In those days of Empire, the practice at Chatswood was to play the national anthem, God Save the Queen, after every match, as the players traipsed from the field. As the recorded music began and the band struck up on this particular occasion, Yanz found himself standing beside Peter Wakeford, a University Wallaby forward with whom he had had the odd run-in during the game. Yanz was rigidly at attention, as was everybody else, with head held high, heels together and arms at his side. His gaze wandered momentarily; he spotted Wakeford within range, and the temptation was too much. He let go a left jab which felled him, then immediately resumed his rigid pose, eyes front, as if nothing had happened. The moment was frozen until the national anthem had ended. There was hell to pay afterwards, of course. And it was the last time the national anthem was ever played after the game at Chatswood.
It was not like that all the time, mind you. Gordon’s backs were a talented lot who scored plenty of wonderful tries. Brian Moffat and then Don Logan at halfback, the Phipps brothers Jim and Peter in the centres, Maurie Graham at fullback . . . they were all exciting players, and the premierships we won in 1956 and 1958 were richly deserved. We would have won in 1957, too, but six of us had been selected for the big tour of Britain, France and America that was to leave a few weeks later. The club made the decision that we should not play the last two games of the season, so we missed the final and then the grand final, won by St George. It was a disappointment to miss out on that, but I still marvel at the selflessness of the club committee who made that decision, putting our welfare and the great opportunity that lay before us ahead of any other consideration. They didn’t want us to risk getting hurt. It was the way it was at Gordon. Everybody looked after everybody else.
11
WAR WITH ENGLAND
THE START OF Norm Provan’s stellar career in representative Rugby League coincided with the arrival in Australia of Dickie Williams’ 1954 English side, a rough and tumble bunch of hardheads who brawled their way through many of the 22 matches on the Australian section of their tour. These were days when Great Britain tours were hugely anticipated and drew sell-out crowds. The 1954 tour embraced 22 matches in Australia and another ten in New Zealand. The team was the first to fly to Australia—the trip took four days—and their tour covered four months.
Australia had won the Ashes in 1950 for the first time in 30 years, but lost them again on the 1952–53 tour of England. The club competition in England’s northern counties was very strong after World War II, attracting many Australian players and building national teams of high quality. England was where the money was in those days. Australian players of the calibre of Arthur Clues, Harry Bath, Ken Kearney, Trevor Allan, Rex Mossop and Brian Bevan—the most extraordinary of them all with an amazing 796 tries to his credit in English league—had a huge impact on English football.
Australia as a whole still looked to the mother country with a certain deference, and Rugby League was no different. Their teams were considered stronger, smarter and more ruthless than Australia’s, and when the 1954 team arrived in Sydney all the evidence suggested they would be hard to beat. Included in the Australian team that eventually brought them down two Tests to one was a tall, long-striding 22-year-old from St George who formed an outstanding second-row partnership with another debutant, Kel O’Shea. It was the ‘Sticks’ and ‘Twigs’ show.
NORM PROVAN
Three years in first grade had been a good grounding for my rep career, but to kick off against England was something else. At that time the Second World War was still recent history, and we had been on England’s side. But the way they went about their football you wouldn’t have thought so. We were the enemy, plain and simple. I reckon they happily would have run on against us with bayonets if they could have.
Still, it was a great time to kick off in Test match football. We won the first Test 37–12, which was a point-scoring record at the time, and I scored the first try of the game.
It was a terrific thrill, but the thrills were coming rapid fire at the time, and I don’t recall dwelling on any of them too much.
The teams were loaded with top-class players. My Saints teammate of the previous three years Noel Pidding scored 19 points in that game from a try and eight goals, and with people like Clive Churchill, Brian Carlson, Keith Holman, Killer Kearney, Harry Wells and Co., we were very well equipped.
The Poms played a different game from us. They were clever with the ball in close, and forwards like Nat Silcock, Dave Valentine and Jack Wilkinson were a handful for any side. In the backs they had a young kid named Billy Boston who created some havoc on the wing, and punishing centres in Ernest Ward, Phil Jackson and Dougie Greenall, who seemed to be a fighter first and footballer second. His mastery of the stiff-arm tackle was one of the features of their tour.
Great Britain bounced back in the second Test to win 38–21—another point-scoring record—and they did a lot of it on the back of two recruits from Welsh Rugby Union. Lewis Jones at five-eighth kicked ten goals and Boston scored two powerhouse tries. Boston was such a Rugby League novice that he reckoned they had to teach him how to play the ball in the team hotel on tour. That was the start of a wonderful career for him—he kept terrorising Australian sides right until his last trip Down Under in Eric Ashton’s 1962 team. Jones had toured Australia in 1950 with a British Lions Rugby team, and later played out his career in Sydney with Wentworthville in a second-tier competition.
With the series locked at one-all, and the Poms wearying after nearly three months of travel, the caravan moved to Sydney for the second of three games against New South Wales that season. This became probably the wildest and most controversial in the history of Anglo–Australian Rugby League. So uncontrollably violent did it become that referee Aub Oxford found it impossible to stop an all-in brawl that developed halfway through the second half. He simply threw his hands in the air and walked from the field, abandoning the game.
I was in the middle of it, as was everybody else on the field, but my recollection of it is less clear than it might have been since I was only semi-conscious for much of it. Somebody hit one of our blokes in front of me, so I whacked him, only to be simultaneously hit from behind and absolutely decked. I know the brawl went for a long time and I know the referee didn’t seem to have any idea how to stop it. As I gathered my senses and the referee called it off, I remember thinking that his action was a bit extreme. It was a big game, and just stopping it dead with about 20 minutes to go was a big call. But the other side of the coin was that he probably did not have a lot of options. The brawl was as intense as any I have ever seen on a football field, and nobody seemed in any mood to stop. It just kept going. When Oxford got to the dressing room, the league secretary, Harold Matthews, ordered him to ‘Get back out there’. Oxford threw his whistle at Matthews and said, ‘You get out there,’ such was the level of his frustration.
When we thought about it in the cool light of retrospect later on, there were a lot of things happening to trigger the mayhem of that afternoon at the SCG.We were all convinced it was pre-ordained. England were desperate to win the third Test, and it seemed they thought they would have a much better chance if they could get rid of some of our bigger threats. They targeted Clive Churchill for starters, and Noel Pidding too. Pidding’s nineteen points in the first Test butchered their chances there, and they would rather he spent the final Test match day somewhere other than in the Australian team. Our outstanding half Keith Holman was also on their hit list.
Giving credence to the theory that they were trying to cripple our final Test team was the team they picked for that NSW game. The NSW players assumed it would be a sort of extra Test, with the best available teams involved. NSW picked their top side. But the Poms went for a very second-string line-up, with some strange positional shifts. Burly props Jack Wilkinson and Brian Briggs found themselves on the wings, and the fullback was Geoff Gunney, normally a second rower. We didn’t take long to work out what that meant. They had picked all their best fight
ers, and the tactics of the day would be to do us as much damage as they could. It was on from the start, and it only got worse from there.
We agreed before we went on that we would play football. We didn’t want to be involved in a blue. But we also had it in the back of our minds that we wouldn’t take anything either. I doubt that we over-reacted, but we certainly reacted when they started putting on the biff. There were some cruel stiff-arms . . . knees, elbows, you name it. Clive Churchill, our captain that day, was especially upset. He reckoned it was the dirtiest game he had ever been part of. He said it was just disgraceful. ‘A filthy brawl of back-lane thuggery’ were his words. The premeditated nature of the whole thing had lit the fuse in us too, I suppose, and when you think about it the whole atmosphere was ripe for trouble.
Another contributing factor undoubtedly was the tour schedule. It was the second of three NSW games against the touring side. There had been two Test matches already, and a lot of their players and our players had also run up against each other in country games. For a while there it seemed like we were playing them every week. There is no doubt such familiarity bred a fair bit of contempt. Incidents built upon each other. A bit of a liberty taken in one game brought revenge in the next, and the aggro became cumulative. An incident that was not particularly bad in one game was still being sorted out three games later, with obvious results. Small rivalries became World War III.
Rugby League is a curious game in circumstances like these. The photo of Arthur Summons and myself that has become so famous is said to be a great reflection of how bitter rivals put it all behind them once the final whistle goes and they are all mates. In our case, that was certainly true. But the aftermath of that NSW–Great Britain game I believe is a better example. As I said, the blue was fierce and unrelenting and nobody showed any sign of letting up until Oxford turned on his heel and left. That shocked everybody and the fighting stopped, very suddenly it seemed to me. Once we worked out what was going on and started following Oxford off the field, weighed down with some remorse, I think, opposing players started shaking hands. Some walked off with their arms draped around a rival’s shoulders. It was almost as if it had been a couple of brothers, scrapping in the back yard until Mum called them in for tea.
Later that night a lot of players from both teams—most, I think—attended the South Sydney ball in the old Mark Foys auditorium in the city. That building now houses criminal courts, which is a bit Freudian, I suppose. Players from both sides were laughing and joking through the night, having a drink with each other, enjoying all the things that Rugby League traditionally meant after a game. A few hours before the Poms had been shouting things like ‘Give Churchill a kicking’ or ‘Get Holman’. Now they were all mates, revelling in the aftermath of a fierce contest in which they had given their all . . . even enjoying the uniqueness of the first game of such stature ever to be abandoned. It was a crazy day.
Years later, blame for the various eruptions of that afternoon was still shifting backwards and forwards. Billy Boston reckoned the seeds were sown in a bush match at Wagga Wagga the previous week when Harry ‘Dealer’ Wells had hung one on his opposing centre, Dougie Greenall, and flattened him. Greenall was as wild as they come, and knew how to hold a grudge. He was in the middle of everything as the temperature rose at the SCG. Most of the Poms conceded that things had got out of hand, but most of them never conceded that they were to blame. They reckoned they had been needled and niggled, or that NSW reaction to whatever happened was out of proportion. Personally, I am happy with the original theory—that they were trying to do damage to key players in our Test team by fair means or foul . . . and they chose a side for that purpose.
The NSW League held a big inquiry the following week and did little. They suspended one Pom for a couple of weeks, threw out a few cautions here and there, and demanded of the English captain of the day, Charlie Pawsey, an apology on behalf of his team. He gave it, apparently quite genuinely, and that was the end of the affair. To make the point that these things never die, however, Charlie’s son revealed many decades later that his dad had resented having to make that apology. Not because he didn’t think the Englishmen had been pretty bad that afternoon, because they had and he was happy to acknowledge that. But he considered it totally unfair that he alone had to apologise, when he thought that it had taken two to tango, and that an apology should have been forthcoming from NSW as well. Like so many controversies in Rugby League, the argument probably will transfer down the generations, and still be spoken of by grandsons and great-grandsons when the combatants of the day are long gone.
League officials did everything they could in the immediate aftermath of the game to get referee Oxford to return to the field and allow the last 24 minutes of the game to be played out. Oxford refused. Every tackle leading up to that final eruption had been accompanied by a flurry of punches, and he wanted no more of it. Oxford packed his bags and left the ground. He never refereed again. The third and final Test was played out a week later in an atmosphere of anticlimax, even though it was a series decider. Everybody was on his best behaviour, polite even. There was hardly a caution required. England led 8–0 early and looked strong, but Australia levelled by half time and a try soon after the break—a Dealer Wells special—clinched the Ashes for Australia. We looked ahead to the initial World Cup with confidence high.
•
The 1954 World Cup was held in France, and after our series win against England in Australia we thought we were in good shape to win it. It was the first World Cup, organised and hosted by France, who saw it as a means of making some money and getting their game onto a better footing. Rugby League had only been going there for about 20 years, and they had a constant battle with the much bigger Rugby Union, not least because the Rugby mob had been allowed to take all their assets during World War II. The World Cup was their best chance of getting back on their feet financially.
We flew to England in one of the old propeller-driven Super Constellations. It was a long and noisy trip with plenty of stops, but it was all terribly modern for the established players, whose previous trips to England had been by ship. The New Zealand team travelled with us—it was only England, France, New Zealand and Australia competing—but they were a very quiet bunch. Not much was said, even after the trip when we played a couple of exhibition games in America, one of them on the arena in Los Angeles that had hosted the 1932 Olympics.
Once we kicked off in the World Cup, it was pretty obvious what the ultimate plan was. The financial success of the Cup depended on England doing well, with an England–France final the ideal result for them. That’s the way it turned out. We were well beaten by England first up. Our season had ended some weeks before and we were all a bit rusty. The 28–13 score was probably pretty fair. But when we came up against France next game, it was clear what the form was. We had two tries disallowed—even a fair goal by Noel Pidding was waved away—and we lost 15–5. Whether by outright design or by some subconscious need to achieve the desired result, there was no doubt the referees were giving the French and English a leg-up, and that was the end of the World Cup for us. We did manage to knock over the Kiwis, but I think both sides knew we were always playing for third.
The American experience afterwards was interesting to say the least. One game was played on a field about 20 metres narrower than a normal Rugby League ground, and the other game had to be abandoned when a dense fog moved in and nobody could see anybody else. We replayed it later. I returned home just before my 23rd birthday with a full Test series and a World Cup under my belt, and by now I thought I was just about ready for anything.
12
THE WALLABY HOP
THE WORLD OF Rugby Union offered horizons Arthur Summons never imagined. He was just 20 when he represented NSW against South Africa’s Springboks, only to miss out on his first Test because of injury. By 22 he had made it as first choice five-eighth on the long tour of the British Isles, where his brilliant, evasive running in all four Test
s made him a tour standout. By 1958, New Zealanders were hailing him one of the top five players of their season after a Wallaby tour that brought Test victory against the All Blacks. By the time he had added the touring British Lions to his Test match tally, it was in double figures, and the world was his oyster. Summons had established himself as one of international Rugby’s high achievers, and he lapped up the experiences that accompanied such standing
ARTHUR SUMMONS
The 1957–58 Wallaby tour of the British Isles and France was at the same time one of the richest and one of the most disappointing experiences of my life. To a Rugby player, this is the golden prize of international involvement. We were five weeks at sea getting there, and we were wined and dined in the most luxurious of circumstances. A dinner suit was obligatory for the after-match dinner at every game. We mixed with dukes and duchesses, war heroes, politicians, legendary sportsmen of every persuasion. We stayed at the best hotels, and marvelled at the heralds, with their ornate uniforms and long trumpets, who occasionally were on hand to pipe us in to formal occasions. As a social experience for a 21-year-old from the back of Cabramatta, it was something else.
We also played 41 games on a tour through England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Canada and America that took seven months to complete. We had a hugely talented team but no direction. We lost all five Tests in Britain and France, won only 22 of our 41 games, and even went down to British Columbia in Vancouver. They said we were the worst Australian side to tour. We weren’t really. We were just totally ill-prepared. We had no coach on tour, no real tactics, no strategies, no basic understanding of our opponents, and in the end no real idea what we were doing. Compared to the way teams are prepared in both codes these days, with armies of coaches, assistant coaches, video analysts, defence coaches, kicking coaches, dietitians and the rest, we were by any measure an amateur rabble.
The Gladiators Page 8
