Notes
1 Initially the name was just for the British tour; in America they were Waratahs, but Wallabies soon caught on.
2 Australian cricket had adopted the colours as early as 1899, its Olympic team in 1908, but Rugby League and Union not until 1928 and 1929 respectively.
3 Daily Telegraph, 27 Oct 1908.
4 Daily Mail, 14 December 1908.
5 Growden, Wallaby Warrior.
6 Ibid.
7 Melbourne Argus, 6 May 1915.
8 Moran, Viewless Winds. His chapter heading is ‘Men, Rough Men and Rugby’.
9 Moran, Viewless Winds.
10 Evening Post, 12 June 1915.
11 31 March 1909.
12 Imperishable Anzacs: A story of Australia’s famous First Brigade from the Diary of H.W. Cavill (Brooks, 1916).
13 Moran, Viewless Winds.
14 The Referee, 24 August 1915.
15 Sydney Morning Herald, 12 May 1915.
16 Growden, Wallaby Warrior.
17 Stuart Perry, Manly fullback 1911–14, letter from Gallipoli, 16 July 1915.
18 Michael McKernan, in The Making of Modern Sporting History, ed. McKernan and Richard Cashman (University of Queensland, 1979).
19 Lt G.H. Goddard, Soldiers and Sportsmen (AIF, 1919).
20 The Referee, March 1915.
21 The Referee, 13 October 1915.
22 Moran, Viewless Winds.
5
New Zealand
From the shafts of strife and war
Make her praises heard afar.
New Zealanders were alongside Australians on the beach that April day at Gaba Tepe, consecrating Anzac Cove in the national memory: 600 of the 3,100 who landed became casualties. Like the Canadians at Vimy, they stormed a ridge in 1917, this time at Messines, and matched signal success with fewer losses than the grim Western Front norm. They had days of bloody disaster with the British at Chunuk Bair on Gallipoli, suffered terrible reverses at the Somme and Passchendaele and paid back the Turks in Palestine. At the death in November 1918, they finished the war on a literal high as they scaled Vauban’s fortress walls of Le Quesnoy using ladders borrowed from French firemen.
For New Zealanders, however, no single moment of wartime myth-making defined a young nation, as it did for Australians and Canadians, or even South Africans at ‘Devil’s Wood’. For that national legend had already been fashioned, ten years previously, by warriors who boarded a boat and sailed from the ‘uttermost ends of the earth’ to fight on peacetime playing fields in Britain, Ireland, France and the USA. The narrative that underpins New Zealand’s national identity was written by a rugby campaign in 1905; the war simply consolidated that identity. Both stories cultivated the ‘stereotype of the Kiwi male as a tough, uncomplaining, self-disciplined team player’.1 Chief in this heroic saga was the captain, Dave Gallaher. That he would again shrug on his armour, reclaim three years of his youth with a lie in order to fight, and die aged 43, during an attack at Passchendaele merely sanctified his myth in New Zealand memory.
Born David Gallagher in Ireland’s County Donegal in 1873, he became plain Dave Gallaher when, in May 1878, his parents James and Maria took their seven children on a 12,000-mile voyage (‘Are we there yet?’) on the Lady Jocelyn to settle in New Zealand’s Katikati. This North Island coastal town would later strike an early blow for independent nationalism (and lure picnickers) by rechristening its St George’s Bay as Anzac Bay in January 1916, spurning the name of England’s patron saint and king in favour of ‘the letters of the word [which] would always remind us of those memorable deeds. ”A” stood for Australia, “NZ” for New Zealand and “AC” for the Allies’ Cause’2 (actually Army Corps, but the speechmaker, also a George, knew what he was doing). The last troops on the Turkish peninsula left the following day; the small town would lose nine of its sixty menfolk who served.
Life was tough in Katikati for the Gallahers, with another seven children added to their brood, now one short of a full XV. Dave’s teacher mother was the breadwinner and when she died of cancer, his father was already 75; the older children worked, Dave leaving school at thirteen, and the family relied on charity. Katikati held its first rugby game in 1880, and by 1904 supported three teams, even forming its own Rugby Union; Dave learnt his trade. Rugby was already widespread in New Zealand and the wellspring of an uncompromising character and pride. As the journal Zealandia asserted in 1890, ‘there is now no danger of New Zealand rearing a nation of milksops, effeminate fops and luxurious dandies’.3 Chris Laidlaw, an All Black at 19 and later skipper, before entering politics, argued that, ‘Rugby became the medium by which New Zealanders would come to realise that they were different from the British.’4
The Gallahers moved in search of a living to Auckland in 1889. Dave worked as a foreman for the Farmers’ Freezing Company and played his rugby for Parnell, then Ponsonby. By 1901 and his departure with the NZ Mounted Infantry for the Boer War in South Africa, he was the local hero:
A very large crowd of the members and enthusiasts of the Ponsonby District Football Club assembled at the Ponsonby Club Hotel on Saturday night to say farewell to ‘Dave’ Gallaher, the well-known footballer, who left with the Sixth Contingent for South Africa this week. Mr. S.D. Hanna proposed the health of the guest in a very happy manner. Several other well-known members spoke as to ‘Dave’s’ good qualities, and the chairman then presented him with a well-filled purse of sovereigns. Corporal Gallaher replied very feelingly, and thanked all his old comrades for the kind way they had treated him.5
He returned in 1902 with two stripes on his sleeve, three clasps on the Queen’s South Africa medal and two on his King’s, and ten games of army rugby under his belt. Playing for Auckland in its first Ranfurly Shield challenge (lost to Wellington) was precursor to selection for the 1903 New Zealand tour to Australia; they won all twenty matches. Beginning the tour as hooker, Dave played the last five as a wing forward, perfecting the rover role and winning his first international cap in Sydney. A second winning cap was added at Wellington’s Athletic Park against the 1904 British tourists, with Blair Swannell but without the injured Bedell-Sivright – what a clash that might have been. Dave was then selected as captain for a ground-breaking tour of Britain.
Aboard the SS Rimutaka, there was daily training as relief from the monotony of shipboard life: ‘physical drill’ started at 7.45 a.m., followed by separate morning sessions for backs and forwards, and afternoon sports including boxing, wrestling and conditioning with Eugen Sandow’s bodybuilding apparatus. Gallaher (forwards) and vice-captain Billy Stead (backs) took training, with coach Jimmy Duncan sidelined. They held team meetings to discuss rules, tactics and styles of play; these innovative brainstorming sessions continued throughout the tour, as they refined techniques like passing ‘at the moment of being tackled’ – offloading skills are nothing new for New Zealanders. Other passengers watched and some, including women, even joined in the training. This approach was highly professional when you consider that Alec Todd, Tommy Crean and the 1896 British Isles tourists played deck quoits, ducking for coins and ‘slinging the monkey’ on their voyage to South Africa, and lost the tug of war to the ship’s stokers.
Once docked at Plymouth, the men in black were ‘in the pink’ of fitness and signalled their intent with the 55–4 annihilation of reigning county champions, Devon. Five-eighth Jimmy Hunter scored the first of eleven tries in the third minute; his personal tour tally would reach forty-two. They were a sensation and set off round the country like travelling prize-fighters, taking on all comers in thirty-two matches, high-scoring and undefeated in all but one: against Wales, a hotly-debated try by Bob Deans, that would have tied the game, was disallowed. The twenty-three English games produced an aggregate of 721 points to 15. When they walked onto Cardiff Arms Park in front of 45,000, ‘the crowd started from their seats and almost tumbled over one another in their eagerness to see the famous All Blacks’. Their virtuoso back-play, and forwards playing specific positions in an innovative 2–3
–2 scrum formation, with Gallaher as rover,6 created the legend of these ‘Original All Blacks’. Their schedule paled by comparison with Joe Warbrick’s 1888-89 Māori visitors, who played 107 games, often three a week.
The secret was in their ‘system’ and the scientific thought and constant practice put behind it. But it was no closely held trade secret: they even published a book to explain. Shoemaker fly half Billy Stead sat down during a London break and crashed out The Complete Rugby Footballer in the New Zealand System in just two weeks, with Gallaher drawing the diagrams. The system still works, but there’s more to rugby than reading a manual. Few rugby tours have inspired award-winning novels as this 1905 epic has,7 but that’s how legends are nurtured. Poet and historian, Sir Keith Sinclair even claimed the Welsh defeat as ‘New Zealand sport’s equivalent of Gallipoli’.8
The famous nickname was also popularised on this tour, although it was hardly news, and certainly not the ‘brand’ it is today. Its origin has many elaborations: Wellington’s 1889 team first played in black; in 1893, Thomas Rangiwahia Ellison, who pioneered the wing-forward position and scored forty-three tries on that first Māori tour, proposed at the first NZRFU AGM that the playing colours of New Zealand should be predominantly black, with a silver fern monogram, black cap and stockings and white knickerbockers. This was similar to the Māori team strip, and with a switch to black shorts in 1901, became the familiar national signature. So they were all in black before coming to Britain. After the first pummelling of the Devonians, a local hack depicted ‘the All Blacks, as they are styled by reason of their sable and unrelieved costume’.9 But such was this side’s breathtaking interplay between pack and backs that reports reached London that they played as if they were ‘all backs’. The typesetters at the Daily Mail (Grauniad, surely?) added their bit of ‘l’, and the rest is history – if not well verified.
They pioneered commercial endorsement: the team advertised ‘Jason’s Unshrinkable Underwear for Athletes’. An illustration of the England match at Crystal Palace, was captioned: ‘The New Zealand Footballers Write, 4th Jan 1906’,
Gentlemen, It may interest you to learn that the ‘Jason Underwear’ has given general satisfaction to members of the New Zealand Football team, its general good qualities (especially the fact of its being unshrinkable) justify us in commending it to all Athletes and Sportsmen. Yours faithfully …
Facsimile autographs are appended of the whole New Zealand team except O’Sullivan, whose broken collarbone left him unable to sign. Copywriting has come a long way since in refreshing the parts, and the Adidas golden fleece is far richer than Jason’s, but it was a comfortable start.
These specimens of colonial masculinity in their ‘Unshrinkable Underwear’ became a popular sensation throughout Britain; David Beckham is doing nothing new. In December, a Daily Mail columnist, tongue-in-cheek, described what possessed him ‘body, soul and spirit: the all-conquering Blacks’:
Every word written in the newspapers about the colonials I have devoured … I know their Christian names, surnames, nicknames, birthplaces, pedigrees etc. and every stray biographical fact … I never wear anything but black now, and all my gorgeous fancy vests and the more brilliant ties have been given away for money … My life, dear reader, has become a perfect misery. Why, only the other day I made a long journey in a penny ’bus to the Cottage Tearooms in the Strand in order that I might see the girl there who wears a silver fern brooch.
Of course, as was customary in theatrical spectacle during the festive season, they also lived up to the implied villainy of their dark uniform. Gallaher was accused of gamesmanship, crooked feeding, and being constantly offside, obstructing the opposing scrum half; thus was he the spiritual forebear of celebrated open-sides to come. The Manchester Guardian pilloried the ‘professed obstructionist’ and Henry Grierson recalled that at Bedford:
Gallaher played wing forward, wore his shinguards outside his stockings, shouted ‘A-heave, A-heave’, which annoyed the crowd, and did lots of good work in the obstruction line.10
His team-mates argued with referees, querying decisions when they were repeatedly penalised; their vigour in hurling men to the ground after tackles was even noted by the press back home. But it was all great box-office. No more so than in Scotland’s bastion of amateurism, where the SFU’s high-minded refusal of a guarantee, in favour of the tourists taking the gate, backfired spectacularly as 21,000 flocked to the spectacle. Despite their popularity, the British establishment did not invite them back until 1925, although they would return in uniformed guise – and triumph – in 1919.
On the way home via Paris, they summarily despatched France, who would take many years to perfect the mercurial hoodoo which they now spring on the All Blacks when they are not looking. The French were then emerging as a rugby nation: this international baptism was a daunting debut. They wisely treated the tour-toughened ‘Noirs’ with the respect of novices, as George Smith told the Herald: ‘If a Frenchman grassed one of our players at all roughly they would turn around and say “Pardon, monsieur”.’ In March France first played England in a friendly, but the new sporting entente did not admit them to a full set of Home Nations fixtures until 1910.
In America, the Originals played a nominal New York side (bolstered by six of the tourists) in a Brooklyn baseball park, then took the Santa Fe railroad via Chicago and the Grand Canyon to California, where exhibitions were played against British Columbia. In front of crowds new to rugby in San Francisco, they ‘showed wonderful speed and skill … created enthusiasts, won over lukewarm spectators and silenced many critics’. Tour manager George Dixon made admiring notes on a stroll through the city’s streets: ‘understand no limit to hours pubs kept open – but have seen no cases of drunkenness’. He was optimistic too that ‘our missionary work will bear fruit in the near future’; that is a chapter to come.
On docking in Auckland, they received a welcome fit for conquering warriors, and the native greeting ‘Kia ora’ from Premier Richard Seddon who, like all politicians, missed no chance for a moment of national popularity. He personally escorted them off the ship and pronounced with pride that ‘the triumph of the team is not only a credit to the colony but to the Empire’. He might as well have added, ‘and I claim this game of rugby for New Zealand over all others and in perpetuity’, but modestly refrained. The Auckland Observer noted: ‘Their tour and its splendid achievements have not only added to the prestige of New Zealand football … but have also advertised the country in a way that a score of immigrant agents and half-a-dozen Tourist Departments could not have done.’11 And this was well before the films of Peter Jackson.
Smug sportswriters predicted that the ‘kindred in the Mother Country would, in all their important matches, employ the wing-forward, as one of the many things taught by the All Blacks’, ignoring its Yorkshire origins in the 1880s. These conquistadors also brought with them untold riches: it was announced that tour receipts were £14,700, ‘a sum beyond everyone’s wildest dreams’, with net profit after expenses £9,500, enough to put the national body on a sound footing ever after. The mould for the touring All Blacks was cast in gold. One dissenting and isolated voice was ‘Sport’, a correspondent to the Auckland Star, who bemoaned the ‘banquet laid on for a team of men who have had expenses paid and even an allowance per day for a good holiday trip. Why should such a fuss be made of them?’ He made pointed comparison with the treatment of earlier military returnees:
When our gallant Contingent, the Seventh arrived from South Africa no reception of any sort was proposed … and the authorities had not even the common courtesy to present their medals, but advertised that they were available at the Defence Office.
We could perhaps infer that ‘Sport’ may have been one of the ‘gallant Seventh’. Either way, the distinction between military and rugby warriors was soon to be wiped out, along with many thousands of New Zealand soldiers and sportsmen.
Gallaher had passed 40 when war was declared, but volunteered in July 1916
after younger brother Douglas was killed with the Australians near Armentières in June. Dave knocked three years off his age to be allowed to fight. In February 1917, he once again sailed for Europe, aboard the Aparima, and in June became a sergeant in 2nd Battalion, Auckland Infantry Regiment. His service number – 3229 in South Africa – was now 32513, sure sign of the scale of this new conflict. That Gallaher was already a national celebrity – and a confident one too – was soon clear, as the Official History described the voyage:
… the only ‘regrettable incident’ being the stranding of two or three personnel at Colombo owing to a misunderstanding as to the hour of departure. As the last of the troopships left the latter port and was making good headway westwards, a small tug came racing out and signalled her to stop. There was much speculation as to the reason for this action, and the usual wild explanations multiplied as the tug was seen to lower a boat which pulled smartly over to the trooper. The gangway was put down, and up this majestically stepped a solitary Rifleman. This was the famous New Zealand footballer, ‘Wing’ David – a man much beloved by his comrades and something of a trial too, though secretly admired by his officers. Arrived on deck, he waved a haughty dismissal to the tug and a condescending signal to the bridge that the troopship might now proceed.12
From Dave to David: it seems he had lost his ‘id’ and gained an ego. He would die four weeks short of his forty-fourth birthday in 1917, shot in the face at Gravenstafel Spur during the struggle for Passchendaele. He died of his wounds the following day at No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station, little more than a dugout scooped from a trench wall. His home city obituary was as imprecise as he had been (and the CWGC still is) on his true age:
Mr. Gallaher was born in Belfast, about 46 years ago, and came to New Zealand, as a child. From his boyhood he was recognised as a capable athlete, his prowess being exhibited chiefly in Rugby football. Mr. Gallaher was for many years sole selector for the Auckland Rugby Union, and was the captain of the All Blacks team which toured England in 1905–6. He saw service in the Boer War and on the outbreak of the present war was eager to join the forces, but was for some time detained on account of family ties. Mr. Gallaher is survived by his wife and child, at present in Sydney.13
After the Final Whistle Page 8
