On the very day that his countrymen began this blood-soaked battle fighting as one brigade, Transvaaler Tobias Mortimer ‘Toby’ Moll, capped just once against the British in 1910, died of his wounds serving as a second lieutenant in the British 9th Leicestershires, just two kilometres to the west. He had left his bank job to serve in SouthWest Africa, and then came over to England. A former Cape rugby team-mate met Toby in a lull from fighting, but not safety from lethal shellfire:
We were now out of that nightmare wood, in what was once the village of Bazentin-le-Petit … The village was a shambles and nothing remotely resembling a house was to be seen. Here I came across an old friend from Hamiltons, Toby Moll, who told me that Cyril Bam had been killed. No trace of him was to be found. Soon after this, Toby was hit by shrapnel when he was quite near me and I saw at once that there was no hope. It was hard to see Toby go – everything else was impersonal, almost unreal, but with Toby one was up against it.15
Moll was buried in a marked grave. Cyril Bam, who had come from Cape Town with Toby to join the Tigers, is one of those 72,000 bodiless names on Thiepval.
What was left of the South African Brigade remained at the Somme. In October it fought again at the Butte de Warlencourt, an ancient mound that formed a German stronghold. As reinforcement drafts arrived, 1917 saw further action on the Arras front and at Third Ypres. In March 1918, it was back on the Somme during the Kaiserschlacht, almost annihilated once more at Marrières and Gauche Woods. The tattered remnants of the brigade fought on at Messines, Wijtschaete and Mount Kemmel. Now down to battalion size, they helped capture Meteren in July, but then left the Division, to reform in England, rejoining the 66th (East Lancashire) Division in September 1918.
Given South African rugby fervour, it is not surprising to find that rugby was equally popular in Flanders, both behind their own lines (playing for the Lukin Cup donated by brigade commander, sport-loving Major General Henry Lukin) and for an unfortunate few (or fortunate, depending on your view) behind the enemy lines. Just as Boer prisoners of war had embraced the game, so did their equivalents at Schweidnitz, Freiburg and other camps. Andries Venter, the fabled ‘Boer Giant’ at heights variously reported as 6ft 7in to 7ft 2in, experienced both wars as a prisoner; his second internment came in 1914 when the outbreak found him working in a circus in Germany.16 Sport in the prison camps reached a level of organisation that seems parodic, but provided a comforting reminder of home: Bishop’s boy and 1913 Oxford Blue J. Moresby-White served as president of the ‘Ruhleben Rugby Union’ for two years.17 Barracks teams named after Blackheath, Harlequins, Wasps, Nomads and Barbarians played in a daringly experimental league format. There were even ‘international’ sides, some necessarily composite, with Moresby-White skippering the ‘Scots–Colonials’ against ‘England’, ‘Ireland’ and ‘Wales’.
On 11 November 1918, the South African Infantry Brigade had the honour to be at the easternmost point gained by any troops of the British Army in France. The casualties of the brigade were close to 15,000, nearly 300 per cent of the original strength. Of these some 5,000 were dead.
Nancy the springbok died of pneumonia during the harsh winter of 1918. She was the only animal in military history to be accorded full military funeral honours and to be buried in an Allied war cemetery, at the South African shrine that is the Delville Wood Memorial. South African rugby, however, was very much alive.
Notes
1 Growden, Wallaby Warrior.
2 Thirty-six Springboks place it third in a table topped by Paul Roos Gymnasium, formerly Stellenbosch, renamed in honour of the 1906 Springbok skipper.
3 Neil Orpen, Cape Town Rifles: Dukes (Rifles Regimental Council, 1984).
4 David Parry-Jones, Prince Gwyn, Gwyn Nicholls and the First Golden Era of Welsh Rugby (Bridgend, 1999).
5 E.J.L. Plateneur The Springbokken Tour in Great Britain (Geo. Wunderlich, 1907).
6 Peters’s England debut in 1906 was seventy-two years before Viv Anderson became England’s first black soccer player.
7 J.B.G. Thomas, On Tour (Anchor Press, 1954).
8 Plateneur, Springbokken Tour.
9 Plateneur, Springbokken Tour.
10 Cape Argus, 14 October 1933.
11 Sewell, Log of a Sportsman.
12 Sewell, Roll of Honour.
13 John Buchan, The History of the South African Forces in France (Nelson, 1920).
14 See Floris van der Merwe’s encyclopaedic Soldiers and Sportsmen (FJG Publikaties, 2012).
15 Lt Col. H.L. Silberbauer, ‘Reminiscences of the First World War’, South African Military History Journal, 1997.
16 Van der Merwe, Soldiers and Sportsmen.
17 He would also play in the 1919 Varsity Match.
8
United States of America
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
There was a moment in the early twentieth century when America was on the brink of becoming a rugby nation. That moment may have been 16 November 1912 at the University of California (UCal) at Berkeley; specifically the midpoint of the second half when the All-America team led 8–3 in the first ever Test between Australia and the USA. Rugby was vigorously contested between a cluster of universities in California, with the ‘Big Game’ between Stanford and Berkeley an annual highlight since 1906. The Australians were billed by the US press as ‘world champions’ in deference to their 1908 Olympic gold. The omens were good for an exciting game:
The day was a marked contrast to that of a week before when Stanford and California met in a sea of mud. The sun shone bright and clear, and the ground had dried to such an extent that both teams were able to use their full quota of speed and accuracy. The crowd on the bleachers was in fine fettle, although there was no organised rooting. The thousands that thronged the field to see the international game witnessed some of the best Rugby ever played on this coast.
From the start to the finish, the game was one of fast concerted action. Back and forth across the field the ball travelled in a series of quick rushes that threatened first one goal-line and then the other.1
Australia fielded a strong team against the students, including vice-captain Tom Richards, fellow Olympian Daniel Carroll, and the doomed trio of Harold George, George Pugh and Twit Tasker.
Billy Hill, a former NSW player accompanying the tour, had been invited to referee: ‘His affable and responsible personality was such that both sides approved his appointment.’ His brother Ralph had played most of the games against the Californian university sides, but he sat this one out; it is not known whether this was to avoid accusations of bias, or if he was simply nursing a huge hangover. One excuse given for the poor Australian performances (they had lost every game so far, apart from at Santa Clara, the weakest of the varsities, and would lose every game in Canada) was the prodigious hospitality of the college fraternity houses in which they roomed. Bob Adamson recalled: ‘We were never in bed. That was the trouble. I’ve never had such a time in my life.’ Animal House has a heritage.
On this occasion, the Australia team needed no official assistance, although they faced an uphill battle. After a first-half interception try by Phillip Harrigan (the first rugby points scored by the USA) and a penalty from 40 yards, the tide turned in the last twenty minutes to deliver a final score of 8–12:
From this point on, the Australian goal seemed invincible, and the foreigners began their march to victory. Score followed score with lightning rapidity so that when the pistol shot announced the end the visitors stood 4 points to the advantage. Something seemed to snap in the American line-up, the defence weakened and the speedy backfield action of the previous half died away. Rush after rush swept the All-Stars from their feet and four tries were piled up against them.2
The crowd numbered under 10,000, although the previous week’s Big Game had a much bigger pull at the 23,000 capacity California Field (despite a low-scoring 3–3 draw, anathema
to American sports fans). This stands testament to America’s unwavering enthusiasm for domestic rivalries over international contests – it still boasts its baseball play-offs of one American city against another as the ‘World Series’. Was this, however, the Damascene conversion for America? The San Francisco Chronicle certainly thought so:
America has arrived on the international map, and it will be looking down upon all the other nations in a few more years, ready to lend a hand as it does in all other forms of athletics.
Such modest and generosity in the same breath: what if they had actually won? A century later, there’s just one small problem.
The first green shoots of American rugby had emerged on the East Coast at Yale in the 1870s, courtesy of an Old Rugbeian, D.S. Schaff. Harvard and McGill of Montreal played their first match in 1875. But disputatious Ivy League academics argued over the laws, with games sometimes played to a different set in each half, and the gridiron code muscled its way to pre-eminence. Real impetus behind rugby only came as a result of a crisis over the innate violence of American football. The 1894 Harvard–Yale match, known as the ‘Hampden Park Blood Bath’, crippled four players. Add the death of fifty players since 1900, fifteen in 1905 alone, from ‘unnecessary roughness’ including the ‘flying wedge’ formation, and sharp practice by college coaches, and it became a matter of national debate as the ‘Football Crisis of 1905–6’. After the death of Harold Moore of Union College, kicked in the head in a tackle, a newspaper cartoon showed the Grim Reaper perched on goal posts.
Even that vigorous advocate of outdoor life President Roosevelt intervened against the increase of ‘foul play and intentional brutality’.3 Columbia, Duke and Northwestern dropped football and the presidents of the two leading West Coast schools, Stanford and Berkeley, opted for change: in 1906, the Big Game rivals since 1892 dropped football in favour of rugby. The states of America were disunited: President Wheeler of Berkeley foresaw a Pan-Pacific Union of rugby and predicted that ‘the West’s football future would be with rugby-playing countries rather than with American universities’.4
As in Canada, the seat of power was firmly in the east and geographically distant; the danger for universities in western states was marginalisation from America’s national winter sport. However, this unilateral declaration of independence by the Californian enclave of rugby-minded varsities attracted Canadians and New Zealanders. The 1905 All Blacks, with their innovative scrum and roving wing forward, were too successful in England to be popular with the RFU; they contented themselves by battering Australia repeatedly, and looked further afield. By way of smart reconnaissance, the Blacks had steamed westwards after their British marathon, playing two exhibitions in February 1906 against British Columbia teams in Berkeley and San Francisco, via an unofficial match in Brooklyn. The hardened veterans of the silver fern thundered on to the field and put the hapless Canadians to casual slaughter, scoring an aggregate 108 points to 12. It would be tempting, if not seismically sound, to blame them for the earthquake two months later.
The local press, previously lukewarm, were delighted at the first game – which was fast and open and without the ‘clash of beef, the steaming, straining of two highly organized machines’5 found in gridiron. The Daily Palo Alto agreed that from the ‘spectacular point of view Rugby was far superior to the American game’.6 The second game only increased their fervour: ‘The superiority of Rugby to our own amended game was demonstrated even more forcibly.’7 It was widely observed that Americans relied upon bulk, strength and tackling, whilst other teams emphasised speed and skilful ball handling. Rugby was preferable because it was a pastime not professional commerce; it was less brutal and could be played by smaller men, not just giants, and at class as well as varsity level; and it was free of coaches and the ‘immoralities’ of the American game.
The rugby heresy spread further through student intellectuals venturing outside the confines of North America. An ‘All-America’ side, selected exclusively from the two California schools, including future ‘Captain America’ of 1912, Laird Monterey Morris, and dressed in suitable ‘winged-shield’ jerseys, travelled 16,000 miles to tour New Zealand and Australia in 1910. They lost most matches but acquitted themselves honourably, salvaging a draw against Auckland. That same year, Princeton’s Donald ‘Heff’ Herring, gridiron footballer, wrestling champion, hammer-thrower and Rhodes Scholar ‘Yank at Oxford’, became the first American to win a rugger Blue. Stanford medico H.R. ‘Bert’ Stolz, also at Oxford, would not get his Blue, but later played for the USA against New Zealand. Bert was another adventurous academic: in a gap year from Stanford he almost sank Jack London’s yacht The Snark off Honolulu by opening the seacock. Later he wrote the 1951 educational classic Somatic Development of Adolescent Boys; he had joined Rosslyn Park in 1910, but there is no connection between those two last facts, allegedly. He served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps in the war and would skipper the USA rugby XV in 1919.
Heff Herring caused a stir at home by writing to The Princetonian from his dreaming spire at Merton, Oxford, after another rash of serious gridiron injuries. He urged that ‘in light of the fate of football being sealed unless radical changes in the rules are made, so that men may take part in the game without the great liability of injury’, that ‘the English game of rugby be taken into serious consideration with a view to either substituting it for American football or improving the American game with the best features of the English game’.8 He further advised that, ‘The English game subjected the players to less danger and was at the same time more interesting both to the players and the spectator than the American game.’ If this all sounds dangerously un-American, he redeemed himself in the war as a lieutenant in the 94th Aero Squadron, alongside America’s top ace Eddie Rickenbacker, flying French-made Spad fighters over enemy lines. Sadly, he also abandoned his rugby prophecy in the wilderness of war – America was by then not listening anyhow.
One extra benefit to America of the 1912 Wallabies tour was that they left a joey behind: Daniel Brendan Carroll was born in Melbourne, and scored two tries in winning his Olympic gold medal in London. He was an elusive ball-carrier, blessed with great acceleration. First capped against Wales on that 1908 tour when he was the baby on the team,9 he won his second in California. He decided to stay on in the sunshine to study geology at Stanford – and naturally to play rugby. As America did not enter the war until 1917, this had the added advantage of extending not only his playing career, but quite probably his life.
Carroll won his third international cap on 15 November 1913 against New Zealand, this time playing for his adopted country of the USA. The pitch at Berkeley’s California Field was familiar, as was the referee, Billy Hill. The All Blacks had warmed up at home by eating Australia for breakfast, 30–5; they left the second string to finish off the meal (they made a mess of the dessert) and took a strong team, skippered by Alec McDonald, the last of the class of ’05, to California. They held daily haka practices aboard ship. In America, they dined royally on the local sides, racking up 457 points in twelve matches and conceding only one try. Stanford and UCal were despatched twice each, without ceremony and almost without points – the solitary score from UCal prop Jack Abrams. The inevitable happened in the Test: New Zealand ran in thirteen tries for a 51–3 win, the result of ‘even more than usual excellence of the New Zealanders and the lack of teamwork of the Americans’. In a sad postscript, a trio of All Black forwards would die in the forthcoming war: Dewar, Downing and Sellars.
As tours go, this was flat-track bullying: little wonder then that they did not return to the USA until 1980. The previously exultant San Francisco press was crestfallen:
The Californian players are the best we have developed in seven years of intercollegiate rugby – the very best. And the score against them was 51 to 3. The only conclusion is that we have not yet learned how to play rugby. It is still a foreign game.10
The US sporting almanac Spalding’s Guide (whose L.A. Wolff had accompanied
the All-Americans down under in 1910 and even appeared in the team photo) was no cheerier in its admiring review:
The visit of the New Zealand ‘All Blacks’ … was easily the feature of the season of 1913, and the indelible impression of their whirlwind tactics will remain in the history of California football for years to come … They came at a period when the development of Rugby in California appeared to have reached successful stages, at a time when the effects of Australia’s competition was about to materialize in wonderful strides on the part of local efforts.
American rugby was truly demoralised by the men in black: ‘the overwhelming defeat of the All-American fifteen left us with little appreciation of the extended effort on the part of our selected team. The rumblings are not just giving vent to a wounded pride. We have not mastered the rudiments of rugby.’ The West Coast began to feel isolated from America’s national game of Football. UCal threw in the towel and returned to the pigskin in 1915, with Stanford following two years later; by post-war 1919, the Big Game was again played on the gridiron, as it has been ever since.
With great power comes responsibility to the game.11 There is a deep echo in Chicago a full century and another dozen tries later in October 2014. If one of the undisputed joys of modern rugby is that the sporting world order is turned on its head by a Pacific nation of 4.5 million as its established superpower, there is equal pleasure in the occasional French bouleversement, Bokke mugging or Aussie dancing lesson meted out to the All Blacks – let alone a rare England win. They may have sold out 61,500 seats at Chicago’s Soldier Field, and even more replica shirts, but will a ruthless, basketball-score 74–6 trouncing of the USA Eagles really be ‘inspiring Americans to fall in love with rugby’, as the match programme claimed? Or will it send rugby’s development in this proud but brittle sporting nation into reverse, and renew a splendid isolation in games that no one else plays? Let’s hope it’s not ‘déjà vu all over again’, to quote New York Yankee, Yogi Berra.
After the Final Whistle Page 14
