After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  His mother (her banker husband died before Jack) was tireless in ensuring her only son’s immortality: she commissioned a memorial with the legend ‘If character be destiny then his is assured’, and had the same inscribed on his headstone;5 she published his unfinished coaching manual Modern Rugby Football, and endowed an Oxford scholarship in his name. She probably washed his kit too. Now in poor health, her last wish was to be laid to rest alongside her beloved son. She knew well enough that any official request would be denied, so went directly to the gardener at Lijssenthoek Cemetery, Walter Sutherland. A year later, a package containing her ashes arrived, and Sutherland knew precisely what he must do. Within minutes the urn was buried next to Jack’s headstone and the turf replaced. The secret was only revealed by Sutherland’s son George in 2014.6

  The official response to this pent-up grieving was mercifully enlightened and imaginative, and caught the national mood. The return and interment of the Unknown Warrior from the Western Front provided an outlet for shared mourning, and an eagerly grasped scrap of symbolic consolation that the anonymous corpse could be any mother or father’s lost son (unless, of course, that son happened to die in Mesopotamia, Turkey, Salonika, Italy or East Africa). Vast and sombre monuments were constructed to carry thousands of names and the Imperial War Graves Commission under Fabian Ware did its inspired work to give the identified bodies dignity and equality in death. Kipling accompanied King George V to the cemeteries and crafted a speech for him that contained the powerful line: ‘There can be no more potent advocates for peace upon earth than this massed multitude of witnesses to the desolation of war.’ This multitude of silent advocates for peace was quietly ignored twenty years later.

  As the monuments were built and the burial plots consolidated into neat cemeteries, the people emulated their king: there was an explosion of battlefield and cemetery tourism. In some cases, with live ordnance still lying around, the explosions were fatal for souvenir hunters. Those who had served and survived returned to pay respects to friends; some like Lieutenant A.P. Herbert, RNVR, would process the experience and memory into poetry:

  We only walk with reverence this sullen mile of mud

  The shell-holes hold our history, and half of them our blood.7

  For many the Ypres Salient was only a day away by packetboat and railway, just as it had been for the troops; the lack of high-explosive bombardment helped considerably with track maintenance and timetables. Michelin printed battlefield guides in 1919. The remarkable poem ‘High Wood’ written in 1918 by Cranleigh schoolteacher, Lieutenant John Stanley Purvis, 5th Yorkshires, under the pseudonym Philip Johnstone, was already looking prescient:

  Please follow me – this way … the path, sir, please,

  The ground which was secured at great expense

  The Company keeps absolutely untouched,

  And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide

  Refreshments at a reasonable rate.

  You are requested not to leave about

  Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange peel,

  There are waste-paper baskets at the gate.

  If you have endured the coach-party chaos of school visits at Essex Farm (John McCrae) or Thiepval, then Purvis’s words look positively prophetic.

  For the families of Dominion soldiers who remained in foreign soil, this was simply not possible. As Lieutenant Goddard had gratefully acknowledged, the time and expense of a passage to Europe from the ‘uttermost ends of the earth’ was beyond most Australians and New Zealanders. It was literally, half a world away. No symbolic Unknown Australian Warrior was returned from Villers-Bretonneux or Chunuk Bair, despite popular calls, and new methods of ‘distance mourning’ had to be devised. A multitude of shrines sprang up in Australia as surrogate gravestones, where communities could mourn their absent menfolk who had fallen. Pines from Gallipoli and poppy seeds from Flanders were taken back and planted, and what two-way traffic there was reciprocated with Australian flowers and trees. Postcards, books, stereoscopic slides and film all provided a visual link and the visits of state and national representatives, like Premier Stanley Bruce who had fought, were avidly reported in the press. Australian authorities moved swiftly to protect the use of the word ‘Anzac’ under the War Precautions Act. Requests came from wounded diggers wishing to name their dogs or sons (no worries, George Anzac), and widows their houses (refused). Brewers’ beer labels, tobacconists’ hoardings and the ‘Anzac Gollywog Company’ were all turned down.

  American poet Moina Michael read John McCrae’s poem; she sold artificial poppies sewn in France and gave the money to needy soldiers. UK ex-servicemen’s societies united in 1921 to form the British Legion, and a Frenchwoman involved in the sewing project in France suggested that the Legion sell them to raise funds. 1.5 million poppies were ordered for 11 November 1921; the first Poppy Appeal made £106,000. The Legion then set up its own project, as employment for disabled ex-servicemen; in 2014, the appeal raised £40 million.

  Rugby mourned its own. E.H.D. Sewell, former Blackheath player and Harlequin captain, who knew personally so many of the players who perished, published in 1919 his Rugby Football Internationals Roll of Honour, an exemplary record of facts and fond reminiscences. This 47-year-old armchair warrior felt conscious of not having served. His foreword describes the arrival of material from New Zealand via Vancouver just as an Air Raid warning sounds. He is forced to review the papers in a ‘kind of dugout’ shelter ‘which lent an air of sharing, in a very safe kind of way, some of the perils they had undergone’.

  Sewell’s fondest words were reserved for Mobbs. Military matches in aid of a Mobbs Memorial Fund, between New Zealanders and South Africans, were played at Franklin’s Gardens as early as 8 December 1917. Only eighty-five of Edgar’s original 264 recruits for his D Company returned home. They marched together again for the first time on 17 July 1921 in his honour, as thousands lined the Northampton streets. His memorial at Abington Gardens is inscribed: ‘TO THE MEMORY OF A GREAT AND GALLANT SPORTSMAN’.

  On 24 July 1927, ten years after his death, when Field Marshal Plumer inaugurated the Menin Gate Memorial at a rebuilt Ypres with the words ‘He is not lost; he is here,’8 Lieutenant Colonel E.R. Mobbs, DSO, once again led the Northamptonshire Regiment at the head of a detachment of dead names. Amongst the 55,000 inscribed there are Billy Geen of Wales, Alec Todd of England, Basil Maclear of Ireland, and many more rugby men than can be chronicled in these few pages. His memory was further perpetuated from 1921 in an annual Mobbs Memorial Match between the East Midlands and the Barbarian Football Club, for whom it became their longest-standing fixture until professionalism made it impossible to assemble a side. It survives as an itinerant fixture between the British Army and teams from Bedford Blues and Northampton Saints.

  The 1914 photograph of Mobbs with Colonel Fawcett at Northampton Barracks appears in the 1921 match programme; this time the caption shows his advancement to Lieutenant Colonel Mobbs, DSO. As his bones were not interr’d, the good that this man did was free to live after him. Tributes surround the team lists (poignantly, there is only one pre-war Barbarian, Coventry stand-off H.J. ‘Dick’ Pemberton) with Earl Spencer leading: ‘In honouring him we honour ourselves, the town and the Regiment whose highest traditions he enshrined and fulfilled so faithfully unto death.’ Claude Palmer, club chairman, acknowledged his enduring legacy to Saints:

  The glorious memory of my best friend Edgar … has been a constant inspiration in the reconstruction of the Northampton Football Club; Edgar Mobbs’ last message in 1916 being a request ‘to use very effort to keep the game going’, and this has been our watchword.

  The East Midlands Honorary Secretary, J.B. Minahan, went further:

  Edgar Mobbs was THE man of our generation, the greatest personality in English Rugger of modern days, and to us locally his death was a calamity. He played for the highest ideals and lifted local Rugby football out of the common rut. On the field he carried the spirit of adventure and reckless daring – in
his stride it was rampant and insistent – and it seemed that enthusiasm and audacity emanated from his entire personality. But above all he possessed the compelling power – the birthright of such men – which drew crowds to his circle.

  Tim Rodber, former England number eight with forty-four caps, was a captain in the Green Howards even after the game turned professional, only leaving the army in 2001 after retiring from rugby. In 2014 he made an emotional BBC radio pilgrimage to Zillebeke in search of his fellow Northampton Saints captain.

  Rugby also had new beginnings and new colours in memoriam. On 23 May 1919, in Belfast’s Thompson’s Restaurant, Instonians was founded as the Old Boys rugby club of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Two teams were fielded in that inaugural year; they played in the yellow-and-black of the school with the addition of purple, as a permanent memorial to the 132 old boys who had fallen during the war.

  Glasgow Accies’ Honorary Secretary Macgill had lost none of his letter-writing energy and by November 1919 was busy with a planned Academy memorial and a match against Watsonians at Anniesland to fund it. In 1925, the city of Toulouse erected a heroic memorial, dubbed L’Herakles, in honour of all fallen French sportsmen. It featured a bronze relief of their rugby club founder and half-back star ‘Maysso’, the first international rugby player to die. Frank Cowlin, President of Bristol Football Club, wrote in support of the appeal of his city’s lord mayor for a proposed memorial to local rugby footballers:

  There can be no doubt that victory was won by the sportsmen of the Empire, and the record of Rugby footballers is one of which all lovers of the game are justly proud. More than 300 local players are said to have made the great sacrifice. The amount required for the Bristol Rugby Memorial Ground is a substantial one, but [it] will be worthy of the city and the Bristol Club, and a fitting memorial to those men who ‘played the game’ but who alas! will never return.

  The ground was indeed built in ‘Proud and Grateful Memory’ on ‘Buffalo Bill’s Field’, a site used by William Cody’s Wild West Show in 1891; a service is held at the gates of the ‘Mem’ every Remembrance Sunday. Bristol Rovers football club sold the ground to a supermarket chain, which happily employed images of the 1914 ‘Christmas truce football game’ (for which there is no evidence) in its advertising to peddle chocolate bars. Yet it plans to knock down the ground for a new supermarket – you can never have too many of those.

  It was not long before old comrades gathered on significant dates for regimental reunions. The London Scottish Regiment still convenes for a Hallowe’en dinner to remember Messines. In April 1926, the 15th Battery of the Canadian Field Artillery met at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel; they drank toasts to the King and their thirty Fallen Comrades listed on the Honour Roll. In the aftermath of war, there were still lashings of the soldierly humour that had got them through it. The dinner menu makes for great reading, if unappetising eating:

  Bucket of Blood, Shell-hole Special, Fish-guts

  Mules Innards, Frozen Rabbit, McConnachie, Bully

  PIE: Ypres Fish-tail, Somme Chalk, Vimy Mud,

  Passchendaele Slime, Arras Pip-Squeak, Amiens Sunshine

  PUDDING: Cambrai Muddle, Valenciennes Camouflage or Mons Coal

  In recent decades, it has become the norm for touring cricket and rugby teams to pay homage at the Western Front sites. During their French tour in 2000, the All Blacks planted a rose called ‘Lest We Forget’, bred in memory of those who never returned, at the grave of Dave Gallaher at Nine Elms, Poperinge. At Le Quesnoy they were joined by the New Zealand A team, which was also in France, a distant echo of the two touring military sides that brought excitement back to Britain’s clubs in euphoric 1919.

  Most of their fifty countrymen buried at Le Quesnoy Cemetery lost their lives on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice. Skipper Todd Blackadder recalled: ‘We walked around the town [to the memorial] and we laid a wreath there. I was standing next to a Frenchman who had tears streaming down his face. He was moved by the generosity of the New Zealanders all those years ago. It’s something you don’t understand when you’re in New Zealand.’9 So, Mr Gove, there is a little we can learn about the Great War from a Captain Blackadder. In November 2014, the Wallabies laid wreaths including native Australian flora at the Tombeau du Soldat Inconnu beneath the Arc de Triomphe. One player found a more direct line of understanding: James Horwill’s great grandfather had won the DCM for saving the lives of fourteen compatriots in 1917.

  One hundred years on from 1914–18, centenary commemorations are remembering those who fell, rugby players to the fore. The RFU commissioned a huge oil painting by Shane Record of the 1914 England team at Colombes: the six players who fell have their red roses ‘greyed’ in remembrance. In March 2014 Rosslyn Park righted the historic wrong of its missing memorial when RFU Chairman Bill Beaumont unveiled a new clubhouse plaque to its Great War dead. A commemorative match was played with leather ball, in baggy cotton shirt and shorts with embroidered poppy and under 1914 Laws. Guest appearances came on the field from former Artillery officer and RWC winner Josh Lewsey, and by soldiers of the Household Division, with a Rifles bugler to play the Last Post. At Twickenham on 11 December, in a ceremony to commemorate fifty-five fallen Blues before the 133rd Varsity Match, Edinburgh Academy was the first school to lay a wreath in tribute to its eight lost alumni.

  London Scottish played Blackheath on ‘Richmond turf’, in a poetically licensed replay of their last 1914 fixture, in memoriam to Mick Imlah’s ‘Forty-five’ and Blackheath’s sixty-five lost members, Robert Pillman, Billy Geen, Reggie Hands and Bungy Watson among them. The fallen players’ names were worn on the sleeves of the multi-generational sides. Fittingly and more happily, Scottish sent a youth side back to France, to play in a commemorative tourney for the battles on the Aisne; this time they all came back. Representatives from Blackheath, London Scottish and local French clubs remembered their players at a ceremony on 13 September 2014 at the Monument des Basques at Craonelle. LSFC Secretary Paul McFarland, whose grandmother was engaged to John McCrae, read his famous words.

  Edgar Mobbs’s first club, Olney, honoured its sixteen fallen and marked the anniversary of the ‘England v Scotland’ recruiting game of January 1915 with two matches: current players from the East Midlands region lined up against the 1st Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, and Olney Ladies played the Army Women’s XV. Not only does rugby remember; it also moves forward.

  In February 2015, prior to the 1st XV match against Widnes, Birkenhead Park commemorated the death of Park and England skipper ‘Toggie’ Kendall. A piper from the Liverpool Scottish Regiment, the military family to so many international and Merseyside club players, played a lament prior to kick-off. Old Whitgiftians Rugby Football Club toured the battlefields and cemeteries, visiting every grave and memorial on the Western Front of its forty players who fell, including Lloyd’s broker 2nd Lieutenant Frank Benton, club captain for six seasons, who was killed in the same regiment and action as Humphrey Dowson. Charles Henman, architect of their clubhouse, never saw his work completed, as he was killed at Gallipoli with the Royal Marine Engineers. The Canadian rugby players of Vancouver Rowing Club, led by a New Zealander, will make their own pilgrimage in 2015, and tour Britain as the rugby world gathers again for the Rugby World Cup.

  The centenary of 4 August 1914 fell fittingly, if by coincidence, on the 9th of Av in the Jewish calendar, in Hebrew, Tisha b’Av, the most mournful day of the Jewish year. At London’s Bevis Marks synagogue, the date was marked with a candlelit ‘Lights Out’ commemoration following the Tisha b’Av service. A memorial plaque lists the names of thirty-nine members of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation who gave their lives in the Great War, amongst some 50,000 Commonwealth Jews who fought for Britain. Among them was a rugby player from the Wasps Football Club, originally in Finchley, but in pre-war years at a dozen grounds in west London. Captain Robert Sebag-Montefiore, of the Royal East Kent Yeomanry, died in Alexandria, Egypt, in November 1915, of w
ounds received at Gallipoli. He was 33 and one of thirty-eight Wasps on their own memorial.

  There is even a newly revived club, inspired by a photograph in a Devon pub of a village team that last turned out in 1908. In 2014, Ide Rugby Football Club played its first match in 106 years, under the captaincy of Scott Voysey whose great-uncle, Private Jack Voysey, captained the original team. Conscripted at 37 to fight with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, Jack was shot in the stomach at the Battle of Cambrai, only three months after reaching the front. A letter from his widow Edith, postmarked 13 November (a week before he died), was later returned to sender, freshly marked with the stark word: ‘Killed’.

  Sergeant Mitchell wrote to her in 1917: ‘It may afford you a small amount of comfort to know that he was respectably buried in the village of La Vacquerie.’10 His grave was lost in more fighting and Jack is on the Louverval Memorial with over 7,000 other men from Britain and South Africa. Surely it would delight him to know that his Ide RFC has been revived as a barbarian invitation side, a ‘lasting memorial through the playing of rugby, to those rugby-playing servicemen and women who were killed in serving their country 1914–1919’. Their first match on Remembrance Sunday, in aid of service charities, was against a veterans’ XV; the spirit of Harry Burlinson at Old Deer Park must surely rejoice at this inspired idea conceived over a beer in the Poacher’s Inn.

  In a year when the Rugby World Cup returns to the cradle of the game, and where, in 1919, the first tentative but symbolic steps were made to bring together the world’s nations in team sport, we have another choice. We must look to the future and deploy the wealth realised by such tournaments to cultivate the game’s values and power for good. Let rugby build a pitch in Afghanistan; Asad Ziar assures us that if we build it, they will come. Let rugby forever avoid the farce of a governing body awarding its football world cup to a place where it can do little other than generate more money.