After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  It is claimed that twenty-seven rugby internationalists served with the 4th during the war, but not all could be assembled on this day; the men from the trenches still managed to muster some considerable rugby talent from three nations, including two future presidents of the Irish Rugby Union. At full back, Lieutenant William Hinton, of Wesleyan College, had sixteen caps for Ireland and seven games for the Barbarians. Ulsterman Captain William Tyrrell, with nine caps in the green jersey, had toured South Africa with the British in 1910.1 As Irish pack-leader in their last game of 1914, he had fought that notorious running battle with Welsh collier Percy Jones at Belfast. He was a medical officer who won the DSO and Bar, MC and Belgian Croix de Guerre. He joined the RAF after the war and ascended to the height of air vice-marshal; appointment as honorary surgeon to King George VI during the Second War earned him a knighthood in 1944. Tyrrell was also buried by an explosion not long after this game, an experience which allowed him to contribute personally to the findings of the Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock’ in 1922. His conclusion was that shell-shock is caused by attempted repression of fear.

  A second RAMC captain in the side, Harold James Storrs Morton, Blackheath prop and Cambridge Blue in 1908 and another Baa-Baa, was capped four times for England in 1910. Scots internationalist Lieutenant Rowland Fraser, a front-row forward from Edinburgh, won three light Blues, captaining Cambridge in 1910. He was later promoted to captain in the Rifle Brigade but was killed on the first day of the Somme; his name is carved on the Thiepval Memorial to those 72,194 killed in the chalklands, who could not be identified to give them their own resting place. J.N. Thompson of London Scottish and Ireland triallist J.G. Keppell made up the known rugby names, but nine more of the side have faded into anonymity.

  English rugby and regiments were both organised on county lines, and there was close identification between club and battalion. The 48th Division team mainly comprised ‘Soldiers of Gloster’, with eleven players from the 1/5th Gloucestershires, who were serious about their rugby. In wartime, they had challenged the newly arrived Canadians and played for a company cup, won by D Company, before they crossed the Channel to Boulogne on 29 March 1915. Ten of the division’s players had turned out for Gloucester Football Club, some over many seasons, others for only one; some were county champions with Gloucestershire in 1913 and several had also faced the Springboks.

  Notable among them was hometown boy, Private Sid Smart, a back-row forward with 195 games for Gloucester in a thirteen-year career that would last until 1923, skippering the club in his final season. He also amassed twenty-six County caps and twelve for England, including both pre-war Grand Slam seasons, and led the recruitment charge on that August 1914 day at Shire Hall. Twice wounded in the war and eventually discharged from active service, he resumed rugby after the war for his club, a resurgent Gloucestershire2 and his country, with a further three Test caps. A lifetime clubman, he died aged 81 in 1969 at his beloved Kingsholm, while serving as a steward in the grandstand during a game against Cambridge; when we consider what he lived through in his twenties, this has to count as a great result. Gloucester FC’s memorial lists thirty players lost in the war; seventeen of them have no known grave.

  Analysis of the 48th Division team throws up interesting comparisons with peacetime rugby and wartime casualty stats; of its fifteen men, three were killed and six wounded. Fourteen men are identified by name, with a guest appearance by the prodigious and ageless A.N. Other; records show that he has played for a prolific number of clubs in a remarkable career that still endures today, yet is still uncapped. Like Zorro, his real name is unknown (Andrew, Arthur, Algernon?) but his is a rugby biography that one day must be written. Eight players were privates: Smart, Sysum, Webb, Washbourne, Hamblin, Harris, and two Cooks (broth unspoilt), which gives the lie to any generalisation that rugby was exclusive to the officer class. Four officers played on this side: Gloucesters’ Lieutenant Lionel Sumner, later MC, wounded and acting major; Royal Warwicks Captain Francis Deakin, skipper of Moseley and Midland Counties and a 1914 Barbarian; and two from the Royal Berkshires including Lieutenant Charles Cruttwell, an Oxford University triallist, who was also wounded. He later wrote a history of the Great War and engaged in a running feud with Evelyn Waugh. The fourth officer, who surpassed them all in talent if not rank, would die by a sniper’s bullet three weeks after his final game, at Ploegsteert Wood on 5 May.

  Two more Gloucesters in the 48th’s side, Syd Millard and Sydney Sysum, would later be killed at the Somme on the same 23rd day of July 1916, a dark day for two battalions of the regiment and the rugby club. At 0630 the whistle blew along the trenches for a pincer movement on the fortified village of Pozières, the 48th attacking from the northwest and the 1st Australian Division from the southeast; they were mown down like summer corn by scything German machine guns. The pair can be found on the same pier and face of the Thiepval Memorial, still side by side (Syd by Syd?). Another NCO on the team, half back Lance Corporal Alec Lewis, was wounded that day; his younger brothers, Tom and Melville, both rugby players, were listed missing and later joined the Gloucester roll on Lutyens’s arched ziggurat. Alec was later commissioned and rose to become Captain Lewis, MC and Bar, giving another lie to the stereotype of the public-school officer class. The fifteenth man remains unheralded: for a man so extensively documented in his playing career, the wartime service of A.N. Other remains a mystery. It is commonly acknowledged that some military records were later destroyed by Luftwaffe firebombs; his must surely be amongst them.

  The referee was Ireland’s genius Captain Basil Maclear, of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He too was killed a few weeks later in May. The match was reported in the first April edition of The Fifth Gloucester Gazette, one of the first trench newspapers produced at the front.

  The Fourth kicked off with the wind and immediately began to press, their forwards doing splendid work. Then Sysum broke away and scored after a bout of passing … The Fourth returned to the attack and almost scored, but after some loose play our forwards broke away and ‘got over.’ Hamblin converted. Soon after, Washbourne intercepted and a combined movement with Hamblin resulted in the ball being taken over the line by J. Harris. The score at half-time was 11 points to nil. The South Midlands continued to keep the upper hand and Harris again scored. Five minutes before time Washbourne scored a brilliant try, leaving us victors by 17 points.

  ‘Despite the difference in the scoring’ wrote this soldier-scribe, ‘the game was most interesting and was thoroughly enjoyed by all the spectators, especially the Welshmen who had turned out to see a football match after many months in the trenches.’

  The man we have to thank for such a complete team-list for the 48th, unusual for these scratch games of teams thrown together at the front, is touch judge Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert Collett, DSO, of Gloucester County, a Cambridge Blue of 1898 and a 1903 British Lion. His reason for preserving his list is our fourth officer and South Midlands captain, whose name was famed throughout the rugby world: Lieutenant Ronald Poulton-Palmer, 1/4th Royal Berkshires, Harlequins, Liverpool FC and England Grand Slam hero. Originally Poulton, the addition of Palmer to his name came as a condition of a legacy from the biscuit family.

  Collett supplied the list to Ronald’s father when he was killed three weeks after this final game. Ronnie had written to his father about the Nieppe game: ‘The match was quite amusing. We won 14–0 [actually 17–0], and there were millions of Generals there.’ He added more detail in his journal entry for the day before turning in, adding a hefty swipe at the ‘red-tabs’ of Divisional Staff, comfortable away from the trenches:

  After breakfast, drove into Nieppe in a motor lorry to see an exhibition of bomb throwing. After that we drove in a motor ambulance to Armentieres to have lunch and to shop. This town seems none the worse and there is plenty of business, though everything is expensive. After lunch we moved to Nieppe and I played rugger for the South Midland Division against the 4th Division. It was an amusing game.


  Several of the Liverpool Scottish from Ypres came over including Dum Cunningham and Dick Lloyd. It was splendid to see so many rugger players about. I changed in the room of the Captain of the 4th Divisional Staff. They lived in great style, quite unnecessary I thought. In fact they rather bored me. They ought to do a turn in the trenches with us all. Back to bed.3

  It was Ronnie’s magnetic attraction that allowed the opposing 48th to enjoy the services of two ringers from the Liverpool Scottish, former team-mates at Liverpool FC, who had heard there was a game on and Ronnie was playing.

  ‘Dick Lloyd’ was Richard Averill ‘Dickie’ Lloyd, a rugby and cricketing star at Portora Royal School ‘the greatest school side in the history of the game’,4 which beat adult sides like North Ireland and Lansdowne, and annihilated school rivals by cricket scores to nil. He made his Ireland debut in 1910 while at Dublin University, playing half back with his opening partner at bat, H.M. Read. Either side of the war, Lloyd won nineteen caps, eleven as captain, and held a kicking record of 69 points that lasted until the 1960s and Tom Kiernan. On New Year’s Day 1914, Lloyd had played on French soil under happier circumstances, and behind William Tyrrell’s pack, when Ireland beat France 8–6 at Parc des Princes; Tyrrell added his try to Joseph Quinn’s first, but the winning difference was the conversion by captain Dickie. He was described by one writer as ‘a genius, one of the superlative half-backs’:

  He was the completely equipped player, but excelled as a kick. Opposing captains might tell off their wing forwards to suppress him, but he would circumvent them. Other men have kicked as quickly; no player of modern times has been more accurate … usually he was the man of his side and the man of the match.5

  Lloyd’s Liverpool season netted him 183 points, including 114 with the boot. In August he commissioned into the local 10th King’s Liverpool Regiment (KLR), known as the Liverpool Scottish, and was in France by February 1915. An erroneous report of his death in April 1915 confused him with club colleague and near namesake R.A. (Robert Arthur) Lloyd, killed with the 4th Battalion. Former Dulwich XV schoolboy Paul Jones was half right when he mourned his lost rugby idols:

  Do you realise what a fine part amateur sportsmen are playing in this war? I really doubt if there will be any great athletes left if things go on as they are doing. On the same day I read that Poulton Palmer and R.A. Lloyd are gone. Only last year, I remember seeing these two as Captain of England and Ireland respectively, shaking hands with each other and with the King at Twickenham.6

  Dickie’s companion, Robert ‘Dum’ Cunningham, was an old Rugby School chum of Ronnie’s, as was fellow school XV centre Rupert Brooke who would die on Skyros nine days later, on St George’s Day, of septicaemia from an insect bite on the way to Gallipoli. Dum was another Liverpool FC player who took his place with Poulton-Palmer and Lloyd in a poignant photograph from the final season of peace: six of the sitters perished. Dum was a pre-war volunteer in the first draft of the Scottish aboard the Maidan when it crossed to France in November 1914. Despite his best efforts, being wounded three times, he achieved his majority and survived the war, winning the MC at Rivière for remaining under fire while severely wounded to get another wounded man to safety.7

  That photograph of the Liverpool Football Club team in 1914 taken outside Birkenhead Park’s pavilion, with six doomed players in red, black and blue hoops, captures a vanished moment for Liverpool, for rugby and for imperial Britain. The year marks a pinnacle in the economic fortunes of a city that considered itself, with good reason, the ‘second city of Empire’. Its growing confidence built on global maritime trade in ‘commodities’ especially with America – once slaves, now cotton and insurance – would be crowned by the completion in 1916 of the waterside trio of magnificent buildings at Pierhead, known as the Three Graces, including the Royal Liver Building. Liverpool FC was the oldest open rugby club in the world, formed in 1857, when a group of Rugbeians challenged local boys to a football game under their school rules. In 1871, the club provided four of the England team that played Scotland in the first rugby international.

  The 1895 schism that created the breakaway Northern Union almost did for first-class rugby union in the region. The Liverpool Mercury warned in 1897 that ‘The Rugby code in Liverpool and district will in a few years be as extinct as a dodo.’8 The writer, nervous of being branded a heretic, tentatively suggested a ‘Manchester and Liverpool District Rugby Union League’, observing that the success of leagues in Association and Northern Union is ‘a sufficient object-lesson of the utility of such a system in vastly increasing the interest not only of the general public, but also of the players’. The proposal was ignored, as its author almost certainly expected. But as the city’s thriving economy attracted an influx of businessmen and professionals, so amateur rugby union prospered, although it hardly spoke with a pronounced Scouse accent.

  In 1914, as if to prove the city’s stature, the club’s first XV was graced by its own trinity of international captains: Poulton-Palmer of England, Ireland’s Dickie Lloyd and Frederick Turner of Scotland. It is a unique honour for a club to claim in a decade, let alone a season; between them they amassed an impressive (for the era) fifty-one caps. The reputations of these three men alone would merit the team’s label as ‘one of the best sides ever’, but there was strength in depth. Alex Angus, capped fourteen times for Scotland from 1909, did not make the team photo but was another great star in the pre-war firmament; he shone again with four more caps and a try against Ireland in 1920. He started the war as a private in the 9th Royal Scots, was mentioned in Haig’s despatches, and ended it with a DSO as CO of the 5th Cameron Highlanders.

  Not that the internationalists were alone in their glory: Tracey Fowler, at wing forward, won a Cambridge Blue and was an England triallist; George Davey was a regular county selection at scrum half for many years and Tommy Williams Lloyd and Robert Raimes Jackson, a Barbarian, were widely regarded as one of the swiftest pairs of wingers in the business. Seven of the side represented Lancashire – it would have been more had the rules not forbidden those with Irish or Scots caps from playing for English counties. The season’s haul was 191 tries with Jackson (39) narrowly pipping T.W. Lloyd (34) for the title of top try-scorer in this annus mirabilis.

  With Turner and Dickie landing goals from all angles, they were defeated just four times in thirty-one outings: a shock defeat at Carlisle was ascribed to the absence of key players and to ‘the fact that Turner played in the centre, leaving us without a hooker’. Let that be a warning to today’s hookers who loiter with intent in the backs. Carlisle supporters, disgruntled that some stars had not turned up, behaved in a very French fashion and pelted them with mud. That season they scored a club record 838 points and conceded only 239. According to forward Henry Royle, interviewed for the Liverpool Post in 1964, the winning formula was simple:

  Our pattern of play seldom varied; Turner would hook, the forwards shoved and kept our legs out of the way, and as soon as Davey had the ball we had no further trouble. As a comparatively light pack we worked very hard in the scrum. I have a pair of thick ears as a memento – but it was well worth it.9

  To his thick ears, Royle would add serious shrapnel wounds to thigh and groin at Second Ypres, and a gassing at Third Ypres: he was invalided for home duty in March 1918, but rejoined his 2/6th KLR battalion in France, happily seven days after the Armistice.

  The Great War sparked many changes in Britain and would signal the start of a long fall from grace for the city of Liverpool; the club’s title would be usurped by a football team in red, and the game of rugby union would lose premier status in the northwest city, overwhelmed by a rising tide of Association success. It was the city’s blue side, Everton, who would finish the controversial 1914–15 season in April as League champions; they would hold the title for another five years, as football finally gave reluctant way to the demands of war. By the time soccer was suspended on 23 April 1915, Liverpool’s rugby club from the last pre-war season had already lost two of
its finest, and would suffer the loss of four more. When the final reckoning came, the club counted a sad toll of fifty-seven members killed. The original LFC added a white hoop to its colours in the 1986 merger that created Liverpool St Helens – the true Football Club is still alive on Merseyside.

  As in Gloucester, when war arrived, most Liver-birds of a rugby feather flocked together as one battalion, in this case the 10th King’s Liverpool Regiment (Liverpool Scottish). In November 1914, the Liverpool Echo reported several new commissions in the Scottish, including rugby players George ‘Pinkie’ Cowan, Dickie Lloyd and his cricketing brother William, and the Turner brothers, Frederick and William. During the war, this single battalion would include in its ranks an extraordinary seven rugby internationalists. Such was their stellar reputation that men like Lawrence Blencowe of Oxford, Headingley, Yorkshire, Harlequins and Barbarians – a mere England triallist – rarely get mentioned in the 10th KLR tributes, but he too fell at Ypres in 1917.

  Frederick Harding Turner, the Liverpool captain of captains, who sits flanked by his two stellar lieutenants, Poulton-Palmer and Lloyd, was capped fifteen times by his country and led the Scottish team in 1914. He was Liverpudlian by birth, in Sefton Park in 1888, but Scottish through his parents, such that he occasionally turned out for the London Exiles when moonlighting from university in the Big Smoke. His schooling was amidst the Howgill Fells at Cumberland’s rugby nursery of Sedbergh and then Trinity, Oxford. He won three Blues 1908–10 and first played alongside the wizard Poulton-Palmer, who later recalled his ‘cheery and infectious laugh’ and practical joking. Their Varsity Match photo of 1910 is sobering: Oxford skipper Turner sits with Poulton-Palmer again on his right hand, Billy Geen (Wales), Ronnie Lagden (England) and David Bain (Scotland). Hindsight turns the formal gravity of young men in such photographs into the look of the grave.