CHAPTER THREE KARL MULLEN’S HAPPY BAND Australia and New Zealand 1950
In the immediate post-war period, Great Britain, and to a lesser extent Ireland, had rather more to worry about than rugby. It was a time of strict austerity, and rationing still applied to many ordinary everyday items, including meat.
The tight rationing rules apparently did not apply to cigarettes, as the 1950 tourists were given their supply free of charge for the entire duration of the six-month-long tour to Australia and New Zealand in which they played 30 matches, including six Tests. It was to be the last time the Lions travelled by sea to the southern hemisphere. They sailed out on the SS Ceramic via the Panama Canal, and came back also travelling westwards, so it could be said that they sailed around the world just to play rugby. On the way home though, they took a shortcut via the Suez Canal and Mediterranean Sea en route from Sri Lanka, where they had played an unofficial match against a team representing the former Ceylon, before stopping for dinner in Mumbai, then known as Bombay.
More than a few of the players had seen service during the war or had undergone their two years’ mandatory national service in the forces, so they were used to being away from home for long periods. It was nevertheless particularly hard on newly married men or fathers with young children: ‘I had to leave an infant son behind and when I came back he was just so much bigger,’ as one 1950 Lion put it.
Two great characters of rugby and stars of that tour—both now in their late eighties—recently recalled what they were doing in the greatest skirmish of them all: the Second World War. It says a great deal about Dr Jack Matthews and Bleddyn Williams—and indeed all the rugby players who served in the war—that so many were anxious to get back to playing the game after what had been an ‘interesting’ time for them. Jack Matthews, who is now 88, managed to do both war service and national service, as he explained:
I was one of five children, with two sisters and two brothers, both of whom joined the army when war broke out. I was just starting to study medicine, but I wanted to join my brothers in action so I went off to Penarth without telling my parents and joined up as a fighter pilot.
I trained for five months of a six-month course and we were being taught to fly a new type of Spitfire, when my CO came up to me and said ‘Matthews, you’re out.’ I said ‘Beg your pardon, sir, what have I done wrong?’ He explained that they had just heard from the Home Office that I was a medical student, and I was thrown out because it was an exempt profession.
I spent the war qualifying as a doctor in Cardiff, but before I could finish, I was called up for national service. I said ‘Hang on, I’ve already done five months in the RAF, doesn’t that count?’ But Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn-Hughes, who was in charge of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and also ran the Barbarians, persuaded me not to go back to the RAF but to join the RAMC. I was captain of Cardiff at the time, and he was very persuasive in saying I could carry on playing at Cardiff as long as I played for the RAMC in the inter-services Cup. I did, and we won it.
I have a wonderful photograph of Field Marshal Montgomery presenting me with the cup. Funnily enough, I don’t think the RAMC have won it since.
During the war, Matthews kept fit partly by boxing for his medical school side, which travelled to St Athan to meet an RAF select in 1943. On that occasion his opponent was an American ‘guest’ with a knockout reputation—none other than Rocky Marciano, who would later become the only man ever to retire as undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Matthews managed to avoid being stopped by Marciano, something only six of the great fighter’s professional opponents achieved.
Matthews eventually went on to complete his service in medicine with the RAF. His great friend Bleddyn Williams was also in the RAF, serving as a pilot, and performed the unique feat of invading Germany and playing for Great Britain at rugby in the same week.
More than 63 years later, Williams tells the story of the last week in March 1945 with relish:
After Arnhem there was a shortage of glider pilots so they were looking for volunteers from among us surplus pilots for the big push over the Rhine—it was ‘you, you, and you’, the usual way of volunteering, so I became a glider pilot.
I had been picked for the Great Britain side which was due to play the Dominions in one of the morale-boosting international matches that were played occasionally during the war. The match was set for Leicester on the Saturday after I was due to land in Germany, which we duly did early that week in the massive push (Operation Varsity) to get our troops across the Rhine.
On the Friday morning, the day before I was due to play for Great Britain, I was still in the camp in Germany, when my CO, Sir Hugh Bartlett, who later became captain of Sussex county cricket team, said to me ‘Aren’t you supposed to be playing at Leicester tomorrow?’ I replied that indeed I was, but I had been sleeping in a slit trench all week and was looking rather unkempt by then. All he said was ‘Pack your bags’. We were five miles inside Germany at this point, I should add.
I got a ride in a jeep to the Rhine, crossed over in a empty DUKW (amphibious vehicle) and there was another jeep waiting for me on the other side which took me to Eindhoven in Holland where I got a lift in a plane to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. I was stationed in Essex at the time but waiting for me was the CO of the camp who grabbed a spare aircraft and flew me home.
I wasn’t long married at the time and when I presented myself at the door of our digs my wife thought I was a ghostly apparition, because she had been told that there had been very few survivors of the attack. I spent the night, went up by train to Leicester the following morning and I played for Great Britain and scored a try in our victory. War was incidental to rugby football, you see.
With two centres, one of whom had gone the distance with Rocky Marciano and the other who had invaded Germany, how could the 1950 Lions fail? Other former servicemen on the 1950 tour included Billy McKay, who had been a Commando and had served in the bloodiest conflicts in Burma, now Myanmar. Welsh scrum-half Rex Willis had served in the Royal Navy while Scottish captain Peter Kininmonth had seen action in Italy and as recently as 1947 had served on the Northwest frontier in Afghanistan. Ken Jones served as a sergeant in India, and his victory in the All-India Games in 1945 kick-started a sprinting career that saw him run for Britain in the 1948 Olympics and win a silver medal in the sprint relay—almost sacrilegiously for a Lion, he perhaps unsurprisingly recalled the 1948 Olympics as the highlight of his sporting career rather than his touring experiences.
Of such tried and tested stuff were Lions made. The 1950 touring party was the first to be called the Lions by all and sundry, though they were still formally billed as the British Isles Rugby Union Team, and the initials BIRUT appeared on the tour blazer beneath the now accepted emblem of the four home unions’ badges on a quartered shield. A more obvious change—as mentioned earlier—was the adoption of bright red jerseys, prompted by the previous blue colours clashing with the black jersey of New Zealand. The Lions in Red were here to stay.
The manager for the 1950 tour was a distinguished Royal Navy doctor, Surgeon-Captain L.B. ‘Ginger’ Osborne, then a selector for England and later a rear admiral. His good humour coupled with Mullen’s inspirational captaincy made this one of the happiest of tours. Indeed, we know just how pleasant an experience it was from first-hand accounts in a DVD documentary of that 1950 tour called The Singing Lions. ‘With all those Welshmen, what did you expect?’ as Jack Matthews