After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  When I saw him, absolutely cool and collected under a murderous machine-gun fire, with shells falling all round, one thanked God for such men to set such a priceless example. He was absolutely lionhearted, and had he come through, I should have promoted him on the field and recommended him for the D.C.M. [Distinguished Conduct Medal].

  It was a sad day for football. We can ill spare men like these, but if another game of football is never played in Britain, the game has done well, for after two years’ command in the field, I am convinced that the Rugby footballer makes the finest soldier in the world.22

  Notes

  1 Hinton would be President of the IRFU in 1920–21, Sir William Tyrrell in 1950–51.

  2 County Champions in his last three seasons.

  3 Quoted in James Corsan, For Poulton and England (Matador, 2009).

  4 Edmund van Esbeck, One Hundred Years of Irish Rugby (Gill & McMillan, 1974).

  5 W.J. Townsend Collins, Rugby Recollections (R.H. Johns, 1948).

  6 Paul Jones, War Letters of a Public Schoolboy.

  7 A.M. McGilchrist, The Liverpool Scottish 1900–19.

  8 Liverpool Mercury, 3 May 1897.

  9 Liverpool Post, 10 March 1964.

  10 Sewell, Roll of Honour.

  11 Sewell, Roll of Honour.

  12 Chavasse, a keen rugby player at Oxford and 1908 Olympian athlete, died of wounds at Brandhoek in 1917, in an action which earned him a second VC, this time posthumous.

  13 Sewell, Roll of Honour.

  14 The Times, 11 March 1901.

  15 The Times, 11 December 1905.

  16 Ecclesiasticus 44, 13: ‘Their seed shall remain forever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.’

  17 London Gazette Supplement, 2 December 1918.

  18 Oakes, Yorkshire RFU Memorial Book.

  19 Grierson, Ramblings of a Rabbit.

  20 Stanley Bruce, MC, Jesus College and Cambridge oarsman, became Prime Minister of Australia in 1923 and later Lord Melbourne.

  21 Letter to The Times quoted by David Woodall, The Mobbs Own.

  22 Oakes, Yorkshire RFU Memorial Book.

  10

  Ireland

  Together standing tall

  Shoulder to shoulder

  We’ll answer Ireland’s call1

  In England, there was no Rugby Battalion: the rugby boat had already sailed, with its players rushing to enlist or taking up commissions in August and September. The closest was D Company, 7th Northants, raised at a rugby ground by Edgar Mobbs, whose own story, as he rose inexorably from enlisted man to commanding officer, annealed the bright armour of his ‘Own’ company, or even ‘Corps’ – the nickname burnished with the myth.

  Across the Irish Sea, another D Company, 7th Battalion, would be raised from volunteers at a rugby ground, under the banner of the Irish Rugby Union, and would suffer the same bullets and bombs of outrageous fortune as Mobbs’s men. Nine Irish internationalists lost their lives in the war. But it was a single company of ordinary men, many of them from one Dublin club, who stood tall and fell the hardest.

  Ireland was then part of Britain, but by no means happily so. It would take more than this chapter (and already has taken many books) to unravel the entanglements of Irish politics. The country was divided on sectarian lines with a minority of mainly Protestant loyalists concentrated in northern Ulster, amidst a Catholic majority that was lobbying from Dublin for Home Rule. The Unionists feared for their future and clung on resolutely to their status within the United Kingdom. This simplifies the complex web of loyalties far beyond its tortuous reality, but a solution seemed close before war intervened.

  The Government of Ireland Bill, passed three times by the Westminster Commons in 1912, 1913 and 1914, was repeatedly rejected by the Lords. As the Parliament Act stipulated, it then automatically became law, receiving Royal Assent on 15 September 1914. But the declaration of war with Germany six weeks before, and fear of civil war at Britain’s back door postponed its implementation. King George’s presence at Twickenham for the England game against Ireland had carried a clear political message. Rugby provided a shining light of unison which rose above the sectarian divide and marked it out from the inevitably Nationalist sports of Gaelic football and hurling. In rugby, players from north and south, Catholic and Protestant, stood shoulder to shoulder in a ‘Combined Irish’ team, a remarkable display of rugby’s ability to put aside political tensions in vigorous common pursuit by all ‘four provinces’ of an oval ball. While Association still cleaves the Emerald isle in two, rugby holds it together.

  The August declaration of war signalled an extraordinary outburst of patriotism by Empire loyalists and Nationalists alike. More decisively than C.J.B. Marriott in England, and as swiftly as the SFU, Frank Henry Browning, President of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) since 1912, issued a circular to the clubs in the Dublin district, urging members to place themselves at the disposal of the country in war, in response to Irish-born Lord Kitchener’s first appeal for one hundred thousand men. Dublin-born in 1868, Browning (nicknamed ‘Chicken’) had been a cricketer for Marlborough and MCC, captaining Ireland thirteen times.2 He played his rugby at half back – as befitted ‘a short and stockily-built man with powerful forearms’ – for Trinity College and the Wanderers club, narrowly missing out on a double cap. The response to his call was immediate: Browning inaugurated the ‘Irish Rugby Football Union Volunteer Corps’, headquartered at the Lansdowne Road ground. He extended membership beyond rugby to all sporting clubs and engaged several drill sergeants, including one Sergeant Major Guest: in a few weeks, he had over 300 recruits under military instruction, drawn from the commercial and professional classes of the city. Browning and Guest stand proudly in front of their men in a photograph; in September 1914, Guest is the only one who is in uniform.

  Browning contacted an old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Dowling, CO of the newly formed 7th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers (RDF), who had been a renowned rugby footballer as captain of Monkstown. Dowling agreed to keep open a special company for ‘Pals’ from the IRFU Volunteer Corps and advertised in the press:

  To the Irish Rugby Football Union Volunteers

  I am keeping my Battalion open for you to join. Come in your platoons (fifty men). Mess, drill and work together, and I hope, fight the common enemy together. I am waiting for YOU, but I cannot keep open long. Come at once TO-DAY.

  Like ‘Mobbs’ Own’ this sub-unit was denominated ‘D’ Company.

  Dowling’s Monkstown had a long association with the military, with many officers playing in its ranks. It had already lost one Irish cap, Pierce O’Brien-Butler, in the Boer War; during this new conflict it would lose internationalists Ernest Cotton Deane and Basil Maclear. Deane was killed in action, serving as a captain with the RAMC attached to the Leicestershire Regiment, near Laventie on 25 September 1915. A month earlier, he had won an MC when,

  a patrol in front of the line was bombed by the enemy. Captain Deane, without any knowledge of the enemy’s strength, at once got over the parapet and ran by himself to the spot under rifle and machine gun fire. Finding four wounded men, he returned for stretchers and got them back into safety. This was not the first time that Captain Deane’s gallantry under fire had been brought to notice.3

  It would however be the last.

  On 16 September, those who had enlisted at Lansdowne Road – barristers and solicitors, doctors, stockbrokers, barbers, students of medicine, engineering and art, commercials, civil servants and insurance salesmen – marched off to Kingsbridge station en route to the Curragh Camp for training, cheered by a warm ovation as they went. Training involved drilling, musketry, trench-digging and gruelling route marches. This was no ordinary company of soldiers. In December, they took a break from training, as guests of Lieutenant Cochrane at Bray, south of Dublin. The subaltern was also Sir Stanley Cochrane, Baronet, whose father had made a fortune by inventing ginger ale; Stanley spent some of it on building a cricket field and railway
station at his Woodbrook estate, where he hosted the national XIs of Australia, South Africa and India. Fortified by a weekend of ginger ale and mineral waters from Cantrell & Cochrane Ltd (other famed Irish beverages almost certainly available), D Company marched in full battle gear from Bray to the Curragh: by road that is 40 miles, or less by the direct but mountainous Wicklow scenic route. As ever, less is more.

  D Company trained at the Curragh for seven months. One newspaper correspondent watched the volunteers at their ‘labour of love and loyalty’:

  I was particularly interested in ‘D’ Company, the ‘Footballers’, as they were known when they were first drafted to the Curragh. The title is steadily drifting into abeyance. They were footballers when they went to the Curragh. They are soldiers of the King now; and proud to be nothing else; and, above all, proud to be serving in the ‘Old Toughs’.

  I watched them at their drill … and they went through their movements with splendid precision and confidence. It was difficult to believe that the majority of the men were civilians like the rest of us only a month ago. They marched and countermarched, and formed fours; and wheeled and counter-wheeled, and deployed and performed all the other evolutions of the parade ground with, so far as I could judge, the smartness and certainty of veterans. The Prussian drill-sergeant is supposed to be the last word in efficiency production. No cursing, swearing, jack-booted, bullying Prussian non-commissioned officer could have his men in better shape or fit.4

  The ‘Old Toughs’ was the nickname for the 2nd Battalion, Dublin Fusiliers; predictably (and justifiably in many cases), D Company became known as ‘the Toffs among the Toughs’. When the battalion embarked for mainland Britain in May 1915, their progress through Dublin’s streets was again reported in fond detail, as proof ‘that the city pulses with ardent enthusiasm for the cause of the Allies’:

  Led by the band of the 12th Lancers and the pipers of the Trinity College Officer Training Corps, they marched off from the Royal Barracks. Along the Liffey quays, crowds on the pavements and spectators in the windows cheered and waved. Outside the Four Courts, a large group of barristers, solicitors, officials and judges shouted good-bye to their friends. Little boys strutted alongside the marching column, chanting their street songs:

  Left, right; left right; here’s the way we go,

  Marching with fixed bayonets, the terror of every foe,

  A credit to the nation, a thousand buccaneers,

  A terror to creation, are the Dublin Fusiliers.

  Not for them the direct route along the Liffey quays to the ships. Diverting across Essex Bridge, they marched through the commercial centre of Dame Street, then College Green, passing the Bank of Ireland and Trinity College where many of the Battalion had been students and one a Professor. Spectators became dense as the marching column crossed O’Connell Bridge and right wheeled onto the quays skirting the statue of O’Connell the liberator. Emotion rose when well dressed ladies from the fashionable Georgian and Regency squares of south Dublin mingled with their poorer sisters in shawls from the Liberties and lesser squares of north Dublin. Together they joined their husbands and sweethearts in the ranks to keep step with them the last few hundred yards.5

  The professor was Ernest Julian, Reid Professor of Criminal Law at TCD when he enlisted.6 Many from the TCD contingent did not take commissions, although it is unclear whether this was out of a desire for equality or, as is more likely, a hunger to get to the front without tiresome and lengthy officer training. Another lawyer, Henry Hanna, KC, lived next to the rugby ground, was secretary of the Pals committee, and wrote a remarkably fresh and vivid chronicle of D Company which was published in wartime, and stands as tribute to the Irish rugby men who marched away.

  They were not all Toffs: Private John Boyd played rugby for Clontarf and worked as a clerk; Harry Boyd worked with his father in a well-known pharmacy William Boyd (no relation) was a travelling salesman from Bective Rangers RFC. Charles Ball, Assistant Keeper in the Botanic Gardens and editor of Irish Gardening, added a cultivated touch to the company. Douglas Gunning, 19 years old, working in a Sligo bank, cycled 50 miles to join up with his elder brother, Cecil; they kept a joint diary throughout. Private Hugh Pollock, of Wanderers, an assistant manager on a tea plantation, travelled from Sumatra, Dutch East Indies, to enlist. Wanderers, whose clubhouse was tucked away in a corner of the Lansdowne Road ground, already boasted two Victoria Cross recipients from the Boer War in Tommy Crean and Robert Johnston. A third would be awarded in this war to its Fred Harvey, a record unmatched by many regiments, let alone a single rugby club. Its war memorial lists thirty-three names.

  As they crossed the Irish Sea, one Dublin Fusilier and rugby hero of Ireland already lay dead in Flanders. Basil Maclear was always destined to be a star: his Ulster-born grandfather Sir Thomas Maclear, Astronomer Royal at Cape Town Observatory, has a crater on the moon named after him, as well as a beacon on Table Mountain. Born in Portsmouth and rocked in the rugby cradle of Bedford School, Basil played for Blackheath, Monkstown, Cork County, Munster and the Barbarians. Fellow Bedfordian, Henry Grierson, described him admiringly:

  Six feet tall, weighed well over fourteen stone, and could do the hundred in ten and three-fifths – good time for so big a man. In his clothes he looked a trifle on the heavy side but stripped he was a picture, and possessed those delightful abdominal muscles lying in ripples, which are rarely encountered today, but which are familiar to the students of ancient statuary. No wonder the ladies of Dublin called him the broth of a bhoy.7

  On the field he was ‘a forceful rather than subtle player, he was dangerous in attack and formidable in defence, running straight and hard, and handing off with a force which was only equalled by the tremendous vigour of his tackling’.8 Even the fearsome ‘Darkie’ Sivright was once knocked almost unconscious by Maclear’s hand-off. However, it can be said that he handled his opponents literally with kid gloves – he played on the wing wearing a trademark pair of white leather mittens, as well as a khaki puttee wrapped round his waist, for reasons no one ever discovered. Despite these quirky trappings of a sporting genius, Maclear was also a ‘Tough’: he won the Sword of Honour as top cadet at Sandhurst, was gazetted as second lieutenant to the 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers and at 18 years old served in the Boer War, being wounded at Spion Kop and mentioned in despatches. In 1905, he took full command of the Lagos Battalion, West Africa Frontier Force. On his return to Britain, rugby took centre stage.

  Unaccountably passed over by England’s selectors, after being watched in a game in which he scored four tries and converted twelve, he repaid their myopia by choosing to play for his father’s country, beating England three times, and appearing eleven times overall in the green jersey. He captained Munster in one of his four games against the 1905 All Blacks, on 28 November at Limerick (a 33–0 hiding but not unusual on that tour). But his moment of glory came a year later against the Springboks at the Balmoral Showgrounds in Belfast. Grierson wrote:

  E.H.D. Sewell told me that Basil’s try for Ireland against the South Africans in 1907 was the finest he had seen and he had observed a good number. Maclear playing ‘dead’ centre, received the ball on his own 25 line and with characteristic dash burst clear through [opposite wing Loubser] and when clear, swung to the left. Little Joubert was playing fullback and when the time came, he attempted the tackle at the right-angle, only to be handed-off in the face. He made a second effort when he recovered with similar result, but nothing daunted had another gallant go and was put down for good.

  The Globe reinforced the significance of the score and its timing:

  Basil Maclear’s run will go down to posterity. It is not at all likely to be forgotten by those who were fortunate enough to be present. It was altogether out of the common in an international match for a man to score after running from his own ‘25’ and the incident gathered particular force from the fact that Ireland then were apparently in a hopeless position. Maclear’s try gave Ireland a new lease of life.

&nb
sp; The try and two more from Harold Sugars ran the South Africans close in the 12–15 final score.

  Basil’s last match in March 1907 was a less glorious 29–0 pasting from Wales in Cardiff in front of 30,000 Welshmen, and an unimpressed Irish ladies hockey team. The match may be more remembered for the debut of Fred Harvey, an 18-year-old schoolboy at Portora, Enniskillen. Half-back Fred, part of the Wanderers XV that won the 1906 Leinster Cup, followed in the footsteps of his brothers, both capped for Ireland. His debut must have been traumatic, and perhaps, like Ireland, ‘thoroughly demoralised and upset … stupefied by the brilliance of their opponents’, he emigrated to Canada. His second cap on his return came as fourth-choice full back in 1911 against France; despite the 25–5 victory, a poor display (his error let in the French try) ended his Irish career.

  Back in Canada, Fred married and joined the Mounted Rifles, transferring into Lord Strathcona’s Horse in 1916. Cavalry regiments were under-employed in the Western Front conditions, but Harvey proved the value of the horse in March 1917 at Guyencourt on the Somme. Seeing a previously invisible strand of wire protecting the machine-gun post they were attacking, he ‘jumped the wire, shot the machine-gunner and captured the gun’. According to his Victoria Cross citation, ‘his most courageous act undoubtedly had a decisive effect on the success of the operations’. A year later, Fred repeated his heroism, when he was awarded the MC in the same action that earned fellow Canadian Gordon Flowerdew the VC.

  By 1912 Basil Maclear was Inspector of Physical Training at Sandhurst. He rejoined 2nd RDF as a captain in February 1915 and went to France as second-in-command, in time for the heavy fighting at Ypres during April and May. In a brief respite, Basil refereed the game on 14 April at Nieppe, where Poulton-Palmer threw his last pass and Ireland’s Dickie Lloyd, sixteen-cap Billy Hinton and William Tyrrell played for the 4th Division. On returning to his unit, for four days from 8 May he was in company command. Every day, in brief intervals snatched from the fighting, he wrote to his mother, his last letter dated 23 May. The next morning he was killed at the age of 34. Seven months later his mention in despatches cited: