When rugby returned to a sort of normality after the war, clamour grew for the British and Irish unions to send a touring party to the southern hemisphere again. The next tour would be to South Africa in 1924, and from then on the tourists would bear their immortal name, the Lions.
As with every other activity in the British Empire, after Armistice Day in 1918 the sport of rugby was determined to get back to its usual state as quickly as possible. In 1919, a team from the New Zealand forces triumphed against their opponents in Britain and stopped off to wallop several South African sides on the way home. The Springboks toured New Zealand and Australia in 1921, and the quality of their play was dazzling. But as in so many strands of life in Britain and Ireland, a return to prewar normality was just not possible for rugby in the home countries due to the colossal number of deaths and injuries sustained among a generation of young men.
The number of internationalists killed during the hostilities—30 from Scotland and 27 from England alone—shows the scale of the losses. The worldwide influenza epidemic after the war also took its toll. It was going to take a good few years for a new generation to come through to replace those who had gone.
The political situation in Ireland also caused problems. The 1920 partition of Ireland into the 26 counties of the Free State, later the Republic of Ireland, and the six counties of Northern Ireland, had been mirrored by rugby much earlier. In 1874, the Irish Football Union had been formed from clubs in Leinster, Munster and parts of Ulster, while the Northern Football Union of Ireland, founded in the same year, was an association of clubs centred mainly on Belfast. With Ireland still a single political entity under the control of Westminster at that time, the two associations amalgamated to form the Irish Rugby Football Union in 1879. When partition took place, the IRFU Committee resisted attempts to politicize rugby and took the decision—unpopular in some areas, too—that it would continue to govern the sport in all 32 counties. By and large, and despite many problems down the years, the IRFU has remained united in the cause of rugby for all of the island of Ireland. It remains an intriguing question, given the strong feelings that partition and subsequent ‘Troubles’ have evoked, as to whether the British and Irish Lions would have continued to represent all five nations in these islands had not the IRFU taken that momentous decision to stay united. Certainly, there would have been a lot less fun without all the Irish tourists.
Arguably the greatest damage done to rugby union and to the Lions tours in the inter-war years came from the Great Depression. Money was scarce from the early 1920s onwards, and most players simply could not afford to take months off work, while employers became increasingly reluctant to give even unpaid leave of absence as this meant holding a job open for someone who might return from a tour with a serious injury, which was often the case in years to come. Other players took the money on offer from rugby league and switched codes rather than pursue caps and a tour with the Lions, which was really the only ‘reward’ that rugby union had to offer.
When the Great Depression arrived from 1929 onwards, the situation worsened considerably, and not even a sport that was so resolutely middle-class in most areas of these islands could escape the ravages of economic turmoil. Less damage was done in the southern hemisphere, though in Australia the economic situation probably helped the professional version of the oval ball game, rugby league, to achieve the dominance over union which it still enjoys.
Another problem was that the home unions still did not take the concept of a touring team entirely seriously. Their bread and butter was the international championship, which largely earned the money to bankroll the unions—there were no formal leagues in those days, and no television riches, and the Five Nations matches were for a long time the principal earners of cash. No one had any money left over to invest in a tour that was still seen as a luxury.
These problems meant that in the 21 years between the wars, just three Lions tours took place, compared to four in eight years between 1903 and 1910 inclusive. The first post-war tour to South Africa in 1924 may have been disappointing in terms of results—they were the first tourists to have a win record of less than 50 per cent—but at least they did return with a priceless asset.
No one seems entirely sure where the name ‘Lions’ came from. The official branding of the 1924 party and indeed subsequent parties was the British Isles Rugby Union Team, or BIRUT. The biruts? Fortunately, some ties made for the tourists had been embroidered with three lions—a heraldic device that bears a strong resemblance to the badge of the English football (soccer) team.
The lions did not appear on the blue jerseys worn by the players in matches, and photographs quite clearly show that, for the 1924 Tests at any rate, the jersey badge was, as now, made up of the insignia of the four unions quartered on a shield. But the lions on the ties made an impression, and perhaps it was some bright spark in the party, maybe even the captain Dr Ronald Cove-Smith himself, who first suggested that the tourists were all lions. Or perhaps it was some long-forgotten press correspondent who wrote of ‘the lions’, and the name stuck, not least because it was so much better journalistically than ‘the biruts’.
Some officials in the various Celtic unions thought it was a bit presumptuous to use a symbol traditionally associated with England—Scotland’s single lion is rampant, not couchant. Protests were made by administrators, but, for once, player power counted. The newly minted Lions were not unhappy with the nickname, even those from Ireland and Wales, whose emblems were a shamrock and a dragon respectively. By the time the 1930 tour came round, the nickname was so well established that the blue playing jersey was embroidered with three lions, just like the English football badge, and players were given a plentiful supply of lion brooches and pins to hand out to their hosts.
Dr Cove-Smith’s Lions should have been the best ever to leave these islands. England had won the Grand Slam that year, their third in four seasons, and Scotland would do so the following year, and both those sides contained players who are now legends of the game. But in fact British and Irish rugby had fallen well behind the standards of the southern hemisphere teams, as would be proven when the All Blacks toured England, Wales, Ireland, France and Canada in late 1924 and early 1925, playing and winning four Tests and completing the 32-match tour unbeaten—hence their nickname of The Invincibles. The two tours overlapped slightly, but there was enough time between the final Test in South Africa and the Tests against the All Blacks for the Lions to arrive home and prepare themselves for another beating, this time in their own national colours rather than in the blue jersey of the British Isles Rugby Union Team.
On a tour that, at one point, saw the Lions go eight matches without a win, the South Africans were to hand out rugby lesson after rugby lesson. The touring party was missing great players like Wavell Wakefield—later the first Baron Wakefield of Kendal, and the father of modern forward play as well as captain of England’s Grand Slam winners—and G.P.S. ‘Phil’ Macpherson, who would skipper Scotland to their first Slam the following year. But that was no excuse, as the full squad of 30, which included two replacements, contained 24 past, current or future internationalists.
There were horrendous injury problems, however, many caused by the concrete-like surfaces of some of the South African pitches. Arthur Young, perhaps the finest scrum-half of the era and lynch-pin of England’s Grand Slam side, missed three of the Tests, while W.S. Gainsford was injured in the opening training session and sat out the entire tour. Ian Smith, the Australian-born Scottish winger who set an international record of 24 tries that stood until David Campese beat it, played only two Tests. Some players, such as Roy Kinnear—later a Scotland international and Great Britain rugby league cap, and father of the late well-known comic actor of the same name—managed to play in all four Tests, as did fellow Scottish cap Neil McPherson.
McPherson’s story is illuminating about the attitude of