Bill Beaumont: The Autobiography

Our engagement coincided with England having an even more disastrous time in the Five Nations Championship and I’m just grateful that Hilary and I were better at selecting our partners than the England selectors were at picking a side that might actually win something. With John Burgess gone from the scene, England elevated their Under-23 coach Peter Colston into the hot seat and it really was a baptism of fire. Peter’s one saving grace was that we did manage to beat Australia, even if we lost everything else.

At least I was picked to play for England in what was effectively a trial game against the North and Midlands at Leicester. (It would be interesting to discover just how many different permutations of trials the selectors devised during what you might regard as some of the bleakest seasons in England’s history.) The game at Leicester was hardly a confidence-booster because we were beaten by a combined divisional side led by Peter Wheeler. The selectors’ axes were not merely sharpened after that but used with bloody effect, and seven members of that side were dispatched. Thankfully, I wasn’t one of those beheaded, and I also survived a narrow victory over the South at Gloucester when three more changes were made for the final trial at Twickenham just before Christmas.

I held my place as we won 39–21 and the selectors picked us en bloc to take on Australia. Sadly for Roger Uttley he had been forced to pull out of the trial through injury, his place taken by Andy Ripley. The team included three new caps: Barrie Corless, the Coventry centre; Mark Keyworth, my old team-mate at Ellesmere College who was playing for Swansea; and a scrum-half who appeared to come from nowhere and who almost as quickly went back there. Mike Lampkowski, who was of Polish extraction, played for Headingley and had been a member of the North and Midlands side that beat England in the trial game. He was a very powerful player and extremely committed. He could batter his way through all but the best defences but he lacked that one ingredient that is so necessary to a scrum-half: he couldn’t pass a ball quickly and accurately and, at international level, you aren’t afforded the luxury of time.

As debut games go, Lampkowski’s wasn’t too bad. It can sometimes happen that a new boy gets an adrenalin rush and plays better than he will ever play again. Certainly, the lad played out of his skin, despite his limited repertoire, scoring a try, and many were left thinking we had unearthed a real find. For obvious reasons, we were very keen to beat Australia but it turned out to be a very different Aussie side, especially in terms of attitude. The only Test they in fact managed to win was against Ireland in Dublin. We recorded what, at the time, was the biggest ever victory over our Commonwealth cousins from Down Under. Even with Steve Finnane, Peter Horton and Stuart MacDougall in their front row the game passed without incident, although the 23–6 scoreline may have given us a false impression of just where we stood in the pecking order. In those days the Aussies were nowhere near the force they have been in the last decade.

Having earned the first three of my four caps against Australia, it was great, from a personal point of view, to be given the chance to play against the other countries in the Five Nations Championship. Yet it was a campaign to forget as we suffered a whitewash that had more to do with the selectors than the guys out on the park. We were well beaten by Wales, but then Lampkowski and Martin Cooper were up against Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett so the first chinks were seen in the scrum-half’s armour. The difference in class was patently obvious and Lampowski’s form had reached crisis level by the time we had succumbed to Scotland 22–12 at Murrayfield. Alan Old had been drafted in to partner him but passes were flying all over the place and he made a number of suicidal breaks, which resulted in him spending much of the game under a pile of Scottish bodies. Panic set in but the selectors kept faith with Mike and, instead, dropped our key line-out jumper at the back of the line, Andy Ripley, and replaced him with Leicester’s Garry Adey, who was much smaller and never reappeared in England colours once the campaign finished. Dave Duckham was injured so my Lancashire colleague Mike Slemen won his first cap in the 13–12 defeat by Ireland at Twickenham and, that time, Lampkowski paid the ultimate price after another poor game in which his inadequacies were once again exposed. I must confess to feeling sorry for him. It wasn’t his fault and he was being asked to do a job that, quite clearly, he was incapable of doing. Nobody helped him to either improve his service or iron out some of the wrinkles in his game.

While Mike stayed in the side we simply couldn’t set up our backs, and I couldn’t believe that the selectors could ignore the claims of Steve Smith. I know he was a mate but when you play alongside a player you discover what sort of contribution he is capable of making and there was no doubt in my mind at that time that Smithy and Alan Old made up the best half-back pairing in the country. They were ignored for too long and it is interesting that both played key roles in the tremendous success of the North side that so comprehensively beat the All Blacks at Otley in 1979. There is an irony about Smithy being forced out by Lampkowski. He had been told by the selectors at the trial stage to concentrate his efforts on getting the ball out to the backs quickly, which is exactly what he did. Then, when he was left out of the side, he was told that he hadn’t been taking defences on in quite the manner that Lampkowski had. If that wasn’t double-Dutch then I don’t know what is. Smithy was penalised for obeying instructions and not playing his natural game. In any case, he had the ability to play it whichever way they wanted and was experienced enough, once on the field, to determine the tactics rather than adhere slavishly to whatever battle plan had been concocted in the dressing room.

Even when the selectors finally turned to Smithy that season, having dropped Lampkowski, they still contrived to get it horribly wrong. Initially they paired Steve with Moseley’s Martin Cooper for the game against France in Paris but Martin was getting over an injury and, before we flew out on the Thursday, he was subjected to the most rigorous fitness test I have ever seen. If he had started out fit there is no way he would have been at the end, and, surprise, surprise, he was ruled out of the game.

At that stage it was patently obvious to everyone involved that Alan Old, who had already been named on the replacements’ bench, was the player who should be called in at the eleventh hour. All except for the selectors who plucked another name out of the hat and Chris Williams, the Gloucester fly-half, was rushed out to the French capital to earn his one and only cap, while poor Alan sat and watched us go from bad to worse.

When I think of how organised things are today in the England camp it is difficult even trying to comprehend just how chaotic it used to be. You really did have to be involved to understand how bad it was and I had sympathy for Chris because an international debut is tough enough anyway without it being made even more difficult by going in unprepared, and having to join a losing side that was very low on morale.

France hammered us 30–9 and seven members of that side – Garry Adey, Bob Wilkinson, John Pullin, Peter Butler, Ken Plummer, David Cooke and Chris Williams – were never seen again. I had only been on one winning side in eight international starts but survived to fight again. It was little wonder we were so poor because the standard of selection was awful and too many of the players, myself included, simply weren’t playing at a competitive enough level on a regular basis. By that stage I had found club rugby pretty well pressure-free and it was only in the county season that the standard was high enough to be meaningful. Even then there was a big disparity in terms of the ability of the county sides and, with a side as strong as Lancashire had become, there were a limited number capable of asking serious questions of us. Gloucestershire would always do that and, in the northern region, Northumberland enjoyed a dominant spell with a side based largely on the successful Gosforth club. It has been very different since the game went professional and the best players have been confined to a smaller club elite, much though some in the game hate the thought of any form of elitism at club level. With top players scattered around a great many clubs, it was a mammoth, costly and time-consuming task for selectors to traverse the length and breadth of the country checking on form.

The present England management not only has its senior squad available for training on a regular basis but is also able to monitor progress by taking in just six games every weekend. Very often those games are spread over three days and, even if Clive Woodward and his coaches can’t always get to games they have the facility of watching match videos. Nothing is left to chance and most countries now envy our domestic competition.

The 1976–7 season dawned with me in good condition and spirits. I was due to get married, Lancashire were sweeping all before them, Fylde even had a good run in the John Player Cup, rugby’s equivalent to the FA Cup, and the British Lions were due to go on tour to New Zealand the following summer. My hope was that I might possibly be in with a chance of a Lions tour providing that I stayed in the England side and performed well. I thought my chances had been enhanced when a combined North and Midlands side crushed Argentina 24–9 at Leicester, just seven days before the Argies lost by a mere point to Wales in Cardiff. A lot of good it did me. England had a new selection committee, headed by the genial Sandy Sanders and including Mike Weston, Derek Morgan and Budge Rogers, and I was dropped down to the Rest side for the final trial. Not only was I fed up over my demotion, I also had to abstain from seeing in the New Year in traditional liquid fashion because the administrators, in their infinite wisdom, decided to play the trial game on New Year’s Day. The only saving grace was that I was in some fairly good company, with Steve Smith and John Horton at half-back and Dusty Hare at full-back. All three were with me when we performed the Grand Slam three years later. We dominated the line-out, largely through the efforts of Andy Ripley who had been given a roving commission at the line-out with me and the other second row, Barry Ayres, acting as decoys. At the interval the sides were level so Barry and I were promoted to the England team in place of Bob Wilkinson and Roger Powell and the seniors ran out comfortable 20–3 victors. That ensured that I was in the starting line-up when the Five Nations began but, even though selection improved that season, there was still a glaring omission – Tony Neary.

I had played alongside Tony for Lancashire, the North and England ever since I had broken through into the senior ranks and knew he was an enormously talented player. Peter Dixon was another badly treated by a succession of English selection panels although, under Sandy, they got it right that season by including him. As they also picked Roger Uttley as captain, England could have had a back row of Uttley, Dixon and Neary. They had to wait until Otley two years later to discover just what they had been missing: three great-thinking footballers and first-rate ball-handlers, who played Graham Mourie’s All Blacks off the park to record a memorable victory that, I suspect, still rankles with the New Zealanders.

We beat the Scots 26–6 at Twickenham and were almost getting giddy with excitement when we beat Ireland at a muddy Lansdowne Road. For the second successive game the English pack took control, although it was fly-half Martin Cooper who got over for the only score of the game following a good break by current broadcaster Alistair Hignell – another talented footballer whose fearless tackling provided much-needed solidity in defence. As a cricketer of county standard he also had good hands.

Nobody needed reminding that we were just two games away from a Grand Slam but our next outing was to be against the same French side that had demolished us twelve months earlier. We faced the same fearsome pack but, in 1977, we gave as good as we got and should have won the game, which ended 4–3 in favour of the French. Even then they were assisted by Alistair missing five out of six kicks at goal and further helped by a very dubious try scored by their centre François Sangalli after everyone other than the referee had been convinced that full-back Jean-Michel Aguirre had knocked on. The French boys admitted afterwards that they felt we had deserved to win.

Michel Palmie played in the French second row that day, as he had a year earlier, and we got to know each other quite well. At one stage we served on the European Cup committee together, and I soon learned that when he was present at the meetings held in Dublin it was not a good idea to stay overnight unless, of course, I wanted to get completely wrecked. He played for Béziers, and when Hilary and I went on a camping holiday in that region in the summer of 1978, I decided to give him a call. He came round to the site to take us back to his place and caught me doing the washing-up. I never lived that down and he demanded to know, ‘Why is a man doing the washing-up. What is a wife for!’ I won’t relate Hilary’s comments here, but he became a good friend and we rarely pass through that part of the world without popping in to share a glass or two – or maybe a few more – with Michel.

That defeat ended our Grand Slam hopes but I had other things on my mind because Hilary and I were married three days later, four days before I turned out to help Lancashire beat Middlesex in the county final. To say that Hilary was a very understanding young woman would be to understate the case but, by then, she had grown accustomed to the inconveniences of having an international rugby player as a partner. Fortunately, she had grown to enjoy both the game and the company, and had become part of the social scene at Fylde, doing her stint on the ladies committee and helping with some of the unglamorous work behind the scenes such as ensuring that numerous starving players didn’t go hungry after games.

Our honeymoon had to be put on ice until the end of the season. Or at least that was the plan. In the meantime we travelled to Cardiff to take on Wales for the Triple Crown and my one great regret is that I never played in a winning England side at the National Stadium. Even before the new Millennium Stadium replaced it, the old stadium had lost some of its aura, but when I was playing it was an intimidating venue. As you waited like Gladiators in the dressing room you would hear the biggest choir in the world giving full voice, and that was worth a few points start to the Welsh. The current England side isn’t at all intimidated by travelling to Cardiff, but Wales have been a very pale shadow of what they once were.

Wales won the game 14–9. We played badly and I didn’t perform well against Geoff Wheel, which annoyed me because I knew the British Lions party to tour New Zealand was due to be announced a couple of weeks later. Knowing that they would take four second rows, I had held on to the hope all season that I might just scrape in but Geoff Wheel got the call rather than me and was due to have Gordon Brown, Nigel Horton and Allan Martin as his travelling companions. Geoff withdrew from the party later. I heard the news on the car radio, and my heart almost missed a beat as I waited for the name of his replacement to be announced. When it turned out to be Moss Keane I couldn’t believe it. I had played against Moss on a couple of occasions and thought myself to be the better player.

The Lions were travelling without a specialist front-of-line jumper but that wasn’t the only piece of poor planning; I also felt the management team was wrong. The late George Burrell went as manager and though he was a nice bloke he was rather dominated by coach John Dawes, who virtually ran the whole show through Phil Bennett. John had captained the successful Lions in New Zealand in 1971 but he wasn’t the world’s best coach and I suspect he had pushed for Phil, who had captained Wales, to be given the job in New Zealand. Phil is a nice guy but rather shy and he lacked the personality of Willie-John McBride who had led the all-conquering Lions in South Africa three years earlier. Indeed, Phil was the first to admit that he shouldn’t have taken the job and, by the end of the tour, he had lost form and was homesick, something that seemed to afflict the Welsh lads more than the other nationalities.

Once I had heard about the inclusion of Moss Keane I was so brassed off that I booked a honeymoon in Majorca during the time when the Lions were away, and when the factory closed down for the annual Whitsun holiday, Hilary and I took ourselves off on a camping holiday to the Lake District with our long-standing friends Steve and Sue Braithwaite. In fairly typical Lake District fashion the weather was terrible. It poured down so, in the end, we packed up and returned home. We arrived back on a Monday evening and I suggested to Steve that we take the wet tents to the factory where they could dry out while the workforce were away on holiday. When I went into the office I took a telephone call from Malcolm Phillips, a Fylde member and Lions selector, telling me that Nigel Horton had broken his thumb playing against Otago and would be in plaster for six weeks. I was about to become a Lion.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_2f1355f2-2269-5402-9594-f44edb29806d)

Lion cub (#ulink_2f1355f2-2269-5402-9594-f44edb29806d)

Although I realised I was the Lions sixth-choice second row I wasn’t going to quibble, and I started hastily clearing the decks at work. The adrenalin at that stage was flowing and my first task was to ring Fylde secretary Peter Makin. I had been appointed captain for the following season but told Peter that, as I wouldn’t be starting the new season because of the tour, I wanted scrum-half Micky Weir to take on the role. Micky took on the responsibility and did a fantastic job – such a good job, in fact, that I never achieved my ambition of becoming club skipper. As I became even more heavily involved with England I decided to put the club job on the back burner until I stepped down from the international arena, but injury put paid to any such plan.

Micky and Peter came round to wish me all the best and speed me on my way, and Hilary travelled down with me, but it was a somewhat pensive William Beaumont who arrived in London to collect his gear and jet off to the other side of the world. Instead of feeling over the moon, I felt heartbroken. I remember wondering why on earth I had agreed to travel. I had just got married, my honeymoon had been postponed yet again and I experienced the same empty feeling that had marked my return to boarding school as a youngster.

I had to meet John Lawrence, secretary of the Four Home Unions Committee, at a Club in London in order to be measured up for my Lions blazer and flannels, so we set off a little late to drive to Heathrow to catch the flight to Auckland which, just to stop me getting bored, was dropping in at Los Angeles, Hawaii and Fiji en route. If I had mixed feelings about having to leave Hilary to join the Lions, I felt all the more like turning around and going back home when a crash in the underpass on the approach to Heathrow effectively brought traffic to a standstill. There was nothing else for it. I had to grab my kit-bag and my new Lions outfit and leg it through the tunnel to the check-in desk at the terminal, arriving only just in time for the flight. It was a very hot day and I was saturated in perspiration, so I felt sorry for the poor devil who had to spend all those hours sitting next to me on the aircraft.

It seemed like forever before the plane touched down in Auckland. I had been told to wait in the arrivals hall where I would be met by a New Zealand rugby official who would ensure I was placed on the correct onward flight to Christchurch on the south island, the Lions’ next port of call after travelling from Invercargill, where they had beaten Southland. By that stage, with the first Test approaching, they had chalked up eight straight victories. I was handed a bundle of Auckland newspapers to hand over to a guy called ‘Doc’ Murdoch. He was a great guy: a Kiwi who was travelling with the Lions as a sort of physiotherapist-cum-baggage man. Quite apart from working on our bodies he also had responsibility for moving mountains of kit around the country. He had worked with the Lions in 1971 and was chuffed that they asked especially for his services again. As a mark of respect for someone who was popular with the entire party, we ended up paying for him to travel to Fiji with us at the end of the tour.

When I arrived in Christchurch, feeling shattered from having spent more than 30 hours squashed into an aircraft seat in the economy section, I was met by crisp, frosty weather and Russ Thomas, the New Zealand official who later managed the All Blacks side that the North beat so memorably at Otley two years later. Russ took me to meet my fellow Lions, and I remember Willie Duggan, the Irishman, saying to me, ‘If you have any bloody sense you will get on the next plane back home.’

As I was to discover, that particular tour was marred by atrocious weather and it was usually a case of mud, glorious mud. The photograph of a bedraggled Fran Cotton became the company logo when he set up Cotton Traders with Steve Smith and people still walk around with the picture on the front of their tee-shirts. It didn’t take me too long to work out that it was a far from happy tour. Some Lions tours have been noticeable for a wonderful spirit, whereas others have all but fallen apart; this one definitely fell into the latter category (to some extent, the 2001 trip to Australia wasn’t exactly a bundle of laughs either). In the end it all comes down to good, firm management, and that’s something they had in abundance in South Africa in 1997 when Fran went as manager and had Ian McGeechan and Jim Telfer as a well-balanced coaching team right out of the ‘good-cop, bad-cop’ mould.