The magnetism of the New Zealand reputation made their military teams the biggest wartime draw, with all manner of units providing sides for charity and services games. In October 1918 at Torquay, the small print in the ‘BARBARIANS v NEW ZEALAND’ programme reveals this is ‘Devonport Barbarians’ against the ‘NZ Discharge Depot’. The seven in the pack were listed en bloc but that enduring curiosity, the ‘wing-forward’, Rifleman Curtis, got special billing. Two parallel rugby squads were maintained either side of the Channel: a ‘United Kingdom’ HQ XV in England and the Divisional Trench Team in France; they would later unite to become the NZ Services team. Another side of Māori Pioneers, including Parekura Tureia of Ngāti Porou, defeated the crack Welsh Guards team and the Royal Naval Division; Tureia was included in the Services side in 1919 but would later find himself shamefully excluded from that team on the way home.
New Zealanders left many indelible marks of their time in Britain. One you can still see – if you can access Bulford Camp – is a kiwi bird carved by soldiers into the chalk hillside at what used to be Sling Plantation, one of many colonial camps on Salisbury Plain. But the most profound mark is not visible: it is etched since 1905 into the collective psyche of rugby players and supporters around Britain by that first Originals tour. Whenever the All Blacks come back to these shores, they bring that same sharp-edged ruthlessness and a century-old tremor of excitement. They rarely leave empty-handed.
In 1919 their soldiers left as battlefield victors. More than any team, the All Blacks are acutely conscious of their heritage and the weight of expectation from an entire nation. In 2015, the descendants of those 1905 founding fathers of New Zealand’s national identity return as reigning world champions, seemingly invincible and certainly intimidating. And everyone will want to beat them.
Notes
1 Ian McGibbon, Te Ara, The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, www.teara.govt.nz.
2 George Vesey Stewart, Bay of Plenty Times, 8 January 1916.
3 Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for a National Identity (Allen & Unwin, 1986).
4 Dinner speech at Twickenham 2006.
5 Observer, 2 February 1901.
6 British teams still played ‘first-up, first-down’: whoever got to the breakdown first formed the front row.
7 Lloyd Jones, The Book of Fame (John Murray, 2008).
8 Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Auckland, 1988).
9 Express and Echo, 16 September 1905.
10 Grierson, Ramblings of a Rabbit.
11 10 March 1906.
12 Lt Col. W.S. Austin, Official History of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade (Watkins, 1924).
13 Auckland Weekly News, 18 October 1917
14 Quoted in Evening Post, 12 June 1915.
15 A.C. Swan, History of New Zealand Rugby (Reed, 1947).
16 Wellington Evening Post, 12 June 1915.
17 Wellington Evening Post.
18 Jack Sciascia is shown as J. Hiahia in team photos of 1910 and 1913.
19 W.H. Cunningham, C.A.L. Treadwell, J.S. Hanna, The Wellington Regiment (NZEF) 1914–19 (Ferguson & Osborn, 1928).
20 He is misreported in newspapers and books as Tupine or Turpine.
21 London Gazette, 14 May 1919.
22 Growden, Wallaby Warrior.
23 Malcolm Ross, the journalist who reported this figure, admitted he was not there.
24 Pakeha, a non-indigenous New Zealander.
25 The Graphic, 24 February 1917.
26 12 and 15 February 1917
27 Quoted in Charles Hoyer Millar, Rosslyn Park The First Fifty Years (1929) Four serving Chrystall brothers survived the war; a fifth died of a chill as a volunteer doctor in Malaya.
6
Canada
Our home and native land
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
Canada is more than a vast country: the ‘Great White North’ is the frosted crown of a whole continent. Its land mass measures 9,093,507 square kilometres and there’s an extra 10 per cent or more of permanent ice. The land alone would hold over a billion rugby pitches, although not all of them would take a stud too well and a few trees might need to be cleared. In 1914 that would have meant 135 pitches for each of some 8 million Canadians.1 The two factors of unforgiving climate and almost inconceivable size help explain the early development of rugby in Canada. A first game was played by artillerymen in Montreal in 1864. A Canadian Rugby Football Union (CRFU) was founded in 1884, but a national team was a financial and geographical impossibility: only the following year was the Canadian Pacific transcontinental railway completed.
A confusion of Unions did not help. The first North American cross-border game was played in 1874 between Montreal’s McGill and Boston’s Harvard University.2 Ontario and Quebec formed their own Rugby Unions on the same January day in 1883, possibly stung into action by the founding twelve days previously of the Ontario Football Union, precursor to the gridiron Canadian Football League (CFL). The Canadian Interprovincial Rugby Football Union was formed in 1907 by the ‘big four’ of Hamilton Tigers, Toronto Argonauts, Ottawa Rough Riders and Montreal FootBall; in its first game, Montreal defeated Toronto. But these eastern province club names betrayed the influence of the American football code that, with so many other cultural influences from the noisy neighbours to the south, crept irresistibly over the world’s longest international frontier.
In the vast expanses of the western and central provinces, even where a club took root, fixtures were hard to come by: Calgary City RFC, founded in March 1906, only played their first game nineteen months later in October 1907, defeating Strathcona RFC 15–0 at Calgary. The taste for victory took them to Edmonton and its Exhibition Grounds in November to defeat Edmonton RFC 26–5 in their first game. Manitoba, Saskatchewan & Alberta Unions jointly formed the Western Canada RFU in 1911. A new Rugby Union of Canada was later formed in 1929 and the CRFU finally went over to the dark side in 1931 when it permitted the forward pass. The Grey Cup, originally donated in 1909 by Governor-General Earl Grey for the ‘Canadian Dominion Rugby Football Champions’, is now the modern CFL Championship title game and trophy. Rugby players rarely get excited about a Cup of Earl Grey.
Resistance to gridiron encroachment continued until wartime: in 1913, Londoner Cecil Crossley ‘was instrumental in introducing and organising Rugby rules for the University football matches’ at McGill, as well as being Canadian middleweight boxing champion. With the Royal Irish Fusiliers at Gallipoli in 1915, he would take a fatal punch from a Turkish grenade, the impact described by the plain-spoken Lance Corporal Hardman: ‘His head was nearly destroyed by a bomb and death was immediate.’
As its name indicates, British Columbia’s strong links to the Mother Country, fons et origo of the game, ensured that rugby thrived in this provincial pocket of strength. From the 1870s, local men played Royal Navy sailors stationed at Esquimalt; clubs formed at Vancouver, Chemainus, Comox, Nanaimo, New Westminster, Cowichan and Victoria, mingling the British and the ‘Columbian’, provided regular opposition for each other. The BC Rugby Union formed in 1889 ‘to unite in one organization all lovers and players of Rugby Football in British Columbia’. Its teams competed for the McKechnie Cup from 1895 and BC remains a stronghold of rugby in Canada to this day, but rugby’s reliance on immigrant British players meant that clubs would suffer heavy losses when the time came to fight.
Canada’s eastern provinces are closer to Britain than they are to BC. A pioneering but ramshackle tour of Britain in the winter of 1902–03, funded by private interests in Montreal, included only five BC players. The team played on Christmas Day, lost thirteen of twenty-four matches, but claimed notable scalps at Bristol and Ulster. BC instead looked westwards and south for its rugby challenges: as early as 1894, BC played rugby at the Midwinter Fair in San Francisco. Exchanges between Victoria, Vancouver and the two Californian universities at Stanford and Berkeley took place annually from 1906 for the Cooper Keith Trophy. British Columbia as a pr
ovince welcomed international teams: the Anglo-Welsh in 1908 and Australia in 1909 and 1912.3 The New Zealand All Blacks on their 1906 North America visit twice played a ‘sturdy aggregation from Vancouver’4 (actually a BC Province team) in San Francisco, and in 1913 All Black tourists played a representative side at Brockton Oval, Vancouver.
As with Aviron Bayonnais in France, rugby was the winter game of oarsmen at Vancouver Rowing Club (VRC). Dating back to 1886, the year of Vancouver’s incorporation as a city hewn out of frontier forest with just 1,000 citizens, VRC is its oldest sports club. In 1908, Reggie Woodward encouraged VRC rowers playing rugby at other clubs to form their own XV: dual participation lasted until the 1950s. For ‘wet-bobs’ with a floating clubhouse, their initial steps on dry land were shaky: over the two seasons 1908 and 1909, they lost all but one game in the City Senior League. But a triumphant 1910 saw ‘Rowers’ win all ten games and the city’s Miller Cup, with 186 points scored and just 5 conceded. The secret, said skipper Theo Byrne, was ‘relentless training. A good man who refused to train was dropped for a less skilful player who was keen.’ He added, in memory of his Edinburgh school, ‘as for the slow lobbing pass, anyone guilty of committing this sin was given one hundred lines of Greek verse’ – a penalty sadly under-employed today.
By the outbreak of war, Vancouver’s population had grown to over 130,000 and supported two Militia infantry regiments, the Seaforth Highlanders and the Duke of Connaught’s. Ninety of the 115 VRC members eligible for military service volunteered immediately. Their last summer regatta was a subdued affair: ‘very few left at the Club, all gone to the front’. Another forty-nine, under-age in 1914, would enlist, making a total of 164 volunteers from an active membership of 200.5 Sporting activity ground to a halt, as it did at clubs worldwide; rugby was discontinued and the Vancouver Rugby Union did not reform until 1919. At the 1917 AGM, life members were asked to donate $5 or more towards the club’s upkeep, ‘owing to the fact so many members were on active service and to the difficulty of getting new ones while the war lasts’. All soldiers were ‘kept on the membership roll during their period of service’, but by 1918 the active roster numbered only thirty-five, not one of whom was a single man fit for service; forty-two never returned.
The Seaforth Highlanders went to war as the 72nd Battalion, 7th British Columbia Regiment, Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). The regiment was raised in 1910 by Scots-born local magnate, Henry Bell-Irving. His six sons, all ‘splendid specimens of manhood’, were all sent away to Loretto for schooling and to Europe for fighting (with two sisters for nursing). Malcolm, who had faced the All Blacks, was the first native-born Canadian to join the RFC in December 1914. He arrived in St-Omer in March 1915 to make his first operational flight; wounded twice flying sorties over enemy territory, he was awarded the MC.
On 20 June 1916, while flying a Morane scout plane between Lille and Ypres with an observer named Scott, Bell-Irving was attacked by three German aircraft. He shot one down in flames – the first Canadian RFC ‘kill’ – and drove off the others. He evaded three more attackers but was severely wounded in the head by ‘Archie’ – anti-aircraft fire. Half-blinded by blood, he turned for the nearest airfield, but feeling he could not last, landed behind Allied lines to save Scott’s life. After giving orders for the safe delivery of his photos, he collapsed. His exploits won him the DSO – another first for Canada in the RFC. He was transferred to Lady Ridley’s Hospital in London, – sister Isabel was nursing there – and remained semi-conscious for three months. He had been wounded three times and ended the war with the rank of major.
Sibling rivalry reached new heights with the Bell-Irving boys: four brothers collected nine bravery decorations between them. Duncan, also in the RFC added an MC and Bar to his seven kills, was twice wounded and thrice shot down; the French threw in a Croix de Guerre for good measure. Henry earned the DSC with the Dover Patrol for shooting down two German seaplanes. Roderick’s DSO was posthumous: he was commanding the 16th Battalion, CEF (Canadian Scottish), when he was killed near Cambrai on 1 October 1918, six weeks short of the Armistice.6
When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, Canada also found itself at war as part of the Empire. Yet its army numbered only 3,000 regulars and 74,000 part-time militiamen. This tiny peacetime force grew tenfold almost overnight: in September, 32,665 volunteers arrived by special trains at the new camp at Valcartier, the assembly point for the CEF, north of Quebec City on the St Lawrence. By the Armistice, 619,636 Canadians, including over 3,000 nurses, would be in uniform – a huge proportion of the country’s population.
Built in just two weeks, the purpose-built Valcartier, with the world’s largest firing range of 15,000 targets, was a soft launch into the nasty business of war. Latter-day Toronto has been described as ‘New York run by the Swiss’ but Valcartier could have run it close:
… electrically lighted, with purified water and baths for every unit, with broad roads and board walks, with post-office and hospitals, a network of telephones, a bank and YMCA tent, with canteens for soft drinks, goodies and smokes. The camp was scrupulously clean: metal incinerators like burning-ghats lined the streets; left-over food was hourly consumed while nightly carts removed all refuse. On either side the main road, ditches carried away the dirty water.7
These early days were documented in September 1915 by the Canadian Field Comforts Commission, after the contingent had seen action, gas and death at Ypres. It aimed to ‘raise funds for the purchase of many extra comforts, which are welcomed by the officers and appreciated by the men’. Creature comforts at Valcartier featured a menagerie of pets, some not purchased but ‘requisitioned’ on the journey east:
Plenty of mascots: a cinnamon bear from the west, a cross little black one from New Brunswick, a calf kidnapped near Winnipeg when a troop train stopped for water, a monkey for the artillery and dogs beyond mentioning … two doves of the Royal Canadian Engineers, bill by nose with the horses, they used to eat their oats – poor little emblems of vanished Peace.
The volunteers described as ‘only the fittest, the Dominion’s finest and best’ also brought with them their sporting enthusiasms: ‘In spite of the constant drilling, riding, marching and practising with rifles and artillery, the men were still keen for football.’
Nearly 70 per cent of this first volunteer contingent was made up of young men born in the British Isles. Many British immigrants had come searching for riches (or simple subsistence) in minerals, engineering or ranching. 1914 Canada was in the grip of economic depression: unemployment had risen since 1912, credit was squeezed, and farmers had abandoned their land to look for work in the cities. Disappointed, many returned to fight with British regiments or joined this First Canadian Contingent. As with the working-class ‘Pals’ in Britain, the martial imperative was as much basic survival as patriotism: they needed to eat and the daily rations were good. But for the Canadian press they were,
Our own giving heed to the Motherland’s call,
Our own steeled to face whate’er may befall!
After the Elysium of Valcartier, they ‘sailed away on thirty-one great grey transports guarded by seven cruisers, down the big river so many would never see again’. General Sir Sam Hughes, Minister of Militia and Defence, bade them farewell in an address of which Churchill (or Maximus Decimus Meridius for that matter) would be proud:
What reck you whether your resting place be decked with the golden lilies of France, or be amidst the vine-clad hills of the Rhine; the principles for which you fought are eternal.
His optimism that the war might reach German soil is, with hindsight, bittersweet; the inadvertent pessimism of his past tense ‘fought’ is inescapable.
On arrival in October, the Canadians’ first taste of Western Front conditions, even before reaching ‘somewhere in France’, came on Salisbury Plain. Spread over its 300 square and bleak kilometres in camps at Bustard, Larkhill and Sling Plantation, they endured the ‘rainiest, most flooded winter England has known in
years’. It rained on 89 of the 123 days they were there, making them oddly nostalgic for the icy Canadian climate: ‘in the heart-sickening, never-ending fall of rain, how preferable would have been ground-hardening frost and good deep snow, to keep out the cold’. Reports reached the home press:
Salisbury today bears a slight resemblance to Venice. The two main streets are streams, and rowboats have been put into use by enterprising citizens who charge ‘thruppence’ for a ride chiefly from Canadians, who don’t mind paying for a novel experience. The fact that the city is flooded in such a way gives one an idea of what the officers and men must endure on the Plain … it amounts to active service conditions without the ‘excitement.’ A wounded soldier who fought for several weeks in France said that the living conditions were worse here than at the front. In Belgium or France a soldier fought an enemy he could in most cases see, but here it was the unseen enemy – sickness – which must be encountered. No man will be satisfied until he goes to France. The constant waiting under such conditions has caused considerable discontent. Having had about five months of training, the men think it is quite enough.8
They were nonetheless fascinated by ancient Stonehenge, where they held church parade and speculated that the fallen cross-slabs provided ‘a place for the druids to sit and keep their feet out of the mud’. An anonymous soldier-poet complained of the effect on Sam Hughes’s boots:
Our soldiers like to stroll
In the mud,
And the horses love to roll
In the mud;
Our good Canadian shoe
It goes quickly through and through
Peels the sole and melts the glue –
In the mud.9
Battle-hardened and decorated for bravery by late 1915, one officer still grumbled, ‘We think there should be a special clasp for Salisbury Plain.’ Another wrote with feeling: ‘Things over here are not pretty wet, they are most blighted soaking.’ It was a far cry from Valcartier. The doggerel poetess of the Daily Mail, Jessie Pope (to whom Wilfred Owen sarcastically dedicated his first draft of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’) wrote a tribute to the ‘Lads of the Maple Leaf’:
After the Final Whistle Page 10
