Our Game E-Book

Ron Palenski

• Herausgeber: Mower
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 333

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The year 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the first game of rugby in New Zealand in Nelson; this book will celebrate 150 years of New Zealand's national game, the game more than any other that has helped shape the New Zealand psyche and identity. It will take the form of 150 short stories – stories about the players, the teams, the provinces, the trophies, everything that helped make the game what it is, from the first in the horse and buggy days to the latest in the days of ultra-modern technology. It will talk of players who no one living saw play; and it will talk of players who are recognised wherever they go in the widening rugby world. And who can talk of players and resist speculating who the greatest of all might have been? It's opinions and speculation that make up some of the enduring appeal of the game New Zealanders are (mostly) better at than anyone else.

Leseprobe

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

ISBN e: 978-1-990003-06-6

ISBN m: 978-1-990003-07-3

A Mower Book

Published in 2020 by Upstart Press Ltd

Level 6, BDO Tower, 19–21 Como St, Takapuna 0622

Auckland, New Zealand

Text © Ron Palenski 2020

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Design and format © Upstart Press Ltd 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec tronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Design by CVD Limited www.cvdgraphics.nz

To those who first decided rugby would be New Zealand’s game . . . and those who passed it on.

Introduction

A couple of long manuka branches, one end sharpened and stuck in the ground; another branch serving as a crossbar, lashed to the uprights with strips of flax. Jerseys, coats placed carefully on the ground to mark the lines of touch. Sheep cleared out of the way.

In the towns, the gutters are the touchlines. A chalk line across the road serves as the goal-line. The local cop frowns at posts in the middle of the road so no goals. Only tries count. If cars approach, the move stops until they’re gone then the move resumes.

At the city’s big rugby ground, the groundsman is out at first light marking out the white lines, pushing what looks like a lawnmower with a paint pot on top. The scoreboard is made ready. The home team name, painted in white on black-painted plywood, goes up first. Then one that just says ‘Visitors’. At some more sophisticated grounds, the actual team name is used.

In a hotel somewhere, players gather for lunch. They don’t talk much; just eat and wait for the time the coach or the captain stands and tells them what’s required of them that afternoon. The words are simple and straightforward but heartfelt. There’s no St Crispin’s Day speeches, no ‘From this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered’.

Players file into the sheds, putting bags down at their usual spots, then outside for a sniff of the air, a look at the ground, toss a bit of turf in the air to test the wind. Then back inside. The slow ritual of dressing for the arena. Some don their knight’s armour in a specific order — right sock, left sock, jersey. Others don’t bother. Some seek a rub from the masseur, who’s probably the butcher during the week, others just slap a bit of oil of wintergreen on their legs themselves. For most, the boots go on last. They stamp down on the concrete, just to make sure all is well. If they have to wait, they jog up and down on the spot; when the whole team does it, it sends shivers down rugby spines.

The referee, clad all in white, pokes his head in the door. ‘Okay, time to go,’ he might say.

Out into the wintry sunlight. Out into the roar. Or perhaps just polite applause. The game is to begin. The game’s the thing.

That’s rugby. Times, fashions, attitudes and demands change, the boy who plays in the street could grow up to be the focus of all eyes on the international arena; those who play in the back paddock could one day find themselves at Twickenham or Murrayfield or any of the other great rugby venues around the world.

Rugby is New Zealand’s game. It has been for at least 150 years, probably for a year or two longer. Other sports were first organised around the same time in New Zealand, a period when the reach of the railways and the telegraph made people more aware of what else was happening in their land. But no other developed quite like rugby, no other captured such a hold on a young country that it was never to be loosened.

You can pick a country’s game when driving. You see the playing fields and you know what sports are played there. The soccer goalposts in most countries. The four upright posts in Australia that denote their unique game. Baseball diamonds in the United States. Rugby goalposts. You see them more in New Zealand; perhaps only Wales could match it.

Rugby also has a hidden element, a part that goes beyond the television and radio coverage, the acres that used to be in newspapers and which now gets spread around online. The hidden part is the knowledge that a great many New Zealanders have of the game and how they love getting together to learn more or to share their knowledge. There are grown-ups who take pride in being able to name every member of a touring side from their youth; there are others who can remember scores. Eras define their memories. Older people may talk nostalgically of 1956 or 1959 or the golden era of the 1960s; younger ones have their recall conditioned by the professional era, who talk proudly of having seen Jonah Lomu. Some people live in houses crammed with rugby memorabilia; others have rooms devoted to All Blacks players’ jerseys they’ve bought.

New Zealand provincial government was abolished in 1876 but provincial parochialism continues to define rugby followers. There are those who recall great eras for their provincial teams and even more remember great players and are blinkered to the claims of others.

And it’s not just a man’s game. Never was. Mothers, sisters, girlfriends followed their males and followed their game; some more passionately than the men. Find the oldest photo of a rugby crowd and chances are there will be women in the crowd. Some clubs and provincial unions used to have special seating areas for women, so as to protect them from the rougher, rowdier elements. Young women probably played the game informally from the beginning; there certainly was an attempt to form a women’s professional team in the nineteenth century, long before men had the same idea.

Rugby is a game of the people, unlike in some countries. Whether left wing or right, socialist or capitalist, labourer or lawyer, it’s all the same to rugby. As a chief justice, Sir Richard Wild, said when speaking at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Zealand union, ‘There’s no yielding to status in a rugby tackle, there’s no privilege in a scrum.’

To many New Zealanders, the much-quoted words of John Mulgan still ring true: ‘Rugby football was the best of all our pleasures.’

What follows are 150 stories on aspects of New Zealand rugby; if there’s a heavy emphasis on the All Blacks, that’s because the country emphasises the All Blacks. They are the pinnacle. They are the apex of the pyramid whose base is all New Zealanders.

First game

A small advertisement appeared in the Wanganui Herald on 2 June 1869: ‘Foot-Ball Match’, it said. ‘Country v Town. Town accepts the Country’s Challenge, provided the Rugby Rules are attended to. Game to commence at 2 o’clock pm on Saturday, 12th inst. 2 June 1869.’

It’s the first known indication of rugby being played in New Zealand. The game was postponed from 12 June and eventually took place the following week, with both the Herald and its tri-weekly contemporary, the Chronicle, reporting on it (and others later in the year).

The Herald, the paper founded by later prime minister John Ballance, reported: ‘a football match was going on between fifteen of the town and same number of the country. The match was very well contested and after two hours hard kicking was withdrawn, rain and darkness coming on. The match will be resumed on Saturday week.’

It was clear rugby rules were ‘attended to’, as the advertisement wanted, by the Chronicle’s report: ‘The foot-ball match on Saturday was not terminated when night-fall brought the game to a termination. The country side, however, seemed to have the best of it, having had the ball in the neighbourhood of their goal for some considerable time, but were unable to kick it over the horizontal bar. The match is thus postponed for a fortnight.’

Other references indicated rugby rather than one of the other football versions common for the time. In one game, the Country boys ‘had the advantage in weight, which was counterbalanced by the pluck and splendid play of the Town boys’.

This undermines the orthodoxy that the first game of rugby in New Zealand was played in Nelson in 1870. Here was clear evidence that Wanganui was there first. Nelson had the advantage of its local paper listing the players involved in its first game in 1870, and these were later reproduced in Arthur Swan’s History of New Zealand Rugby Football. Swan said the first game in Wanganui was in 1872, three years later. But further evidence of Wanganui’s rugby primacy came from Tom Eyton, the part-promoter and advance man for the Natives’ odyssey of 1888–89. He wrote in his account of that tour that he had played in a match, Armed Constabulary against Wanganui, in 1871.

There were also reports of Irish regiments of the British Army stationed in New Zealand during the 1860s playing ‘football’, but there was no indication of which version. The 18th Regiment of Foot was said to have played a game in Wellington in 1868 but by which rules was not specified; the 18th was also stationed in Wanganui and was the last British regiment in New Zealand.

Primary evidence from the Wanganui Herald.

Monro doctrine

Charles John Monro introduced rugby to Nelson in 1870, no question. But whether his innovative act was the first game in New Zealand, or whether the game spread outwards from Nelson, is open to considerable question.

As we’ve seen, there is evidence of a game in Wanganui in 1869; there is no evidence that what happened in Nelson influenced footballers in places such as Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin to adopt rugby rules.

Towns then were dots on a map not always connected; railways were in their infancy, overland travel otherwise was by foot, horse or horse-drawn coach; the super-highway of the day, the telegraph, was still developing. Most travel was by ship and letters from, say, Auckland to Christchurch often went via Sydney, Melbourne or Hobart. New Zealand in the 1860s and 70s was a frontier society. While there were newspapers in most places, they were largely confined to their own areas reporting their own news or what they could clip from papers brought by ship.

Monro came back from Christ’s College in North London and told the young men of Nelson about the version of football played according to rules evolved at Rugby School. Hitherto they, like boys elsewhere in New Zealand, played different versions of football — some played Association (soccer), some Australian rules, some the rules of other English public schools. Some games were a mixture of rules; for example, half one version and half another.

The first game of rugby in Nelson was between Nelson College Old Boys and ‘Town’ and was played at the Nelson Botanical Reserve on 14 May 1870. A team of Nelson boys went to Wellington later in the year and played there too.

In 1904, a week after the All Blacks’ first test in New Zealand, Monro recalled the Wellington venture: ‘How we did enjoy ourselves, both victors and vanquished, and how little we thought in those remote times that football would one day become the great national game of the colony or that . . . some of us would form part of that vast multitude who on Saturday last cheered themselves hoarse when a crack team from England was so signally defeated by our successors and fellow countrymen.’

1875 and all that

William Wills Robinson, more often published as W.W. Robinson, and known to some as ‘Captain Billy’, deserves more credit in the development of rugby in New Zealand than he generally receives. Generally, he receives none.

But Robinson was of profound influence in the 1870s when rugby gained precedence over various forms of football in the Auckland area. By Robinson’s own account, he drafted rugby rules from memory in 1871, supplementing his memory with an 1865 Lillywhite’s Guide. Teams in Auckland and Thames gradually took on rugby.

An Auckland cricket team (which Robinson captained) toured New Zealand in 1873 and he and leading rugby players decided rugby should follow suit, and they did so in 1875. Their first game was against Otago and this is generally acknowledged as the first interprovincial match.

Its greater significance was that the main football clubs in Dunedin, Dunedin and Union, which hitherto had played Association or Victorian rules, switched to rugby so they could give Auckland a game. They never switched back. The Aucklanders also played Christchurch Football Club, which had switched to rugby rules earlier in 1875 so they could play South Canterbury, who were captained by Alfred Hamersley, who had played four times for England, once as captain. A year later, Canterbury went north and played Auckland, also captained by Robinson, for the first time.

Robinson’s role is at odds with the view that rugby radiated out from Nelson. Given the poor communication of the time, it seems probable that like-minded people organised rugby wherever they were, heedless or ignorant of what had happened in Wanganui in 1869 or Nelson in 1870.

Robinson’s actions, according to his own words, bear that out. But it was also a theory favoured by an early Wellington player and lawyer with a history bent, Edmund Bunny. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote, ‘there is no one who can claim to have been the father of rugby football in New Zealand. Each district in New Zealand developed its own organisation and no doubt there were one or two especially active players who were responsible for the origin and development of the game in each district.’

Robinson wrote a book, Rugby Football in New Zealand — Its Development from Small Beginnings, in 1905 based on articles he had written in the Pall Mall Gazette. Robinson, who was born in Birmingham on 17 June 1847, died in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, on 14 September 1929.

Early blue

The annual match between Oxford and Cambridge universities, usually known just as the Varsity Match, is a British sporting institution with a status not much below that of the Boat Race. New Zealanders have been frequent players, with Chris Laidlaw captaining Oxford and the Blaikie brothers, John and Duncan, who both played for the Highlanders, captaining Cambridge.

New Zealand also had influence in the earliest days. Before the Varsity Match in 1929, a writer in The Times looked back on the 1875 match as one of great significance: it was the first time teams were fifteen-a-side (leading to internationals following suit), it was the first time that a goal was not required to win a match (just tries would do), and it was the last time Cambridge played in pink (their blue came the following year). The paper also noted that the 1875 game featured an Australian for the first time, contrary to an ingrained belief that Charles Gregory Wade became the first Australian in 1890 (he was Greg in his playing days and when he became a politician back home, he was Charles). The Times was sort of right.

The man in question was James Allen, who was born in Adelaide, but his mother died soon after his birth and father James took him to New Zealand. Young James also played in the Varsity Match in 1876. He had two spells of education in England, at St John’s Cambridge and later at the School of Mines, but otherwise he was in New Zealand. He captained Otago in 1882 in the two games he played for the province (the second of which was against New South Wales, the first overseas visitors). He was later president of the Otago union (and presided when Pat Keogh, one of the great nineteenth-century players, was banned for betting on a match in which he played).

Allen became a Member of Parliament and was defence minister during the First World War and frequently acting prime minister when William Massey was on lengthy visits to London or the peace conference in Paris. Allen was in effect New Zealand’s wartime leader. He was knighted in 1917. He became high commissioner to the United Kingdom in 1920 and was often with the 1924 All Blacks when they toured Britain and Ireland. He was part of the official entourage when royalty were introduced to the All Blacks and he presided at the end-of-tour functions at which two loving cups were presented.

Footy to the rescue

When Canterbury went south to Dunedin to play Otago in 1878, the players probably expected that travelling on the newly laid railway line was novelty enough.

But it became a footy trip to remember when they stopped in Timaru on the way back and could see drama unfolding out at sea. About an hour or so earlier, a fierce squall had whipped up the waves and five vessels anchored offshore were being tossed about.

When the players’ train hissed to a stop, they could see that a couple of the boats had parted from their anchor cables and one had already washed up on the beach. Crew were being thrown around in the pounding surf.

As a story in the Timaru Herald said, ‘now came the time for those on shore to show the stuff they were made of’.

Several of the players plunged into the raging waters and among them was William Varnham Millton, a promising young lawyer who was to become the founding treasurer of the Canterbury Rugby Union and who also played cricket for Canterbury. His teammates called him ‘Scruffy’, a nickname from his days at Christ’s College.

A later report said of him: ‘The dauntless fashion in which he plunged again and again into the boiling surf full of broken spars and wreckage to save life was not more marked than the perfect silence which he afterwards kept of his share in the day’s events.’

Just under six years later, the silent hero Millton captained the first New Zealand team, one that was chosen by the Otago, Canterbury, Wellington and Auckland unions and which toured Australia as a reciprocal visit for the first by New South Wales two years before.

This team gained retrospective status as the first All Blacks — though their jersey was blue with a gold fernleaf — and survivors were given caps by the New Zealand union in the 1920s.

Millton was not among them. He died of typhoid three years after the tour, aged twenty-nine. (By a cruel coincidence, the captain of the first New South Wales team to visit New Zealand, Ted Raper, also died of typhoid, and didn’t live to see the first New Zealand team in Australia.)

William Millton’s younger brother, Edward Bowler Millton, was also in the 1884 team. When he died in 1942, his estate was left to the Sunlight League ‘for the health, education and welfare of Canterbury children’. The E.B. Millton Charitable Trust still exists.

William Varnham Millton

Longest tour

It was rugby’s longest tour. By the time the New Zealand Natives got to Auckland for their last match in August 1889, it was a case of last men standing.

Since June the previous year, in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, they’d played 119 matches, twelve of those in the unfamiliar Australian rules against some of Melbourne’s leading clubs.

For this exhausting odyssey, they had just twenty-six players and for many matches, because of injuries and fatigue, they had just the bare fifteen available. For some games, they couldn’t even field fifteen. Along the way, local players were sometimes borrowed to make up the numbers.

This incredible tour was conceived and in large part organised by Joe Warbrick, an outstanding player of the period who had made his debut for Auckland when just fifteen. His original idea had been to choose a Maori side to play the visiting British team, the first from beyond Australia to tour New Zealand.

But that didn’t prove possible for unstated reasons, most likely financial, so Warbrick extended his horizon and thought if they couldn’t play the British in New Zealand, they’d have a go at them over there.

With the assistance of Tom Eyton, a Taranaki man who had played football with the Armed Constabulary, he set about organising a tour, the like of which rugby had not seen before and has not seen since. He also enlisted the help of a Gisborne publican, Jimmy Scott.

In one of the early games, against Auckland, Warbrick broke an ankle and, already worried about playing strength, decided to enlist some non-Maori. He adroitly changed the name to New Zealand Natives in the belief all players were native-born, that is, born in New Zealand. That wasn’t so, but they became and remained the Natives.

Some of the Natives were of the highest quality: Tom Ellison, one of the great thinkers of the game in the nineteenth century; Dick Taiaroa, brother of Jack who’d played for the 1884 New Zealand team; Davy Gage was something of a Billy Wallace of his day, popping up in various positions; Pat Keogh, one of the ring-ins, was years later described as the best back in New Zealand in his time. Warbrick had four brothers or half-brothers with him on tour, and three Wynyard brothers were also in the squad.

Once it was known they’d also be playing Australian rules games, they enlisted the assistance of a Melbourne coach, Jack Lawlor, whose contribution was more a drain on finances than an aid to performance.

The Natives set the tone for much of the touring to follow, as well as seeing their black jersey with the silver fernleaf become the official garb of the New Zealand union when it was formed three years after the tour.

The New Zealand Natives of 1888–89 . . . the longest tour. Frank Marshall – Football – The Rugby Game

Ladies first

More than a century before rugby took the momentous step in 1995 of abandoning its amateur ethos, a small group of New Zealand women did the same thing. In 1891, when women’s football was hardly considered, an Oamaru-born Aucklander, Nita Webbe, placed advertisements in newspapers around the country calling for young women to take up the game. The idea was to form two teams and take them round the country and to Australia, playing each other in exhibition matches (and with the idea of inspiring yet more women to take up the game).

She planned to pay her players 10 shillings a week (about $85 today). According to the Auckland Star, Webbe had thirty women in training and they ‘have already obtained a fair degree of proficiency in manipulating the leather’. But the newspaper’s editorial writer thought women were ‘constitutionally unfitted’ for rugby and such games would be ‘essentially unwomanly’.

Webbe wrote to the paper, pointing out the increasing areas open to women (and, in two years, women in New Zealand would become the first in the world to have the right to vote). ‘Strict observance to the rules will be enforced and when they play in public I am confident that the verdict will be not only that there has not been the slightest breach of propriety, but that a cleverer game has seldom been seen here,’ Webbe insisted.

But it was not to be.

About a month later, newspapers reported the scheme had been abandoned and the weekly Observer recorded, without further explanation, ‘a certain action for damages having broken down, the projected team of female footballers has come to nought’. That led to an assumption that neither Webbe nor her husband, Frederick Cleaver Webbe, had the money to carry the idea through. As the men’s game would discover in the 1970s and 80s, promises of payment in the game were difficult to back up with delivery.

So the embryonic women players trained but didn’t play.

Women or girls would undoubtedly have joined in games at picnics or fairs, but the first known game involving only women was at Newtown Park in Wellington in 1915. The women played at halftime of a men’s match in a day of sport on 12 June 1915 to raise money for the Wounded Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Fund. Though the game was necessarily brief, it was rugby. The referee, May du Chateau, was a daughter of one All Black, Harry Roberts, and the sister of another, Teddy Roberts. ‘After much excitement,’ the Evening Post remarked, ‘the match ended in a draw, each side scoring an unconverted try.’

A union formed

A Yorkshireman, a Lowland Scot and a Highland Scot, an Irishman from Cork, an Aucklander whose family came from Londonderry and County Mayo, and three other native-born colonials sat around a table at the Club Hotel in central Wellington on a Saturday night, 16 April 1892. Each of them became a midwife to the birth of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union.

They had been urged to attend by Denny Hoben, a red-haired Aucklander of Irish extraction, a journalist whose burning ambition was to form a national rugby union. He’d lived in Hawke’s Bay and Wellington, had managed the Hawke’s Bay team, was friends with many players, and knew the difficulties of organising rugby without a national body. He moved the motion that the NZRFU be formed and an Auckland-born saddler, Henry Joseph Haliday, seconded.

The other two native-born colonials, George Campbell, a government auditor, and Tom Newth, a Manawatu carpenter who played in the local brass band, were in favour. So too was Barney Ronaldson, a public trustee who had been born in Cork, and the Yorkshireman, dentist Bert Ginders.

But the two Scots, William Deans Milne born in Ontario of Aberdeenshire parents, and Thomas Smith Marshall, the Canterbury union secretary who had been born in Greenock, said no. The ayes had it. Letters of support had been received from Nelson, Wanganui and Marlborough unions.

The union was formed without Canterbury, Otago and Southland (they joined three years later). Essentially, the southern unions did not like the idea of being ruled from Wellington. Milne, a promising lawyer, said a national union would undermine the self-government of the provincial unions.

The eight men who made such a portentous decision for New Zealand rugby had an average age of twenty-seven, the oldest being Ronaldson, thirty-five, and the youngest, Ginders, who was just nineteen.

Hoben, who was a political and music writer for the Evening Post in Wellington, had toured the country the year before with his brother Sydney, a concert pianist, encouraging support for a national union. He became its founding (unpaid) secretary and for the next four years worked to get Otago, Canterbury and Southland to join, then tried unsuccessfully to form an Australasian union with New South Wales and Queensland. Hoben left in 1896 to take up a job on the weekly Sydney Mail; he worked back in New Zealand early in the twentieth century, then moved to Melbourne where he died in 1918.

Ellison walkabout

About seventy-five years before Keith Murdoch sought anonymity in the Australian hinterland, one of New Zealand rugby’s leading men of the nineteenth century may have done the same.

Tom Ellison was an innovative thinker on and off the field: he was a member of the 1888–89 Natives on their two-hemisphere odyssey and, when home, he adapted a position he’d seen into the wing forward, which became a distinguishing feature of the New Zealand game until 1932. He was a Wellington delegate to the first annual meeting of the NZRFU and successfully moved that the Natives’ jersey of black with a silver fern become the national team uniform and, fittingly, he captained the first team to wear it, in Australia in 1893.

Ellison after his playing days was a man of substance. He was a lawyer with chambers in central Wellington, seeking justice on ill-gotten Maori land his main specialty; he was a licensed native interpreter, as they were known, and he was owner of several properties. He was a Wellington rugby selector and played cricket in the summer; he was also a wrestler of some repute and a golfer. He was well liked and mixed in the Maori and Pakeha worlds with ease.

But in 1895 he was arrested and charged with procuring an abortion at the same time as a husband and wife were arrested for performing the illegal operations. The case dragged on for months; the chief abortionist was eventually convicted and jailed for eighteen years but they refused to implicate Ellison and the charge against him was dismissed.

A few months later, a paragraph appeared in a Hastings paper saying that Ellison was in Menzies in a remote area of Western Australia (about 700 km east of Perth) and had played a game there. The story gave no source, but it might have come from Ellison’s cousin, Jack Taiaroa, the 1884 All Black who was a lawyer in Hastings. It was repeated, again without attribution, a few days later in the Evening Post in Wellington. On 19 June 1896, a newspaper in Perth reported that Ellison was going to coach the Fremantle team. But he was back in Wellington later in the year because he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. His reputation was clearly not diminished because he was talked of as being manager of the 1905–06 New Zealand team, but he died the year before that tour. One of his obituaries recalled him as ‘one of the finest exponents of football in Australasia — perhaps in the world’.

Tom Ellison

Death roll

A popular wing, Barney Armit, was paralysed as a result of a tackle in a match in Dunedin in August 1899. He lingered in hospital for about three months until he died, the first All Black to die as the result of injury in a game.

Two more were to follow.

Alexander McNaughton Armit, born at Inverkeithing in Scotland in 1874, played nine matches for New Zealand in Australia in 1897. The fatal tackle came two years later, on 26 August 1899, when he was playing for Otago against Taranaki. The tackler was Alf Bayly, who captained the All Blacks on Armit’s one tour and who was later president of the New Zealand union.

Between the tackle and the death, there were various reports about what happened and Armit himself, paralysed from the neck down, said Bayly was not to blame. Two versions dominated at the inquest: one that Armit crashed to the ground while trying to hurdle Bayly; the other that Bayly upended Armit and dropped him. The coronial jury’s verdict was: ‘That deceased died from injury received in a football match, that the occurrence was purely accidental, and that no blame attaches to anyone.’ Bayly was reported to have played just once more for Taranaki after the Otago game.

An Auckland forward, Bert Palmer, an All Black in 1928, 1929 and 1932, died from a head injury sustained in a club match in September 1932. He was playing for Otahuhu when he went down after his head hit the hip of a University player, Norman Jenkin. He was taken to a private hospital, then to Auckland Hospital where he underwent surgery. But he never regained consciousness. The All Blacks, Otahuhu and his former club Ponsonby were represented by pallbearers at his funeral. At the inquest a couple of days later, various players described the game as being normal and Jenkin said there was nothing unusual about Palmer’s tackle. The coroner ruled Palmer died from a cerebral haemorrhage.

Fifty-two years later, in 1994, another popular All Black died as a result of injury. Nicky Allen, an All Black in 1980 described as a supernova by captain Graham Mourie, was playing in a club match at Port Kembla, a suburb of Wollongong in New South Wales, when he was tackled and fell back, his head hitting the ground. He had had a history of head injuries. Allen, in a coma, was taken to the city hospital where he died.

Foreign coach

The concept of a foreign coach is a relatively modern one, rugby following soccer’s lead — as it often has — by going beyond national borders for a coach. New Zealand and South Africa among leading countries haven’t done it yet, but most countries have at some stage had coaches from somewhere else.

Many of the foreigners have been New Zealanders — Graham Henry and Steve Hansen with Wales, Warren Gatland with Ireland and Wales, and others of lesser profiles. Robbie Deans goes on the list for having coached Australia from 2008 until 2013 and frequently is referred to as the Wallabies’ first foreign coach.

But no. The first time an Australian team took the field, in 1899, the coach was a New Zealander.

William Warbrick was the second youngest of the five brothers/stepbrothers who went on the long 1888–89 Natives’ tour, and who later played for both Queensland and New South Wales. He was a boatbuilder and prominent in football in Sydney when Matthew Mullineux led his British team to Australia in 1899. When the first Australian test team was named, the Sydney Morning Herald said it would be training that afternoon and ‘Mr W Warbrick will supervise the work’.

So he was a coach by function if not by name. Not only did he coach the first Australians, he was also a touch judge in the first match (the other was Blair Swannell, who played for both Great Britain and Australia). And just to complete the unusual facts of that first test, the referee was also a New Zealander, William (‘Gun’) Garrard from Christchurch, who thus became the first southern hemisphere neutral referee.

Jim Gleeson, a member of the first New Zealand league team in 1907 and its de facto manager, recalled in the 1930s the influence Billy Warbrick had had. Warbrick, he wrote, used to frequently call into the central Sydney office of the weekly sports paper, the Referee, and talk over games of the past and the future. ‘What a knowledge of rugby Billy Warbrick had,’ Gleeson wrote. ‘It was an education in the scientific side of the game and a rare privilege to listen to his dissertation on how games had been lost and won and how they would be fought out a few days’ hence. He was one of the generals of rugby.’

Warbrick didn’t live long to enjoy his newfound status as Australian coach. He developed consumption (tuberculosis) and returned home to die, settling back on family land in Bay of Plenty only a few weeks before his death on 28 October 1901, aged thirty-five. Four of the Warbrick boys died young — he was first, followed by Arthur, who drowned in 1902; then Joe, killed by a geyser in 1903; then Frederick, also of consumption, who died in 1904.

A fractional change

Ever wonder why New Zealand rugby has first and second five-eighths and the rest of the world doesn’t?

The answer, as with many quirks of the game, resides in the nineteenth century during rugby’s formative years. It apparently happened after an annual match between the Dunedin club, Alhambra, and Merivale of Christchurch in 1891. Jim Baker, an Alhambra and Otago forward, recorded that Jim McCleary, a noted rugby tactician of the day, introduced the new position, though it was given its name by Baker.

McCleary, the father of 1924 All Black Brian McCleary, wanted to try a new experiment in the Alhambra backs to confuse Merivale. He told Billy Johnston, a well-known Otago footballer and cricketer, to move out of the scrum when Alhambra were inside the Merivale twenty-five, and to make himself as useful as he could among the backs.

After the game, won by Alhambra, one of the Merivale men asked: ‘Where did that extra man come from? He wasn’t a halfback and he wasn’t a three-quarter.’

To which Baker replied: ‘If he’s not a halfback and not a three-quarter, then he must be a five-eighth.’

The name — and the tactic — stuck and soon other provinces adopted what they saw as a winning advantage, and island and national teams followed suit.

As much as World Rugby, the former International Rugby Board, has tried to bring uniformity into the game, especially since the end of the amateur era, it has failed to impose on the world one set of positional names. To most New Zealanders, a first five-eighth is precisely that (even if it’s often misspelt ‘five-eight’), but a second five-eighth often gets labelled as a second centre, which he’s not, or the nebulous, imprecise ‘midfield’. While we stick to ours, others stick to theirs: the position has more names than any other in rugby — flyhalf, standoff, outhalf, demi d’ouverture, quite apart from literal translations into any number of other languages.

Coaches and commentators in the modern game have tried to overcome this plethora by simply calling the player in the position ‘the ten’, just as they refer to halfbacks (or the scrumhalf) as ‘the nine’. That’s all very well in the modern jargon but could be confusing if used retrospectively. In the old numbering system, ‘the ten’ used to be ‘the six’ and ‘the nine’ used to be ‘the seven’. And when tour numbers, usually derived from an alphabetical list of players, were worn, it was entirely likely for the first-five to be ‘the twenty-two’ or any other number between one and thirty.

The first test

A day worthy of noting on the international rugby calendar is 15 August, because it was on that day in 1903 that New Zealand played its first test, against Australia in Sydney. Previous matches had been intercolonial affairs against New South Wales and Queensland. (Australia became a nation and the separate colonies became states on 1 January 1901.)

This was the day New Zealand and Australia met for the first time in a test match. It was a 22–3 win for the All Blacks and people as long as their memories lasted recalled the 1903 side as being worthy to rank with the 1905 and 1924 teams.

The Australians began their test history with four matches against a Great Britain team in 1899, even though an Australian union was not formed until 1949. For the single match in 1903, the Australians were selected by two from the New South Wales union (Harry Wood and Jim Henderson) and one from Queensland (Fred Lea) and played in the light blue jerseys of New South Wales.

One report had a crowd of 30,000 at the Sydney Cricket Ground to watch New Zealand have a decisive win, so decisive that it left some Australian reporters despairing about whether their country would ever be good enough. ‘It seems almost impossible,’ one said, ‘for Australia to put a side into the field with any hope of victory.’

The test was part of an eleven-match tour, during which New Zealand lost only once — and that was in a shakedown match against Wellington before the All Blacks crossed the Tasman. One of the All Blacks forwards, George Nicholson, later said: ‘The 1903 All Blacks that toured Australia — that’s the best team I ever saw or played with . . .’ (Nicholson was a member of the 1905–06 team in the northern hemisphere.)

The weekly Sydney Mail took a gloomy view after this historic encounter: ‘It seems hopeless to expect to ever score a substantial victory over the Maorilanders,’ it said. ‘A suitable climate and a longer season have made New Zealand the headquarters of rugby in the southern hemisphere . . . we could, with, say, annual meetings look forward to considerable improvement in our method of playing rugby.’ That improvement didn’t take long. New Zealand and Australia drew one test in 1907 and the Wallabies beat the All Blacks for the first time in 1910.

The New Zealand captain in this first test was Jimmy Duncan, a five-eighth from Otago who was the only survivor of the previous tour, in 1897. He was later coach of the 1905–06 team in the United Kingdom, Ireland and France.

Part of the Sydney Mail’s coverage of the first test.

Billy the Brave

The Victoria Cross, the supreme award in the Commonwealth for acts of bravery in the face of the enemy, was awarded seventy-eight times during the Boer War between 1899 and 1902. One of them was to a New Zealand trooper, William James Hardham, who had rescued a wounded mate under fire. It was the first VC to go to a New Zealander.

Twelve New Zealanders were ordered to charge a kopje (small hill) where Boer fighters were holed up. Hardham rode about forty or fifty metres ahead of others in an advance guard and he happened to look around and notice that the horse of one of the other troopers, John McRae, had been shot from under him, leaving McRae on the ground and no chance of getting clear.

According to the citation in the London Gazette