Once Were Lions: The Players’ Stories: Inside the World’s Most Famous Rugby Team

The results from that period in New Zealand show that when the Lions backs got plenty of possession against the lesser provincial sides, such as Wanganui and Taranaki, they scored a barrowload of points, winning 31–3 and 25–3 respectively against these two sides. Indeed, the Lions won every non-Test Match after their defeat by Southland. Against the mighty rucking pack of the All Blacks, however, they were forced into defensive duties in the main, and though they usually coped admirably, no side on the back foot can hope to keep out New Zealand permanently.

‘We did play good rugby,’ recalled Matthews. ‘I was lucky enough and fit enough to play in all six Tests, and there were all these good players around me. We only just lost the series against the All Blacks by a few points over the course of the four games, and I’ve had many letters from New Zealand saying that our 1950 Lions were the best rugby-playing side that ever went there.’

Waving a fond farewell to their conquerors, the Lions moved on to Australia where again the hosts were magnificently hospitable and the rugby was rather less difficult. The backs feasted on much greater possession and ran in a total of 150 points in 6 matches.

The first Test in Brisbane was comfortably won by 19–6, with Lewis Jones scoring 16 points with a personal ‘grand slam’—all the possible scores of a try, conversion, drop goal and penalty featured in his haul. The second Test in Sydney was even easier, with a scoreline of 24–3 in favour of the Lions.

Their Australian copybook was blotted, however, with a lacklustre performance in the final match against a New South Wales XV who surprisingly won 17–12. Perhaps all those long days of travelling, not to mention the hospitality Down Under, had taken its toll.

Despite the final setback and the losses in New Zealand, the tour was judged a massive success, not least because the Lions had boosted the public image of the sport.

Karl Mullen’s words at the start of the tour summed up his squad’s approach and resonate down to us today as embodying the proper creed of the Lions: ‘We are not after records of matches played and won. We want to see the game played for the game’s sake and to give you good football. We will be only too happy if you beat us in a good football match.’ Sadly, not too many coaches and captains would dare to utter such sentiments in our winner-takes-all society of today.

Bleddyn Williams and many of his band of Welsh colleagues from that 1950 tour eventually did gain a measure of revenge over New Zealand, Wales beating the All Blacks during their tour of the northern hemisphere in 1953. Some 54 years later, he remains the last Welsh captain to have led his men to victory over the All Blacks. Williams would later become a company director and wrote on rugby for The People newspaper for 32 years as well as making countless broadcasts.

To their credit, both Williams and Matthews and their fellow Lions never turned their back on the Welsh Golden Boy, Lewis Jones, who committed the Great Sin of signing up as a professional less than two years after the Lions tour, joining Leeds for a then record fee of £6,000. Immediately ostracized by rugby union, Jones was was banned from having any contact with all clubs worldwide—he could not even buy a drink in a clubhouse for fear of ‘tainting’ a club. Many Welsh players and officials refused to speak to him, due more to fear of being expelled themselves rather than any personal animus against Jones.

His defection to rugby league at the age of 20 caused great controversy in Wales, particularly as he had been the Golden Boy of the sport. The headlines were blaring and most indicated that Jones’s decision had been a betrayal, though many pundits pointed out that his move had been inevitable given the fantastic money on offer.

The hypocrisy of the rugby authorities concerning professionalism was exposed as well. In those days, the very mention of being involved with rugby league scouts could see you declared persona non grata in Union circles, as Bleddyn Williams recounts: ‘It happened to George Parsons before the Victory International against France in 1947. He was kicked off the train while travelling to play for Wales because he was alleged to have been seen speaking to a rugby league scout. He eventually had to turn professional, and played almost 300 games for St Helen’s.’

The charge of hypocrisy arose from the fact that everybody in rugby union knew that it happened. Two of the 1950 tourists—Bleddyn Williams and Jack Matthews—are happy to admit that they discussed terms with rugby league clubs, though they eventually rejected offers. Williams said:

It happened during the war when I was about to go to America for pilot training, and in wartime there were fewer restrictions on mixing with league so I ended up at Salford and Wigan just trying to keep fit. My brother had played for Wigan before the war and the club manager obviously knew who I was. They offered me £3,000 on the spot to sign for them and I had to point out that I couldn’t serve two bosses and was off to America in any case.

When I came back they offered me £5,000 and then £6,000, and I gave them first refusal if I changed my mind, but in the end I just didn’t want to do it.

Matthews was also ‘tapped’ by rugby league clubs: ‘I had offers galore, but my parents wouldn’t look at it. It wasn’t for me but I didn’t blame anyone who went “up north” to join rugby league as they didn’t have any jobs, then. I wasn’t against that at all, but league wasn’t for me because they were two different games.’

Williams concurred: ‘I am glad I didn’t take the money and thus miss the 1950 tour, because I am very, very proud of being a Lion.’

As for the ostracization of Jones, both Williams and Matthews consider that it was shameful.

‘It was ridiculous that he couldn’t even go back and visit his old friends,’ said Williams. ‘Just ridiculous, but that was the way it was.’

Matthews agreed: ‘We looked after any Cardiff player who went north and came back, even though they tried to bar them from the clubhouse. It was all a lot of rubbish.’

Lewis Jones lives in Leeds and has kept his ties to that city’s club for which he starred for many years. The members of Gorseinon rugby club in his home village paid him the tribute of naming their new clubhouse after their local hero, and Jones himself came to open it in early 2008, making a welcome public appearance in Wales. More than 50 years on, all has long been forgiven and forgotten, but as we shall see in subsequent chapters, joining rugby league was still seen as treason for many years after the Golden Boy made his move north.

The Lions’ attitude to those who left the union fold is proof that the companionship forged on those tours with their long sea voyages was unbreakable. Williams and Matthews, for example, have remained lifelong friends and both have been honoured by the Queen.

Jack Kyle has always been grateful for being a Lion, but points out the main difference between then and now was not just money but the players’ attitude to the sport:

The fact that we had a career was more important than rugby. If you had a bad game and had an exam coming up afterwards, it soon got your mind off your game and onto the important stuff. In today’s professional world there would be a video analyst and a coach discussing your game and where you went wrong. The most we ever got if we lost was ‘Hard luck, chaps, you did your best.’

I have made and kept many friends through rugby and there’s no doubt being a Lion enriched my life tremendously and opened doors for me. To give you an example—I worked in Indonesia as a surgeon from 1962 to 1964 and my wife and I went up to Hong Kong for a holiday and were staying at the Repulse Bay Hotel. We had just got in and were unpacking and the phone rang. It was a guy from the local rugby club inviting me along to their meeting that night.

I said ‘How did anyone know I was in Hong Kong?’ as I was pretty sure no one knew we were going there. He said ‘The customs officer at the airport is a rugby man and spotted your name on your passport.’ Those chaps were wonderful to us for the whole holiday, taking us for meals and arranging cars for us. That’s the kind of thing that has happened to Lions over the years.

That 1950 band of happy Lions seems largely to have been blessed with success in later life. Ivor Preece enjoyed a long career with Coventry RFC, where he was both captain and president. He died in 1987.

Billy Cleaver rose through the mining industry to become deputy director of the National Coal Board in South Wales. Defying stereotypes about rugger lads, Cleaver had a lifelong interest in the arts and became vice-chairman of the Welsh Arts Council. He died in 2003.

Ken Jones lived until he was 84, having retired from rugby in 1957 when he was the record Welsh cap holder. The following year he had the honour of carrying the baton containing the Queen’s Speech at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff. ‘What kept you?’ said Prince Philip, after Jones took a wrong turning.

Peter Kininmonth returned from the Lions tour with a most spectacular find: his wife Priscilla, who was on board the ship which took them home. Kininmonth had a distinguished career in financial services before turning to a second career on his wife’s farm where he became an award-winning master cheesemaker. He died aged 83 in 2007. Several of the 1950 Lions attended his funeral.

John Robins became a leading figure in physical education, and went on to coach the Lions in 1966—more about that later. He ended his professional career as director of PE at the University of Wales in Cardiff. He died in 2007. Fellow Welsh cap Bob Evans achieved high rank in the police and was a stalwart for Newport all his life until his death in 2003.

Doug Smith would become one of the most successful managers in Lions history—again more about him later. Grahame Budge, who died in 1979, left a rugby legacy to his family which endures—his granddaughter Alison Christie has been capped 61 times for Scotland.

The most extraordinary story of the 1950 Lions, one which they have kept to themselves assuming they know all about it, did not emerge until after the death of Don Hayward in 1999. No one should pretend that the Lions have been innocents on their tours, and there are countless tales of liaisons between tourists and women—some of them even of ‘a certain age’—over the decades, though most are treated under the unbreakable code of rugby omerta, which states roughly that ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’. Not all such dalliances involved sweetness and romance, it must be said, but none had a happier ending than Hayward’s tale.

The Welsh forward had loved his time Down Under in 1950 so much that he emigrated there, after meeting and marrying his wife Linda in 1952. He returned briefly to play rugby league for Wigan in the mid-1950s when his wife became ill. On returning to New Zealand, Hayward opened a butcher’s shop in Wainuiomata, a suburb of Lower Hutt, though he later moved to Otaki. Linda sadly died, but Hayward remained in Otaki with his son Gareth.

One evening in October 1993 a knock came at the door of their house. On the doorstep stood 42-year-old Suzy Davis and her partner Tony Sims. They asked if he was Don Hayward, a member of the Lions tour party, and after being invited in, Sims blurted out: ‘Suzy thinks you are her father.’

Indeed he was. Hayward had met Suzy’s birth mother, Iona Potter, for just one night in Dunedin during the tour in 1950. He never knew that the then 29-year-old Potter had become pregnant and given birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Victoria before being put up for adoption and acquiring the name Suzy Davis.

It wasn’t until the age of 35 that Davis began the search for her real parents. Showing all the determination her father had displayed on the field, she spent years patiently combing through records until she found her mother, who had two other children from a subsequent marriage and who confirmed that her father had been a rugby player from Wales, though she could not remember his name.

Davis combed through rugby books and found pictures of the Welsh contingent in the 1950 Lions. Revealing her story in 1999, she told the Evening Post in Wellington: ‘I remember looking and looking at the photo to work out which one it might be.’

Her birth mother was reluctant to say more about her illicit liaison in 1950, but after she contracted terminal cancer, Iona told Suzy that her only memory of the tall Welshman she had met in Dunedin was that he was a train driver from Pontypool. Armed with this information, Davis tracked down Hayward with the help of sportswriters.

His first reaction was: ‘My God, I have always wanted a daughter.’ A paternity test proved conclusively that he was indeed the father.

For the remaining five-and-a-quarter years of his life, Don Hayward cherished Suzy, and she grew close to the father she had never known. Ironically, for years she had passed his butcher’s shop daily on her way to and from work as a teacher, and had never known that the man behind the counter was her dad. But then, they did things differently in the 1950s.

That tour to New Zealand and Australia would be the last time that the British and Irish Lions would be forced to spend many weeks on a ship travelling back and forth to the southern hemisphere. By the time of the next tour, the age of the passenger aircraft had been well and truly established.

The world was changing and modernizing, and so was the sport of rugby, albeit under much protest and at a snail’s pace.

CHAPTER FOUR ROBIN THOMPSON’S QUALITY STREET GANG South Africa 1955 (#ulink_23a4a179-5f8c-5969-b4c8-afd962178d37)

The 1955 tour to South Africa was the first to see the initial journey south undertaken by air, albeit in a propellor-driven aircraft rather than one of the new-fangled jets of the time. But the accolade of being the first Lion to fly south had gone five years earlier to Lewis Jones, the Welsh full-back who made the then long and hazardous journey to New Zealand to replace George Norton who was injured early in the 1950 tour.

Now known universally as the Lions, the tourists were eagerly awaited in South Africa. Having whitewashed the All Blacks in a four Test series in 1949, and having toured Britain, Ireland and France in 1951–52, completing the Grand Slam against the Five Nations and the Barbarians—Scotland in particular were humiliated 44–0—and losing only one of 31 matches, the Springboks rightly considered themselves to be the champions of the world. Their devoted fans wanted them to prove it against the Lions, while the whole rugby-mad country was simply brimming over with excitement at the arrival of the tourists for the first time in 17 years.

It was also the first tour to be heavily covered by the press, a few of whose representatives, most notably former Lion and all round-sports-man Viv Jenkins, travelled constantly with the party—Jenkins eventually wrote a book about the tour. The first newsreel films of matches were shown in British cinemas, helping to build public awareness of the Lions, while from the likes of Jenkins, Clem Thomas and Cliff Morgan we have been handed down highly readable accounts of the tour. In short, the 1955 tour is the first where most of the action on and off the pitch was well documented.

The captain for the tour was again an Irishman, Robin Thompson of Instonians and Ireland, and though his playing ability was criticized, most notably by Clem Thomas, his quiet assuredness and capacity for hard work were undoubted, while he was desperately unlucky to be injured in the second Test. The vice-captain was the Scottish full-back Angus Cameron, but a knee injury curtailed his contribution. The manager was a large Belfast man, Jack Siggins, who had no hesitation in laying down the law to what was deliberately a young party. Siggins felt that only athletic youthful types would be able to cope with the conditions in South Africa, and discouraged the selectors from picking anyone over the age of 30—he originally wanted 27 as the cut-off age—with only Trevor Lloyd of Maesteg and Wales being past his 30th birthday.

Bryn Meredith of Newport was the first-choice hooker in the squad. He recalled:

There were great players like Jack Kyle, Jack Matthews and Bleddyn Williams who could have played, but the manager didn’t want anyone over the age of 30. He made his decision and that was the end of that. But we still had a team of great quality.

Personally, I was surprised to be chosen. When you start off you never think you’re good enough for your village side, then you never think you’re good enough for your country and who was I to think I was good enough for the Lions?