Salford and Wigan just trying to keep fit. My brother had played for Wigan before the war and the club manager obviously knew who I was. They offered me £3,000 on the spot to sign for them and I had to point out that I couldn’t serve two bosses and was off to America in any case.
When I came back they offered me £5,000 and then £6,000, and I gave them first refusal if I changed my mind, but in the end I just didn’t want to do it.
Matthews was also ‘tapped’ by rugby league clubs: ‘I had offers galore, but my parents wouldn’t look at it. It wasn’t for me but I didn’t blame anyone who went “up north” to join rugby league as they didn’t have any jobs, then. I wasn’t against that at all, but league wasn’t for me because they were two different games.’
Williams concurred: ‘I am glad I didn’t take the money and thus miss the 1950 tour, because I am very, very proud of being a Lion.’
As for the ostracization of Jones, both Williams and Matthews consider that it was shameful.
‘It was ridiculous that he couldn’t even go back and visit his old friends,’ said Williams. ‘Just ridiculous, but that was the way it was.’
Matthews agreed: ‘We looked after any Cardiff player who went north and came back, even though they tried to bar them from the clubhouse. It was all a lot of rubbish.’
Lewis Jones lives in Leeds and has kept his ties to that city’s club for which he starred for many years. The members of Gorseinon rugby club in his home village paid him the tribute of naming their new clubhouse after their local hero, and Jones himself came to open it in early 2008, making a welcome public appearance in Wales. More than 50 years on, all has long been forgiven and forgotten, but as we shall see in subsequent chapters, joining rugby league was still seen as treason for many years after the Golden Boy made his move north.
The Lions’ attitude to those who left the union fold is proof that the companionship forged on those tours with their long sea voyages was unbreakable. Williams and Matthews, for example, have remained lifelong friends and both have been honoured by the Queen.
Jack Kyle has always been grateful for being a Lion, but points out the main difference between then and now was not just money but the players’ attitude to the sport:
The fact that we had a career was more important than rugby. If you had a bad game and had an exam coming up afterwards, it soon got your mind off your game and onto the important stuff. In today’s professional world there would be a video analyst and a coach discussing your game and where you went wrong. The most we ever got if we lost was ‘Hard luck, chaps, you did your best.’
I have made and kept many friends through rugby and there’s no doubt being a Lion enriched my life tremendously and opened doors for me. To give you an example—I worked in Indonesia as a surgeon from 1962 to 1964 and my wife and I went up to Hong Kong for a holiday and were staying at the Repulse Bay Hotel. We had just got in and were unpacking and the phone rang. It was a guy from the local rugby club inviting me along to their meeting that night.
I said ‘How did anyone know I was in Hong Kong?’ as I was pretty sure no one knew we were going there. He said ‘The customs officer at the airport is a rugby man and spotted your name on your passport.’ Those chaps were wonderful to us for the whole holiday, taking us for meals and arranging cars for us. That’s the kind of thing that has happened to Lions over the years.
That 1950 band of happy Lions seems largely to have been blessed with success in later life. Ivor Preece enjoyed a long career with Coventry RFC, where he was both captain and president. He died in 1987.
Billy Cleaver rose through the mining industry to become deputy director of the National Coal Board in South Wales. Defying stereotypes about rugger lads, Cleaver had a lifelong interest in the arts and became vice-chairman of the Welsh Arts Council. He died in 2003.
Ken Jones lived until he was 84, having retired from rugby in 1957 when he was the record Welsh cap holder. The following year he had the honour of carrying the baton containing the Queen’s Speech at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff. ‘What kept you?’ said Prince Philip, after Jones took a wrong turning.
Peter Kininmonth returned from the Lions tour with a most spectacular find: his wife Priscilla, who was on board the ship which took them home. Kininmonth had a distinguished career in financial services before turning to a second career on his wife’s farm where he became an award-winning master cheesemaker. He died aged 83 in 2007. Several of the 1950 Lions attended his funeral.
John Robins became a leading figure in physical education, and went on to coach the Lions in 1966—more about that later. He ended his professional career as director of PE at the University of Wales in Cardiff. He died in 2007. Fellow Welsh cap Bob Evans achieved high rank in the police and was a stalwart for Newport all his life until his death in 2003.
Doug Smith would become one of the most successful managers in Lions history—again more about him later. Grahame Budge, who died in 1979, left a rugby legacy to his family which endures—his granddaughter Alison Christie has been capped 61 times for Scotland.
The most extraordinary story of the 1950 Lions, one which they have kept to themselves assuming they know all about it, did not emerge until after the death of Don Hayward in 1999. No one should pretend that the Lions have been innocents on their tours, and there are countless tales of liaisons between tourists and women—some of them even of ‘a certain age’—over the decades, though most are treated under the unbreakable code of rugby omerta, which states roughly that ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’. Not all such dalliances involved sweetness and romance, it must be said, but none had a happier ending than Hayward’s tale.
The Welsh forward had loved his time Down Under in 1950 so much that he emigrated there, after meeting and marrying his wife Linda in 1952. He returned briefly to play rugby league for Wigan in the mid-1950s when his wife became ill. On returning to New Zealand, Hayward opened a butcher’s shop in Wainuiomata, a suburb of Lower Hutt, though he later moved to Otaki. Linda sadly died, but Hayward remained in Otaki with his son Gareth.
One evening in October 1993 a knock came at the door of their house. On the doorstep stood 42-year-old Suzy Davis and her partner Tony Sims. They asked if he was Don Hayward, a member of the Lions tour party, and after being invited in, Sims blurted out: ‘Suzy thinks you are her father.’
Indeed he was. Hayward had met Suzy’s birth mother, Iona Potter, for just one night in Dunedin during the tour in 1950. He never knew that the then 29-year-old Potter had become pregnant and given birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Victoria before being put up for adoption and acquiring the name Suzy Davis.
It wasn’t until the age of 35 that Davis began the search for her real parents. Showing all the determination her father had displayed on the field, she spent years patiently combing through records until she found her mother, who had two other children from a subsequent marriage and who confirmed that her father had been a rugby player from Wales, though she could not remember his name.
Davis combed through rugby books and found pictures of the Welsh contingent in the 1950 Lions. Revealing her story in 1999, she told the Evening Post in Wellington: ‘I remember looking and looking at the photo to work out which one it might be.’
Her birth mother was reluctant to say more about her illicit liaison in 1950, but after she contracted terminal cancer, Iona told Suzy that her only memory of the tall Welshman she had met in Dunedin was that he was a train driver from Pontypool. Armed with this information, Davis tracked down Hayward with the help of sportswriters.
