A Full Back Slower Than Your Average Prop E-Book

Ian Smith

• Herausgeber: Arena Sport
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 396

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Listed as one of the five worst international selections ever, and described in a book about Scottish rugby as 'a full back slower than your average prop', Ian Smith cheerfully won eight caps for Scotland in a career that saw him score every point for his team on his debut in an historic victory over South Africa (and in so doing became the first Scottish full back to score a Test try) and defeated a star-studded England team to lift the Calcutta Cup at Murrayfield in the 1970 Five Nations. One of eight international full backs to have come out of Heriot's FP, Smith also played for a dashing, innovative Edinburgh University side that revolutionised attacking back play. But this book is so much more than a story of a fleeting Test career. It is a window to another time, when a player could appear, as Smith did, for his club's third XV and two weeks later make his international debut for his country. And then, eight Tests later, return to his club where he was only considered good enough to play for the second XV.

Leseprobe

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2019 by

ARENA SPORT

An imprint of Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.arenasportbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Ian Smith 2019

ISBN: 9781909715813

eBook ISBN: 9781788851824

The right of Ian Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh

www.polarispublishing.com

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Most of us don’t leave much of a mark and we disappear almost completely when the last person who remembers us also dies

This book is written for my grandchildren and their children

CONTENTS

___________

Prologue: The Magic

Introduction: I’m sorry to tell you that David Boyd has died

1:  Mine

2:  Murder Ball

3:  The legend of Billy McCosh

4:  You are too small to be a centre. We want you to play full back

5:  Now do that with your right foot

6:  You have to be a lot quicker if this is going to work

7:  I told him, ‘If you do that again I’m going to kick your fucking head in’

8:  What do you mean you dropped fourteen balls?

9:  Ian Smith had better play for Scotland after all the trouble he’s caused me

10: Just give me the one chance to show how good I can be

11: But who are you?

12: Gie’s us fire and fucking fury

13: If they could take international caps away

14: I believe you are playing for Scotland against Wales this afternoon. Well, your wife has just had a son

15: Ian Smith has never been tested under the high ball and Shackleton the England fly half will certainly test him on Saturday

16: You are too fat and idle to play at this level

17: We thought Ian very lucky to get his cap last year – but now think he is worth it

18: You’re in the 2nds next Saturday

19: You’ll be posted home for not aiding the civilian population

20: The Irish Guards don’t play rugby

21: We do not sit over there

22: I’d like you to accompany me to the police station

23: He’s too dirty to play for Newport, so we have to pick him

24: The final whistle

Afterword: View from the clubhouse

Postscript: Teams

Acknowledgements

Plates

PROLOGUE

The Magic

It is 9.45 on a Saturday morning in the winter of 1953/54. The temperature is only just above freezing. A little nine-year-old boy is standing, shivering, with the sleeves of his heavy wet blue-and-white striped woollen jersey hanging down over his hands – no vest, no gloves, no second jersey underneath. His shorts are soaked, his socks sodden below knees that are blue and twitching with the cold, and his leather ankle-high boots, with nailed-down studs, are thick with glutinous mud.

The boy is one of fifteen nine-year-olds playing a school match for George Heriot’s 36th XV, otherwise known as the 6th Juniors. He is standing in the middle of the most enormous rugby pitch, with a huge grandstand and a massive press box where he and his teammates changed before the match and where they will return, almost hypothermic, an hour hence.

The few parents watching the match do so in silence, as cheering is not encouraged – in fact it is actively banned by Mr Archie McIntyre, the bald-headed tyrant who, along with Mr Donald Hastie, ruled not only the boys’ behaviour but that of their parents as well.

‘Heriot’s parents do not shout or cheer,’ one of the masters could be heard to say to a rogue parent who had committed the grievous sin of encouraging their child.

The heavy vertical rain, which shows no sign of stopping, is cascading off the boy’s nose and running down the back of his neck. A fog has begun to roll in, largely obscuring the distant try line and making the heavy leather ball even harder to catch or kick. All in all, it is a miserable picture. Yet the little boy is having the time of his life. It is his first game of rugby and all he has ever wanted to do.

I should know – I was that little boy and it is a morning I have never forgotten, even though it happened nearly sixty-five years ago.

INTRODUCTION

I’m sorry to tell you that David Boyd has died.

I must admit that it has been a very emotional experience writing this book, because it has made me examine how I feel about rugby after almost sixty years of either watching, playing, coaching or writing about what I believe to be the greatest of all the team sports.

It is only after you retire from rugby that you begin to appreciate what you took for granted for so long as a player. It might be at the start of the new season, or perhaps after injury prematurely ends your playing days, that you venture back into the changing room only to realise that there is now a barrier between you and the men you may have spent years in the same team as – men you love in an unspoken way, teammates that you would accept injury and pain for without giving it a second thought, men you would spend so much time with that you became like brothers.

People who have never played the game are unlikely to understand the invisible bond that holds a rugby team together.

The instant you retire, however, something goes. You will never again be part of the dressing room humour, the in-joke, the leg-pulling, the snide remark . . . the look. You are out of the loop and you’ll never be in it again. You don’t feel the pain at first, but all too quickly you become like an addict deprived of his fix, an alcoholic who wants desperately to drink but can’t risk even one sip.

This feeling affects former players in different ways. Some can’t face watching a match for years or even going to their club for a drink. Others can’t bear the smell of liniment or hear the sound of boots on concrete as players emerge from the dressing room without a desperate longing overtaking them. Some take up coaching, but have to leave the dressing room as the players gather together in a huddle and bond before going out to do battle.

These conflicting emotions never leave you, this sense of total frustration. Even when you are old and are crippled with arthritis, you still dream at night of being summoned from the crowd to play, and managing to be the hero of the hour as you seize victory from the jaws of defeat.

Rugby is an incurable addiction. That’s why teammates and foes of old have so much in common when given the chance to meet. They relive past glories, catastrophes, incidents on and off the field, memories of matches won and lost that bind them together. In these moments, the barriers come down, the past seems like yesterday, and for a few hours they are transported back to the days when they played, and they are once again in a real rugby environment. Camaraderie may not be the best word to describe what you had, but that is what it was and still is.

For me, it isn’t just the smell of liniment or the crack of studs on concrete that takes me back to my rugby-playing days, but also the smell of burning leaves. Burning leaves was the smell of autumn, which meant the rugby season, which I grew to love with a passion that was to totally consume me. Every autumn when I smell burning leaves I feel a heartache, a longing. I can close my eyes and I’m once again running on to a rugby pitch. I hate autumn now.

I hope you will enjoy reading about the highs and the lows of my rugby career, and if you are as I am, an ex-player looking back with your own fond memories, bells may ring, perhaps echoes of your own rugby career may resound. You may even read about yourself, or games you were involved in, because if you are aged between sixty and eighty and played rugby in Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, or Japan, there is every chance you will know people who can be found in this book – or perhaps even find yourself.

If you are a younger reader I want to tell the story of what rugby was like before leagues, substitutes, money, collisions, promising careers cut short by serious injury, coaches, television match officials, artificial pitches, roofs being closed, twenty-three players in a matchday XV . . . It was a time when players could rise from their club 3rd XV to represent their country in a Test match in ten short days. Impossible, you might think – but it happened to me.

In other words, I want to tell you about a time when rugby was fun yet taken incredibly seriously and somehow fitted in around a career. It was a time that still left room for a few beers and some high jinks after a match without the risk of any off-field activity being spotted, recorded and reported because there were no such things as smartphones and social media and the press were interested in the sport and the sport alone.

These are some of the reasons for wanting to write this book. But there is also another one.

‘I’m sorry to tell you that David Boyd has died.’

Just before Christmas in 2016 I heard that the man who had been my last rugby captain at school had passed away after a short battle with cancer. His name was David Boyd – to give him his full initials D.S.C. Boyd – and he had been our excellent 1st XV scrum half for two seasons. On receiving the news, a little part of me died as well. To be honest, our paths had rarely crossed after leaving school, but we had shared a bond when we met that is unique amongst rugby players, something totally different to just being friends from our schooldays.

I replied to the sad news by emailing the group I still belong to, based on the school 1st XV in 1961/62, and attached an old press cutting with a photograph featuring David and one or two others in action in a 1st XV match. Shortly afterwards I received a response from another ex-team member who also featured in the photo, saying he didn’t know the picture existed, and indeed he had forgotten all about the game that day.

Of course, we often forget events in our lives which were of great significance at the time, and then, when we die, no one remembers – but that seems to me very sad. I then read David’s obituary in The Scotsman and was astounded to discover he had been awarded a medal for bravery and had become a very successful yachtsman and a very senior banker – very little of which I knew. This got me to thinking about how one-generational our memories are.

Earlier on in 2016, the legendary Alastair Biggar of Scotland and British & Irish Lions fame died after a long battle with cancer, and I realised that he was the third of the four men who got their debut caps for Scotland against South Africa in December 1969 to die.

His passing left me as the only survivor from the new caps that day.

Duncan Patterson and Gordon Brown both died some time before Alastair, and apart from that sobering thought it has made me think of all the personal memories that have died with them.

That was a large part of my decision to write my rugby autobiography – so my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, if they have any interest in rugby at all, will have some idea what part I played in the sport that dominated my life between 1951 and 1983. But it took Julie, my wife, to bring me to book, so to speak, when she found and read the press cuttings my father had begun to lovingly collect of my rugby career over fifty-five years ago. What she said, in effect, was that everything I had told her about my rugby career, in that I hadn’t been all that good, about all the luck and good fortune I had happen to me, was in fact rubbish. Everything she had read had been complimentary, so I must have been very good.

I omitted to tell her that my father had made certain that none of the multitude of poor press reports were ever saved! The conversation that night, some five years ago, made me realise that I belong to a lost and very lucky generation of rugby players who have a tale to tell about a rugby career that simply couldn’t happen in the modern professional game.

This story describes in detail the nerve-racking journey experienced by that little boy who played for the 36th XV in 1953 as he progressed towards the great honour of representing his country, followed by a slow but enjoyable decline thereafter. It is a window into rugby as it was and, sadly, will never be again. I hope you will enjoy it.

ONE

Mine

As I began preparing to commit myself to print and started looking at the press reports from 1961 when I made my school 1st XV debut it also brought back to me things I had completely forgotten.

As a full back there was the fear as I waited under the first high ball of the season, the first high ball of a match. I prayed that no one ever saw the fear I felt, and that my ability was up to the task in hand of catching that ball and taking whatever tackles and blows came as a result without flinching.

Sadly, this fear was shown by some when moving up a playing level, being chosen for a representative side, and coming under closer scrutiny from the press and the selectors. The question might well be asked, was it better to be brave, stand your ground and drop a high ball, or just not quite be in quite the right place, leaving another to take what was rightfully yours, and thus appearing blameless?

Many promising rugby careers foundered as ex-players turned rugby correspondents soon found you out. They knew whether you were able but chicken, or scared but brave, or saddest of all scared but brave and not good enough. You can, in time, build confidence in yourself as to your ability to stand your ground and catch everything that is thrown at you – but how thin that veneer of confidence can be and how quickly it can be destroyed.

Obviously, I can only write with the experience of my own position as a full back, but every position has its own worries, and whilst my fears always related to the high ball, a prop probably has far bigger concerns – but I made certain I stayed as far away from the front row as I possibly could.

The fear factor, which affects players in completely different ways, is not something you often read about in autobiographies, but as this is my story I need to be honest about how I felt.

Some players need encouragement, always to be told they have done well, or told not to worry because they’ll be fine the next time, whilst others need a kick up the backside. I always needed encouraging, especially if I got to the first high ball (which was always a problem as I’d much rather let it bounce) and then dropped it.

To be fair, that did not happen very often. If I plucked up the courage to get underneath it, I almost always caught it.

The call of ‘Mine!’ or ‘My ball!’ was something I was taught very early and almost without exception that used to make me get to the ball or stand my ground. What is staggering is how the on-board computer works. The brain has some way of inputting how hard and how high the ball is kicked, what the wind is doing, where the nearest opponents are, and allows a judgement call as to whether you need to call for a mark or not. It all comes about from experience, borne out of years of fielding high balls from childhood, practising, and playing.

I read many rugby autobiographies and most of them are written by world stars of the game, acknowledged by their peers and recognised globally. Increasingly they move between huge clubs like Leicester, Saracens, Wasps and Bath, or they are hired from New Zealand, South Africa, Australia and the Pacific Islands and, more and more like football stars, they move where the money is. Loyalty today seems to be based on cash, so the rugby I will be writing about has long gone. I hate the expression, ‘in my day things were different’, but I am going to use it here because they were.

Things were certainly very different at the time this story begins. It was only six years after the Second World War had ended.

I was born in Dundee in 1944 but moved to Edinburgh with my parents when I was still very small. When I was five years old I went to George Heriot’s School, in September 1949, and there I stayed for the next fourteen years before leaving in 1963.

This was extremely lucky for me because it would have been much easier for my parents to have sent me to George Watson’s College which was much closer. Indeed, we could have walked there in fifteen minutes, instead of getting on the number twenty-three tramcar from Morningside into town.

Both Heriot’s and Watson’s are very famous rugby schools and have played a prominent role in the history of Scottish rugby. Watson’s had been, for many years, possibly Heriot’s biggest rivals, and like Heriot’s has had its fair share of famous rugby former pupils. Little did I think as a five-year-old that I would become the seventh Heriot’s full back to play for Scotland.

None of this would have happened had I gone to Watson’s. To be fair both schools had one thing in common, and that was the fact that to almost all the boys, rugby was a religion.

With a rugby-mad father, I suspect he had done his homework, and whilst realistically Watson’s was the ideal choice, Heriot’s probably looked the better bet for him, and thus for me. The truth of the matter I suspect is that I failed the entrance exam for Watson’s whereas Heriot’s took me on. Whatever the reason, I loved my fourteen years there.

I think the most important moment in a rugby player’s life is when and how he or she is introduced to the game. It doesn’t necessarily have to be playing, it can be watching that may be just as powerful. In this respect my father played it perfectly.

My father Bill Smith (W.A. Smith), educated at Morgan Academy in Dundee, was a sports fanatic, good enough to be a single figure handicap golfer, a winner of tennis tournaments, and a graduate of St Andrews University where he won a blue for athletics and played rugby for the university. He was very proud to have played in the same university team as the 1938 Lion, Duncan Macrae.

I can’t have been more than six when my father took me to my first rugby international at Murrayfield. It was Scotland versus Wales in 1951. Through the school we bought enclosure seats, which were benches right round the ground reserved for school-children. It meant an unbroken view, because apart from the huge west stand, Murrayfield was all terracing at that time.

There are three things I remember about the game. The first was where we were sitting, which was right behind and in line with a Scottish player who dropped a goal. That image has been fixed in my mind ever since, especially when my father told me it was Peter Kininmonth the Scottish number eight. It was unheard of then for a forward to drop a goal, and almost unheard of now, and I hadn’t a clue what he had done but everyone stood up and cheered. Wales seemed to crumble after that and Scotland won 19–0.

The second thing was the Scotland full back, who was small, quite plump, had number one on his back (the numbers are reversed now), and he kicked the ball over the bar. I didn’t know what penalties and conversions were then, but everyone got very excited, and my father told me that his name was Ian Thomson, that he had gone to Heriot’s, had three initials as did I (I.H.M.) and he was only nineteen years old. This was fantastic, and from that moment I wanted to be play for Scotland.

The third thing was the colours and the noise, the fervent singing of the Welsh supporters, especially their national anthem, plus the unique smell everywhere of pipe tobacco. The whole terrace seemed red; my father had taken me down to Princes Street on the morning of the match and it too had been a sea of Welsh red.

There was a story about the aftermath of the 19–0 victory over Wales who were stuffed full of players who had recently toured New Zealand with the Lions in 1950. In fairness they had been the overwhelming favourites to win the match comfortably. On the Sunday after the game, they were taken by coach to see the Forth Bridge, described as one of the modern wonders of the world. When they got out of the coach, a selector said, ‘Enjoy the view, boys, because most of you aren’t going to see this again at the Welsh Rugby Union’s expense.’

Nobody in the ground knew it would be another four long years before Scotland won another international, and during that time we suffered a total massacre at the hands of the Springboks, 44–0. One reporter was quoted as saying, ‘We were lucky to get nothing.’

It isn’t just when you are very young that international matches can have a huge impact on the choices you make in a rugby career or, amazingly, see men who help you make important decisions about your future.

I wasn’t to miss an international at Murrayfield, apart from the New Zealand game in 1954 when I had ’flu, until I left university in 1968. I can remember the newspapers in 1954 before Scotland faced the mighty men from New Zealand saying, ‘Scotland’s best defence would be to dig trenches’. In the event I believe we only lost 3–0.

I was there when Scotland beat Wales in 1955 to finish our unwelcome run of seventeen consecutive Test defeats, when an unknown wing, Arthur Smith, scored one of the best individual tries ever seen at Murrayfield. He punted and fly-hacked the ball, regathering at least twice and making the Welsh full back, Arthur Edwards, look very foolish – although to be fair, Arthur Smith was so good he could do that to almost anyone. How little did I know that many years later both men would have a direct influence on choices I would make.

As an eighteen-year-old I remember the immediate aftermath of the 1963 Scotland vs Wales match at Murrayfield as the crowds were streaming away from the terracing opposite the west stand. Scotland had just lost 6–0 in possibly the most boring game of rugby I have ever seen. Clive Rowlands at scrum half for Wales kicked the ball into touch constantly, more than once just fifteen yards out from Scotland’s line. In total there were 111 lineouts, and with no lifting they were a total shambles.

David Watkins, the Welsh fly-half, received only five passes in the entire game. I am certain this match was the tilting point for the ‘Dispensation Law’ forbidding kicking out on the full outside your own twenty-five that was to be brought in a few years later.

As a group of us were leaving, I became aware of two totally forlorn figures still leaning on a crush barrier halfway up the rapidly emptying east terrace, and to this day I remain convinced they were in tears. I knew them well by sight. One was Pringle Fisher, a dental student, as I was about to become, not yet capped, and the other was Jimmy Blake, never to be capped. They were Royal High School Former Pupils (FP), consistently the best rugby playing school in Scotland. Both were highly rated, and the newspapers had been encouraging the selectors to pick them for months. Pringle was capped against England at the end of the season, going on to captain Scotland, and Jimmy, the mercurial, exciting fly half selectors loved to leave out, was never capped. He was the Danny Cipriani of Scottish rugby, with huge ability but never the safe option.

This sight had a considerable effect on me because, whilst I loved my rugby, was sad when my team lost and sadder still when Scotland lost, I had never seen two grown men in tears over a result before. It made me realise how much the game could mean to people.

TWO

Murder Ball

Throughout those formative years between 1952, when I was eight years old, to 1963 when I was eighteen, my whole world of rugby took place at school. For any younger readers, you might find it strange that there was no such thing as mini rugby. From the very beginning there were scrums, lineouts and tackling, and fifteen-a-side teams. There was also no doubt that the boys chosen to play for the school understood what an honour it was to be picked. The proud history of Heriot’s rugby was something we all grew up with and it was hammered home to us over and over again.

In our first year of rugby the better fifteen players were picked for the 5th Juniors, and I suppose that the two teams were selected from sixty or seventy boys who had no choice over their winter sporting activity. I had made my debut for the 6th Juniors but the next week I found myself playing centre for the 5th Juniors. I should add that the 6th Juniors were in fact the 36th and lowest side fielded by the school on many winter Saturday mornings.

There was rugby practice twice a week, either Tuesday and Thursday, or Monday and Wednesday, from September to March, and the days varied as you went up through the school.

Memories dim with age, but what I do remember was we used to get on the tramcar which was drawn up waiting in Lauriston Place outside the school. They transported us down to the school playing fields at Goldenacre at the far end of town where there were eight rugby pitches, and a huge grandstand opposite the 1st XV pitch.

I should add these pitches were filled most Saturday mornings at 9.30 and 10.30 and all our big rivals in Edinburgh – George Watson’s, Daniel Stewart’s and the Royal High School – had a similar number of pitches. Similarly, their pitches were full at the same time, so it is obvious there was a huge number of rugby teams in each of these schools.

At the other end of the playing field was the cricket pavilion where the junior school rugby was based. I remember it as a cold, damp, unwelcome place that smelt sour. Memories can be unreliable, but the smell was a cross between carbolic soap, linseed oil from the cricket, and an all-pervading smell of damp. We had to change there and were told in no uncertain terms that rugby kit consisted of ankle-high boots which had cork studs with three or four nails holding them in, blue school socks with garters to hold them up, blue shorts, but no underwear, certainly no gloves, and one of two jerseys. They were blue and white stripes and an all dark-blue jersey used to differentiate two sides, which we would change into for home matches if the stripes meant a colour clash.

For practice matches you knew how well you were doing by the jersey you were told to put on. The dreaded call would be when you were told to swop your striped jersey for a blue one, because that meant you had just been dropped.

It is the rugby practice matches that will remain with me for the rest of my life. Throughout my time at Heriot’s from the 6th Junior XV to the 1st Senior XV, the practice never changed. There were no drills, no coaching, no tactics, just games.

The 6th Juniors played the 5th Juniors, and the 4ths played the 3rds in the year above, and the 2nds played the 1sts in the year above that. I assume there were games going on between the players who weren’t considered good enough to represent the school, but every week one or two boys came up to our game, and one or two boys vanished to the lesser game, probably never to be heard of again.

These games were a matter of life or death to all of us madly keen small boys, and they continued throughout the ten years I was to play rugby at school. To be dropped after missing a tackle, failing to fall on the ball or dropping a pass seemed like the end of the world, and the shame of it stuck to you.

You had to play well for your team on the Saturday, outplay your opposite number in the practice match more than once, and then he had to play badly, to have a chance of being promoted. Come rain, hail or shine you went to the practice matches. To be fair there wasn’t much choice.

The bellowed words, ‘Try disallowed!’ rang out loud and clear across the pitch, and I’m sure could be heard up to a mile away, and ‘Penalty to Blues’ are probably my first memory of practice matches at school.

A sharp blast of the whistle followed by, ‘Smith you jumped up and down when More scored a try, that foolishness has cost your team three points. You must turn round and run back to your end of the pitch and get ready for the kick-off. Heriot’s boys do not congratulate the try scorer, only footballers do that.’ Said with a sneer as well!

So, we learned the hard way not to congratulate a try scorer. In fact, try scorers could almost have felt they were plague carriers such was the way their teammates turned their backs on them as they returned in triumph. Everyone just turned away and sprinted back to the half way line with not even a smile, lest the sound of the death knell whistle erupted in our young ears, and fear and trepidation as to the shame that could be inflicted on any one of us foolish enough to show any excitement or pleasure at all. Especially if we had been promised that the next try wins the game, and we could all go and have a bath.

This would shortly be followed by such a shrill blast on the whistle you fully expected uniformed police officers to appear and arrest the miscreant, but what we heard instead was one of these statements that struck fear into the heart of thirty little nine-year-olds.

‘No try, Clark, you are wearing a vest under your jersey.’

‘Penalty to Stripes. Brown, your socks are down, where are your garters, boy?’

‘Penalty to Blues. Anderson, you are wearing gloves. Go back to the pavilion and take them off . . . Run don’t walk, boy!’

‘Alexander, you turned your back on the ball after I awarded that penalty. Another ten yards, Blues.’

You learned jolly quickly to back-pedal facing the ball when a penalty was awarded against your team. This went on week after week, month after month. Mr Donald M. Hastie and Mr Archie McIntyre ruled us with a rod of iron.

No matter how cold it was, all clothing accessories were forbidden, not even underpants were allowed, never mind a tracksuit. A second jersey under the first was almost a capital crime. Almost worst of all was the shrill cry of the whistle followed by, ‘Stand still!’ often followed by, ‘Smith. What do you think you are doing? Stay where you are.’

At this point thirty little boys stood frozen to the spot, awaiting the announcement of their crime. We all knew where we should be, but overcome by laziness, cowardice or just plain inability, we were about to be shouted at, punished, or simply mocked. That’s not quite true, because one or two of the more knowledgeable boys would less than subtly shuffle towards where they knew they should be, only to be yelled at, ‘Stand still.’

Significantly, the boys who were shuffling, whose knowledge of the game was better than their peers, were the same group who used to turn up on a Saturday afternoon to watch Heriot’s FP 1st XV, who were consistently one of the best club sides in Scotland in the 1950s and 60s.

I was one such boy, mostly because my father was so enthusiastic, and whilst the group of friends from school watched most of the games, we also kicked a ball around on one of the neighbouring pitches.

The lucky few, who oddly enough went on to become the stars of our schoolboy teams, names like Hogarth, More, Lewis, they always escaped the verbal lashes. I would like to say I was one such boy, but there was no chance of that. I always came in for an earful, perhaps, on reflection, because I had a cheeky face, and was prone to answering back, something that has sadly never left me.

The one thing this form of mental torture achieved was to very quickly make little boys know where they should be on the pitch. When you add the games of British Bulldogs and Murder Ball, there certainly was no health and safety here. I believe from the safe distance of over sixty-five years there are few better ways to find out who has ability, who has speed, who loves physical contact, and who simply doesn’t want to be there in the first place.

Murder Ball was played by placing the ball on the halfway line and two equal teams had to lie down at either end of the pitch. The whistle would blow and both teams had to sprint for the ball, no kicking allowed, and the object was for one team to carry it through the posts at the other end for a score, then the whole thing would be repeated. There was method in this madness, because the quicker children became three-quarters, and the slower, often stronger boys became the forwards.

In British Bulldogs one or two players had to tackle called-out individuals and stop them running from the try line to the half way line. If a player was quick enough or could dodge well enough to get to the half way line then everyone else standing behind the try line could charge forward. Slowly but surely the number of tacklers increased and the runners became fewer. It quickly became quite obvious who could tackle, and who could run and beat a group of tacklers, and also the poor unfortunates who couldn’t run or tackle. I know what you are thinking – they became full backs.

These games were also played in the school gym during PE lessons, which happened at least twice a week, and of course the gym staff liaised with the rugby teachers, and we soon were allocated positions.

At this stage I was one of the fastest in my age group, could catch the ball most of the time, and seemed to find passing quite easy, not that we did a lot of that, so found myself playing in the centre.

There was no ‘tag’ or ‘mini rugby’. We were into contact, scrums, lineouts and fifteen-a-side from day one on a full pitch. No playing across the pitch between the twenty-five-yard line and the try line, and no coaches on the pitch, only the masters who refereed.

There were no non-slip rugby balls, no new balls or nearly new, just hand-me-downs. I remain convinced that the balls we played with when we were small were full-sized leather balls with a lace, that had started life as a new ball played with by the 1st XV. By the time we used them they had become slimy and heavy, which meant nobody was strong enough to land a conversion, especially with the eight-panelled South African balls. If the pitch was muddy, the ball became like a cake of soap, and if you adjusted it when you caught it then it was deemed a knock-on and a scrum had to take place.

If the pitches were frozen or snow-covered, a not infrequent occurrence in Edinburgh, then there was no question of getting home early. We still had to travel down to Goldenacre and run up and down and round the pitches to keep fit, and that was horrible.

To add insult to injury, after the practice was over we returned to a pavilion that had little or no hot water, just foot baths, no showers as I recall, and mud-coated floors. Our boots had nailed-on studs, so cuts and scratches were the order of the day, but amazing as it might sound, we loved it. Nevertheless, we came to look with envy at the boys in the senior school, who had passed their eleven plus exam, because they got to change in the new pavilion next to the 1st XV pitch, under the grandstand, which had huge hot tubs, and was definitely five-star accommodation by comparison.

The day ended with a half-mile walk to the tram, and then a thirty-minute tram journey from one end of Edinburgh to the other, followed by a six hundred-yard walk down my street in Morningside, all done with muddy knees, knowing a hot bath awaited. Eight or nine years old, often in the dark, and almost always on my own, twice a week it became a habit I would repeat throughout my time at school.

No fears, no nasty incidents, no dirty old men lurking in the shadows, no thoughts of them either. They simply didn’t exist; we just looked forward to going home to high tea with our mums and dads. No cars on the road, or very few, and almost a total absence of cars parked at the side of the street.

I returned to my home in Nile Grove a few weeks ago, and there are now parking permits, and not an empty space to be seen. What a different world we live in today. There was no television to go home to, no computer games, no mobile phones, and whilst there was radio, it lacked anything we children wanted to listen to. This is what life was like in 1953, only eight years after the end of the Second World War. The year that sweet rationing ended, and dental decay returned with a vengeance.

So what did we do?

We went straight out into the street where friends from other schools had just returned from their sports fields. We played pick-up football, cricket, dodge ball, and a variety of other games using a tennis ball, more often than not under the street lights, and boy did we learn three things. The first was ball control, the second was climbing garden walls to fetch the many balls that didn’t remain on the street, and the third was running away from a policeman on the beat, who knew exactly where we lived.

The other strange thing I remember clearly was the total lack of obesity. There are lots of different opinions about the shape of far too many of us today, and at the age of seventy-plus I must include myself. What I do know is this: there were absolutely no ready-cooked meals, in fact there were no supermarkets, no fast food outlets, and no snacking between meals. In my home, my mother was on her own all week because my father worked away, and she fed her three children extremely well, if predictably, because money was always in short supply. Monday was leftovers from the Sunday roast lamb, with the meat, potatoes and gravy all heated in a dish. Tuesday was very often ham from a ham hock which had been used to make soup along with lentils, onions and carrots. This soup would then be added to according to what was prepared on other days. The soup became thicker and thicker until you could stand a spoon up in it. We had no refrigerator at this stage, so the soup sat out on the cooker, and I can remember my mother removing the mould before boiling it again! Wednesday was often mutton stew, which was my absolute favourite. Again, mother was making soup and boiling the scrag-end of a neck of mutton, and then picking out the pearls of meat, which I can taste the sweetness of as I write. We would eat this with carrots and potatoes which had been boiling along with the meat. Mince and mashed potatoes and mashed turnip was another midweek favourite. Thursday was often cubed spam in a cheese sauce with hard-boiled eggs, and Friday was either fried fish and chips, or spam, egg and chips, although I do remember being allowed to stay up late as I got older and my father had come home for the weekend. He worked all week in Aberdeen so mother would cook his favourite things. This included mince with a poached egg on top, which was disgusting, or smoked haddock in milk, equally disgusting, or some rice dish which reminded me of vomit so to this day I will not eat risotto, but I, of course, being allowed up late had to pretend to like it.

We should all have hated Donald Hastie and Archie McIntyre, but at that time we were just little boys who were a bit scared and certainly in awe of them. Many of us over sixty years later still hold them in high reverence, for the standards they set us, standards that we wish were still maintained today.

At the end of season 1953/54, and after we had played our first few matches, we were ecstatic to realise that Mr McIntyre was no longer to be our rugby master, and he was to be replaced by a Mr Malcolm Hunter, a younger member of staff who we discovered still played occasionally for the club 1st XV.

Heriot’s FP was one of the top clubs in Scotland along with many other similar old boys’ teams, coupled with similar sides from Glasgow and town sides from the Borders, such as Melrose, Gala, Hawick and Langholm. They played each other throughout the season for an unofficial championship and Scotland teams were in the main selected from these clubs, with several players from England, nearly all of whom played for London Scottish.

It was, however, out of the frying pan and into the fire, because Malcolm was if anything even more scary than Mr McIntyre. He differently used sarcasm as a weapon, and withering scorn can be the hardest taskmaster of all, but he was to be involved in my rugby throughout the rest of my time at school, and without him I would never have gone on to have the level of success I had.

Malcolm had faith in me when I didn’t have faith in myself and he liaised cleverly with my father to convince me where my best interests lay as a fifteen-year-old who thought he knew best.

The gratitude I have for these three men remains with me today, and it wasn’t only the principles of what playing sporting rugby was all about, but more importantly the life principles they instilled in us. There was never any question of cheating. If you knew you had put a foot in touch (there were no touch judges), you said so, even if it meant not scoring the winning try. It was that kind of an upbringing.

The thing that was drummed into us incessantly was to learn how to tackle ‘properly’. By properly it was the adage, ‘the bigger they come the harder they fall’. There was tackling practice every week at Goldenacre, also in the gymnasium using rubber mats, where we were split into two groups standing in a line facing each other. The whistle would blow, and the person at the end of one line would run down the gap between the two lines of boys and the end person in the other line would have to tackle him. How we all hated that exercise, because it always seemed that you drew the biggest and fastest boy to tackle. All tackles had to be made below the hips as close to the knees as possible, heads had to be on the correct side, into the backside, and we were assured that tackling meant winning, and how wrong that proved to be.

It seemed to me, and most of my friends, that instead of ‘the bigger they come the harder they fall’ it should have read ‘the bigger they come the harder they are to tackle and the more it hurts.’

Rather embarrassingly there is photographic evidence to suggest I never quite got the knack of getting my head behind the backside when tackling on my left shoulder, so it is little wonder I took a number of head knocks during my rugby career.

Looking back over sixty years I feel that the first experience of tackling should have been to tackle someone smaller than yourself, then when confidence had grown begin tackling bigger boys, but not when they were running flat out. Tackling practice frightened some boys, who never recovered, and whose tackling was always suspect right through school. Having been put through the tackling practice ordeal week in, week out it was quite demoralising to discover we had essentially been told fairy stories about how tackling won matches. This theory had one very serious drawback which we came to realise very quickly. Without going into too much detail at this point, the word ‘passing’ comes to mind.

One of the teams we played hadn’t had all the tackling practice, instead they learned how to pass, and this side caused us a lot of heartache and grief.