Saxon, and when the sergeant threatened to kick him out the door; George turned on him: With ____ like you running this war, you’ll soon kill off all the tall men, and then you’ll have to come for me, ’cos I won’t come willing.’ Two years later they had killed off the tall men, lowered the height restrictions, and sent George his call-up papers, which he ignored. Eventually two redcaps came to his house, only to find him packed and ready to go: ‘I told you ____ in 1914 you’d have to come and fetch me, and now you have. Let’s go to war.’

  Mobbs was a one-man recruiting machine; when he wasn’t recruiting, he played rugby and often combined both. He sat on the wartime committee of the Barbarian Football Club (along with England’s Bruno Brown, Cherry Pillman and Harold ‘Dreadnought’ Harrison). In training at Shoreham Camp, he captained a team against his own Baa-Baas in a December match ‘in aid of Lady Jellicoe’s North Sea Fleet Comforts Fund’. As 1915 dawned, he switched to the famed black-and-white hoops at Leicester, ‘for encouragement of recruiting and in aid of patriotic funds’. The improvised nature of these games can be seen on the team-sheets. At Leicester both sides were one short: Shoreham’s full back, James Urquhart, was a Grimsby Town amateur footballer and Northampton teacher who had never played rugby before, nor belonged to a club, but sailed under the Rosslyn Park flag of convenience on the irresistible advice of his gigantic team-mate, John Rosher, of the Durham Light Infantry.

  Mobbs was prime mover in a ‘Scotland versus England’ challenge played at the County Ground, Northampton, on 30 January 1915. The match programme left spectators in no doubt of the serious purpose of the game, exclaiming: ‘90 PER CENT of the Rugby Players of our Empire are serving their King and Country. Will you join them!’ No question mark was used or needed. The local hero was star of the show: Lieutenant Mobbs as ‘the English Captain’ is pictured in uniform with Colonel Fawcett at the Northampton Barracks. The same photograph would reappear in a changed world after the war. Edgar skippered the side from the centre against Lieutenant Ian Moffat-Pender’s16 line-up of Scots in khaki; they were actually lent Scotland’s official blue jerseys for the occasion while ‘England’ played in the green and white hoops of Mobbs’s East Midlands. The team was essentially the Shoreham Camp side, peppered with Saints and Counties men from D Company. Programme notes confide that ‘Lieutenant Mobbs will be pleased to interview any new recruits in the Dressing Room after the Match or at the Plough Hotel after 7 o’clock in the evening.’ Kitchener is quoted: ‘We must have more men and still more men if we are to crush the enemy.’ As chilling for an English crowd as these words and the January weather was the announcement tucked away in small print: ‘The Scotch Pipers from Bedford will be in attendance and play Selections.’ ‘England’ restored the peace of a day in the shires, ‘winning by about 50 points’.

  Mobbs’s Barbarian rugby caravan reached Richmond’s Old Deer Park in April to play the RAMC, its ranks swelled by a glittering array of eight international stars; they faced another six caps in the Medics’ red jerseys. Billed as the ‘Great Rugby Service Match’ in aid of the Red Cross Fund, this was one of the first Services charity games organised by Rosslyn Park’s Harry Burlinson, which sustained rugby through the war in the absence of clubs. A week later, on 17 April 1915, Mobbs captained the Baa-Baas at Cardiff Arms Park in what was termed a ‘Military International’ between Wales and ‘England’, designed to boost recruiting for the newly formed Welsh Guards and to raise funds for local military charities. The match raised £200. Wales fielded a near full international team with only two uncapped players, Dan Callan of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, and Tom Parker. The Barbarian side had twelve Englishmen, two Irishmen and a Welshman (Joseph ‘Birdie’ Partridge) who had been capped for South Africa.

  Even Barbarian historian Jock Wemyss found the 26–10 victory ‘one of the greatest surprises imaginable, as not for one moment was it expected that the scratch Barbarian Service XV stood any possible chance of beating the Welsh side’. Scratch was the word. At Paddington, they were a man down and counted only seven forwards; on the train, they discovered centre John Birkett of Harlequins, who had been independently invited by the Cardiff organisers to turn out for ‘England’. At least they now had a XV, but played with an extra back instead of a full pack:

  That the seven forwards not only held, but actually got the better of the Welsh eight was the most astonishing feature of the match, but it must also be said that Birkett and Mobbs displayed such wonderful form and ran so hard and straight, that the Welsh centres were quite unable to cope with them.17

  On that day, Wales wore white, which everyone knows is not right; just as in 2007 grey was not All Black against France. (In the 2011 Final, the French nobly conceded a colour change out of respect to the hosts; how might that result have changed if New Zealand had played in their all-white second strip?) In the end, Wemyss concluded that victory belonged to the ‘visitors [who] were remarkably fit owing to the fact that fourteen of them were then training for Active Service’. On the same day, at Hill 60 east of Ypres, Alec ‘Fin’ Todd, British Isles and England forward, twice wounded in the Boer War, returned from home leave, stood tall in his trench and was again wounded, in the throat: third time, not so lucky.

  Services rugby came to an abrupt end when they crossed the Channel. Initially war was one big game and the boys from schools and clubs relished the outdoor life, the physical exertion and the bonds of male company. In fact, it reminded them exactly of school life (with dreary diet to match). Scotland’s Freddy Turner, ‘somewhere in France’ with the Liverpool Scottish in late 1914, wrote to his old master at Sedbergh:

  It is a man’s life out here and it agrees with me splendidly. I have never felt fitter in my life; in fact, I could very nearly run the whole length of the old footer field at school uphill without breaking down, which, you will admit, would be a performance of some merit.18

  Henry Grierson, Mobbs’s friend, rugby team-mate and comrade in D Company, recalled: ‘To France we went in August 1915, did a lot of training for open warfare, and suddenly walked sixty miles to Loos to take part in that appalling mess-up. No orders, no rations, no water, no nothing.’

  In early September 1914 after the RFU cancelled the season, The Times reported that ‘rugby football is temporarily and
honourably dead.’

  More permanently, no less honourably, its players would be next.

  Notes

  1 Paul Rubens’s song ‘Your King and Country Want You’ was addressed to sportsmen.

  2 The August Bank Holiday was then observed on the first Monday in August.

  3 R.F. Oakes in Yorkshire RFU Memorial Book 1914–19.

  4 Unpublished memoir, courtesy of his daughter, Lady Maggie Robinson.

  5 Fairbairn would die in June 1915 in a trench near Wijtschaete, Dale in a flaming kite balloon in Italy in January 1918.

  6 The Citizen, 29 August 1914.

  7 The Citizen, 3 September 1914.

  8 Letters courtesy of Hugh Barrow and The Glasgow Academical Club.

  9 The Times, 7 November 1914.

  10 Daily Telegraph, 14 September 1914.

  11 The Stratford Express, 2 December 1914.

  12 Chairman of the Automobile Association and a leading Conservative politician.

  13 Major Leonard Tosswill, Football: The Rugby Union Game (Cassell, 1925).

  14 Daily Telegraph, 30 November 1914.

  15 Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1914.

  16 One of only eight in Scotland’s 1914 Calcutta Cup team to survive.

  17 Andrew ‘Jock’ Wemyss, Barbarian Football Club 1890 to 1955 (Playfair, 1955).

  18 Quoted by Sewell, Roll of Honour.

  3

  Scotland

  When will we see your like again?

  That fought and died for

  Your wee bit hill and glen1

  The Scots were spoiling to fight: some 690,000 served, of whom 65 per cent willingly joined the Colours in the two years before conscription, a higher proportion than the overall 53 per cent of British volunteers.2 And that’s without reckoning with the ‘Jockish diaspora’ across the Empire who rallied to the cause. By November 1918 Scotland topped another dismal wartime table: the flower of its rugby men – thirty-one capped players – had been hacked down, the highest score of all the nations.

  Scots took the early hits in 1914 when the trained regulars of the BEF tried in vain to stop the swinging arm of the Schlieffen Plan punching into France. They would be the early casualties at the First Battle of Ypres, whose frozen bodies dug into the parapets would thaw and reek in the spring of 1915, as the Second Battle began. They would wilt in the June heat of Gallipoli, in a disastrous campaign of mismanagement and misadventure. In September 1915, kilted regiments charged with braveheart cries at Loos, just as the Tyneside Scottish would at the Somme in 1916. With players to the fore as natural leaders, Scottish rugby suffered early blows in the first half of the ‘Greater Game’. The first was Lieutenant Ronald Simson, aged 24, capped just once for Scotland against the ‘Auld Enemy’, and killed by a new foe after just forty days of war. He was lionised by friends and the cheerleading British press as the first international sportsman to die for the Colours in this new war.3

  Edinburgh-born Simson was an all-round athlete who captained the Royal Military Academy XV at Woolwich. His impressive showing in the first of his three Army v. Navy games at Queen’s Club secured him selection at centre for Scotland at Twickenham in 1911. He ‘picked up a bad pass, ran clear to Williams [the English full back] kicked over his head and after nearly colliding with a goalpost, managed to get the touch down’. His wing that day was London Scottish team-mate Lieutenant Stephen Steyn (originally Stephanus from Cape Province), a Rhodes scholar, capped before he won his Blue. Like Simson, he joined the Royal Field Artillery (RFA); Steyn died in Palestine, the day before General Allenby took Jerusalem in 1917. Despite his try, Ronnie was never picked for Scotland again. Perhaps he lacked seriousness: he was always ‘bubbling over with mirth … if he was stamped upon by the opposing forwards, he came up shaking with laughter’. He was not laughing on 14 September; as he reconnoitred on horseback for his battery, a shell burst under his mount, killing man and beast instantly.

  Two days later another London Scot, James Huggan from Jedburgh, Edinburgh medical graduate and RAMC lieutenant, was the second to fall. His game was one of ‘all-out dash and energy’. He had scored one of three tries4 in the last close-fought Calcutta Cup at Inverleith; on 13 August, just nine days into the war, he dashed to France with the Coldstream Guards in the force hastily despatched to repel Germany from neutral Belgium. After Mons, the 25-year-old Huggan’s war became a desperate fighting retreat.

  Newspapers were feeding public bloodlust by painting all Germans as barbaric, nun-raping Huns, library-burners and child-murderers laying waste to ‘poor little Belgium’. They even accused them of melting down British corpses for candle tallow. James Huggan, doctor and professional soldier, calmly did what he was trained to do and showed a sense of fair play nurtured on the rugby field and in his Hippocratic Oath; in doing so, he gave his own life to save his enemy. His CO, Lieutenant Colonel Fielding described the action on the Aisne to Huggan’s brother:

  There were in a barn about sixty wounded Germans; they were all cases that could not move without help. The Germans shelled this barn and set it on fire. Your brother, in spite of shot and shell raining about him, called for volunteers to help him save these wounded men from this burning building and I am glad to say it was greatly in consequence of his bravery that they were all saved. After he had run this great danger successfully he moved many of his wounded men to a quarry in rear, when a big shell came into it and killed him and many others. He was buried where he fell. The whole battalion regretted his loss, as we had all got very fond of him, and admired him as a really brave man, always ready to sacrifice himself for the good of those who should happen to come under him for treatment.5

  As troops staggered back in headlong retreat before the relentless German push, his field hospital of broken and bleeding casualties ‘in rear’ had often found itself closer to the enemy than the fighting line. His previous coolness and bravery under fire had commended him for the Victoria Cross, but his compassion for his fellow men, regardless of whether they wore khaki or field-grey, was not the story the War Office – or editors – wanted in the press. His commendation is as lost as his body; only his name remains, on the La Ferté-sous-Jouarre memorial and in Sir John French’s despatches.

  Scots also led the charge of the citizen-soldiers: the 14th (County of London) Battalion, London Regiment (London Scottish), were the first Territorials to cross the Channel to Le Havre on 16 September. Six weeks later, on All Hallows’ Eve, they were the first into action near the Belgian village of Messines. The London Scottish Football Club (LSFC) mourns 103 men on its enamelled bronze memorial at the Richmond Athletic Ground; nineteen were internationalists, the red lion’s share of Scottish rugby’s honour roll, with Huggan the first.

  Forty-five of those men were mythologised in London Scottish (1914), the elegy by poet and 1978 Magdalen College XV skipper, Mick Imlah6 from Milngavie:

  April, the last full fixture of the spring:

  ‘Feet, Scottish, feet’ – they rucked the fear of God

  Into Blackheath. Their club was everything:

  And of the four sides playing that afternoon,

  The stars, but also those from the back pitches,

  All sixty volunteered for the touring squad,

  And swapped their Richmond turf for Belgian ditches.

  October: mad for a fight, they broke too soon

  On the Ypres Salient, rushing the ridge between

  ‘Witshit’ and Messines. Threequarters died.

  Of that ill-balanced and fatigued fifteen

  The ass selectors favoured to survive,

  Just one, Brodie the prop, resumed his post.

  The others sometimes drank to ‘The Forty-Five’:

  Neither a humorous nor an idle toast.

  There is artistic licence here: Scottish did not play on the last weekend of the season, nor did all four sides play the same day, or even against Blackheath, and Brodie is a mystery. But his poem has a hard core of fact: in 1919, pre-war Territorial and club member John
King wrote to the regimental Gazette stating that of the sixty in the four XVs playing at the end of the season forty-six had been killed. So what if Imlah chose instead to rhyme ‘survive’ with ‘five’, for this is what poets do. A toast to ‘The Forty-Five’ with its distant Jacobite echo will always make Scottish hearts beat faster.

  The 14th was no ‘Pals’ battalion, joining up in an autumn rush of patriotic fervour. Eight from LSFC were already serving with the regiment; all eight were at Messines. On 31 October, they were ordered to plug a gap in the Ypres Salient to withstand a German attack. Requisitioned ‘Old Bill’ buses, still hawking Pear’s Soap and Fry’s Chocolate, shipped 800 London Scots in distinctive hodden grey kilts,7 sporrans and glengarries, to Wijtschaete (‘Whitesheet’ to Tommy, ‘Witshit’ to Jock).

  From midday till the next dawn breaking over the ‘wee bit hill’ at Messines, their Hallowe’en vigil held off the enemy and averted the threatened breakthrough. But they paid the butcher’s bill in full, with more than 300 killed, missing or wounded, and were forced to retire. LSFC’s price was heavy: Oxford Blue Charles Farquharson was wounded and missing in action; Kyle and James Ross (capped for Scotland in 1905) were killed; B.D. Tod survived Messines, but was dead before Christmas; Robertson, Jebb and Mather were commissioned in other regiments but did not see the Armistice. Private Kinross was back – briefly – on the rugby field in December: the 6ft 1in forward wrote in his diary, ‘Beautiful day. Played Rugger in the afternoon, game stopped in second half as we had to parade and march off.’ He was later commissioned and survived the whole four years. Messines remains a battle honour of the London Regiment; a dinner every Hallowe’en at its Horseferry Road depot commemorates the first horrors and heroism shown in October 1914.

  Six hundred kilometres north of the Exiles’ ground, in Britain’s then second city, Glasgow Academicals played arch-rivals West of Scotland in the last game of their season on 28 March 1914. ‘Accies’, a club of former schoolboys from the city’s Academy, were reigning Scottish champions. ‘West’ were founded in 1865, a year before the Glasgow Academical Football Club – no need, it was felt, to include the word ‘Rugby’ as Association did not arrive in Glasgow until the formation of Queen’s Park in 1867 (and why on earth mention some wee English school?). The fixture, first played in 1867, is an ancient tie that still binds the clubs to this day. On this occasion, the ‘junior’ club ran out winners by 27 points to 8, although the championship would elude Accies, despite their season of 500 points scored and only 76 against.