My earliest memory of international rugby was a typically Scottish one of seeing a black and white Andy Hancock run the length of the Twickenham pitch to level the scores when I thought we had definitely won the Calcutta Cup. Uncle Roy, my mother’s brother, had played for Edinburgh Accies FPs and the Co-Optimists in the 1950s. He was a giant of a man for those days and my mother had kept all his newspaper cuttings. I couldn’t wait to get to secondary school and play rugby.
At the start of autumn 1966 we eleven-year-olds reported for duty as potential players in the first year side. The PE teachers put all the tall boys in the scrum and the short ones in the three-quarters. Presumably they thought they could sort out our true aptitudes later. Incongruously, I was put in the front row of the scrum as a prop. I quickly developed low back pain that would just about resolve between episodes of play. Eventually I could tolerate it no longer and asked to be moved out to the threes. I was upset when I was initially dropped because of this. At the start of the season it was exciting to get the little blue folded card fixture list with our all home and away opponents for the season laid out: Ayr, Ardrossan, Irvine, Beith, Marr, Bellahouston, Kilmarnock etc… Alongside these matches were the spaces for filling in the scores for and against.
Cumnock Academy didn’t have a sports pavilion in those days. We changed in the technical department classrooms and washed up afterwards with cold water in the sinks in the cloakrooms. The sports ground at Broomfield was on the outskirts of the town off the Auchinleck road near the river. We had to run through the town in our kit to get there. This was bracing on a frosty night but we enjoyed the clatter of our studs on the pavement. It felt like we meant business. Cleaning mud off your legs with cold water after playing in sub-zero conditions is an experience that stays with you.
Cumnock was not known for its rugby. It was more of a football and basketball school. Being so large (1500 pupils) there were a number of schoolboy football internationals. Cumnock would usually get to the final stages of the schools cup and produced a number of professional players, notably George Burley. Out of curiosity he once came for a net with the cricket team. After asking how to hold the bat thingy he proceeded to whack my fastest deliveries in all directions. Another time, after mocking the rugby players, the football team turned out for one of our practices saying that it didn’t look that hard. They then proceeded to run rings round us in a most annoying fashion.
Away games introduced us to what were often long bus journeys to places like Stranraer and somehow we learned the words of the mandatory obscene songs. Three-Card Brag in the back row of seats was the other way to kill time. I never fully understood ‘prials’ and the like. The boys stuck strictly to the rules as money was at stake and traditionally added the played cards to the bottom of the deck without shuffling them. Legends arose of the infallible memories of some players and their ability to predict how the hands would be dealt as the game went on.
The other great excitement was travelling to Edinburgh for internationals. At Cumnock we didn’t get into the famous schoolboy enclosure next to the pitch. This seemed to be the preserve of the independent schools. We were mixed in with hoi polloi on the terracing, taking our chances with beer-swilling adults. Aged 13 in December 1967, I was present at the All Blacks game when Colin Meads was sent off for kicking the legs from Chisholm. we were all chanting ‘Off! Off!’ but were astonished when he was actually dismissed. We all took part in the obligatory pitch invasions at the end, hardly able to believe we were running on the match surface. One of our party once got an autograph from Mervyn Davis (Merv the Swerve). He claimed Merv signed it holding the pen in his closed fist like a dagger.
Sometimes Uncle Roy had spare tickets for internationals. Once we were driving up to Eskbank to meet him at my grandparents’ house when the bonnet blew clean off my father’s Jaguar near Douglas. The mechanic in the local garage was able to weld the hinges temporarily but we were very late. Uncle Roy was also a rally driver and we set off for the ground at top speed in his Sunbeam Rapier. I recall hurtling through the junction of Frogston Road and Biggar Road at Fairmilehead. A school chum of Roy’s had a laundry business right next to Murrayfield Stadium where he parked and we made our way under the railway bridge to the turnstiles from there.
Until a school trip to Bergen, Murrayfield was the one place where I felt a bit short. This was particularly so in the area behind the West Stand where Roy had his seats. Another difference between me and the crowd in that part of the ground was their refined accents. On the way back to Ayrshire my mother asked me if I’d enjoyed myself. I said I had but I was a bit embarrassed that everyone around me was so posh. My mother said, ‘Well, you should have shown them that you can speak nicely too.’ At this my father exploded and said, ‘You speak any way you like! Don’t be ashamed of the way you speak!’ An atmosphere persisted in the car after that. It was difficult being the product of a mixed marriage.
After second year at Cumnock there were only two rugby teams: the first and second fifteens. To play for one of those in third year required some physical precocity. In second year I got kneed in the face and had only been saved from losing my front teeth by having had an orthodontic brace fitted the week before. I decided to give up rugby for a bit.
I carried on playing cricket in the summer. I was cricket captain in first and second year but frankly this wasn’t much of an accolade as we frequently had trouble finding eleven boys to turn out. When I was made Head Boy at the end of fifth year it was made clear to me that I would be expected to play a winter sport, so I returned to rugby. I played inside centre for the final season – although I was never really fast enough. I am on the far right of the back row in the picture below. I appear to be taller than the rest but that is a trick of perspective. The boys in the middle of the row were lock forwards, taller than me, well over six feet.
On my right is Tom Frame, who was precocious in many ways and was Ayrshire Schools sprint champion at age group level. We shared a flat in Edinburgh in 1975-6. As you can see, a strict dress code was not enforced and the number of times a strip had been through the wash resulted in us looking like a motley crew. We might have been disheveled but the team contained four future doctors, several scientists and a couple of lawyers. We won the vast majority of our games.
Sixth year brought the chance of a trip to an away international. The year before, Scotland had lost to Wales 19-18 at Murrayfield, the game that featured ‘the greatest conversion since St Paul’. This was the kick by John Taylor that won the match. We had high hopes of winning the next game in Cardiff. A number of outwardly respectable teachers played for the lower strata of Ayr Rugby Club and four of us pupils (Gordon and Peter Paterson, Ian Kiltie and myself) accompanied them and some of their teammates to Cardiff for the match. Having picked us up in Cumnock the bus first made its way to Ayr High Street where the entire row of back seats were stacked to the roof with cans of Tennants Lager and McEwans Export. The teachers blew up balloons and wrote ‘McEwans Marauders’ on them. We were asked how many beers we wanted. We thought half a dozen cans would suffice. It turned out they meant cases.
The bus then headed south to the sound of beer cans opening and filthy songs. As we headed south the ‘grown-ups’ called for increasingly frequent piss-stops until the bus driver, infuriated, refused. The party then discovered a hatch in the floor of the bus used for cleaning it out. You could see the prop shaft to the back wheels below and the tarmac rushing past. At first the effluent was passed into beer mugs then emptied down the hatch but soon this process was streamlined to pissing directly onto the motorway. Inaccuracies resulted in pools of liquid slopping around the floor.
Formal stops were made at motorway service stations which were invaded by the Marauders. Members of the public clasped their loved ones to their sides for their protection and the bus began to fill up with ‘souvenirs’. I remember a huge yellow Duckham’s Oil thermometer. Finally we arrived in Cardiff and were driven off to hospitality at one of the Welsh rugby clubs. I have only the vaguest recollection of the rest of that evening but I do recall doing my party piece – the bass recitatif from the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony followed by the first verse. We were dropped off at our digs where I was sick all night into the hand basin in our room.
The next morning I felt appropriately terrible and both my wrists were swollen up like balloons. At that point I remembered I had fallen down the stairs of the digs as we left for the rugby club the previous evening. Our tickets were for some strange terracing under the main stand at Cardiff Arms Park. As play went to the ends of the ground the view was obscured by the supports for the seating above and the crowd would surge forward, lifting us off our feet in an alarming way.
The game was epic. JPR Williams – who has admitted to using pharmacological assistance in those days – stamped on PC Brown in a dead ball situation. Later JPR went off having mysteriously developed a broken jaw. In the second half Scotland were leading 12-10 with the last quarter still to go when Gareth Edwards gathered the ball on his own 25 yard line, kicked ahead and ran the length of the pitch to score. One of the greatest tries of the era, it was used in the opening sequence of Grandstand for many years. After that everyone in the Welsh team seemed to score including, once again, John Taylor. At 35-12 it was a record defeat for us.
On the second night, in the hope of meeting the players, Gordon Paterson had booked us into the grand Parc Hotel now Jurys Inn. I was in no fit state to enjoy it and certainly wasn’t up for any drinking. The team of course were at the post-match dinner – of which more later. The next morning, Sunday, the disheveled remnants of McEwans Marauders climbed on board the bus to head back up the M6. They stank of stale beer, vomit and ketones. We were appalled to see them opening the last of their cans. As we were dropped off in Cumnock we heard them discuss meeting up ‘for a pint’ somewhere in Ayr that evening.
Later that year, myself as Head Boy and John Hunter as rugby captain, were invited to attend a Cumnock Rotary Club lunch. The guest speaker was Gordon ‘Broon fae Troon’ Brown who, like JPR Williams, was a British Lion and had played in the game we were at in Cardiff. The teachers rightly thought we would appreciate the opportunity to hear him. Brown was a great speaker and regaled us with stories of the Lions on tour. He said the New Zealanders were not good losers, kept to themselves after matches, and muttered, ‘They shouldn’t have sent Pine Tree off in ’67’. He took questions and I asked about that year’s game in Cardiff and the incident with his brother Peter Brown. He said the team were furious about JPR but said the coach Clive Rowlands had the Welsh team so wound up before a match that they ‘would eat their grandmothers’. JPR seemed to have lost it when he stamped on Peter Brown early in the match, ‘But,’ Gordon said, ‘We melted him at the next high ball’. I remembered the shredded state of his shorts. Later in the match JPR sustained a broken jaw and he missed the post match dinner. A message came to the Brown brothers at the dinner that JPR wanted to see them outside. Imagining more trouble was brewing, both brothers went outside to meet him only to find him upset and wishing to apologise for what had happened.
Many years later Gordon Brown attended our department at the Royal Infirmary. He was being seen in out-patients and needed a chest X-Ray. I was looking forward to maybe having a chat with him after I reported the film but Miss Brown our senior radiographer – and a Borders girl – intercepted me so that she could escort the great man back to out-patients. When she returned I asked her what they had chatted about. ‘I told him there was something I’d always wanted to know,’ she said. ‘Why did your brother always turn his back on the ball before taking a place kick?’ ‘What did he say?’ I asked. ‘He told me it was to give it a surprise!’ she said.
The other Welsh game that stuck in my mind was the infamous over-sold match at Murrayfield in 1975 which had a world record official attendance of 104,000. Thousands of welshmen holding tickets couldn’t get into the ground and the rumour was that the crowd was a lot bigger than the official figure. I believe that was the match when my friend Willie Kerr had his front teeth knocked out by an unprovoked head butt from a welsh fan outside the Caledonian Alehouse in Haymarket. The pub was later demolished for the tram scheme in 2008.
When we got to the ground the terracing was packed and people were falling down the grass embankment behind it. Stewards were cramming people in from the aisles. We were packed so tightly my arms were trapped by my sides. In order to smoke I had to raise my hands above my head and place the fag packet and matches on the shoulders of the man in front of me to light up. People were fainting and being passed over the heads of the crowd by hand. We thought it was a bit of a laugh. When the Welsh ran out there seemed to be enormous numbers of their support but the arrival of the Scots exceeded that in noise and flags. Somehow we won 12-10.
In 1983 I saw Scotland draw with New Zealand 25-25. Peter Dodds missed a touchline conversion to win it. But the biggest thrill I had at Murrayfield was the Grand Slam game of 1984 when we beat France. My brother and I unexpectedly got tickets but it looked like I would have to do on call for acute psychiatry at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital where I was a first year trainee. Everyone else was busy but a trainee from Singapore had recently joined the scheme and was living on site. In desperation I asked if he was doing anything that weekend. He said no and that he would be happy to cover me. It’s the only match I’ve ever been to where people threw their hats in the air.
Six years later in 1990 my luck ran out. Scotland were playing England in a Grand Slam decider. Neither my brother David nor I could get tickets so we planned to watch the big match on TV together. At the very last moment a pal of David’s came up with debenture seats that his father wasn’t able to use. David went to the match, the biggest in Scottish rugby history, and I didn’t. After that I bought debentures so I would never miss out again but further successes for Scotland have been conspicuously absent ever since.
That summer Scotland toured New Zealand as northern hemisphere champions. I was a year or so into my consultant radiologist post by then and an enthusiastic colleague thought we should be offering Saturday morning barium lists as part of our service. Scotland had done well on the tour but had lost the first of the two tests. The second test was in Aukland on 23 June. It went out live in the early hours of Saturday morning our time – so I recorded it rather than stay up late on a work night.
The next morning I made a coffee and watched the first half as live without knowing the result. Scotland scored two tries and were deservedly ahead 18-12 at half time. I thought this was it; the first ever victory against the All Blacks. The second half started – and the weather changed. Scotland were playing into a sleet-filled gale that made kicking impossible – even for Gavin Hastings. I glanced at my watch; barium time was approaching. I had to fast-forward the VHS to reach the denouement and avoid being late for my list. The score ticked over, Grant Fox popped up with the wind behind him. I saw the score change to 18-15, then 18-18. Fox kicked six from six that day, the winning penalty coming with ten minutes to go.
The players in any All Blacks side facing Scotland don’t want to be the ones who finally lose to us. Their fans are particularly unforgiving in defeat. It must be odd to support New Zealand, a team that wins all the time. A mono diet of victory has to become a bit stale eventually and the rare defeats unusually bitter. Their fans are also denied the intense pleasure that comes with overcoming the odds once in a while.
The Bohemian Waxwing 