resemblance to the badge of the English football (soccer) team.
The lions did not appear on the blue jerseys worn by the players in matches, and photographs quite clearly show that, for the 1924 Tests at any rate, the jersey badge was, as now, made up of the insignia of the four unions quartered on a shield. But the lions on the ties made an impression, and perhaps it was some bright spark in the party, maybe even the captain Dr Ronald Cove-Smith himself, who first suggested that the tourists were all lions. Or perhaps it was some long-forgotten press correspondent who wrote of ‘the lions’, and the name stuck, not least because it was so much better journalistically than ‘the biruts’.
Some officials in the various Celtic unions thought it was a bit presumptuous to use a symbol traditionally associated with England—Scotland’s single lion is rampant, not couchant. Protests were made by administrators, but, for once, player power counted. The newly minted Lions were not unhappy with the nickname, even those from Ireland and Wales, whose emblems were a shamrock and a dragon respectively. By the time the 1930 tour came round, the nickname was so well established that the blue playing jersey was embroidered with three lions, just like the English football badge, and players were given a plentiful supply of lion brooches and pins to hand out to their hosts.
Dr Cove-Smith’s Lions should have been the best ever to leave these islands. England had won the Grand Slam that year, their third in four seasons, and Scotland would do so the following year, and both those sides contained players who are now legends of the game. But in fact British and Irish rugby had fallen well behind the standards of the southern hemisphere teams, as would be proven when the All Blacks toured England, Wales, Ireland, France and Canada in late 1924 and early 1925, playing and winning four Tests and completing the 32-match tour unbeaten—hence their nickname of The Invincibles. The two tours overlapped slightly, but there was enough time between the final Test in South Africa and the Tests against the All Blacks for the Lions to arrive home and prepare themselves for another beating, this time in their own national colours rather than in the blue jersey of the British Isles Rugby Union Team.
On a tour that, at one point, saw the Lions go eight matches without a win, the South Africans were to hand out rugby lesson after rugby lesson. The touring party was missing great players like Wavell Wakefield—later the first Baron Wakefield of Kendal, and the father of modern forward play as well as captain of England’s Grand Slam winners—and G.P.S. ‘Phil’ Macpherson, who would skipper Scotland to their first Slam the following year. But that was no excuse, as the full squad of 30, which included two replacements, contained 24 past, current or future internationalists.
There were horrendous injury problems, however, many caused by the concrete-like surfaces of some of the South African pitches. Arthur Young, perhaps the finest scrum-half of the era and lynch-pin of England’s Grand Slam side, missed three of the Tests, while W.S. Gainsford was injured in the opening training session and sat out the entire tour. Ian Smith, the Australian-born Scottish winger who set an international record of 24 tries that stood until David Campese beat it, played only two Tests. Some players, such as Roy Kinnear—later a Scotland international and Great Britain rugby league cap, and father of the late well-known comic actor of the same name—managed to play in all four Tests, as did fellow Scottish cap Neil McPherson.
McPherson’s story is illuminating about the attitude of officialdom in those times. Though he was actually born in Wales, he qualified to play for Scotland because of his Scottish parentage, though this meant many long arduous trips north for the young man who played for Newport. He made the mistake, however, of accepting the gift of a watch worth 20 guineas to mark Newport’s unbeaten season in 1922–23, and when the gift was made public, the supposedly whiter-than-white Scottish union banned him from the international side.
In that 1924 party, Dan Drysdale, Doug Davies, Robert Howie, Arthur Blakiston, and Cove-Smith himself were the only other ever-presents in the four Tests. The first three would all play a vital part in Scotland’s 1925 Grand Slam, and Drysdale would later become president of the SRU, while Blakiston succeeded his baronet father and became Sir Arthur.
There was also no reliable goal kicker, and Scotland’s full-back Drys-dale had a miserable time missing what would now be considered certainties. In his defence, he had to play on while injured, the ball was much heavier in those days, and its flight high on the Veldt has baffled many more kickers than Drysdale. A forward, Tom Voyce of Gloucester and England, took over the kicking duties and fared little better. Voyce, who would become president of the RFU in later life, also had to play out of position in the backs, this happening several times as the Lions numbers were depleted. Willie Cunningham, an Irish international who had moved to live in Johannesburg, was called up as a replacement from ‘civilian’ life—as would happen to the accidental tourist, Andy Nicol, in Australia in 2001.
At one point in the match against the Border side in East London, the Lions were so desperate to make up numbers that a spectator called McTavish was pressed into action. Nothing more was known about him, and no more was ever heard about him, but there remains the intriguing possibility that out there somewhere are the descendants of an unacknowledged Lion.
Dr Cove-Smith admitted that the injuries had all but overwhelmed his squad. Later he wrote: ‘Looking back, one cannot help but laugh at the subterfuges to which we were forced to resort to place 15 fit men on the field, and I have marvelled many times in retrospect that the fellows were able to put up such a good show in spite of all the handicaps.’
The Lions were also caught out by what some considered a piece of trickery by the Springboks. In order to combat the dynamic wing forward play of the Lions, South Africa’s Test side lined up with a scrummage in a 3–4–1 formation, the wing forwards binding their support to props rather than the second row, as opposed to the traditional 3–2–3 system. The Lions refused to adopt the advantageous new formation and duly paid the price as the South African defence became even more formidable.
Forget these excuses, however. The fact is that the 1924 Lions were just not as good as their hosts, as the four Tests showed. The first Test at Durban saw the debut in the green jersey of the legendary fly-half Bennie Osler, one of the greatest of all Springboks. A prodigious kicker, Osler’s clearances from defence and his probing kicks in attack rendered many of the Lions strategies redundant. His drop goal was the difference between the two sides in that first Test, won 7–3 by the Springboks. ‘He kicked more than was warranted,’ was Cove-Smith’s later comment.
The second Test at Johannesburg was played in front of a crowd estimated at 25,000, of whom a large number had forced their way in after being locked out when the ground reached its supposed capacity of 15,000—there was no longer any doubt about the popularity of matches against the Lions. It was no tense affair, however, South Africa recording their biggest ever win by 17–0.
Having lost so heavily to the Springboks and having failed to beat no fewer than eight provincial sides, the Lions at least salvaged a draw in the third Test in Port Elizabeth. The series was lost, and insult was added to injury when the Springboks snatched victory with a late try in the final Test in Cape Town.
The humiliation was complete, and the knives were out for the tourists back home—in the polite terms of the day, it was suggested by various complainers that the host unions’ generous hospitality had helped the Lions rugby to reach a nadir. In other words, far too much drink had been taken.
W. Rowe Harding, the Welsh winger, later gave vent to his feelings about the tour and the Lions in general in his controversial book of 1929, Rugby Reminiscences and Opinions. ‘Many unkind things were said about our wining and dining, but that was not the explanation of our failures,’ he wrote, going on to blame instead the injuries, the long train journeys between venues and the hard grounds. But he then struck a more honest note.
It is not difficult to analyse the reason for our failure. Dissipation has nothing to do with it…the real
