One evening in October 1993 a knock came at the door of their house. On the doorstep stood 42-year-old Suzy Davis and her partner Tony Sims. They asked if he was Don Hayward, a member of the Lions tour party, and after being invited in, Sims blurted out: ‘Suzy thinks you are her father.’
Indeed he was. Hayward had met Suzy’s birth mother, Iona Potter, for just one night in Dunedin during the tour in 1950. He never knew that the then 29-year-old Potter had become pregnant and given birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Victoria before being put up for adoption and acquiring the name Suzy Davis.
It wasn’t until the age of 35 that Davis began the search for her real parents. Showing all the determination her father had displayed on the field, she spent years patiently combing through records until she found her mother, who had two other children from a subsequent marriage and who confirmed that her father had been a rugby player from Wales, though she could not remember his name.
Davis combed through rugby books and found pictures of the Welsh contingent in the 1950 Lions. Revealing her story in 1999, she told the Evening Post in Wellington: ‘I remember looking and looking at the photo to work out which one it might be.’
Her birth mother was reluctant to say more about her illicit liaison in 1950, but after she contracted terminal cancer, Iona told Suzy that her only memory of the tall Welshman she had met in Dunedin was that he was a train driver from Pontypool. Armed with this information, Davis tracked down Hayward with the help of sportswriters.
His first reaction was: ‘My God, I have always wanted a daughter.’ A paternity test proved conclusively that he was indeed the father.
For the remaining five-and-a-quarter years of his life, Don Hayward cherished Suzy, and she grew close to the father she had never known. Ironically, for years she had passed his butcher’s shop daily on her way to and from work as a teacher, and had never known that the man behind the counter was her dad. But then, they did things differently in the 1950s.
That tour to New Zealand and Australia would be the last time that the British and Irish Lions would be forced to spend many weeks on a ship travelling back and forth to the southern hemisphere. By the time of the next tour, the age of the passenger aircraft had been well and truly established.
The world was changing and modernizing, and so was the sport of rugby, albeit under much protest and at a snail’s pace.
CHAPTER FOUR ROBIN THOMPSON’S QUALITY STREET GANG South Africa 1955
The 1955 tour to South Africa was the first to see the initial journey south undertaken by air, albeit in a propellor-driven aircraft rather than one of the new-fangled jets of the time. But the accolade of being the first Lion to fly south had gone five years earlier to Lewis Jones, the Welsh full-back who made the then long and hazardous journey to New Zealand to replace George Norton who was injured early in the 1950 tour.
Now known universally as the Lions, the tourists were eagerly awaited in South Africa. Having whitewashed the All Blacks in a four Test series in 1949, and having toured Britain, Ireland and France in 1951–52, completing the Grand Slam against the Five Nations and the Barbarians—Scotland in particular were humiliated 44–0—and losing only one of 31 matches, the Springboks rightly considered themselves to be the champions of the world. Their devoted fans wanted them to prove it against the Lions, while the whole rugby-mad country was simply brimming over with excitement at the arrival of the tourists for the first time in 17 years.
It was also the first tour to be heavily covered by the press, a few of whose representatives, most notably former Lion and all round-sports-man Viv Jenkins, travelled constantly with the party—Jenkins eventually wrote a book about the tour. The first newsreel films of matches were shown in British cinemas, helping to build public awareness of the Lions, while from the likes of Jenkins, Clem Thomas and Cliff Morgan we have been handed down highly readable accounts of the tour. In short, the 1955 tour is the first where most of the action on and off the pitch was well documented.
The captain for the tour was again an Irishman, Robin Thompson of Instonians and Ireland, and though his playing ability was criticized, most notably by Clem Thomas, his quiet assuredness and capacity for hard work were undoubted, while he was desperately unlucky to be injured in the second Test. The vice-captain was the Scottish full-back Angus Cameron, but a knee injury curtailed his contribution. The manager was a large Belfast man, Jack Siggins, who had no hesitation in laying down the law to what was deliberately a young party. Siggins felt that only athletic youthful types would be able to cope with the conditions in South Africa, and discouraged the selectors from picking anyone over the age of 30—he originally wanted 27 as the cut-off age—with only Trevor Lloyd of Maesteg and Wales being past his 30th birthday.
Bryn Meredith of Newport was the first-choice hooker in the squad. He recalled:
There were great players like Jack Kyle, Jack Matthews and Bleddyn Williams who could have played, but the manager didn’t want anyone over the age of 30. He made his decision and that was the end of that. But we still had a team of great quality.
Personally, I was surprised to be chosen. When you start off you never think you’re good enough for your village side, then you never think you’re good enough for your country and who was I to think I was good enough for the Lions?
I was a schoolmaster at the time and how else was I ever going to go abroad to play rugby? So when I heard I was selected I was always going to go and that was that, even though I was just married at the time, and my wife Betty had to go and live with her parents while I was away. It can’t have been too bad for her—we’re still together all these years later.
The result of the age limit was that young stars emerged and made themselves famous on that tour, with the two best known being Cliff Morgan of Wales and Tony O’Reilly of Ireland. The former would become a much-loved broadcaster and senior figure in the BBC, while the latter, who celebrated his 19th birthday on the tour, became a very wealthy businessman and owner of newspapers, who organized, and paid for, reunions of the Lions from his era. The exploits of the handsome and witty O’Reilly as a Lion and afterwards in business could fill a book by themselves, and Bryn Meredith credits the Irishman with helping to maintain the strong squad atmosphere that persists among the surviving 1955 Lions: ‘He is the one that has kept us together, organizing the reunions and taking us to see the 2007 World Cup Final. I don’t think the modern professionals will be doing that sort of thing in years to come—these days they want paid for crossing the road.’
O’Reilly may have been the individual star, but on that 1955 tour the dominant figure was Cliff Morgan, who led by example and brought his keen intelligence to bear on tactics. Dickie Jeeps, one of the great characters of rugby union for nearly 60 years, recalled that he got his place in the Test team, despite being second or third choice scrum-half, because Morgan wanted him alongside:
I hadn’t even played for England by then, but Cliff was a great player and fortunately for me he liked the way I played, passing the ball to the front of him so he could run on to it.
It meant that Trevor Lloyd rarely got a game, and I was so concerned for him that I went to see Jack Siggins to ask that Trevor should play. He just growled ‘I manage this team, not you,’ so it was hard for Trevor as he only played in about five games.
Morgan, the excellent English centre Jeff Butterfield, and O’Reilly were the fulcrum of a superb set of backs whose dashing play impressed their hosts throughout the almost four-month-long tour. Morgan repeatedly gave committed displays of controlling rugby in the No. 10 jersey, while O’Reilly dazzled on the wing or at centre, where he played in the final Test, with the flying Welsh sprinter Gareth Griffiths—a replacement for the injured Arthur Smith—and Cecil Pedlow sharing the wing duties as necessary.
Butterfield had an important role to play