After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  The King’s Cup would be the jewel in an extraordinary crowning of rugby, as touring military teams from the Dominions took on renascent clubs and home units awaiting demobilisation. In wartime, rugby was approved therapy for shattered men from the front; it would now play a part in the entire nation’s recovery. In this new, uncertain peace, it was an opportunity to restate the values that had carried the Empire through the conflict – this, after all, was the game that won the war, in the view of one headmaster who urged on 26 February that:

  It is timely to press forward the claims of the greatest game of all. It is not only national but imperial; it is the game of the most vigorous of our Colonies; it is the game of the Army that has won the hardest and grimmest of all wars; it should be the universal game of our new educational system because it is a maker of men.

  At Richmond that afternoon, spectators might read his letter whilst perusing the morning Times over a pint while awaiting kick-off. ‘Hear, hear!’ they would murmur before enjoying a double-header of New Zealand and Australian Services A and B teams, in final rehearsal for the royal command performance of the King’s Cup.

  Australia’s representative at the meeting was Major Walter ‘Wally’ Matthews. This versatile man was a qualified doctor, pre-war Sydney University and NSW player, and former mayor; he would not only manage the AIF team and be team doctor, but would also turn out at half back against South Africa at Newport, aged 35. When the whizz-bangs fell silent in 1918, the energetic Australians had wasted no time in setting up a Sport Control Board in France, with sub-committees in charge of staging events for each sport, funded by the Comforts Fund. The rugby organisation was led by Major Syd Middleton, DSO, 17th Battalion, and rangy back-row for the Olympian Wallabies, with Moran, Richards and Carroll. He was an impressive physical specimen at 14 stone and over 6ft, and seemingly tireless: he played the first eighteen tour matches of 1908 on the trot. Against Oxford, to his lifelong regret, he became the first Wallaby to be sent off. His skipper Moran, watching injured on the sidelines, recounted in 1939:

  Suddenly on a line-out I saw one of our biggest forwards swing a blow that hit an opposing forward. A.O. Jones promptly sent our man off; what else could he do? The man who committed this offence was a magnificent athlete, rower, boxer and footballer, and actually a very good sportsman, but irritable and hot-headed. I followed him into the dressing-room with murder in my heart for one who was and is still a firm friend. But when I saw his bowed head I said nothing and walked out. He is still paying for that indiscretion. It has pursued him for thirty years. It followed him to the war and it still pops up, every now and again, when the striker and the struck meet socially in London, where they both live.

  Syd had taken offence at being called a ‘convict’ by one of the students. Was practical joker Freddy Turner the line-out sledger who provoked him? Red mist moments still haunt players today, at least in the media if not always, like Middleton, in their own minds.

  It’s worth pausing to consider the horrors Syd later saw on the battlefield. Richards encountered him at Ypres after a shell had fallen in his trench:

  … the wounded are patched up and after separating the ‘brain from the guts’ the identification disc and pay book are found and then all hands throw the body up over the parapet to strengthen it. Oft-times a shell will throw a body back into the trenches after it has been lying there for some days and is an awful proposition to handle.

  Syd came close to death on numerous occasions: ‘He was practically buried five times in one day, his stars were shot away from his shoulder on one side, the heel of his boot was dinted and his foot wrenched, a piece of shell penetrated his side.’ Yet it was his momentary fall from grace on the field of rugby that troubled him more.

  The chastened Middleton had no interest in joining the defectors to League on returning to Australia in 1908; his loyalty to the amateur code was rewarded when he twice captained NSW against the All Blacks, and twice more against the Māori. He then led the national side in three Tests against NZ, including a prized victory. In a rare Olympic double, he rowed at the 1912 Stockholm Games for Australasia, a joint team of ‘Anzac’ oarsmen, who took home silver; it is no surprise that his seat was in the engine room at six. Middleton fought at Gallipoli and in France was mentioned in despatches in 1918. His DSO citation for his action during an enemy attack near Amiens on 14 May recorded that ‘The battalion owes much of its success to the splendid example set by this very fine type of officer … the manner in which he handled the situation and quickly restored the line showed great initiative and leadership.’ Was it his initiative that winkled out his 1908 tour-mate Danny Carroll from the US Army to play two games in the King’s Cup? For good measure, Syd also took home with him an OBE and a second King’s Cup for rowing from the Peace Regatta at Henley.

  Under Syd’s guidance, a ‘Trenches Team’ of sixty players went into camp at a newly created School of Physical and Recreational Training at Barbençon in Belgium, close to Maubeuge, the original rendezvous for the Franco-British force in 1914. Within weeks, a corps rugby team was ‘sent to Paris to try conclusions with a French Army XV’ eager to test its mettle against the southern stars of the Anglo-Saxon galaxy, and emboldened by a strong showing in defeat to New Zealand in April. Australian victory by 6–3 apparently belied the AIF superiority as Lieutenant Goddard, in his official account, showed promise as a monocular Aussie sports journalist:

  The Australians were on the offensive during the greater part of the game … only their lack of properly concerted action and their inability to take full advantage of opportunities offered, due to the shortness of the period of their training … prevented them from making the score much bigger. Credit must be given to the Frenchmen for their splendid defensive game, and for the numerous occasions on which they repulsed the onslaughts against their line.1

  After Verdun, this was second nature to the French Army. But see how seamlessly the soldier’s language of warfare slides into rugby reportage. The Trench Team then crossed the Channel to play its Headquarters comrades in England, and varied civilian and military sides.

  The AIF ran a rugby competition from March in a round-robin of six teams, one from each of the five divisions and one from corps troops. Although the divisions were widely scattered through the French countryside, ‘each team was concentrated on a central village’ and ‘trained assiduously’. Conditions (and the team bus) were not ideal:

  One day a game would be played on a field covered with a couple of inches of snow. At another time the snow would give place to a similar depth of mud, and yet again the ground would be frozen hard … the teams often had to undertake journeys of 20 to 30 kilometres, and even more, over bumpy roads, and return after the game. The Army wagon was not by any means a well-upholstered or well-sprung conveyance, and it had no central heating arrangements.

  In occupied Cologne, a combined corps team defeated the British Second Army team and the RAF. Now they sought challenges on pastures new, which conveniently materialised, wrote Goddard, ‘When the idea was first mooted of giving Australian athletes who were serving in the AIF, an opportunity of pitting themselves against European nations, it was eagerly taken up.’ What most concerned the competitive Aussies, however, was how ‘to choose the best possible side to represent Australia’ in the crunch inter-services contest. Goddard got his excuses in early:

  This was not such an easy matter as it seemed. There was Headquarters Team in London that had played a few matches and done rather well. There was also the Trench Team, which had come across from France, after having notable victories. Neither was a really first-class combination, although there was a lot of excellent material. The four and a half years of war were responsible for a loss of many of the finer tactical points of the game which had always characterised Australian Rugby.

  Such was the eagerness to play, however, that two teams were formed, separately managed by Watson and Lieutenant Seaborn, MC; both would criss-cross the country by train, bringing a
n exotic brand of rugby to starved pitches. They independently toured Wales and the Southwest, with occasional sorties to the Midlands, sometimes bumping into the two NZEF teams engaged in their own travelling rugby circus. But it was the ‘AIF First Rugby XV’ that would compete for the King’s Cup, now grandly billed on match-day tickets as the ‘Inter-Services and Dominion Forces Championship’, for a ‘Rugby Football Challenge Cup’.

  Every aspect of this sporting celebration was carefully considered. This was the world’s first genuinely international tournament for team sports. The Olympics were primarily about individual endeavour, and the amateur principle excluded professionals. Team sports rarely saw more than a few entrants: 1908’s rugby saw just two contesting an immediate final. Cornwall drew the short straw to face Australia, after Scotland, Ireland and France had all turned down the RFU’s invitation. Nor were there fully representative national sides: Great Britain’s 1900 rugby side was ‘Moseley Wanderers’, a composite team of Midlands clubs and old boys’ associations. There was no rugby at Stockholm in 1912, and little enthusiasm was displayed in 1920 and 1924, other than aggressively by America and France, towards each other and hapless Romania. War’s insatiable demand for manpower, however, meant that – if not already dead or wounded by 1919 – the best sportsmen in the Empire were in uniform in Europe at the same time. If they were good enough to fight for their country, they were certainly fit to represent it at rugby.

  The King’s Cup, it was decided, should be an opportunity for all of Britain to applaud the Dominion troops who had defended the Empire and British values. Venues were chosen to reach a wide population – not easy when clubs had closed grounds when rugby ceased in 1914. A commitment was made to rugby grounds: no need to press into service football or athletics stadia, like Stamford Bridge or White City, with their greater capacity. In total, sixteen games were played at eight venues by the original six teams, plus a seventeenth against the French. This was an early template for what we now recognise as the World Cup format. Not until 1930 did fast-growing association football play its first tournament, and it was not much bigger: thirteen teams played eighteen games, but all in one city, Montevideo.

  It would have been quite possible to concentrate the tournament into southwest London’s ‘rugby triangle’: it boasted perfectly adequate grounds, like Queen’s Club, Old Deer Park and Richmond Athletic Ground – all had staged pre-war Tests and wartime charity matches – and ‘Billy Williams’s cabbage patch’ at Twickenham. Crystal Palace and Blackheath offered southeasterly capital options. Instead, the fifteen matches in the qualifying round-robin format were played over six weeks in different cities around mainland Britain, with the final decider to be played at Twickenham.

  In Scotland, Inverleith hosted two matches, as did Swansea’s St Helen’s and Leicester’s Welford Road. Newport’s Rodney Parade, Gloucester’s Kingsholm and Portsmouth’s United Services Club – presumably with a loyal War Office nod to the Navy – each held one game. On some weekends, simultaneous fixtures were played: Saturday 29 April saw all six teams in action at Edinburgh, Gloucester and Twickenham – no problems with scheduling then, as Logie Baird’s ‘televisor’ would not broadcast its first experimental moving pictures for another six years.2 By the combined miracle of the cinematograph and internet, some flickering moments of these games can still be glimpsed today.3

  The RFU’s Twickenham ground, not yet a fortress, had the English lion’s share of the fixtures, with seven in total; careful planning gave every side the chance to play on the hallowed turf. The scheduler’s art is a fine mystery, but it is perhaps a further sign of South African favour with the RFU that they were accorded three fixtures at ‘HQ’, one more even than the home Mother Country. The stadium built in 1908 at a cost of £8,812 15s, had stands East and West for 3,000, a south terrace for another 7,000 and an open mound to the north, giving a total capacity of some 20,000. With club rugby for its Harlequin tenants suspended in wartime, and Richmond’s transport connections being more convenient for spectators at charity games, the stadium had been used as a grazing enclosure. Both stadium and surrounding area have been built up a little since: Twickenham stages the 2015 World Cup Final as an iconic temple with a capacity of 82,000.

  Poulton-Palmer had been widely mourned in 1915 and poet Alfred Ollivant composed a popular elegy to ‘RWPP: Killed in France’. His last words are said to have been: ‘I shall never play at Twickenham again.’ It seems unlikely that a sniper’s headshot would have allowed him time for such theatrical expiry. But the fallen England captain’s words helped turn the cabbage patch into a rugby Colosseum and Valhalla combined. In 1919 it was quickly restored as a rugby ground, with equine deposits removed and new turf laid. Its suburban, almost rural location was then one of the abiding mysteries of early RFU decision-making and transport problems abounded, as Grierson commented:

  The spectacle of some forty thousand people on foot and in cars and taxis trying to make their way down the Twickenham bottleneck is a sight such as one can only compare with the first cup final at Wembley, and were it not for the inherent discipline and good behaviour of the crowds who frequent Rugger Internationals scenes would have occurred long ago which would have forced the RU to take drastic action in the matter! No first league soccer club would have dared to build a ground for its patrons with such inadequate means of access and egress.

  Little has changed. He would be pleased to know that the same good nature under trying conditions is still exercised by rugby crowds today; trips to HQ are as revered as pilgrimages to Lourdes or Santiago de Compostela, and almost as long.

  Grierson, writing in 1924, may seem an old buffer, but he wrote brilliantly for the satirical trench journal The Wipers Times under the by-line of ‘PBI’ (Poor Bloody Infantry) so deserves respect. He was also a veritable rugby visionary, recommending the scoring system of five points for a try (and two for a conversion) all of sixty-eight years before the International Rugby Board4 finally made it happen.

  His Majesty King George V was a great rugby fan: as Prince of Wales he saw Ben Gronow kick off the first ever Test at Twickenham. He was also cannily conscious of the political symbolism of sporting occasions. The 1914 Valentine’s Day encounter between England and Ireland at Twickenham, his first international since his 1910 coronation, was chosen with deliberation. His attendance with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith by his side, at a time when the debate over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament, was a finely judged gesture of conciliation. Tensions about extremist demonstrations at the ground proved unfounded. Three weeks later, the king made up for lost game-time in his first four years by attending the match between the Officers of the Army and the Navy, at the perennially fogbound Queen’s Club. Still at this stage a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the king proved himself a man of his English people, by sitting throughout the rain-soaked match without benefit of an umbrella, which would have obscured the view of those behind him. ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ he probably thought, as he received appreciative applause from his sodden subjects.

  So it was no small matter in 1919 that His Majesty chose to return to Twickenham. This was about more than watching rugby: this time it was the future of the Empire that concerned him and the need not only to thank his Dominions for their role in the victory, but also to hold together these vigorous colonial partners who were straining at the Imperial leash. As the tournament progressed, the Paris peacemakers were deep in talks: for the first time, in recognition of their part in war, former colonies participated as nations in their own right at an international conference to make peace. When New Zealand, along with Canada, Australia, South Africa and India, was awarded a seat on the new League of Nations, fashioned by the Versailles Treaty in 1920, Prime Minister William Massey said it joined as ‘a self-governing nation within the empire’. This echoed the language of the 1917 Imperial War Conference when the Dominion premiers had called for full recognition as ‘autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth’.

  The spoils of war, won by the sac
rifice of so many sons, brought them a new international role in a world that no longer seemed so distant and remote. The astute George, by donating the King’s Cup for the champion of the Inter-Services Rugby Tournament, was offering another hopeful symbol of Imperial unity and military teamwork. Never slow, the press cottoned on, although they could not manage the new-fangled transition of C-words, from Colony to Commonwealth:

  It is a most practical means of continuing and strengthening the bonds of interest between us and our relations scattered over the world. War has brought all parts of the Empire closer … Often in the past the ties between this country and the colonies have been slender and the strongest of them is the common interest in British games.5

  As further gesture of kingly benevolence, George also sent down his sons from on high at Buckingham Palace to grace the Twickenham turf; the Chertsey Road would suffer more bouts of congestion by royal entourage.

  In another move laden with political messaging, the British Army team, uniting the home nations in rugby as in war, played under one banner as the ‘Mother Country’. There had been plans for separate teams from Army, Navy and RAF, but the sailors could not field a competitive side; predictably, Celts grumbled over the lack of RFU consultation. The term ‘Mother Country’ was already tinged with nostalgia for Imperial stability, long presided over by the maternal Queen Victoria, which was so irrevocably rocked by the Great War. It looked positively odd when typesetters compressed it to ‘Mother C.’ or ‘M. Country’ in fixture lists and match reports for the King’s Cup. Not to mention providing a fruitful source of abusive shortenings to be thrown at the British by their opposite numbers, particularly the Anzacs – let’s not forget these were blunt, rugby-playing soldiers, with four years study of the Trench Thesaurus under their belts and a talent for inventive swearing. Tom Richards, no respecter of the British officer class, refers to the special treatment meted out in one ‘friendly’ at the front: ‘I had a lot to do at full back and could hardly stand up at the finish of the game. Three of our officers played and were handled with a little more despatch than the others.’