Another Hawick son and hero, Walter Sutherland, or ‘Wattie Suddy’, not only won thirteen caps on the wing for Scotland, but was national sprint champion and wore the Scottish athletics vest. A Seaforths subaltern, he was killed on 4 October 1918, five weeks short of the Armistice and seven weeks before his 28th birthday. According to Sewell:
such was his anxiety to be with his men after a period of rest, he hired a bicycle to cover the distance separating him from them. Passing through the village of Hulluch, a stray shell from the enemy reached his vicinity … and he was killed, not leading his men as he would have desired, but nevertheless in just such a manner as he lived, doing his duty.12
Off Cape Helles the waves would also swallow Scots captain David ‘Darkie’ Bedell-Sivright. A surgeon in the Royal Naval Division, he worked ceaselessly in the charnel-house conditions of insanitary field hospitals and ships in that baking summer, first operating on Royal Scots Fusiliers, then Royal Marines. For a man renowned in Australia for his aggressive rugby which verged on outright violence, this was often to his frustration: ‘It makes me swear that I am a medico. I’d be ten times more useful with a parcel of jam-tin bombs and a few Turks in front of me, than a sort of qualified vet.’
Twice a British Isles tourist, once as captain, with four Cambridge Blues and twenty-two Scotland caps (his debut at age 19 against Wales), Darkie was brought down by septicaemia after an insect bite in September. No little irony here for a man who was, in Sewell’s view, ‘the hardest forward who ever played International football’,13 and once reportedly rugby-tackled a carthorse on Edinburgh’s Princes Street after a match dinner. This after he had stopped the Edinburgh traffic for hours by lying across the tram rails; the police knew his reputation and dared not intervene. But man against mosquito is not an equal fight: RND lieutenant and poet Rupert Brooke, one half of a gilded but doomed centre partnership at Rugby School with Poulton-Palmer, had died the same way at Skyros, en route to Gallipoli in April. Bedell-Sivright, as is traditional for sea burials, is on the Royal Naval Memorial at Portsmouth; less traditional but as well-deserved is his 2013 place in the World Rugby Hall of Fame.
Brave are the hearts that beat beneath Scottish skies. Many more would be broken.
Notes
1 From ‘Flower of Scotland’ by Roy M.B. Williamson, The Corries Music Ltd.
2 Information from Ewen Cameron, Professor of Scottish History, Edinburgh University.
3 This ignored the rightful claim of France’s Alfred Mayssonié, who died at the Marne on 6 September. By coincidence he was also the first Frenchman to leave the field injured in an international, against England in 1908.
4 The others came from George Will on the other wing. This ‘flying Scot’ was shot down over Arras in March 1917.
5 Quoted by Sewell, Roll of Honour.
6 Imlah sadly died young, aged 52, of motor neurone disease in 2009.
7 Lt Col. Lord Elcho in 1859 clothed his men not in a patterned tartan but in the plain hodden grey common throughout Scotland: ‘A soldier is a man hunter. As a deer stalker chooses the least visible of colours, so ought a soldier to be clad.’
8 The first official Association Football international was therefore not played until 1872, after the first Rugby Football international.
9 He was never picked again by Scotland.
10 Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London, 1965).
11 J.M. Findlay, With the Eighth Scottish Rifles 1914–19 (London, 1926).
12 E.H.D. Sewell Rugger: The Man’s Game (Hollis & Carter, 1947).
13 E.H.D. Sewell, Roll of Honour of Rugby Internationals (1919).
4
Australia
In history’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.
As the Greeks knew, there is drama in the unity of time and place. For Australians, one single day in the Great War has grown to be the defining symbol of nationhood: 25 April 1915, commemorated as ANZAC Day. It is a day that remembers one place, a tiny patch of sandy beach, then called Gaba Tepe, now officially renamed Anzac Cove. In all 8,141 Australians died in the misbegotten Gallipoli campaign out of a total wartime death toll of some 60,000.
Such is its significance in the Australian mind that ceremonies from Canberra to London, from Villers-Bretonneux to Bullecourt, where many more Australians later died, commemorate one day when battle raged thousands of miles away on a remote peninsula, not far from the site of ancient Troy. Myths are powerful; they are rarely the whole truth but they can make nations. Gallipoli is Australia’s war myth. For a country where sport is an obsession, its nation-building military exploits are entwined with sporting mythologies. Myths also need grand Homeric figures and two of Australia’s greatest rugby warriors were on that beach that day: Tom Richards and Blair Swannell.
New South Welshman T.J. ‘Rusty’ Richards is the only Australian-born player to represent both Australia and Britain; in his honour, the Wallabies and Lions contest the Tom Richards Trophy every dozen years. In a globe-trotting career, he also represented Transvaal, Bristol, Gloucestershire, East Midland Counties, Toulouse, Biarritz, Queensland, the Waratahs and Manly, and coached France. When he won Olympic gold for Australia The Times departed from its customary reserve to proclaim: ‘If ever the Earth had to select a Rugby Football team to play against Mars, Richards would be the first player chosen.’ In war he served from Gallipoli to Bullecourt and was decorated with another medal, the Military Cross.
Tom was a wandering rugby troubadour. This early pioneer of the fine antipodean tradition of ‘going walkabout’ introduced surfing to France and felt ‘expanding one’s horizons to be more important than money’. In 1905 his miner father took the family to South Africa, looking for work in the goldfields. Tom joined a Mines team full of Cornishmen like Redruth’s Jim ‘Maffer’ Davey, later of England; both turned out for Transvaal in the Currie Cup. The South Africans planned to tour Britain in 1906; not yet eligible to play for the Springboks, Tom decided to play against them. He sailed from Durban to England, climbed off the boat and joined the nearest club, which happened to be Bristol.
Residency qualifications in Britain were less rigid when it came to outstanding rugby talent; Tom was duly selected for Gloucestershire against the South Africans, who were somewhat disconcerted to see him. Hearing of plans for a first Australian tour of Britain in 1908, he hurried home to win selection for what would be called the Wallabies.1 After impressing for Queensland, Richards won his place on the tour, playing against Wales and England, and scoring the maiden Test try by a Wallaby. The British press had tried to christen them the ‘Rabbits’, but they rejected the nickname of a pest introduced by the British.
Rugby’s popularity in Australia was demonstrated by the crowd of 52,411 at Sydney Cricket Ground the previous year, who watched New South Wales play New Zealand. National identity was now being asserted on overseas rugby fields in the ‘green and pleasant land’ of the Mother Country. The famed green-and-gold shirts were a long way off2 and Australia played in light blue with a waratah flower on the left breast. Captain Herbert ‘Paddy’ Moran noted that when the scrum was under pressure against Wales, ‘the pack would encourage each other with cries of, “Australia! Australia!”’ But he lamented the pressure to perform an Aboriginal war-cry, haka-style, as the ‘Wallabies’ gravest affliction’.
The tour coincided with the London Olympics, at which rugby was an event. When defending champions France withdrew, the only teams were Australia and Great Britain, represented by reigning county champions Cornwall, the county of Tom’s father’s birth. Aussie victory by 32–3 in the ‘Final’ at a foggy and half-empty White City stadium, meant that the miner’s son had struck both gold, in the form of his Olympic winner’s medal, and another blow for Australian sporting pride. He might have compared medals over a beer with his mate Maffer Davey, but the Cornish had just one silver medal to share between them.
The British press were admiring:
It is only fair to the Australians
to speak of their play in terms of unqualified praise. The ground was very slippery and very heavy and as a result of several hours of continuous rain the ball was very greasy. The excellence of the play of the Australian backs therefore surprised the spectators. They gave a display of football which would have done credit to a Welsh international side at its best.3
They stood the test of comparison with Wales in a close defeat by a penalty, 6–9. The Daily Mail selected Richards for a ‘World’s Greatest XV’ from those watched by its correspondent over fifty years. His individual contribution to the ‘First Wallabies’ brought him acclaim as:
the greatest player seen during the season, whose pace, tackling, cross-kicking and resourcefulness stamps him as one of the finest forwards who ever put on football boots. Throughout the tour he was the best man on the field in every match, and how many tries he gained for his side indirectly would be difficult to say.4
On their return to Australia, eleven of the 1908 Wallabies defected to Rugby League in search of a living from the game; Union crowds declined and the echo of their parting shots is still heard today.
Back in Queensland’s gold-mining country, Richards remained true to Union. He captained and coached Charters Towers, but his wanderlust soon took him back to Africa, where Dr Tom Smyth’s 1910 British Isles team would soon arrive. With the sureness of destiny, Richards was invited to join the injury-stricken tourists and made twelve appearances, listed as a Bristol player, including two Tests. In 1912, he was once again Australian, touring North America as vice-captain and in the side for the ‘All-America’ Test. He returned to England, touring France with Mobbs’s East Midlands Counties in 1913. He helped train France for their match against Wales in Paris and guested for Toulouse. The prodigal then hiked with his swag-bag and £50 to Biarritz, where he surfed and picked up a game or two, before returning to Sydney.
In August 1913, Tom retired from rugby and became a writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and sports paper The Referee. When he enlisted in 1914 – with such alacrity that his service number was 25 – his given occupation was not journalist but ‘traveller’. The adventurer would sail forth again with the first Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on 1 November, on the troopship HMAT Euripides – a portent of tragedy if there ever was one. He railed against the deity in his diary:
The whole business seems almost unbelievable. Thirty-five ships laden with men and weapons, some 30,000 in number, including some of the country’s very best men and most valuable assets … There is something wrong with the world. This is how we sailed out from Albany, in mournful procession, for a destination unknown, and enshrouded in mystery, making a course westerly. Church service was held at 11.30 when the Chaplain tried to justify the Allies’ position and asked God for protection and deliverance. The irony of it all! What hypocrisy! Surely this great God, if he had the power to influence victory in any particular way, would also have the power to prevent it at the very first and before lives were sacrificed.
So it came to pass that on 24 April 1915 he found himself off the Turkish coast. With the lofty perspective of an Olympian and potential interplanetary sportsman, Richards was sceptical of the area’s antiquity (‘Achilles, is buried here, or at any rate there is a place described as the “Tomb of Achilles”’) but conscious of new history being made. That evening he listened to an officer’s final briefing aboard ship:
His speech was full of fine humour, dealing chiefly with our likely fear. It was hardly the kind of speech one would expect on the eve of big doings, as there was plenty of ridicule, nonsense, but no hard facts or detailed information. It seemed more as though we were preparing for a pantomime instead of grim warfare. I don’t mean for one moment that he should have made us melancholy and miserable but he could have given us something like an idea of what to expect.
Humour, much of it the deepest black, was a survival tonic for trench-bound troops in the war, but the Australians had irreverence down to a fine art. The ‘leaning virgin’ atop the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières at Albert on the Somme, battered by artillery fire till she hung horizontal, inspired soldierly superstition in German and Briton alike: both sides believed that if she fell, the war would be lost. The Australians simply christened her ‘Fanny Durack’, after their famed Olympic freestyle swimmer diving off the block.
Richards recorded his four years of war in an articulate and consistently kept diary and even took seven photographs as he came ashore on 25 April. He faced his day calmly: ‘I don’t feel the coming danger any more than I have felt anxious the night before an international football match.’ On the morning of the landings at Gaba Tepe he was able to write:
No bugle call to wake us this morning, but most of us were astir before the sun rose – a brilliant and pleasing red glow. It was just the same as sunset last night – a stage setting with the flashes and booming of the cannon to enliven matters.5
A field ambulance stretcher-bearer, Tom was one of the first to land, was mentioned in divisional orders in July for ‘acts of gallantry’, and was one of the last to leave the peninsula.
After the evacuation of January 1916 – the only bright spark in a dismal campaign – he returned to Egypt and then departed for the Western Front, where he reconnected with his rugby network. On 3 May 1916 he wrote:
I heard that Capt Johnnie Williams, the Cardiff wing threequarter was about – I called on his men, he was absent, but the five Welsh officers compelled me to sit down and wait for his coming, and produced wine, whisky, cigarettes and Perrier. They were not long in finding out my name and my footer performances and a cheery welcome followed until I left at 9.20pm … Football was not much dwelt upon as Williams has retired and Welsh football having gone back so much of late years. I had but little to say as Australian rugby is professionalised and dead.
My pass was only to be out until 8pm and it was 9.20pm when I left the mess. It was dark and lonely with a picket every now and then shouting: ‘Halt, who goes there?’ It was easy to pass them. I usually swore at them and one at least apologised for interfering. I got home safely but the flare shells and roar of bombs, cannons, rifle and machine guns was thick and continuous.6
Corporal Richards was commissioned second lieutenant, 1st Infantry Battalion; Johnnie Williams, whom he had faced in 1908 at the Arms Park, would die at Mametz Wood in 1916.
There are periods in Tom’s account of war in spring 1916 where he seems to do little more than stumble across rugby games and mates; this is the eagerly seized escape to pre-war normality that sustained many through the man-made hell of mechanised warfare. But Richards did not shirk the tough stuff: in May 1917, he led a nineteen-man bombing party near Bullecourt – a gap in his diary as he was a trifle busy – and was promoted and awarded the MC. Twice evacuated with wounds to England in 1917, and again in May 1918, when his back and shoulders were damaged by a bomb, he also survived a gas attack which would cause him respiratory problems till his death of tuberculosis in 1935. He never played rugby again after 1918.
If Richards was Odysseus, Blair Swannell was Achilles, a more complex hero, whose rugby voyage was in the opposite direction. Australia claims him, for he died in its uniform and had represented it against New Zealand on the rugby field. But he was English-born, had fought for Britain in South Africa and played rugby against Australia for two British touring teams in 1899 and 1904. A formal notice of his death portrayed a charismatic pillar of the ‘great and good’:
It has been said that he played rugby in more countries than any other player except T.J. Richards. In 1909 and 1910 he was Secretary to the Metropolitan Rugby Union. During the past few years he occupied the post of [Armed Forces] Area Secretary at Darlington and was one of the first to volunteer.7
He coached hockey as well as rugby at St Joseph’s College, and refereed for three years, earning a reputation for his ability to control a game; he was vice-president of the Sydney Swimming Club and trained military cadets in surf lifesaving. So far, so stalwart, but reaching deeper into his
history, it is clear that his life was tainted by controversy, much of it self-made, even down to his last moments on 25 April 1915. Paddy Moran, paid loyal tribute, but also acknowledged the Marmite stain in Swannell’s character:
In the end, he wore an Australian uniform as stubbornly as he had worn an Australian jersey. He was early in the field and found his end storming the goal on that April morning at Gallipoli. He is still there holding on. When his death became known to his troops, it was rumoured that his own men had shot him down. They did not like his domineering English manner or the way that, in speaking, he clipped off the end of his words. But the story of his being shot from behind was just somebody’s canard.8
This wasn’t the only stain: Swannell was notorious for wearing the same pair of unwashed breeches for every game, which may explain why – perhaps by team vote – he made his way to the back of the pack, as number eight for Australia. And also why he never married?
Born in Buckinghamshire in 1875, Blair Inskip Swannell was schooled at Repton and played his club rugby for Olney, Western Turks and Northampton Saints, where he was known as ‘good old B.I.’ After leaving school he qualified as a seafaring second mate and embarked upon a life of swashbuckling adventure, not all of it plausible or verifiable, but all part of the legend. His first visit to Australia, in whose colours he would play, fight and die, was in 1897 aboard a schooner; his second was with Matthew Mullineux’s British tour party of 1899, when he played seventeen matches and three of the four Tests. The jerseys he faced were maroon in the Queensland Tests and blue in New South Wales.
After the Final Whistle Page 6
