Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Willie John McBride
I A Matter of Balance
II The Swansea Boy
III Picking Up the Ball
IV London Calling
V Mervyn Who?
VI Golden Years
VII Being a Lion – Part One
VIII Coming Home
IX Being a Lion – Part Two
X 1976 and All That
XI Felled
XII Sinking
XIII Getting Back
XIV Keeping the Past
XV Pub Talk
XVI Once We Were Kings
XVII A Lucky Man
XVIII Afterwards
Bibliography
Mervyn Davies was born in 1946 and played for London Welsh, Swansea, the British Lions teams of 1971 and 1974, and the Welsh national side. He is currently chairman of the Welsh Rugby Former International Players Association.
David Roach runs a copywriting agency called Red 10 Creative. He was born in Wales but now lives in Oxford. In 2002, he collaborated with former Llanelli and Wales scrum-half Rupert Moon on the acclaimed Full Moon: Rugby in the Red.
The authors wish to thank the following for their time, help and encouragement:
Mervyn: Jeni Davies, Christopher Davies, Laura Davies, Betty Davies; Peter Thomas and J.J. Williams of the Welsh Rugby Former International Players Association; John Dawes, David Parry-Jones, Willie John McBride, Bobby Windsor, John Taylor, John Hughes; Rob Cole at the Westgate Sports Agency, the Western Mail, Robert Davies; Bill Campbell, Graeme Blaikie, Lizzie Cameron and Ailsa Bathgate at Mainstream Publishing; Green Umbrella Video, Christopher Davies Publishers, Nick Davis.
David: Katy Gordon, William and Isabella; Linda, Jean and Beryl Brown; Cerys and Roger Clarke; Kevin, Mandy, Jamie and Rhianna; John Roach; Sandy Taylor and Duncan Lawson; Richard Tomlin, Muffin Gordon, Callum and Rosa; Ali and Neil MacGregor; David Couch for his Maori nous; David Gedge; Tanya Lidstone; and Jack Gordon and Diana Hawkins for going beyond the call of duty.
Bennett, Phil and Thomas, Graham, Phil Bennett: the Autobiography (CollinsWillow, 2003)
Billot, John, History of Welsh International Rugby (Roman Way Books, 1999)
Curtis, Tony (ed.), Wales: the Imagined Nation (Poetry Wales Press, 1986)
Davies, Mervyn with Parry-Jones, David, Number 8 (Pelham Books, 1977)
Edwards, Gareth, Gareth Edwards: the Autobiography (Hodder Headline Audiobooks, 1999)
Edwards, Gareth with Bills, Peter, Tackling Rugby (Headline, 2002)
Jackson, Peter, Lions of Wales (Mainstream, 1998)
John, Barry, The Barry John Story (Collins, 1974)
John, Barry (ed.), Rugby ’76 (Christopher Davies Publishers, 1970)
Richards, Huw, Stead, Peter and Williams, Gareth (eds), Heart and Soul (University of Wales Press, 1998)
Thomas, Clem and Thomas, Greg, The History of the British & Irish Lions (Mainstream, 1998)
Thomas, J.B.G., The Roaring Lions (Pelham Books, 1972)
Visit: www.wrfipa.co.uk
www.red10creative.co.uk
I suck in the air. The smell of sweat and liniment engulfs me as I make my way to the back of the lineout. The call comes; the ball isn’t going my way. I glance to my right and see the boys lining up, ready. Benny shouts into midfield, but I cannot make out his words. They are not directed at me . . . they do not concern me. Winning the ball, protecting the men who stand before me: that is my immediate concern. We have to watch each other’s backs out here, especially in the lineout. A man weighing 15 or 16 st. is at his most vulnerable when he is airborne. With his arms raised up high above his head he cannot protect himself from the low and nasty punch that comes stealing in under his ribcage. He needs his mates. This is a brutal business. My ribs and midriff are proof: they carry the bruises from a series of well-placed whacks.
I tense my body, waiting for another blow to come, but it doesn’t. I glance at the Boks beside me and they look exhausted. They are breathing hard. For 40 minutes, they have hit us with all their fury, but we have held firm. Now they look lost. Maybe we’ve knocked the fight out of them. Then again, desperate men can be dangerous foes so there must be no let-up until we leave the field. I can hear some frantic Afrikaans; all is not well in their ranks. Bobby prepares to throw, and I can see fruit arcing out of the crowd towards him. A foot comes stamping down on mine so I lean in with my shoulder and shake my assailant off. These boys are bruisers, not rugby players; Christ knows where they’ve come from . . . they’ve been pushed onto the pitch to do us over, but they will not. We have been punched and kicked across the field, but we haven’t yielded a single yard. Little do they realise that we are feeding off their hatred, growing stronger with every blow.
Bobby throws the ball in, but I lose sight of it as Gordon powers up and taps it back to Gareth. Now it is gone. Now my work begins. The lineout breaks up and I turn and push past Kritzinger. He reaches out to pull me back, but I repel him with my arm and break free. The ball is zipping left; I visualise it flying through the hands of our back line: Edwards, Bennett, McGeechan, Milliken and then to J.J. Williams. It is a play we practise – getting the ball out quickly to our fastest runner. I move in support, joining a measured stampede of red jerseys. I feel strong and alert, aware of every obstacle as I pick my way through the backtracking Boks. I feel alive; each heartbeat pounds out the powerful, rhythmic drumming of an unstoppable march. My mind works on split-levels: I can see the exact patch of grass where I need to be, without losing sight of J.J.’s run. I can also sense where my flankers are, but I can’t explain how I can comprehend all three elements at once. If I could explain it, then I might lose the magic.
J.J. feeds J.P.R., who heads wide. J.P.R. squeezes past the number 10 and for a fraction of a second I think he is going to ground. I check my run; a green arm tries to wrap itself around my neck but fails. I go on, ready to support my full-back, but the ball is back with J.J. I am not needed. He is through. I slow down and smile. The red machine, full of cut and thrust, has sliced apart the South Africans yet again. My gaze goes up and over J.J. as he touches down, then on towards the thousands of black and coloured fans penned in behind the posts. They raise their arms and salute him, cheering wildly as the green dream cracks and falls. Then it hits me: the match and the series are both won. Whatever the Boks try now, their efforts will be fruitless. Each Lion, each man in red, grows with every step. We stand tall. We stand supreme. We will go on.
Traffic noise. Too much traffic noise. Cheerful hellos. Christopher wriggling in my arms. The sun feels hot on my face and it hurts my eyes. I wish I had found my sunglasses. I wish I were invisible. The noise and the crowds confuse me. Go away. My mouth is dry and I have no sense of smell. I miss the aroma of bakeries, the smell of fresh bread. I miss the smell of my boy. I put him down on the pavement and rest my left arm. It feels weak. I can’t hold anything properly. There is too much noise.
I want to walk across the road. Such a simple task: first one foot, then the other. But I am nervous. The cars seem different, faster and bigger, yet somehow also smaller. They confuse me. I have to squint against the sun, but I cannot judge how fast they move. I am too scared to guess. But it is just a road. A road I’ve crossed 1,000 times. The colours dazzle me. People stare. Someone stops and talks. I cannot hear her words clearly so I mumble my stock response and try to flee. I look bad, crooked and frail. I try to stand tall, dragging up a mental picture of the man in the white headband . . . trying to change from the inside what I project on the outside. But the image gets scrambled and lost. Leave me alone. I want to cross that bloody road.
I pick Chris up and walk to the kerb. I look left and right and left again, like a child, and then I put my right foot forward; but I misjudge the distance from kerb to road. The sensation starts . . . not again, not now! My knees crumple and I fall. I twist and protect my boy as I land painfully on my shoulder. More faces, more pity. Christopher is gathered up by a passer-by. He’s crying. A crowd forms around me. Cars stop. The town stops. Saturday stops. A hand is thrust towards me but I push it away. I don’t need any help. I will get up. I will get up. I need to cross the road. I will go on.
To hear it said, at least the way I have heard it said, it would be easy to believe that the word ‘Mervyn’ carried more significance than just a name. I’ve heard it used to encourage, to chastise – and even to praise. I dare say it has also been employed as an insult (flanked by a few expletives), particularly in the bear pit of Murrayfield or down Dunedin way. ‘Mervyn’ is a good word for shouting, you see . . . letters well grouped so that one can open the lungs and really go for it. It is the way the syllables sit; it allows the vocalisation to begin with a murmur and develop into a roar. And despite what the smartalecs on the terraces might have believed (you know the type – boys with a quip for every lost lineout ball) no one could shout out my name like my mother. The end to many a day was signalled by her call as it rose up the hill from Trewyddfa Road and into Parc Llewellyn, the place where I would loiter and cling to the last of the evening sun.
I was born in Gorseinon Hospital, Swansea on 9 December 1946: Thomas Mervyn Davies, a post-war baby boomer like fellow Wales internationals Terry Cobner, Bobby Windsor and Ray ‘Chico’ Hopkins. The town of my birthplace, the town where I still live, is the place I’ve called home throughout the larger part of my life. It is my patch, an area of Wales where sea, sky and soil meet head on. From the easy sweep of Swansea Bay arcing out towards the Mumbles to the high hills that rise up seemingly from the sand, this ‘ugly, lovely town’ as (I believe) Dylan Thomas once called it, has a uniqueness, a salty freshness that sits well with me. It is here where I can sit down with a pint and be ‘Merv’, the local boy who once captained his country. In my heart and in my thoughts Swansea remains a game old town where people are drawn to work, to holiday, to escape . . . and I have done all three in her generous environs.
My early Swansea memories are flashback images rather than crystal-clear certainties. Because my memory has been partly stolen from me, there’s a particular pleasure when it provides snapshots of what I did when I was young: trundling around on a three-wheel trike, rolling stones along the gutter, scraping sticks against the brickwork of our street. I think I can even recall a moment in my mother’s shawl but that might be received wisdom from family reminiscences. I do remember watching the Queen’s coronation at a neighbour’s house, staring goggle-eyed at the television set in the days when the set itself was a great novelty – a tiny, blurred screen in a big, brown cabinet. Some memories remain strong because they form the building blocks that helped construct the man I am and they are the ones I hold especially dear – of my father, my mother, my brother, the relatives, friends and the action that was found in and around Trewyddfa Road.
The Davies family wasn’t well off; we were a solid working-class Welsh breed, chapel-goers all, who stuck together through thick and thin. Our house was small and warm and always gave a good welcome to anyone who happened by. David John (Dai), my father, worked as a welder in a local power station. Back then in the ’50s and ’60s Swansea was a place of heavy industry and export, so there was always a job for a man willing to bend his back into some hard graft. One only had to peer down the valley at the industrial sprawl to see how easy it was to earn a few quid.
In the years before the war, my father had been a reluctant coal miner. I say reluctant because he loathed life underground. To him, the call to arms was a godsend, a chance to flee from the pit and enlist in the armed services. He once said the mines would have killed him if he’d stayed there a moment longer. Although mining was a reserved occupation, I think he preferred taking his chances against the Germans rather than having to haul his 6 ft-plus frame to the coalface. My father seldom spoke of his wartime experiences – and now that he is gone I regret not asking him – but I do know he was shipped out to north Africa to fight with Montgomery’s Eighth. After a few encounters with the enemy, he was taken prisoner and joined a large number of his fellow Desert Rats who were plucked off the scorched sands and bundled back to Germany for the duration. Whilst others were fighting their way across France, Italy and Burma, my father spent his war trapped behind barbed wire. Although in many ways his war could have been much, much worse, it was an ironic fate to befall a man who had joined up because he felt imprisoned in the pit.
When news of his capture eventually reached his wife Mary Elizabeth (Betty) – my mam – she must have felt a strange sense of anxiety and relief. All she could do from then on was gather together the occasional – and meagre – Red Cross parcel and hope its arrival would help him through his stretch. Like countless others across the world, they had to wait for an end to the whole business before they could be reunited.
In common with other industrial towns and cities on the home front, Swansea was always potentially a wartime bombing target. Its foundries and refineries, and its strategic access to the open sea where a lifeline of food and materials could be landed, had flagged its presence on many a Luftwaffe map. Local historians, who work hard to chronicle the town’s numerous lives, reckon Swansea suffered over 40 serious air raids between the outbreak of hostilities and the end of 1943. The worst incident was a sustained attack known as ‘the Three Nights Blitz’, which rained bombs for three consecutive nights in February 1941. Some 30,000 incendiary bombs destroyed centuries of history in a few hours. My mother – like so many other men and women fighting the domestic battle – did what she could and joined the local fire service.
As with others of my generation, I am thankful that I was born in quieter times. The war had ended by the time I arrived, but they were still years of hardship, rationing, rubble and rebuilding. Both Mam and Dad, and my nan who lived with us, worked hard to stretch whatever resources we had. We weren’t the only ones living in this way; the whole country was rubbing its eyes and slowly coming to terms with the future.
For the first few years of my life we were a Welsh-speaking household, and then, when I was four years old, an important decision was made about my education. The obvious option would have seen me heading to the Welsh school in Llansamlet some three miles away but that would have involved two separate bus journeys there, and two more back. My parents looked down the hill instead and settled on Plasmarl Juniors, the ‘English place’. There may have been financial reasons behind my parents’ choice – the opportunity to save a few bob a week on transport must have been attractive – but, knowing the way my parents thought, I suspect that their decision was in all likelihood mainly influenced by my future prospects. They were quite traditional in that respect: both wanted their eldest child to go on and achieve the kind of education that they had never had. Throughout childhood, adolescence and even adulthood they sacrificed much for both me and for my younger brother, Dyfrig.
It was a shocking upheaval for a four year old to find himself suddenly in an alien environment, unable to communicate with his peers. My teachers and classmates thought I was backward during those initial months because I knew no English at all. But it is easier for the very young to pick up new words and slowly, painfully slowly, my English came.
Irrespective of any natural ability to learn, there were two factors that helped me settle in at Plasmarl: first, my Aunt Sal taught reception class and kept a watchful eye on her bewildered nephew; and second, my parents ceased speaking Welsh at home. I gained one language but lost another. For every new anglicised term that lodged in my brain a Welsh word was ousted. I did retain some Welsh, but I am hardly fluent. Most of the Welsh I spoke in adulthood was rooted in rugby, because Gareth Edwards and I would use Welsh calls in set-piece plays to confuse the opposition. Losing one’s birth-language was not too much of a hindrance in multi-cultural Swansea, where people like my grandparents had migrated from Devon, and others came from Ireland or the Midlands in search of work. But if I had been born a few miles further west into Carmarthenshire, across the Loughor say, then Welsh would undoubtedly have remained my native tongue.
Schoolwork wasn’t a high priority for me, there was too much of the outdoor boy fighting to be free. Parc Llewellyn was a great, wooded hilltop where streams ran into ponds that were alive with newts and frogs. The trees were made for climbing and gangs of boys would use the thick undergrowth to hide and ambush any approaching foe. It was a place where a boy with a penknife and a ball of string could while away the hours from sunrise to sunset. And the park was somewhere dens could be built that would keep the rain out and the conspiracies in; a great advantage when the big westerly fronts rolled in off the Atlantic (as they often did: Swansea is one of the wettest places in Britain).
Even at such a tender age I showed a zealot’s love for the physical side of life. My size put me a good head, and some shoulder, above my friends. My mother was a tall woman – 5 ft 9 in. – so it seemed I was destined to inherit my parents’ stature. Later, my height made me an awkward adolescent and my gangly frame threatened my fragile teenage psyche, but as a boy, I was surprisingly well coordinated – especially when one considers the distance between my brain and my feet.
Like almost every other small boy I played lots of sport, but times were different then – far different from today. Back then there was no hero worship or cult of celebrity to follow. We didn’t have the access to – or the interest in – what the sporting stars of the day got up to. We saw sport as something to do, a game to pile into, and the need to watch live sport barely entered my consciousness; I saw maybe a couple of Swansea matches down at St Helens, but being in a crowd did not stir my interest the way that playing did. I had to do something, anything, to burn off the restlessness. And if I did have a particular sport of choice when I was a boy then it would have to be soccer: to this day I have a terrific fondness for the round ball game. Most Welsh people do, yet we are caricatured as a nation interested only in their rugby. Witness the biennial ordeal we endure when attempting to qualify for the final stages of the World Cup or the European Championships; that collective angst is a good indicator of what the Welsh feel about the ‘other’ game. I enjoyed my cricket too, but only if I could bat or bowl: I was the kind of boy who would try to slope off somewhere if required to field. Unless I was trying to obliterate a batsman’s stumps or launch my willow at a poorly delivered longhop, cricket had too much space, and too slow a pace, to engage my attention fully. Even then I preferred the claustrophobic thrill of being right in the heart of the action.
At Plasmarl the only part I played in a team game was for the soccer XI. Our school had no grass whatsoever, so we had to play football out in the concrete playground. We would play a few fixtures away against other local schools and I remember on one occasion turning out as centre-forward (the first example of my height dictating my playing position) up at Paradise Park. Never has there been a more ill-suited name for such a rough piece of wasteland: it revealed Swansea’s civic planners’ gifts for irony. It was at Paradise Park where I scored my one and only goal for Plasmarl Juniors, and it was also where I ripped the skin off my leg after attempting a sliding tackle on that terrible, razor-edged asphalt. The one benefit (not appreciated at the time, of course) was that in my later rugby career the rock-hard pitches of the South African high veldt held little fear for a man who had once left bits of his flayed skin all over Paradise Park.
The specific memory from my boyhood that did draw me to rugby is still clear in my mind, the significance of which has grown with the passing years. I must have been aged ten or thereabouts and up to no good in my parents’ bedroom. I recall pulling open a large, heavy drawer at the foot of my father’s wardrobe. I don’t know what I could have been looking for – perhaps some relic from his army days? But there, neatly folded at the bottom of the drawer, beneath his good shirts, was a blood red jersey with a golden three-feather crest. When I opened it out on the bed and turned it over, I saw a large, beautifully stitched ‘8’ in a creamy, off-white colour. Perplexed by the significance of this find, I trailed it downstairs to my parents for answers. My dad’s immediate response was to raise his big paw and show me – in quite explicit terms – what happens to nosey little boys who go snooping about. But he quickly calmed down and said, in his matter-of-fact way, that it was his Welsh shirt, the one that he had worn on Cardiff Arms Park.
Although my father seldom revealed his inner thoughts or past experiences to his children, I don’t want to paint him as a distant or aloof man, because he wasn’t. People have to remember that the dynamics of the parent–child relationship were quite different then. I think that the first time my father watched me play rugby was when I turned out in my first senior game for London Welsh. Nowadays, parents are expected to follow everything their children do, to be there yelling encouragement from the sidelines – but my father was working when I played. He also never, ever pushed me into anything. I respect him for his restraint as much as I do for his achievements. Many a promising child has been lost to sport because of a father’s pressure, and the lesson I learnt from Dai was one I was anxious to follow with my own children. I digress, but by all accounts my father was a more than useful player – better than me, according to many who saw us both play (a view that he shared too, incidentally!). He played for Swansea before the war and was regarded as a tough, uncompromising lock or number 8. His height allowed him to move between the two positions when circumstances required (the curse of the tall, mobile player). Adolf Hitler rudely interrupted his club career with Swansea, and for four dull years there was little opportunity to play rugby in the prison camp. After his repatriation and return to Swansea, he took to the field again – this time as captain of the All Whites. Not long after, when some semblance of normality had returned to people’s lives, he was invited to represent Wales in a series of ‘Victory Internationals’. These matches were played in 1946 in place of the Home Internationals. Although the Wales players wore Welsh shirts and played at Cardiff Arms Park or Murrayfield in front of capacity crowds, the games were not awarded full international status. That meant that the players did not get their caps. The matches were seen as a chance for the players, the public and the game itself to get back to some kind of normality after the rigours of war. ‘Wales’ even played the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces before they set off on their long journey back to the southern hemisphere: an encounter that was undoubtedly as hard fought as any between those great rugby foes.
I gather he played the game properly: with hardness, skill, enthusiasm, commitment and fairness. I suspect he was just happy to shake off the years of confinement and run free again. If he was anything like his son, then he would have viewed each match as a release, a place to put the stress and strain of life and work and family away for a couple of hours each Saturday afternoon. He played the game at the highest level, he achieved his sporting goals, and then, when it was time to finish, he walked away and got on with his life. My father didn’t brag or boast about what he had done. Nor did he hide within the aura of it. A rugby match was just a rugby match . . . a small – but highly enjoyable – part of his weekly life.
If I were the romantic type, then I would have used the ‘jersey in the drawer’ discovery as the defining moment of my childhood. It wasn’t, and I may be guilty of over-playing its significance now. Yet knowing that my father – the man I would see walking in exhausted from work or shaving at the sink, that same man I saw lost in his newspaper or larking about with my mother – had played for his country, made me believe I could do it too. We were of the same stock: if he could achieve something so big, then so could I. Doing what he had done – what I could easily regard as the impossible – was, in fact, feasible. I did not set myself a timetable to follow – I was far too lazy to put that amount of effort in – but I knew that it could be done. Holding his Wales shirt didn’t fill me with a desire to don one myself, it just brought home that someone from someplace like Trewyddfa Road could actually go on to play for his country.
Betty and Dai were good people; they demanded that Dyfrig and I worked hard and were respectful to others. My father wasn’t afraid to use the big paw, and the memory of it finding its spot beneath a mountain of blankets when Dyfrig and I gave him cause to act makes me laugh even now. My brother and I shared a bed as children, and because he is nearly five years younger than me I had the responsibility of an elder brother to dictate what went on in our bedroom – so I was usually to blame for my father’s irritation. Dyfrig and I fought and played together in the riotous and loud way that brothers do, both inside the house and out, and I reckon we were quite a handful. Yet both of us always knew that our parents loved us and would do whatever they could to give us the best start in life. Being a parent is in some ways the hardest job in the world: the hours are unforgiving, the rewards are not always obvious and there’s no formal training for it. You can only do your best for your children, but I realised quite early on in life that my parents’ best was more than good enough.
There are numerous reasons why Wales fell away as a rugby power after the Golden Era of the 1970s. Ask any Welsh person, or any rugby lover for that matter, and they will put forward their own theories. Many people are quick to point out the gradual decline of heavy industry in the valleys and along the coastal areas from Fishguard to Newport. True, one must concede recession did have a grave impact upon the stuttering national game, denying a generation of amateur players the uncompromising training ground that men like Dai Morris and Bobby Windsor grew up on in pit and steelworks respectively. But I feel – in purely rugby terms – Wales was hit as much by the loss of school rugby (especially grammar school rugby) as she was by the loss of her steelworks, her docks and her collieries.
Grammar schools across Wales were the great rugby academies, places where the game could be studied and picked apart with an almost puritanical eye. Games masters would bully and blather away, shaping the minds and bodies of their eager young charges, creating players who would pit their skills against equally adroit boys from other schools. Competition was fierce . . . and the common need to excel raised the standard of the game with each flowering generation. Of course, I never studied at a grammar school so it is feasible that my view is somewhat over-simplified or just slightly skew-whiff. But I have a hunch it isn’t, because whatever district trial I was invited to attend (and there were a fair few in the Swansea of my youth), I never once got a look in. It didn’t matter what I – or the players from my school – did on the field; the shirts we tried out for were already earmarked for the grammar school boys. Five minutes into a trial match and it was all over: the district selectors (mainly with grammar school connections) had already booked their boys their places. Just as it was in England, Ireland and Scotland, many of the youngsters who would one day go on and represent Wales at rugby union came from a grammar school background.
My parents never hid from me their wish that I should go to the grammar school. They longed for me to be the one who broke the mould in terms of the Davies family education. I would have gone, but fate had something else lined up. The greatest demand Dai and Betty placed upon my young shoulders was that I pass my eleven-plus. They gave me no choice. If I was going to get anywhere in life, if I wanted to avoid a dirty, dangerous future, if I wanted to get well away from the acrid smoke of the smelters’ yard or the blackness of the mine, then I would have to ‘think’ my way out. My father didn’t want either one of his boys toiling away like him.
Despite my reluctance to study and the latent nature of any academic leanings I might have possessed, I did what I was told and put the graft in. Whether it was the fear of failure (and disappointing my parents) that spurred me on, or just having a lucky knack of being able to learn parrot-fashion, I passed. Incredibly, I managed to focus my wandering attention long enough to get the grades that would take me into a new kind of Elysian world. Well, that’s what I thought would be coming my way. That is what my folks thought too – young Merv polished up and pushed off to a grammar school like Dynefor or Bishop Gore. The local education authority however, had a different idea. A seismic change in attitudes towards post-war schooling had taken place. Looking back now, the late ’50s/early ’60s resemble an almost egalitarian age where society seemed gripped by the need for change. In my own small way I was part of a grand social experiment, an experiment that would take the cream off the top of the junior schools and spread it about a bit. I was chosen for an entirely new kind of educational experience. Like modern-day pied pipers leading the way, boys of all abilities and from all types of different backgrounds were rounded up by the local education authority and led up the hill to a brand new concrete monstrosity called Penlan Multilateral.
By the time I arrived there in 1958, Penlan had been in existence for little more than a year. The principle behind its foundation – as with other secondary moderns and then comprehensives – was to provide a rounded education to a cross-section of society. We were assessed at junior school and then streamed accordingly. There were two ways to go when new students reached Penlan: either with the school ‘swots’ or off with the also-rans to do ‘tech’. As with other eleven-plus passers, I was popped straight into the top set. Was this the brave new world our fathers had fought for? To see the hopeful looks on our eager young faces as we were bussed in from all over Swansea, one might have thought yes. But – as is often the case with education – idealism and reality found themselves poles apart. The great gleaming citadel to inclusiveness and togetherness that was Penlan was, in fact, a rough-and-tumble zoo where the strongest – or the sneakiest – survived. I am not only talking about physical strength because the pack nature of the stalking student body would often reduce the biggest game to easy meat. No, at Penlan a boy needed alertness, mental sharpness, a quick understanding of the rules and some luck to get through each day. If he was too brainy, too dull, too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too quiet, too loud, too hard, too soft . . . if he was anything that allowed the other pupils to hang a label upon him, then he was a target. The best way to get by was to blend in because if you possessed anything that set you apart from the mob then, by God, you were going to get it. My physical size certainly got me the treatment in my first few weeks until I swallowed hard and decided to give back as good as I got.
The school building itself was five storeys high and well over 200 yards long. It was a massive structure, bigger than any other place I had ever entered. It was also quite impossible to navigate and one lived in fear of disappearing down some godforsaken corridor never to be seen again. The brutality of the bricks and mortar mirrored perfectly the atmosphere inside, for if there was ever a school of hard knocks then it was Penlan. A feral law ruled which fast-tracked many of the boys straight to badness. A few of my fellow pupils were so rough, so hyped-up on front, they even gave some of the more hapless masters a pasting. It was Wild West Glamorgan; full of bandits on the inside – and there were even horses on the outside. I would often stare out of the window, blocking out the chaos around me, looking at these manky old nags wandering around the school. I half expected to see Alan Ladd or James Stewart come ambling into view to round up some of the ruffians. But it was sometimes funny too; especially when the shout went up for a breakout and we’d cheer on one larrikin or another as he made his daring escape, leaping aboard a scraggy mount and disappearing off into the sunset.
For all my criticism of Penlan it did provide me with a good education – and not just in the formal sense. It taught me one of life’s most valuable lessons: it made me streetwise. I learnt more about the scheming tendencies of my fellow man in those few formative years than I did before or since. Take, for instance, the annual cross-country race. Because of the newness of the school, there was no grass anywhere on the premises, just vast tracks of glutinous mud. And on that soggy wasteland the teachers could inflict a little bit of retribution on the little sods that caused them such misery each day. The cross-country ‘track’ itself wasn’t even a track; it was a quagmire that bordered the entire school grounds and we were instructed to run it . . . all three strength-sapping miles of it. The underfoot conditions were guaranteed to be abysmal and the weather to be inhuman: the run always seemed to coincide with the foulest day of the year. Yet no matter how much I loathed running – in particular that aimless, looped running which seemed to go on forever – I could not keep my competitive streak in check for long. In my first year I finished third out of 200. In the second and third years I finished third or fourth but when, 12 months later, the teachers told us to drag ourselves around the course twice, I thought ‘bollocks to that’ and strolled in a hugely satisfying 104th. Never had outright failure felt so good. Whether with Wales, the Lions or running up and down the seafront with Swansea RUFC, my loathing for training runs was born in the Penlan mud.
It is true to say that the sporting facilities at Penlan were somewhat spartan. The theory was that once the school had settled, the grass had finally grown and the pupils could make it safely to the gym without sliding all the way down the hill to Swansea town, our facilities would be the envy of every other school in the area. But my year, the year above and the year that followed, had to make do till nature worked. Yet, as the saying goes, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, and the hardships we faced doing what other pupils in other schools did with comparative ease instilled in us a sense of true grit. Gym class was universally popular, and although I was keen to participate, my height didn’t suit work on the apparatus. There may not have been a rugby or football pitch at that time, but one man was determined to do something positive about it and he can lay claim to unearthing my playing talent. Well, I know he dined out on that story a few times over the years and I never begrudged him because he did have a profound influence on the direction my life would eventually take.
Gwyn Watts was quite a teacher – and quite a character, too. He was the role model teacher I might have aspired to become if I had possessed one iota of his natural teaching talent. Teaching is a tough job – one could argue perhaps the toughest – but good teachers have a gift that makes it seem effortless. And that was how Gwyn taught: with little fuss and apparently a lot of ease.
Like his colleagues around him, Gwyn must have viewed the student body of Penlan with extreme frustration. We were a fidgeting mass of dissent and aggression. What we needed – and what the school needed – was an outlet, somewhere or some way all that testosterone could get channelled and burnt off. But the school had no form, no history, no infrastructure in place . . . it had no well-worn pathway that would have given the boys ideals – or achievements – to aspire to. The school had no network of fathers – or even elder brothers – that would have laid down its own traditions; the school, and everything inside it, was still too new. Men like Gwyn knew that Penlan needed to have something we could all be proud of, and he felt sport was the best way to build it. His attitude was: ‘if we don’t have our own traditions, then let’s make some’. He had a lifelong love of rugby and decided that was what we needed . . . so he put a team together.
In those days, it didn’t matter how short, tall, fat or thin you were; there was always a position for you on the rugby field. Nowadays, players are quite uniform in their physical appearance: wingers are as big as locks; props are the size of flankers. But back then a hooker was as different from a centre as a pit bull terrier is from a racehorse. Rugby used to be a great physical leveller: it provided common ground where players of different shapes and sizes could all fulfil roles of equal importance. On one matter, however, I must take issue with Mr Watts’ claims to being a true rugby scholar. He may well have been a respected referee in his day and he became a trusted friend, but when Gwyn Watts first picked me for Penlan Seniors the daft bugger put me on the wing. I say ‘picked’ but I mean ‘bullied’. He cast his eye over the various classes at his disposal and said, ‘you, you, you, you’ before bussing us down to the rock-strewn fields of Waunarlwydd. I was 12 years old and about to begin my first proper game of rugby.
Initially, I had mixed feelings about the sport. Part of me felt I was born to play it, especially after discovering my father’s Wales shirt in his wardrobe. But another part of me felt strangely detached; rugby seemed an alien activity that didn’t have much place for individuality. My few previous rugby experiences had involved chucking a ball around the street, but that never truly appealed to my sporting instincts. Football and cricket did, because one could see what an individual contributed to the wider team, from hitting boundaries to scoring last-minute winners, but rugby – the rugby I knew, the rugby I was about to play – seemed to disintegrate into a shapeless mêlée. And from my exiled position out on the wing it looked even worse than that – just a frenzy of arms and legs. What did I feel in that first match? A rush of adrenalin as the ball came my way? A strange mix of fear and excitement as I threw myself at the onrushing boots? The cocky bliss, perhaps, of beating a man on the outside? No. I’ll tell you what I felt: boredom. I had never been so bored in all my life. At least in the football matches I had played for Plasmarl there was always a faint chance the ball would come my way if I loitered in or near the opposition box. But rugby, schoolboy rugby . . . I might as well have been fielding at third man up at Parc Llewellyn. Despite Gwyn’s noble intentions to have the game played properly, those first two matches for Penlan descended into free-for-alls. If rugby was going to engage me then I had to be where the ball was. Gwyn said that it was his inspired decision to bring me in off the wing and put me at number 8. But I seem to recollect demanding to make the move. Between us, though, we found the position I would occupy for the rest of my rugby life.
What was it about the nuts and bolts of playing number 8 that enthused me in those early years? I loved the robustness of the role, the need to exert a strong physical presence. Being alert too, always on one’s mettle; that also appealed. I relished the turmoil that would often engulf the back row, whether going toe-to-toe in the lineout or waiting to pick up and dump an opposing flanker. Number 8 tested my strength, my courage, my instincts and my sense of self. Away from the pitch I was never a fighter. I would walk away from bother with barely a look over my shoulder. Away from the pitch I was too tall, too skinny, too covered in spots to have any real self-confidence – I was shy and awkward and offered little more than a lumbering presence in mixed company. But that was away from the pitch: on it, I was an entirely different being. I swaggered; I welcomed the hardness, the bruises, and the lumps being knocked out of me. I enjoyed the struggle and the team ethos, the need to contribute something big to each match. Away from the pitch I was moseying through my adolescence with little care or concern, but on the pitch some deep, deep pleasure was awakened by the crash, bang, wallop of rugby.
Number 8 also suited my size. I could have slotted into the second row and dominated the lineout but number 8 fitted my rangy physicality far better. Besides, if I was to be an effective lock then I would have needed more beef and none was forming on my beanpole frame. I lacked the zip to play flanker, but I did have good stores of natural stamina, which is a vital part of a back-rower’s armoury. The key to effective back-row play, however, is to remain right on top of the action, and my best quality as a player – right across the arc of my career – was an instinctive ability to read the game. From the number 8 position I was in the optimum place to gauge what was going on. Let the flankers sprint and peel off the scrum, let them annoy, niggle and nail the fly-half; but let the number 8 get on with his job . . . setting the tempo, chasing the ball, snuffing out problems, bridging the gap between forwards and backs.
Being tall; now there’s a thing I couldn’t train for. But without my height I doubt I would have made any kind of impact upon the game. Tall people in rugby are often lampooned as great big lurches whose sole purpose is to win lineout ball. At Penlan I used my height well around the rugby field and in other areas too. At this time I started playing basketball, a sport I have always had a terrific love for. Technically, basketball is a non-contact game but it is a sport where one can impose one’s physical presence. There are other aspects of basketball that I fed into my development as a rugby player. An understanding of spatial awareness for one: in basketball you have to continually seek out the gap . . . and essentially, that’s the basis on which good rugby is built. Basketball also demands dexterity; an ability to handle the ball quickly and deftly just as you would in the 15-man game. Basketball is a contest where decisions have to be made instantly: dither and the play is gone. I very much enjoyed making decisions on the rugby field; after all, why should thinking be the sole domain of the backs? After I started playing basketball at Penlan I pursued it even further in college. If I had not got into London Welsh as a rugby player, then maybe I might have tried my hand at basketball with Crystal Palace. Why not? I certainly had the size, the understanding and the love of the game.
The older I got, the easier the going seemed to become. It was often commented that I was so laid back I was practically horizontal. But what, in all honesty, did I have to trouble me? Home life was good, and my only regret was that my understanding of the Welsh language had diminished: the only time I was exposed to Welsh was every Sunday at chapel, or when my grandmother would revert back to her native tongue. Chapel-going was tough, but we did form a good social group and the group would often go out dancing or to the cinema on a Saturday night. But when I wasn’t in school or larking about with my mates, I used to enjoy my own company and go off for miles on my bike exploring the Carmarthenshire countryside. I was a perfectly normal youth with very little – except my size – to set me apart. About the most dramatic thing that happened to me was getting stabbed – and even that was an accident. It happened walking back one afternoon from Penlan with some friends. Behind us there were some lads from a younger year messing about with a penknife. The next thing I knew I felt a sharp pain in my calf. I turned around, looked down, and saw a knife sticking out of the back of my leg. It was not a deliberate act or a malicious assault, it was just boys being boys and pushing a silly game too far. But it did have quite serious repercussions; a large chunk of muscle was sliced open and it consigned me to a couple of months at home.