Football under both codes had prospered in Scotland, despite an unpromising early ban declared at Perth by King James I way back in May 1424, (and reiterated by James II, III and IV, presumably to little effect): ‘It is statute and the King forbiddis, that na man play at the futeball under the payne of xl.s [40 shillings] to be rasit to the Lord of the land.’ By the late nineteenth century, a cabal of high-minded Edinburgh schools and clubs had set a forbidding and Presbyterian tone for Scottish rugby, with particularly severe views on amateurism and any form of expenses or payment. The Scottish Football Union (SFU) opposed any ‘alterations designed to make the game faster, more interesting to spectators and so beneficial to gates’. Even shirt numbers reeked of professionalism: when King George V complained that he could not identify players at the Calcutta Cup he was rebuked: ‘This is a rugby match, not a cattle-sale.’ The SFU refused the touring 1905 All Blacks a guarantee, offering instead the gate, net of expenses deducted: the Southern Hemisphere had the last laugh on and off the field, carrying away a 12–7 victory and £1,700, four times what a guarantee would have given them. This naturally scotches any scabrous rumours spread by Englishmen that Scots are anything but the most generous of people.
Edinburgh’s Academicals may have been the first Scots rugby club in 1857, but their Glasgow namesakes were the first to send a team south, to Liverpool and Manchester in 1870. Two years later they crossed the sea to Belfast to defeat North of Ireland FC. In the absence of a Scottish governing body until 1873, Accies joined the English RFU. After an Association ‘International’ against England had been played at the Oval in 1870 (not officially recognised as most of the ‘Scots’ players were Londoners8), Accies’ J.W. Arthur signed a challenge to the English for a proper game of Rugby Football. It has all the bristle of the thistle, softened by the promise of a dram, as is the rugby way in Scotland:
Sir, There is a pretty general feeling among Scotch football players that the football power of the old country was not properly represented in the late so-called International Football Match. Not that we think the play of the gentlemen who represented Scotland otherwise than very good – for that it was so is amply proved by the stout resistance they offered to their opponents and by the fact that they were beaten by only one goal – but that we consider the Association rules, in accordance with which the late game was played, not such as to bring together the best team Scotland could turn out. Almost all the leading clubs play by the Rugby Code, and have no opportunity of practising the Association game even if willing to do so.
We therefore feel that a match played in accordance with any rules other than those in general use in Scotland, as was the case in the last match, is not one that would meet with support generally from her players. For our satisfaction, therefore, and with a view of really testing what Scotland can do against an English team we, as representing the football interests of Scotland, hereby challenge any team selected from the whole of England, to play us a match, twenty-a-side, Rugby rules, either in Edinburgh or Glasgow on any day during the present season that might be found suitable to the English players. Let this count as the return to the match played in London on 19th November, or, if preferred, let it be a separate match. If it be entered into we can promise England a hearty welcome and a first-rate match.
The English took up the challenge and a first ever rugby international was played in bright sunshine at Raeburn Place, Edinburgh, on 27 March 1871, in front of 4,000 spectators. Teams were twenty-a-side (six Scots being Accies, including Arthur) and two halves of fifty minutes were played. Scotland’s winning try was only awarded after a ten-minute argument; referee Dr H.H. Almond declared ‘when an umpire is in doubt, he is justified in deciding against the side which makes the most noise. They are probably in the wrong.’ The good doctor’s wisdom resonates loudly today.
By 1914, forty such ‘first-rate matches’ had been played, with Scotland three ahead in victories. The Saturday before the West clash, Accies’ Eric Young had won his only cap for his country with Huggan in the narrow Calcutta Cup defeat; trailing 6–16, Scotland fought back with a drop goal (then 4 points) and a converted try (5) to thrill the Inverleith crowd, but lost by a single point. By close of play that year, three players who took the field in this last international on British soil were already dead. In total, eleven men would not survive; there’s that ‘killer stat’.
There would be no next meeting for the two Glasgow rivals for a long while. On 7 September, West’s Honorary Secretary, Hugh Harper, announced that,
as so many members owing to the war are not available for football, the Committee have decided that all fixtures for the coming season be cancelled. The Committee also strongly urge upon all other members who are eligible, to promptly offer their services to some branch of His Majesty’s Forces.
The Accies’ own battle cry has been lost, but one distinguished Academy former pupil would take Harper at his word, serving in two branches of HM Forces and offering service to more than one King George.
Half back Louis Greig had not only captained club and country, but won three caps in the centre on the 1903 British tour of South Africa. In 1905 the All Blacks arrived; Edinburgh doctor Alfred Nelson Fell (an Otago University graduate born in Nelson, South Island) declined to play against his countrymen,9 and Accies’ Billy Church refused, so Greig stepped in as third choice – and third half back to counter the black pack of seven forwards and a rover. They strove to little avail, as they were ‘unaccustomed to playing this formation and the Scottish back play and defence were disorganised’; they lost 7–12. The following November, however, brought triumph when Louis skippered the Scots to victory over the visiting Springboks in front of a record 32,000 at Hampden Park.
By now Greig was serving in the Royal Navy as a surgeon-lieutenant, and playing his rugby for United Services and the Navy; he was a try-scoring fly half against the Officers of the Army in 1910. Perhaps this was when he was first noticed by King George. The Glaswegian was famed for his swearing; it was said that people did not go to watch him play, but to hear him. He dropped a pass directly in front of the royal box and, precisely aware of his position, exclaimed ‘Oh b … other!’ returning the king’s amused glance in full.
He met the teenage Prince Albert at Osborne Naval College, and became friend, mentor and later personal doctor to the shy and diffident stammerer. The grateful king saw to it that the pair served on the same ships – HMS Cumberland, then HMS Malaya. When war came, Louis joined the Royal Marines; he was captured at the fall of Antwerp in September 1914, spending eight months as a prisoner of war. Released in an exchange, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace on his first day back in Britain; the Court Circular shows that King George saw only one other visitor – Lord Kitchener.
After the king abandoned the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for Windsor, Greig also dropped his middle name, Leisler – given in honour of his father’s German business partner. (Fellow Scot, Douglas Schulze, capped thirteen times under that name, changed to his mother’s maiden name of Miller; England’s Frank Steinthal became Petrie.) Greig’s friendship with the prince grew: Louis became his equerry and they both joined the RAF, flying to France in a Handley-Page bomber as the war neared its climax in 1918. After the war, he played both Cupid and Wimbledon tennis partner to the now Duke of York and future George VI, his influence on him arguably greater than that of Lionel Logue, the Australian speech therapist; it was Louis who encouraged his courtship of the true ‘Kingmaker’ – Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Mother.
The Glasgow Academicals XV from that final hurrah against West before the holocaust joined up to a man. Of those willing Glasgow warriors, eight were killed, six wounded and only one returned home unscathed. The catalogue of deaths, wounds inflicted and decorations awarded to this single band of brothers is extraordinary. Of the six try-scorers, Thomas Burton was twice wounded at the Somme and invalided home in January 1917 with a mention in despatches and an MC. Glasgow Highlander Arthur Russell (a pre-war c
oach in France) died of his wounds in July 1916. William Barras of the Argyll & Sutherlands was awarded the Military Medal, but died of his wounds in March 1918, on the first day of the German Kaiserschlacht, an all-out gamble to win the war before the might of the Americans arrived.
Charles Andrew, who dropped a goal that March afternoon, was wounded three times, mentioned in despatches three times and won an MC and Bar. Scotland’s John Warren, who had faced Ireland in February drizzle at Lansdowne Road, also earned three wound stripes on his Royal Engineers sleeve and the MC on his chest. Skipper Arthur Laird joined the Highland Light Infantry (HLI) and was one of 19,240 men killed on the first day of the Somme; his was a one-way trip to Blighty Valley Cemetery. John Smith of the HLI was wounded in March 1917. John Sandeman was twice invalided home, from France and Palestine; his brother Frank fought in Mesopotamia and returned wounded from France in 1918. Robert Arthur of the Royal Glasgow Yeomanry earned six mentions in despatches and was awarded the MC and Belgian Croix de Guerre. George Spiers fought with 6th HLI in Egypt and France, was wounded earning his French Croix de Guerre and finally killed six weeks short of the Armistice in 1918. George MacEwan of the same battalion died of his wounds in July 1915 at Gallipoli. George Warren, who had scored four tries, was the sole survivor to return to the Accies’ Anniesland ground.
In an echo to the east, all of the 1914–15 Edinburgh Academy team of schoolboys, playing their final season while war raged, would go from sixth form into uniform. They suffered four wounded and six dead, all of them with Highland regiments, although one – Ian Gilmour Cameron – had taken to the air with the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) before being shot down by Richthofen in 1916. The last of the six survivors, Gurkha Captain George Alexander Bain, remained in the army and died in Devon in 1982. Their team photograph, taken at the end of the season, shows boyish young men, their faces serious in expectation of harder matches to come. Their autographs on the facing page, all underlined with the defiant manly flourish of the 1st XV, are a handwritten memorial. The ‘Athens of the North’ saw many of its brightest sons die before their promise could be fulfilled: just four Edinburgh schools (Academy, Fettes, Loretto and Merchiston Castle) nurtured eighteen of the fifty-five Varsity Blues who were to die in the war.
Glasgow Accies’ first loss was Stuart Bulloch-Graham, 2nd Gordon Highlanders, on 31 October, his name inscribed on the Menin Gate; the club would suffer another 326 deaths of its 1,375 former pupils who served. Newly capped Scottish flanker, Eric Templeton Young had joined the Territorial Force as early as 1911 and was promoted to captain in August 1914. After training, he joined the 8th Cameronians (The Scottish Rifles) who drilled at Accies’ original Burnbank ground, a green ‘oasis in a growing desert of red sandstone’. He was reported ‘missing, presumed killed’ at Gallipoli, fifteen months to the day after the victory over West. Aged just 23, he was not alone on that terrible June day in 1915: three of his Glasgow team-mates – Archie Templeton, Tommy Stout and William Church would also die in a disastrous attack at Gully Ravine.
A proud photograph of Eric Young in December 1914 with ten smiling fellow Cameronian officers, all ‘Old Glasgow Academy Boys’, records that eight would die that same day, with a ninth killed elsewhere. For many years, his body lost, Young was wrongly commemorated with the 6th Battalion at Le Touret in France but his name is now rightly carved alongside his club comrades on the Helles Memorial, as well as at London Scottish where he also played. He was, wrote a fellow officer, ‘a man of sincere and straightforward character, absolutely downright and one of the most fearless. He took great interest in his men, and was much loved by them.’ His LSFC clubmate and Scotland flank partner from March, the solid and experienced Freddy Turner, was already dead, shot by a sniper near Ypres, in January.
The Scottish Rifles were in the 52nd (Lowland) Division of pre-war Territorials, which took heavy losses even before leaving home turf. On the way to Liverpool for embarkation to Gallipoli in May 1915, 210 men died and 224 were injured (mainly 7th Royal Scots) in a fiery train crash at Quintinshill, near Gretna, to this day Britain’s worst rail disaster. It briefly delayed their departure for the Dardanelles and more slaughter under a blistering sun. Lieutenant Francis Wishart Thomson, aged 24, of the Royal Scots, Edinburgh Academy and Oxford, survived the crash, but met the same fate as the Glaswegians at Gully Ravine; his younger brother, Lieutenant Eric Thomson, aged 22, died in the same action. Lieutenant Tommy Stout, aged 23 but looking more youthful than Young in the photograph, never got that cherished Scotland cap. He came close, as an international reserve (not a substitute – such a notion was scorned), but was never called up; instead he joined the Colours on another field.
Major James Findlay, took command of the Cameronians a week after landing at Cape Helles in June and, another week later, led his inexperienced battalion into action at Gully Ravine. Where there was ammunition for artillery support, the Turkish trenches were easily taken; more often there was none and waves of frontal attacks were exposed to withering machine-gun fire in the bright glare of daylight. The men had small metal triangles sewn on their backs to aid identification by their own troops. As the bombardment lifted, the ground sparkled, ‘as if someone had quite suddenly thrown a big handful of diamonds onto the landscape’ wrote Sir Ian Hamilton, a cerebral commander and lyrical diarist. Those diamonds would be dulled in scrub fires which reduced bodies to ashes and left only bones. Over 10,000 Turks were killed too in their desperate counter-attacks. Fifty years later, a historian found ‘piles of grinning skulls’ and kicked ‘clouds of bones scuffling through the dust’ as he walked.10 Findlay recalled:
I do not think that many of us got much sleep … but dawn came at last, cool and beautiful, with a hint of the coming heat, and the dried-up sparse scrub had been freshened by the night’s dewfall. One was impressed by the good heart of all ranks, but, whether it was premonition or merely the strain of newly acquired responsibility, I could not feel the buoyancy of anticipated success … The artillery bombardment which took place from 09.00 to 11.00 was, even to a mind then inexperienced in a real bombardment, quite too futile, but it drew down upon us, naturally, a retaliatory shelling. Centuries of time seemed to go by. One became conscious of saying the silliest things, all the while painfully thinking, ‘It may be the last time I shall see these fellows alive!’ Prompt at 11.00 the whistles blew.11
His men were met by deadly fire from all sides. Findlay sent back for reinforcements and advanced with his Adjutant, Captain Bramwell, and Signals Officer, Lieutenant Tommy Stout, to establish a forward headquarters:
We soon arrived at Pattison’s bombing party, which I had sent up this sap. He had been killed, and those of his men that were left were lying flat; they could not get on as the sap rose a few yards in front of them to the ground-level, and the leading man was lying in only about 18 inches of cover. Bullets were spattering all around us, and we seemed to bear charmed lives, until just as we arrived at the rear of this party Bramwell fell at my side, shot through the mouth. He said not a word, and I am glad to think that he was killed outright. I made up my mind that the only thing to be done was to collect what men there were and make a dash for it. I told this to Stout, and stooping down to pick up a rifle I was shot in the neck. At the moment I didn’t feel much, but when I saw the blood spurt forward I supposed that it had got my jugular vein. I stuck a handkerchief round my neck and tried to get on, but I was bowled over by a hit in the shoulder. Up came young Stout and said, ‘I am going to try to carry you back, Sir!’
His wounds were serious, but Findlay was obsessed with his objective and the next attack. Tommy Stout ignored him:
I told Stout to send another runner for reinforcements. A few minutes later he came back and took me by the shoulders and some other good fellow lifted me by the feet, and together they got me back some 10 yards, and though a bullet got me in the flesh of the thigh, I was now comparatively sheltered while they were still exposed. It was then that a splinter of shell blew off Tommy Stout’s he
ad, and the other man was hit simultaneously. Gallant lads! God rest them!
Findlay finally staggered back to the lines, with seven major wounds. His battalion had suffered over 470 casualties in its baptism of fire, including twenty-five of its twenty-eight officers. A chaplain described the valley ‘with its heaps of rotting refuse, its burning pyres and sickening stench’ as ‘a veritable Gehenna’; General Egerton, inspecting the ravaged remains of his 52nd Lowland Division, was enraged when General Hunter-Weston blandly remarked that he was pleased to have had the opportunity of ‘blooding the pups’. Major Findlay wrote to Tommy Stout’s parents in Kelvinside: ‘Tom was a good soldier and a great favourite with all of us. I do not suppose there was an officer in the Battalion who knew his job better than he did.’ ‘No more’, wrote the Glasgow Chronicle, ‘shall we see Tommy Stout scoring a try for the Accies, with that wonderful swerve of his and with his hair flying in the wind.’ His body was never identified; Tommy and Eric Young share the Helles Memorial with 20,868 others.
Thirty-nine from Bill McLaren’s beloved Hawick RFC did not return to their Mansfield Park ground in the border country. The blackest day for the ‘Greens’ was 12 July, once again in the furnace of Gallipoli, when the 4th King’s Own Scottish Borderers were caught in a ‘friendly fire’ bombardment and took over 350 casualties, eighty-six of them from Hawick and District. Five died from the rugby club: Privates William Beatson, Cairns and Cranston, Eli Cunningham and Thomas Farmer. The ‘weel-kent’ internationalist Major Walter ‘Wattie’ Forest from Kelso, capped at full back in eight successive Scotland games from 1903, survived that day, and would win the MC on the Somme. His charmed life ran out at Gaza, Palestine, in April 1917, in his second crack at the Turks, when he was killed leading an assault.
After the Final Whistle Page 5
