The Book of Fame Read online

  At 3 pm we walk out in single file, Glasgow pulling his headgear on. O’Sullivan trips on a clod of mud and reddens with embarrassment. Billy Wallace’s eyes dart to all corners of the field; he locates the posts, takes a couple of backward steps then jogs back. Billy Stead notes the roll of the turf and where at one corner it slopes away on the grandstand side of the ground. Gallaher bends down to pick up a clod of mud and throws it away. Steve Casey underarms a pebble. Jimmy Hunter wipes away a nervous yawn. In the short time that it takes us to walk out to the middle we look for a dozen diversions.

  Then a crow flew across the ground and every one of us looked up to follow its flight. Our eyes swam in the blue skies. The sunny day was nothing like what we’d been told to expect at this time of year. George Gillett wore a tweed hat at fullback.

  Our first points on English soil came within three minutes of the start. Fred clears from a scrum to Billy Stead, a sweet transfer to Jimmy Hunter. Jimmy runs hard at the defensive line; the Devon men try to wrap him up but Jimmy’s legs keep pumping and that’s when we first saw the alarm on the faces of the Devon players. You saw the Devon men back on their heels, hands in the air. Jimmy was supposed to fall over. Every other player they wrapped up falls over. They weren’t used to Jimmy’s civil disobedience. But a horse wouldn’t have stopped Jimmy. Behind his maddening release of energy were six weeks at sea, hours of shipboard training, hours spent imagining such a moment as this, through ice storms and tropical heat. Jimmy spins free, as easy as passing through a revolving door and goes over near the posts for Billy Wallace to convert. That was just the beginning. George Smith crossed for four tries. Carbine got three. George Gillett went over for a try with one hand holding on to the brim of his sun hat. We scored twelve tries in all and were up by fifty points before Devon answered with a penalty goal.

  The ease with which we did it surprised everyone, the crowd, the newspapermen, ourselves included. We heard later that several London newspapers came out the following day with the wrong score. The telegraph operator transcribing the dots to letters had ‘corrected’ the 55–4 scoreline to read in favour of the English County champions.

  Later that afternoon in the chandeliered light of a hotel in Exeter we rose with the Devon men to toast the King and sing our national anthems. We were so happy and with the champagne glowing in our cheeks we belted out a haka that had the ashtrays and champagne flutes bouncing on the tabletops.

  Outside the hotel a huge cheer went up. Thousands stood in the dark where earlier in the day we’d passed unnoticed. They wanted to shake our hands. They slapped our backs. They seemed to know us or want to know us. We shook their hands. ‘God bless,’ they said. God bless. We smiled with uncertainty, wondering if this was the right thing to do.

  They were so appreciative and we were so grateful.

  News of what had happened at the County Ground had reached Newton Abbot around six that evening. The stationmaster was first to hear. He’d tipped his cap and shaken hands with Jimmy Duncan earlier in the day. He wrote down the score on a scrap of paper and sent one of his assistants off with it to the innkeeper. Within a short time the news had passed along the doors, from house to house. Now it was just after eleven at night, and as we stepped from the train a huge crowd of men, women, children and their dogs cheered as we made our way to the drays to take us to the hotel. A brass band walked ahead of us through the main street of town playing ‘The Road to Moscow’. As we arrived at the Globe the hotel manager raced out in his shirtsleeves to greet us. We climbed down from the dray and the excited crowd closed in around us. They wouldn’t let us inside until they’d heard some words. Say something to us. Speak! So, from the upstairs balcony, Mister Dixon leant his weight on the balustrade as we’d seen him do so often at the ship rail and put across a typically modest view. ‘Naturally we believe in our system, but it would be premature, premature I think, on the strength of one match to express an opinion about it …’ The crowd looked disappointed. The voice didn’t quite match the deed. The content wasn’t quite there. They shuffled restlessly. George Nicholson correctly read their mood and with Cunningham rallied us for a haka. ‘…who! who! ra! ra!’ They loved that; they clapped and begged for more. They pulled on our shoulders and who-raaaed in our faces. They wanted to hear more. Mister Dixon looked at his timepiece. Nicholson, though, slapped his long thighs and Cunningham rolled his eyes. Pakeha atea! Ring a ring a pakeha … The street thrilled. The dogs howled in the English night.

  ‘The first impression of the New Zealanders was interesting. Their whole costume is black. Black jersey with a silver fern leaf, black knickers, black stockings and boots. One funny item was that the whole team came out in pink elastic knee bandages and anklets which had a very peculiar effect.’

  ‘Their skins are of an equable brownish olive tint …’

  ‘Their kit is, to begin with, jet black, and that must strike their opponents rather forcibly at the outset. Then each jersey has a sort of deeper yoke of a different material, the yoke of the jersey worn by the three-quarters, the five-eighths, and halfback, is made of silk, and is therefore slippery to touch as is compatible with safety.’

  ‘They work together like the parts of a well-constructed watch. Wherever a man is wanted, there he is!’

  ‘They had the true athlete’s walk, shoulders above the hips.’

  ‘There is a note of what might be called desperation—or, better still, desperateness in the play of the New Zealanders … Somebody said of Lord Beaconsfield as a debater, “He talks like a horse racing—he talks all over.” That is how the New Zealanders play, as if their hope of eternal welfare depends upon success. Every nerve and sinew braced all but to snapping point.’

  ‘There is a complete absence of all that noise with which habitués of London Football grounds are only too well acquainted.’

  ‘Our side were like a lot of cowboys, compared to them.’ Mr Carter, ex-President of the Devon Rugby Football Club

  ‘One could not help being struck with the magnificent physique of the team, Cunningham, the forward, known as the “lock” or centre scrummager of the second rank, being especially a splendid example of humanity.’

  We began to feel better about ourselves.

  We attracted a record gate for our second game against Cornwall. Again it was the same story—

  Nicholson forced over from a loosies’ rush

  Abbott was next on the end of a long pass from Roberts. Seeling too, then Smith in transit—bumped through—Wallace converted—Deans got over after the passing went Roberts, Mynott, Hunter, Smith, Deans.

  Roberts, Mynott, Hunter worked the blind side successfully—Wallace converting—Hunter dodged through for the try,

  Wallace the conversion.

  We began to float and to achieve a kind of grace that had become second nature, like language or riding a bike.

  One night Frank Glasgow sat down at the piano and composed music to describe the English style of play; it went—plonk plonk plonk plonk, plonk.

  You heard that and saw the English shift the ball across field, one two three four stop and kick for touch.

  To describe our play Frank came up with this number—dum de dah dum de dah bang whoosh bang! whoosh dum de dah clickety-click bang! whoosh dah

  or Roberts to Stead on the loop around Hunter, on to Smith bursting clear or finding support in Thompson, Booth, or Wallace wide

  or, as the defence gathers around Hunter

  the skip pass from Stead to Smith—Gallaher, Casey, O’Sullivan in support

  ball to ground, cleared by Fred to Mona/Carbine/Bunny racing down the touch line.

  It was music new to English ears:

  they weren’t used to the fullback chiming in outside the wing to score

  tries

  they weren’t used to the ball travelling through so many hands

  they weren’t used to the forwards mingling with the backs

  the form unsettled them, they said

  they weren’t used
to our scrum formation—its two-man front row

  ‘specialist positions’, they said, were new to them

  the wing forward position presented a philosophical problem: was Gallaher a back or a forward? They rolled their bottom lip beneath their teeth. They were unsure as to his entitlements.

  Through the rest of September and October into November it was the same thing. Cornwall, Bristol, Northampton, Leicester, Middlesex, Durham, Hartlepool, Northumberland, Gloucester—they stuck to what they knew, which is what they had been brought up with, and we got into the habit of saying, ‘You’d think they’d have learnt by now.’ We quite liked saying that, and therefore said it as often as we could—‘You’d think they’d have learned something by now.’ It must have got on Mister Dixon’s nerves because at Taunton one evening, at ‘debates’, he instructed us on the ways of compassion.

  What, he asked, do you say to the man who, running late for his wedding, has never seen or heard of a motor car?

  To the single-string bush banjo player who weeps over his simple twanging instrument but who has never heard a cello?

  How do you describe a sunset to the blind?

  What is appealing about new possibilities for those who don’t seek them?

  Unusually for Mister Dixon, whose complexion ran to a sandy ginger, some colour entered his cheeks. ‘About the blind,’ he said. ‘I just threw that in as an example.’

  Gallaher removed his pipe and cast an eye over the room to invite submissions.

  Simon Mynott cleared his throat. He sat up straight and raked his fingers back through his thinning hair. ‘Louise Farrow,’ he said. ‘Now Louise is a case in point. Gorgeous. She has this honey-coloured hair that darkens in winter and … well … her husband drowned when she was just twenty-three. She put up his photograph in every room. Frank. Frank Pritchard. That was his name. The poor drowned bastard. Anyway.

  Frank this, Frank that. Frankly,’ he said—and he looked around to see if we had got that. (‘Still here, Simon,’ said Jimmy Duncan.) ‘Anyway,’ said Simon, ‘you never got anything else out of her. Not a peep. This good-looking, gorgeous woman. But she was stuck with her husband. Stuck with his death. She wore black. Every man who came to her house remained the plumber or the painter, or the coal man, or the postie or the bloke selling eggs. Never a bloke bloke, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Thank you, Simon,’ said Mister Dixon.

  ‘Possibilities,’ someone else said, ‘is knowing how to recognise them.’ This seemed wise, if in an imprecise way, and those with pipes struck attitudes of thought.

  At Camborne against the Cornwall men we started against the hill and the sun. The only elements in our way, as it turned out. A local pen-and-pad man wrote: ‘They walked right through us as if we were a sheet of paper.’

  We racked up 41 points, and a few days later put up the same score against Bristol.

  After Camborne the pad-and-pencil men never left our side. They stood in our shadows, them and their long gazes. They wanted to interview us but we didn’t do interviews. We did our talking on the field. The morning after a match saw us clambering down various stairways to get to the newspapers to see what they had to say—

  we were ‘slippery as eels’

  ‘persistent as wasps’

  ‘clever and alert as monkeys’

  ‘[we] worked together like the parts of a well-constructed watch’

  we were ‘Trojans of the scrum’

  ‘backs of modern Mercury’

  at Limerick we were ‘Maori Marvels’

  ‘full of originality and resource’

  ‘wizards’

  ‘human will o’ the wisp’

  we showed ‘sleuth-hound persistency’ against Glamorgan

  against Oxford we were ‘razor-edged’

  ‘bewildering’

  ‘loose-limbed’

  ‘consummate showmen’ at Hollow Drift against the Bedford fifteen

  ‘powerful’

  ‘dazzling—the ball switching hands 14 times before McGregor waltzed over’

  against Munster we were ‘conjurors of magic’

  ‘Roberts dived for the line. Like a panther, Maclear was on him and pinned him to the ground. They went over Catherine-wheel style. Lo and behold, when we looked again Abbott was resting the ball for a try. How did he get it? Where did it come from? Didn’t it look like magic?’

  After we beat Northampton 32–nil the Telegraph man wrote: ‘The situation is becoming quite alarming.’

  Following the Northampton match the townfolk cheered us all the way back to the Plough Hotel; that night the music halls and theatres were thrown open to us.

  A record gate turned up to see us play Leicester and on our way to Franklin Gardens the men waved to us in our brakes and women fluttered their kerchiefs along the route. It was a huge crowd, and when we walked out a whisper circled the ground—‘Where is he? Which one is he?’ Gallaher had been singled out for his wing forward play; certain newspaper critics bristled at his neither-here-nor-there position. They didn’t like his roving commission. Was he a forward or was he a back? He fed the scrum, threw in to the lineout, stalked the opposing halves, disrupted their ball, and led the dribbling rushes. When we took the field Dave let their stares roll off him; he stood on one leg and picked the mud from the cleats of his boots.

  We beat Leicester 28–nil and the pad-and-pencil men wrote: ‘We have been made, in the noble Cromwellian phrase, like stubble before swords.’ ‘… Mynott thread his way through opponents like an eel, while Smith jumped over our men just as if he was in a hurdle race …’

  Billy Wallace was described as a ‘cross between a greyhound and a flash of lightning’.

  After Middlesex (34–nil) we were compared to blood horses, ‘while the gait of the Middlesex men is more suggestive of the tramp of the shire Stallion’.

  On to Durham, another record gate, and in the long wet grass at Hollow Drift we stuttered to 16–3 in drizzly rain. Mynott had a cold. Casey a bruised shoulder. Dunk McGregor’s knee was troubling him. McDonald’s arm was in a sling.

  At Hartlepool the police stopped the sale of tickets half an hour before the game which we went on to win 63–nil. Seven times we scored in succession; the only time the Hartlepool men touched the ball was to kick off. The local newspaperman wrote: ‘It was bewildering and the crowd stood as one man, entranced …’

  Jimmy Hunter picked up five tries against Northumberland (31–nil). ‘Their adaptability is really their greatest virtue. The man who was fullback at Leicester was wing forward at North Shields.’

  For the match against Gloucester we were met at the railway station by a huge crowd which walked behind our drays all the way to the hotel, ‘a following you’d see at a circus arriving in town’. After the game, a pad-and-pencil man quoted a spectator: ‘What went ye to see? A weed shaken by the wind?’

  These were good words to start the day with. When you left the hotel you felt a lift in the soles of your feet. The air seemed to be waiting for you to breathe it. The gruff little bugger at the fruit barrow threw in an extra apple.

  Our eleventh game brought us to Taunton. The streets were postered with ‘Come and see the wonderful All Blacks’.

  ‘When the Somerset men arrived on the field there was an encouraging cheer, but the Colonials, although enthusiastically welcomed, were gazed at with such curiosity that the crowd almost forgot to welcome them.’

  By now, we’d moved from the world of ordinary men.

  We were the stuff of the shop window

  What children’s birthdays are made of

  We were Christmas

  The bubble in the pop

  The jam on the bread

  We were the place smiles come from

  Wherever we went we were accompanied by a stage and a small brass band.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you …’

  We understood the interest. We knew what it was like to stand at a ship rail and without warning or expectation t
o have a shoal of brilliantly coloured flying fish turn your head.

  Our ‘equable brownish olive tints’

  offered proof of ‘the new way of life’

  advertised in the Somerset County Gazette.

  Taunton’s hotels and eating houses struggled to cope with the invasion. Long lines formed outside restaurant doors, and that night the out-of-town spectators slept in the extra hundred cars laid on by the railways for the purpose.

  As early as one o’clock the Jarvis Field began to fill; by 2.30 no one could move. One of the makeshift stands collapsed but no one was hurt or especially bothered. That section of crowd simply resettled itself in the manner of birds shaken out of a tree. When we ran out to defend the ‘station goal’ the crowd’s stare lengthened and intensified and we realised they were ‘window-shopping’.

  We were embarrassed by our efforts. But 20 of our party were suffering from various injuries and illness. Boils. Poisoned legs. We set about rejigging the backline. We rested Hunter and Roberts. Stead went to halfback; Mynott and Deans served in the five-eighths department. It was not a success. Several times tries went begging for our failure to shift the ball wide. Nicholson knocked on with the line before him. On another occasion O’Sullivan’s pass was ruled forward, and so it went, our enterprise seemingly directed into ways of sabotaging our skill. The field, we realised, was too narrow. The space we usually basked in just wasn’t there. We still ran out winners 23 to nil. But for the first time we found ourselves complaining and reaching for excuses, and for the first time, as well, we heard the pad-and-pencil men scratch on their paper and begin to mutter: ‘Wait till they get to Wales …’

  At Plymouth we played Albion (21–3). A stand was given up to invalids from the nearby military hospital. In glorious sunshine, the Mayor kicked off and dashed back to his place in the stand.

  For the match against Midland Counties (21–5) the Midlands Railway Workers were given half a day off on full pay to watch us play.