South Africa comes 99 years after that first official tour to the same country. The number 99 has become part of Lions folklore, and in this book you will learn precisely why.
We would particularly like to thank everyone at HarperCollins for their unstinting support and professionalism, especially Tom Whiting who commissioned the book and Nick Fawcett and Colin Hall who edited and designed it.
In the course of our joint researches, it is remarkable how many times we heard one word used to describe the Lions, both individually and as teams. That word was indomitable, and as Lions, many have displayed that quality both on the field and off it.
These men once were Lions. To us, they still are Lions and always will be.
Jeff Connor and Martin Hannan January 2009
CHAPTER ONE FIRST TWENTY YEARS OF THE LIONS 1888–1908
The British Isles gave rugby to the world. Of that there is no doubt. The trouble is that, as with so many sports invented or codified in these islands, the world insisted on taking ‘our’ ball and running away with it. It happened fairly early in rugby union, when it soon became clear that France and a few Empire countries had mastered rugby and the pupils were only too anxious to teach the ‘masters’ a thing or two.
Despite the present ascendancy of the southern hemisphere countries, the number of British and Irish ‘firsts’ in rugby constitutes a history to be proud of, including William Webb Ellis’s glorious disdain for the rules in 1833 which marked the beginning of the sport of rugby union; the first international played in 1871 at Raeburn Place in Edinburgh with Scotland beating England; both those nations competing for the first international trophy, the Calcutta Cup, in 1879 and ever since; the foundation of the first Unions; and the first schism over professionalism which led to the establishment of rugby league in 1895 in the guise of the Northern Rugby Football Union.
The honour of being the first truly international ‘tourists’ did not go to any of the home unions, however. In 1882, a team from New South Wales in Australia crossed the Tasman Sea and played seven games against club and provincial sides in New Zealand. The concept of the rugby ‘tour’ was born.
Six years later, in 1888, what has become recognized as the first Lions tour took place. It is remarkable to reflect that in that long gone heyday of amateurism, it was two professional cricket players doubling as sporting entrepreneurs, Arthur Shrewsbury and Alfred Shaw, who proposed and organized the first ever tour by a team from the British Isles. They had seen in Australia how popular matches against the England cricketing side had proved, and proposed to the Rugby Football Union that a similar exercise should be tried with rugby players from the British Isles.
The latter part of Queen Victoria’s long reign saw the British Empire at its zenith. Migration to the Colonies by entire families was a regular feature of life in Britain, and certainly the nabobs of the Colonial Service and the various armed forces loved nothing better than to take their British traditions with them. So it was natural that the fast-developing and already very popular sport of rugby football should be exported to countries like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand where the climate suited the game. Attempts to establish rugby in other warmer colonies such as India largely failed—the Calcutta Cup is made of the melted-down silver rupees of the Calcutta Rugby Club which disbanded in 1878 after just five years of existence.
The colonials, both immigrants and natives, considered themselves equal subjects of the Queen Empress, and liked nothing better than to prove their prowess against the ‘old country’ on the cricket pitch in particular. In retrospect, the two entrepreneurs were knocking at an open door when they decided to try and repeat the success of touring cricket teams with a rugby side.
To promote their case, Shrewsbury and Shaw enlisted the help of a very popular sportsman, Andrew Ernest ‘A.E.’ Stoddart of Middlesex County Cricket Club and Blackheath Rugby Football Club, who was with them in the English cricket side in Australia and who would go on to captain England at both rugby and cricket. He was, by all accounts, a born leader of men.
The politics of rugby organization at that time explain why the RFU’s permission was sought, rather than the International Board which had been formed by the then Scottish Football Union and their Irish and Welsh counterparts in 1886. The RFU haughtily refused to join the Board until 1890 and still saw themselves as the supreme body of world rugby. In truth, so did most people in the fledgling sport.
Perhaps surprisingly, given its reputation for extreme conservatism at that period, the RFU gave a sort of tacit approval for the first tour, in so far as they did not try to ban it. They stopped well short of fully sanctioning the tour, however, and issued stern warnings about the issue of payment to the players—the promoters could make a profit, but the participants could not. Many Lions will tell you things have not changed.
The RFU’s overriding concern about any such tour was a perceived threat to the amateur status of players. Driven by class considerations as much as anything, at that time the rules on combating professionalism were incredibly strict as the various rugby unions fought against even those who wanted to at least compensate players for loss of earnings. Anyone who took so much as petty expenses for playing rugby was summarily banned sine die, while a player could be deemed professional, and thus expelled from rugby, if he even took part in a game where any one of the other 29 players was being paid. It was massive discrimination against working people in an age when club and Union officials were uniformly middle or upper class and could afford their time off work. Politics, professionalism, arguments over expenses, debates going back and forth with the sport’s administrators—these themes will recur again in this book.
Shrewsbury, Shaw and Stoddart employed an agent to find players in the then heartlands of the game, the Scottish Borders and the northern counties of England. Some 22 men signed up from ‘working class’ clubs such as Swinton, Salford and Hawick.
Since the tour was going to last eight months, it is inconceivable that some form of compensation was not paid to men who, in some cases, surrendered jobs to take part.
From the outset, an important principle was established. The tourists would be ‘British’ with, initially, players from England, Scotland and Wales. Shrewsbury and Shaw had realized that a team of such a nature would appeal to the large expatriate community in both Australia and New Zealand, Scots being particularly prevalent in the latter country. In the end, the party consisted of sixteen players from English clubs, four from clubs in Scotland, and one each from Wales and the Isle of Man, W.H. Thomas and A.P. Penketh respectively. Two of the Scots, the Burnetts of Hawick, became the first brothers to tour together for the Lions, while among the ‘English’ players were Irish-born Arthur Paul and Dewsbury’s Scottish exile Angus Stuart, so from the start the tourists really were British and Irish, though not yet known as ‘Lions’.
At the last minute the RFU put the whole tour in doubt when one of the 22 tourists, J.P. Clowes of Halifax, was declared a professional and thus cast into the rugby wilderness. His ‘crime’ was to accept £15 in expenses for his kit for the tour. And given the draconian ‘catch all’ nature of the rules on professionalism, every player who played with him or against him would face a similar sentence.
The RFU Committee made their point clear in a statement recorded for posterity in the minutes: ‘The Rugby Football Union has decided, on the evidence before them, that J.P. Clowes is a professional within the meaning of the laws. On the same evidence they have formed a very strong opinion that other players composing the Australian team have also infringed those laws and they will require from them such explanation as they think fit on their return to England.’ That decision was announced just one day before the party was due to sail. The British
