saying I could carry on playing at Cardiff as long as I played for the RAMC in the inter-services Cup. I did, and we won it.
I have a wonderful photograph of Field Marshal Montgomery presenting me with the cup. Funnily enough, I don’t think the RAMC have won it since.
During the war, Matthews kept fit partly by boxing for his medical school side, which travelled to St Athan to meet an RAF select in 1943. On that occasion his opponent was an American ‘guest’ with a knockout reputation—none other than Rocky Marciano, who would later become the only man ever to retire as undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Matthews managed to avoid being stopped by Marciano, something only six of the great fighter’s professional opponents achieved.
Matthews eventually went on to complete his service in medicine with the RAF. His great friend Bleddyn Williams was also in the RAF, serving as a pilot, and performed the unique feat of invading Germany and playing for Great Britain at rugby in the same week.
More than 63 years later, Williams tells the story of the last week in March 1945 with relish:
After Arnhem there was a shortage of glider pilots so they were looking for volunteers from among us surplus pilots for the big push over the Rhine—it was ‘you, you, and you’, the usual way of volunteering, so I became a glider pilot.
I had been picked for the Great Britain side which was due to play the Dominions in one of the morale-boosting international matches that were played occasionally during the war. The match was set for Leicester on the Saturday after I was due to land in Germany, which we duly did early that week in the massive push (Operation Varsity) to get our troops across the Rhine.
On the Friday morning, the day before I was due to play for Great Britain, I was still in the camp in Germany, when my CO, Sir Hugh Bartlett, who later became captain of Sussex county cricket team, said to me ‘Aren’t you supposed to be playing at Leicester tomorrow?’ I replied that indeed I was, but I had been sleeping in a slit trench all week and was looking rather unkempt by then. All he said was ‘Pack your bags’. We were five miles inside Germany at this point, I should add.
I got a ride in a jeep to the Rhine, crossed over in a empty DUKW (amphibious vehicle) and there was another jeep waiting for me on the other side which took me to Eindhoven in Holland where I got a lift in a plane to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. I was stationed in Essex at the time but waiting for me was the CO of the camp who grabbed a spare aircraft and flew me home.
I wasn’t long married at the time and when I presented myself at the door of our digs my wife thought I was a ghostly apparition, because she had been told that there had been very few survivors of the attack. I spent the night, went up by train to Leicester the following morning and I played for Great Britain and scored a try in our victory. War was incidental to rugby football, you see.
With two centres, one of whom had gone the distance with Rocky Marciano and the other who had invaded Germany, how could the 1950 Lions fail? Other former servicemen on the 1950 tour included Billy McKay, who had been a Commando and had served in the bloodiest conflicts in Burma, now Myanmar. Welsh scrum-half Rex Willis had served in the Royal Navy while Scottish captain Peter Kininmonth had seen action in Italy and as recently as 1947 had served on the Northwest frontier in Afghanistan. Ken Jones served as a sergeant in India, and his victory in the All-India Games in 1945 kick-started a sprinting career that saw him run for Britain in the 1948 Olympics and win a silver medal in the sprint relay—almost sacrilegiously for a Lion, he perhaps unsurprisingly recalled the 1948 Olympics as the highlight of his sporting career rather than his touring experiences.
Of such tried and tested stuff were Lions made. The 1950 touring party was the first to be called the Lions by all and sundry, though they were still formally billed as the British Isles Rugby Union Team, and the initials BIRUT appeared on the tour blazer beneath the now accepted emblem of the four home unions’ badges on a quartered shield. A more obvious change—as mentioned earlier—was the adoption of bright red jerseys, prompted by the previous blue colours clashing with the black jersey of New Zealand. The Lions in Red were here to stay.
The manager for the 1950 tour was a distinguished Royal Navy doctor, Surgeon-Captain L.B. ‘Ginger’ Osborne, then a selector for England and later a rear admiral. His good humour coupled with Mullen’s inspirational captaincy made this one of the happiest of tours. Indeed, we know just how pleasant an experience it was from first-hand accounts in a DVD documentary of that 1950 tour called The Singing Lions. ‘With all those Welshmen, what did you expect?’ as Jack Matthews put it.
In the 1950 party, for the first time every player was an internationalist and all four home unions provided capped players. Although Wales’s captain John Gwiliam could not tour, there were eventually no fewer than 14 players from Wales, Lewis Jones joining as a replacement for the latter part of the tour. Jones would become known as ‘The Golden Boy’ of Welsh rugby but, as we will see, he would become involved in a controversy that split his nation asunder.
The Welsh preponderance reflected the fact that the principality was enjoying one of its periods of domination over the other northern unions, having just achieved the Grand Slam. Great players like Williams and fellow centre Matthews—nicknamed ‘Iron Man’ by the New Zealanders ‘because of my tackling, I think’, he mused recently—and flying winger Ken Jones made the Welsh back line irresistible. ‘I once beat Ken in a 100m sprint,’ Matthews recalled, ‘and when my time was beaten later on, I had to remind the new record holder he was running in spikes and we ran in flat shoes.’
Other Welsh Lions of 1950 included the Terrible Twins from Neath, lock forwards Roy John and Rees Stephens, as well as utility forward Don Hayward, prop John Robins and fly-half Billy Cleaver. Hooker Dai Davies and flanker Bob Evans became vital team members while the ever-cheerful Cliff Davies provided the baritone for the Lions choir.
Despite the tour having an English manager and selector, England had just three representatives, including captain Ivor Preece, which was not really surprising as English rugby was then in the doldrums, while Scotland had five and Ireland nine.
‘The Welsh and Irish got on great,’ said Williams, ‘but really we all gelled right from the start, all the nationalities, and maybe it was because so many of us had been used to getting along with strangers during our time in the services.’
The best known Scottish player of the day, the great back row forward W.I.D. ‘Doug’ Elliott, was invited to be a Lion but could not make the tour as he was a farmer and would miss the harvest, as was also the case with another Scottish invitee, Hamish Kemp. Doug Elliot did ask if he could join the tour for part of the trip, but was refused. The Lions Committee wanted total commitment in those days, and he never did make a tour. He was ‘a great character who was missed’, in Jack Kyle’s words. The leader of the Scottish contingent in 1950 was the barrel-chested flank forward Peter Kininmonth, while his fellow Scot, scrum-half Gus Black, was noted for his long and accurate passes which attracted the attention of an All Blacks team anxious to stop the Lions’ backs from cutting loose. It says everything about his destructive opposite number, Pat Crowley, that Gus Black survived just two Tests before giving way for the third Test to Gordon Rimmer, who in turn was injured during the game and replaced by the Welsh utility back Billy Cleaver, before Rex Willis took over at No. 9 for the final Test—Crowley destroyed them all.
Both the team captain and its star player were Irish. A fine hooker, Dr Karl Mullen had been captain of Ireland’s Triple Crown-winning sides of 1948 and 1949 and was first choice to captain the Lions. Firm and fair and with a surgeon’s bedside manner about him, he would go on to become one of Ireland’s leading gynaecologists, and with his wife Doreen would be at the heart of Irish society for many years. Doreen died in 2008 and Dr Mullen is now living quietly
