Bill Beaumont: The Autobiography

Interestingly, the head boy at the school was someone I would come to know very well through rugby in later life: former England centre John Spencer. He subsequently had no recollection of me because he was in his final year at Cressbrook before going on to Sedbergh, but those of us in the first year knew who he was because of the position he held in the school’s pecking order. Since then, of course, we have become good friends and have worked together for many years in rugby administration.

Arriving at Cressbrook was certainly traumatic. We slept in dormitories and it was lights out at 6.30 p.m., followed by the cruel wake-up exercise of a swim in the freezing pool at 7.15 the following morning. Little wonder, then, that I hated the countdown to returning there after our very occasional holidays. I was so determined not to go back one term that I hid in a tree!

Unlike the local schools my pals attended back in Adlington, we had few holidays and our parents were only allowed to make three visits each term, although they were permitted to turn up to watch us play for the school at soccer, rugby or cricket. Being a boarding school, the routine was very different from most schools. A typical day, for example, might comprise lessons in the morning, sport in the afternoon and then more lessons at four before supper and bed. The sporting routine in my first year was soccer in the winter and cricket during the summer months. Fortunately, I enjoyed both games.

Cricket was probably my greatest love and I still like nothing better than sitting down to watch a game, whether it is a Test Match at Old Trafford or just a knockabout on the village green. The game was in the blood; my maternal grandfather was such an enthusiast that he was one of the founders of the Northern League. My uncle, Joe Blackledge, was not just a good cricketer but also Lancashire’s last amateur captain, taking on that role for the last time in 1962, by which time he was probably past his prime and his timing was not as good as it had been. I remember Dad picking me up from school and taking me to watch him play at Old Trafford but Uncle Joe ducked into a ball from Butch White of Hampshire and was knocked out. To add insult to injury the ball fell on to his wicket, so he was out in more ways than one!

Uncle Joe played at our local club, Chorley, and that’s where you would find me during the school holidays. I was a wicketkeeper and opening batsman, and played quite a lot of my league cricket in the same team as both the father and the uncle of former England fly-half Paul Grayson, who also had a spell playing cricket at Chorley. Another cricketing pal was Paul Mariner, who went on to play soccer for the Chorley Town team before moving on to Plymouth Argyle, Ipswich Town, Arsenal and England. As the youngest players in the team, we tended to knock around together. Paul ended up coaching in America and we have rather lost contact, but I still bump into his parents when I am out and about in Chorley.

I have never tired of watching cricket and, fortunately, our boys developed the same avid interest in the game although Hilary thinks it is akin to watching paint dry. I had to explain that cricket is a wonderfully social game, just as rugby was when I was a young player. It is also a very unforgiving game, cruel almost. More than any other team game, the spotlight is on the individual, and luck can play an important part in success or failure. Some guy might be dropped five times and go on to score a century whereas the next guy could be out first ball to a brilliant catch.

When I first started playing rugby at Fylde I continued opening the batting at Chorley in the summer months, usually in the second team, but all that stopped when I got into the pattern of touring every year, either with England or the British Lions. I did make my ‘cricketing comeback’ a number of years ago, however, when we went to live in Wrea Green, a pretty village not far from Blackpool. It is the archetypal English village, complete with church, pub and houses surrounding the village green and duckpond. The captain of the village cricket team was my neighbour, Richard Wilson, and he persuaded me to turn out for them even though I protested that I hadn’t swung a bat in earnest for years. When I dug out my old bat it seemed about half the size of everyone else’s and the same could be said for the kit, which was so tight it almost gave me a squeaky voice, although I did just about manage to squeeze into the flannels! (There was, however, one memorable occasion when I split my trousers and had to nip home for running repairs, holding up play for about 15 minutes. Then it started to rain so the lads claimed they would have won the game if I hadn’t forced the fabric!) It may have been beginner’s luck but I took a catch in the gully off the third delivery of my ‘trial’ game and took another later when fielding at deep midwicket. We lost the game but I made 51 not out and they thought they had discovered another Ian Botham! The Grapes pub served as the clubhouse and, in the euphoria of getting a few runs – and a bravado fuelled by a few pints – I signed up to play for the team on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I never played quite so well again but at least I could walk to the ground from home … and the clubhouse was always a considerable attraction!

My playing days, apart from in the garden and on the beach, are definitely over now but I enjoy watching our youngest, Josh, playing for the Under-lls side. Golf is more my game these days although I don’t profess to be very good. I got into the game because that’s how rugby players traditionally pass the time when they’re away on tour and aren’t involved in training. Even now, it’s a good excuse to get away with my pals for a few days, although when it comes to competitions I leave Josh to represent the family. As I said earlier, he is something of a natural with a golf club in his hands and won the Royal Lytham Under-17s Championship when he was only ten.

Daniel and Sam are also good golfers, so I never have any shortage of partners, though that proved costly when I played in a competition with Daniel last year. He wanted a car and I had been planning to buy him a very basic model. Young men have their own ideas, however, and he was keen to have one of the new breed of Mini. As I was pretty confident that my pocket wouldn’t be at risk, I wagered him that he could have the Mini if he beat me in a club competition. My pre-round confidence evaporated on the sixth hole when it took me 12 shots to get out of a bunker. Unsurprisingly, Daniel ended up with the Mini. To my pals at the golf club that sand trap is now known as Mini Bunker!

My interest in soccer developed through being taken by a neighbour to watch Blackburn Rovers, and my first major sporting outing was to Wembley to watch England beat Scotland in the days when the two nations met on an annual basis. It is a pity that the old cross-border rivalry isn’t given an airing on the field of play these days, as it is in rugby union, but I suppose the opportunity for rival fans to cause mayhem is a good enough reason to have called a halt.

Even though my father had played for Fylde, my main interest in rugby as a boy, living in Lancashire, was limited to rugby league. Wigan was just a few minutes away so I was more interested in the feats of Billy Boston than in what was going on at Twickenham, although we did watch the internationals on television and I also have a vague recollection of being taken to watch Fylde. While in my final year at Cressbrook, in 1964 I was also taken to Edinburgh to watch England play Scotland at Murrayfield, though I little thought at the time that I would one day lead England to a Grand Slam at the same venue. For all of us it was just a great weekend away from the confines of the school. Sport provided me with many opportunities to escape the academic life. I was a typical lad in many respects, and lazy when it came to school-work. Deep down, I expected to end up working in the family business, so there was no academic incentive, despite the efforts of my grandparents when Alison and I went to stay in their bungalow in Blackpool for the summer holidays. They had turned the front room into a small classroom, complete with three desks, and they gave private lessons. I remember being there one summer when Sir Stanley Matthews’ son, who developed into a good tennis player, was having lessons.

For some reason the family also had the habit of staying at Blackpool’s Norbreck Hydro for three days every year; a massive treat, because it had an indoor swimming pool. My father would travel with his garden spade in the boot of the car and we would take it on to the beach and spend all day building dams. Those breaks were always over far too quickly, and then it would be back to Kirkby Lonsdale and the school routine.

Initially, soccer was the winter sport at Cressbrook, and I played in goal. I suppose it linked very well with my wicketkeeper role when playing cricket. I don’t think we won many matches but I was just happy to be involved, preferring the sports field to the classroom. We weren’t allowed to neglect our studies but I had little thought of cap and gown at that stage in my development. So it was perhaps a little ironic that I ended up, much later in life, with two honorary degrees – one from Manchester University and the other from the University of Central Lancashire. I couldn’t help wondering as I received those what my father would have thought could he have seen me standing, resplendent in gown and mortarboard, before 500 students and their parents, while someone delivered a eulogy outlining why Bill Beaumont was being honoured with a degree!

After initially concentrating on soccer we switched to rugby at Cressbrook and, although I started out at prop, I quickly made a dramatic move to fly-half. They didn’t have anyone else and I fancied my chances because I had quite a good boot on me. I wasn’t that big in those days, only starting to grow rapidly from my mid-teens, but I can’t claim to have been the quickest fly-half in the business. I did have my moment of glory, however, shortly before leaving Cressbrook, when I dropped a goal against a school side that hadn’t conceded a point for two years. I was quite proud of that!

Most of my contemporaries when they left Cressbrook went to Sedbergh, Will Carling’s old school, but my father had other ideas. The plan had been for me to go to Repton, but that was a soccer school so father opted instead for Ellesmere College in Shropshire, where the headmaster was Ian Beer, who had been at Cambridge University with him. Ian, of course, had a distinguished rugby career and represented Cambridge on the RFU committee for many years, being honoured with the Presidency in the 1993–94 season. From Ellesmere he went eventually to Harrow, where Roger Uttley was the rugby master. I spoke at a dinner in Ledbury for Ian many years later, and when he introduced me he dwelt more on my lack of academic achievement than on my sporting triumphs. In response, I observed that this didn’t say a lot for the teachers. Touché.

By the time I moved to Ellesmere College I was used to life as a boarder but it still came as something of a shock because I switched from being a big fish in a little pool of 90 pupils to a small fish in a sea of nearly 400 boys. Most of them were older and bigger than I was. Ian Beer’s later comments on the study front were fully justified because I found academic life a real drag and simply couldn’t be bothered with learning unless it was a subject in which I had a particular interest – which usually meant one involving a ball! I enjoyed my rugby at Ellesmere although I had no thought initially of pursuing it seriously. If I indulged in boyhood dreams, they involved opening the batting for Lancashire at Old Trafford. Indeed, I took so little interest in rugby that the only name that meant anything to me was Richard Sharp, the England fly-half. Yet I knew all I needed to know about our leading cricketers and also vividly remember watching England win the soccer World Cup in 1966. Apart from Fylde I wasn’t aware of other rugby union teams but was always keen to discover how Blackburn Rovers and Blackpool had fared in the Football League.

The sporting facilities at Ellesmere were excellent and that helped me through my school years. If you are into sport then, wherever you are – at school, college or just generally in the community – you will always have mates, and in my time at the college we were a pretty mixed bag. Because we were very close to the border there, quite a few of my rugby mates came from Wales and one of those was Mark Keyworth, who played his club rugby with Swansea and got into the same England team as I did in 1976. We suffered a whitewash in what was then the Five Nations Championship and that was the end of Mark, unfortunately. Those were the bad old days of English rugby when players came and went, often without trace, with frightening regularity. A lot of my fellow pupils also came from abroad – the sons of servicemen, diplomats and businessmen who were based overseas – and I recall one boy staying with my family in Adlington for a month in the school holidays because he wasn’t able to join up with his parents. I suppose I did a lot of growing up at Ellesmere as well as involving myself in the usual pranks that healthy, energetic teenage boys get up to. We used to sneak out of school, I remember, to visit the local pub. Fortunately, it had three entrances, so we had our lookout and our escape route all worked out in case a master walked in and caught us supping ale. There was also a girls school not far away, which now and again joined ours for the occasional concert, but we tended to regard girls as though they had arrived from another planet. The problem with boarding schools in my time was that they were almost monastic in some respects. The interaction of a mixed-sex school is, I think, far healthier.

I continued to concentrate rather more on my cricket than anything else but also played for the school team at rugby, usually at fly-half or full-back. There were no invitations to take part in county or international trials but I somehow don’t think I would have made the grade in the back division, so I’ve no grumbles on that score. But, since I have started to take note of what goes on, I can’t say that I have ever been greatly impressed by schoolboy selections. Some youngsters are pushed all the time by their masters, and if the latter also happen to be selectors you know who will get into the teams. I was interested to read in The Daily Telegraph how Ben Cohen, who has developed into a tremendous wing, played in England schoolboy trials but never got a look-in because he didn’t go to the right school.

Some schools, invariably those in the independent sector, have a tradition of producing rugby talent and, over the years, some senior schools have offered scholarships to promising youngsters based on their sporting, rather than academic, ability. With regional and national selectors being drawn from leading schools, there was always a feeling that their own pupils had an unfair advantage in the pecking order. Today, fortunately, boys from schools that are not as well established in a rugby sense can still progress through the club structure now that we also have regional and national age-group sides drawn from clubs as well as schools.

Selectors also seem to ignore the fact that some players are late developers, this being an aspect that worries me about the current academies, valuable though they are. Not everyone plays top-class schoolboy rugby and, despite what we achieved later, neither Fran Cotton nor I ever played for Lancashire Schools. Fran did make it to a trial in his final year at school but that’s as far as it went, although, knowing Fran as I do, I’m pretty sure this provided him with a goal to aim at. I have also found that some players peak early. They achieve a great deal at schoolboy level but can’t cope with not being top dog when they progress to the senior game, so they simply drift away. The door has always got to be open for players who don’t make it into the academies.

At club level things have changed. When I played the game the county side was the avenue in the North towards national recognition, whereas in the Midlands clubs like Coventry, Moseley, Leicester and Northampton provided the route to international status. Now, however, international players are likely to be drawn from any of the 12 professional clubs in the Zurich Premiership, and, whereas clubs like Bath and Leicester dominated almost unchallenged for long periods, enabling them to attract the best young talent, there is now a far better spread of talent throughout the entire Premiership. Any player performing well in that competition is going to attract the attention of the national coaches and, with England selection being down to head coach Clive Woodward, there is none of the horse-trading that I suspect went on between selectors from different parts of the country in the old days.

Since I was a youngster, much more has been done through the clubs in terms of developing players, largely through the introduction of mini- and junior rugby. That was essential because of the way team sport was discouraged at many schools simply because someone had the daft idea that life shouldn’t be about winners and losers. They didn’t want youngsters to feel either the elation of victory or the pain of defeat but, whatever they say, life is competitive and I feel sorry for those kids who will grow up with no real knowledge of the concept of team sports. I have a real passion for such sports because I believe they mould you for life generally. You learn how to work together, how to show humility in success and how to cope with setbacks. Regardless of what some of the politically correct brigade might desire, we are not all equal and never will be. And, wherever you go in life, there will always be someone in charge.

I left Ellesmere when I was 17, with no inkling of what the future held for me. At that time I assumed I would work in the family business, play cricket for Chorley and perhaps play rugby at my father’s old club, Fylde. Occasionally I have to pinch myself when I think back to how I was suddenly pitched on to a rollercoaster ride that brought its share of joy and heartache but one that, despite the dips and the empty feeling in the stomach these brought, I wouldn’t have changed anything.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_9f18eead-400c-5cad-8064-7d513dd54cac)

Remember you’re a donkey (#ulink_9f18eead-400c-5cad-8064-7d513dd54cac)

My rugby future was being mapped out for me while I was still at Ellesmere College. Father sent a letter to Arthur Bell, the long-serving Fylde secretary, offering my services and pointing out that, although I had been playing full-back towards the end of my school career, I was a bit on the slow side and would probably end up in the pack. So it was with a considerable degree of trepidation that I set off for my first training session at the ground in St Annes, making sure that I arrived in plenty of time. I needn’t have worried because I was to find that not everyone displayed my enthusiasm for training.

I quickly got used to the pattern of training twice a week and discovered that work and family commitments affected attendance levels. Only half of the team would bother to turn up on a Monday, when one of the lads would lead us in some fitness work and, when we reassembled on Thursday evenings, we would meet in the back bar at the club and mess about flinging a ball around until someone suggested that it might be a good idea if we actually went outside and got started; a decision that would be put off for as long as possible if it happened to be wet and cold, which it invariably was. Even then most of the discussion, if we were scheduled to play away from home, usually concerned whether or not we were staying at our host club and making a night of it. Coaches were unheard of in those days and it was invariably the captain who called the shots on the training pitch. Afterwards, the routine was to down a couple of pints, in some cases rather more than that, and then to eat as many portions of fish and chips as we could lay our hands on. Today’s coaches and nutritionists would have had a fit if they could have seen us but it was a very different game then. Had I played in the professional era, I somehow couldn’t see myself surviving on pasta and salad! When I was captain of England, my Friday-night routine would be to settle down at home with Hilary to a prawn cocktail followed by a steak and a bottle of wine, which I am sure would be frowned today.

Training might have been somewhat haphazard in those days but the one thing there was in abundance was club loyalty. Today, away from the professional end of the game where players are tied to contracts, loyalty doesn’t seem to last from one week to the next. Well down the league system there are players who will move clubs simply because they are offered a few quid for doing so. I’m glad that I stayed faithful to Fylde throughout my playing career. We may not have been one of the biggest clubs in the business but we had a decent fixture list and rugby clubs then tended to have a strong family atmosphere. Many of my best friends are lads I played with in my early days at Fylde.

Arriving for that first training session was rather like the first day at school. I was a new boy among men and the only player I knew was the captain, Mike Hindle, who also played at prop for Lancashire (I knew him because he was also in the textile trade). My father had introduced me to Mike and he had facilitated my club membership, but it was to be some time before we rubbed shoulders on the same pitch. I was picked to make my debut at full-back for Fylde’s sixth team against a Manchester junior side called Burnage and that was my one and only appearance in the club’s back division. The following week I was in the back row forwards and, never having had any rugby ambition other than to play the game, happily settled into the routine. I may well have stayed at that level for ever because there was a tendency for the lower sides to hang on to anybody who was as prepared as I was to run around like a mad young thing for 80 minutes. However, a selector called Roy Gartside turned up to watch the sixth team, and even though my team-mates somehow contrived not to give me the ball, Roy must have spotted some talent since I was eventually picked to play for the third team at Percy Park in the North East, probably because some of the regular team members didn’t fancy the trip. So off I went – having told my mother to expect me home about 10 p.m. – all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, clutching a one-pound note, which constituted one-third of the weekly allowance I received from my father.

It was the first time I had ever travelled any real distance with a senior side and I was an innocent abroad. The game went well and, although I found senior rugby harder physically, it was played at a pretty pedestrian pace after what I’d been used to at school. Only afterwards did I realise that I had a lot to learn about club rugby. We went into the clubhouse for a pint of beer and a bite to eat and I asked one of my new team-mates what time the coach would be leaving for home. It came as a surprise when he told me we were on a ‘stopper’ and wouldn’t be leaving until midnight. I was 17, wasn’t used to drinking – not more than a couple of pints anyway – and we ended up in a pub called The Jungle near the docks in North Shields, where I found myself surrounded by the local clientele, who all seemed to have had their faces stitched at some stage in their careers. A few years later I was battling it out with All Blacks, Wallabies and Springboks, but at that stage in my development I was a young lad straight out of public school and I was crapping myself. I was absolutely petrified and determined not to make eye contact with any of them in case they took exception to my scrutiny and decided to ‘fill me in’. My pound didn’t last very long either but I was subsidised by the older players and gradually started to get into the swing of things. I was even chirpy enough to ring home from a transport café at Scotch Corner to tell the folks that I would be home later than planned. It was after 2 a.m. when my mother answered the call, handed the telephone to my father and told him, in no uncertain terms, that I wouldn’t be playing rugby again. I stumbled into the family abode at about the same time as the milk arrived on the doorstep, having discovered the delights of rugby touring. The ‘choir’ sang most of the way home on the coach, and as the vehicle didn’t have an on-board toilet we had to hang out of the door to relieve ourselves until one bright spark decided it would be a good idea to lift the floorboards and pee down the hole. The only problem with that was that our offerings merely hit the drive shaft and sprayed all over the place.

At the same time that I joined Fylde, I started a textile technology and business studies course at Salford Technical College and, not surprisingly, gravitated towards the college rugby team. I played in the back row alongside a former England Schoolboy, Richard Jazwinski, who was playing club rugby at Broughton Park. He was a very good player and went on to represent Lancashire, and, during that time, I played against Nigel Yates, who was a centre at Sale and went on to become a senior referee.

I graduated to the second team at Fylde and also made the move into the second row, but at the start of the following season it was felt that I was too small for the position in which I was later to make my name, so I was demoted back to the third team to learn how to prop. It was in that position that I made my first-team debut against Waterloo in November 1970, when the team were short, but I afterwards returned to the position I was to occupy for the remainder of my career and, a year later, had established myself in the first team.

The only time I was ever dropped by my club was at Christmas during that season, when Roger Uttley, who was studying at university in Newcastle and playing for Gosforth (now the Falcons), returned home for the holidays and was picked ahead of me for the Boxing Day game against our oldest rivals, Preston Grasshoppers. I wasn’t very happy to see this total stranger, to me anyway, suddenly walk in and take my spot, and I had a quiet chuckle to myself when ‘Hoppers’ won.

Looking back it is quite incredible how my playing career has interwoven with Roger’s over the years, our rivalry extending over a considerable time. When I started playing in the second row for Lancashire he was playing for Northumberland and was already an established international. I owe my England debut to Roger because I was called into the side when he had to pull out through injury. He also captained England ahead of me – I then took over the captaincy from him, only to lose it back again later. We were intense rivals, and I think we both felt more comfortable when I was fully established as captain and he came back into the national side in 1980 as a flanker. I had made my mark and the selectors weren’t going to bring Roger back as captain again. I think we always respected each other and we have been good mates ever since. Hilary and I thoroughly enjoy his company – and that of his wife Christine.

My elevation to the second row at Fylde had again only come about because they happened to be short in that position one day, but once in the engine room of the pack I never looked back. Having worked my way through to the first team, I made my senior debut at second row against New Brighton; a side that, like Fylde, was more of a force in those days. Certainly, the side I played in would beat the current Fylde team without too much difficulty. Brian Ashton was at scrum-half and he was a class player with a good understanding of the game, as has been proved since with his coaching success at Bath and with England. He currently has the vital task of looking after the country’s Academy players who are being groomed for the national side. He toured Australia with me in 1975 when he was really on top of his game and he would surely have been capped had he been able to stay Down Under, but he had to return home to be with his wife after she had miscarried the baby they were expecting. It is a tragedy that he never won his cap because he then went to live and play for a time in Italy and so was largely lost to us. When he finally returned it was to move into coaching, where he has played a considerable role in helping to change the way English backs play. He was not just a top player but is a bloody good bloke too and he is ideally suited for the development role he has taken on.

Another Fylde player who came close to representing his country during my playing days was wing Tony Richards. He and Brian were my regular travelling companions and Tony was Lancashire’s wing for many years, playing in England trials but without getting the call he wanted. Despite the passing years, I still see quite a bit of Tony because he is an enthusiastic worker for The Wooden Spoon Society, the rugby charity.

By the time I had established myself in Fylde’s first team I was starting to take the game very seriously and I did find it frustrating that not everyone in the side had the same approach to training and preparation. The difference in attitude became more apparent when I started playing for Lancashire. Suddenly I was in the company of players of international calibre and it didn’t take long to work out why. They were a dedicated and very single-minded bunch. Coming second best was not on their agenda and you never had to worry that anyone might be slacking on the field.

Still, Fylde had a reasonable fixture list, which provided me with the opportunity to play against powerful clubs, none stronger than Coventry in those days. They could almost field a side of internationals and when I picked up a match programme and saw the quality of the opposition I started at last to acquire real ambition. I remember playing against Moseley at The Reddings one day and their side included England half-backs Jan Webster and John Finlan, John White and Nigel Horton. On that occasion I had an excellent game against Nigel and decided that I rather liked the game of rugby union. He clearly had a long memory because, a year later, he smacked me at the first line-out and gave me a hard time generally. I was suddenly made aware that this rugby business wasn’t as easy as I had been starting to think it was.

Lancashire would run a series of trial games, and I played in these in the hope of breaking up the experienced second row combination of Mike Leadbetter and Richard Trickey. Both played in the North West Counties team that became the first English provincial side to beat the All Blacks – at Workington in 1972, during which I stood on the terraces to cheer them on. Mike did win an England cap but only in a 35–13 defeat against France at Stade Colombes in Paris. Under the scoring system then, that was quite a hefty thumping but England were hardly front-runners in the Five Nations during that particular era. There was a lot of chopping and changing and Mike wasn’t the only one-cap wonder by any means.

Richard was travelling reserve that day in Paris – they didn’t have replacements at that time and you were only there in case someone was taken ill before the game – and that’s as close as he got to a cap. That was a pity because he certainly deserved one – the old Sale warhorse taught me a great deal. He was limited in ability and not the purest of line-out jumpers but you couldn’t fault him for commitment. He was the fittest bloke I had ever encountered and was a massive influence on my career. At that time he was working as a sales representative and he would get up at 5 a.m. every day in order to get all his calls done by 2 p.m. so that he could devote the rest of the day to his punishing training routine. He could literally run all day and was ultra-competitive. The lads at Sale tell how, after he had retired and taken up coaching, he would race against them, claiming he had beaten them all, despite his age. On investigation, you discovered that he only won the last of a series of 50 sprints, by which time the players were hardly capable of standing, let around galloping 100 metres!

In 1972, just three days after the aforementioned victory over the All Blacks by the North West, I made my county debut alongside Richard because Mike Leadbetter had taken a knock in that game. Richard made more than 100 appearances for Lancashire and he soon handed out advice that ensured I didn’t get ideas above my station. In his gruff, forthright way, he told me, ‘Don’t try anything fancy. No sidestepping or selling dummies or trying to drop a goal – just stick your head up the prop’s backside, shove like a lunatic and contest every blasted line-out no matter where the ball is meant to be thrown. We’ve plenty of prima donnas in the backs to provide the tricks as long as we provide the ball. Just remember you are a donkey, and behave like one.’ As a young man who was already awe-stricken at finding himself in company with players like Fran Cotton and Tony Neary, not to mention ‘Tricks’, I nodded my head vigorously in accord. I certainly wasn’t prepared to try debating my role with him. The game was against Cumberland and Westmorland, now rebranded Cumbria, and I soon realised just how fit Richard was when I saw the speed with which he arrived at the breakdown ahead of me. I fared all right at the line-out but the pace of the game was a new experience and one and that made me determined to put in even more work on my fitness. Fortunately, I enjoyed training and even turned a corner of the factory into a gymnasium so that I could work out during my lunch break.

I wasn’t picked again during that campaign but I was selected for the following season’s opener at Durham and found myself sharing a room with Richard. It seemed that I still had a lot to learn from this iron-willed man with an equally iron constitution. It was freezing cold but off went the central heating and the windows were flung wide open. Stuffy hotel rooms were not to his liking so I shivered and didn’t argue – I was still in awe of the man. Then there were the mealtimes. I enjoy a good trough as much as the next man, but I have never seen anyone eat quite like Richard. He gorged his way through a mammoth meal in the Royal County Hotel, dragged me off to a back-street pub for a few pints and then, while watching the midnight movie, demolished an enormous plate of sandwiches in the room while I tried to sleep. The following morning he was full of beans, metaphorically speaking, and dragged me, bleary-eyed, down to the restaurant for the sort of breakfast that would have rugby’s modern-day nutritionists slashing their wrists in anguish. He walked it off by frogmarching me up the hill to the cathedral, apparently some sort of ritual for him and one that I continued in the following years. The walk seemed to have the desired effect because not only did it help him to walk off breakfast, it also gave him an appetite for lunch!

In the Lancashire camp they tell the story of how Richard and Fran Cotton attempted a monster meal the evening before once again taking on Durham. As coach John Burgess wasn’t due to arrive until the day of the game because of business commitments in Russia, there wasn’t the same control over what the players ate. Normally it was a set meal but the players this time were allowed to tackle the à la carte menu instead and both Richard and Fran had ordered so much food that their meals could only be accommodated on two large platters – each – and the unbelieving waiters actually carried the platters around the room so that other diners could see what was about to be attempted. I wasn’t there but I’m told Fran retired hurt while Richard sent clean platters back to the kitchen. If Burgess had known about it then their overworked guts would have been had for garters.

John Burgess was not a man to fool with. When I first made the Lancashire squad I was petrified of him. He was a bit of a control freak but I had the greatest admiration and respect for him. In many ways he was ahead of his time because his organisational skills were second to none and he really thought about his rugby at a time when sides tended to go through well-tried motions. Before every Lancashire game he would provide each player with a dossier on the opposition and he had newspaper cuttings of all their previous matches. Goodness knows how he found the time to do it all and run a major engineering company at the same time.

He knew exactly what everyone had to do in every corner of the field and nobody in the Lancashire camp argued with him, not even the top players. A great motivator, he also had tremendous pride in his county and country, although his experience of coaching England wasn’t a happy one. I suppose that when he reached that level he probably needed more than motivation, organisation and set-piece plays. Sadly, there were those in the England camp who regarded him as someone from a different planet.

I’m certain that he was far more comfortable with players such as Cotton and Neary, who thought the world of him, as indeed I did. He more or less transformed northern rugby after it had slipped into something of a backwater. We weren’t a force in the land by any means but Burgess changed that, in no small part due to his honesty, which invariably shone through. As a player the last thing you want to hear is that you haven’t played well but he would certainly let you know if he thought you had had a bad game, and it didn’t matter if you were a many-times-capped international either. He was a massive influence on all our playing careers and I don’t think many of us would have achieved what we did without him. I for one owe him a great debt of gratitude.

I played for the county throughout the 1973–74 championship campaign but injured my Achilles’ tendon and had to withdraw for the final against Gloucestershire – a game we lost and that sparked a sequence of three successive title wins for the West Country side. Battles with Gloucestershire were always pretty memorable because both counties took the championship very seriously and, in some respects, it is sad that this particular element has gone out of rugby. When I played it was imperative that you figured in a successful county side because that was the best route to an international cap, considering the strength, or rather weakness, of club rugby in the north.

Injury kept me sidelined for three months but there was something to look forward to. Lancashire were due to tour Zimbabwe (Rhodesia as it was then) and South Africa in the summer and I was fairly confident of being included in the squad. I had succeeded in forcing out Mike Leadbetter and there was no serious challenger so far as I could see, so I assumed that I would be renewing my second row partnership with Richard Trickey. I had yet to meet a player who later proved capable of challenging the very best – Maurice Colclough. He was a complete stranger then but was destined to become my partner in an England Grand-Slam-winning team and on a British Lions tour. Maurice, a big, redheaded student from Liverpool University, was poised to have a memorable tour but for all the wrong reasons. That he enjoyed a drink was never in dispute and he would have made his Lancashire debut earlier but for the fact that he had to withdraw because of a judicial appearance he had to make in Dublin. In his youthful exuberance he had apparently stripped off in order to swim across the River Liffey and I can only assume that this didn’t go down too well with the local gardaí. Maurice was picked to play in Lancashire’s second tour game in Bulawayo but after a heavy night of carousing he was not really in the best state to sally forth into battle. He tried to fortify himself with a glucose drink, but whilst that provided the propulsion for a wonderful break out of defence it obviously wasn’t too easy to digest because he threw up spectacularly the minute he hit the deck after being tackled. That didn’t endear him to a management that took its rugby very seriously. He had a lot to learn about our Lancashire rugby culture.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_f017dd05-7913-5992-b2ef-67335176ae82)

Your country needs you (#ulink_f017dd05-7913-5992-b2ef-67335176ae82)