Perhaps if we had been able to stay in the game after injury brought our playing careers to an end we might have helped to prevent England, the country that gave the game to the world, becoming so distrusted. It is bad enough that everybody wants to beat England; our scalp is more prized than that of any other country, with a passion. But it saddens me that the word of an Englishman is no longer held in the high regard it once was. That was brought home to me very forcefully when, as a member of the Six Nations Committee, I was a candidate to take over the chairmanship when Allan Hosie stood down. It was a role I felt eminently qualified to take on. I had captained my country for several years, led the British Lions in South Africa in 1980 and had fought to preserve the viability of the Six Nations – a tournament that would lose much of its appeal without England’s involvement. Competing against me for the position was Jacques Laurans from France. He is a nice man and I have no beef with Jacques (if the French will pardon the expression) but I felt I had better credentials to take on the job. So the show of hands around the table felt like a stab in the back as Scotland and Ireland, in particular, combined to ensure that I didn’t win the vote. I did have the support of the Welsh representatives but I had no illusions about how England was regarded after a display of tactical voting with the sole intention of keeping English hands off the reins.
There is no doubt that the deep wound, opened by the bitter row over television money, had continued to fester, as was made plain to me after the meeting when I talked to the two Irish representatives, Syd Millar and Noel Murphy. When the British Lions toured South Africa in 1980, with me as captain, Syd went as manager and Noel as coach. Although we didn’t win the series the three of us had worked very well together as a management team and I regarded them both as good friends. I still do. But they had been mandated by the Irish RFU to support Jacques and, when I asked why they had voted against me, the explanation was simple. ‘We trust you Bill but we don’t trust England.’ So, despite our friendship, I was guilty by association of a crime they clearly felt very strongly about. I was an Englishman.
So, in a few short years, I had been turned away by England after leading my country to overdue success and rejected by friends within the international community for no other reason than my nationality. Both were bitter blows, but I didn’t shun England when they invited me back into the fold a few years ago and I won’t turn my back on our Celtic neighbours either because I believe very strongly in the Six Nations Championship and have established close friendships over the years with players and officials from the three other home countries.
There was a certain irony in the vote for chairmanship of the Six Nations Committee being taken in Dublin. I have had three major disappointments in the Irish capital: it was there that I suffered defeat when I was first capped by England, there that I failed to secure chairmanship of the Six Nations, and there that the vote was taken this year to grant the 2007 World Cup to France rather than England.
I was disappointed that the exciting English concept of a 16-team tournament, backed by a Nations Cup for a further 20 countries, wasn’t adopted. The formula would have generated a lot more money, with the extra revenue enabling the Nations Cup to take place alongside the main event and enabling developing rugby countries to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of a World Cup. The English format allowed for a Super Eight play-off that would have given another chance to countries that lost a game in a hard pool.
It was not to be and, whilst it will take time to heal the wounds, we will gain nothing from remaining at loggerheads. We should all be working together to develop and improve rugby in the northern hemisphere, both in domestic and international competition, and England has a great deal to offer in that respect, having set the standard in recent seasons. And, by being completely open with our neighbours, we will hopefully regain their respect.
Childhood, school and family life
If the meeting with Allan Hosie at The Drum and Monkey was fairly critical for the wellbeing of English rugby, the meeting between my parents and doctors at Preston Royal Infirmary shortly after my birth on 9 March 1952 was even more critical for the wellbeing of William Blackledge Beaumont. I had arrived somewhat prematurely by Caesarean section and, within days, had gone down with pneumonia. My chances of surviving beyond a few more days were deemed to be so minimal that I was actually christened in hospital as it was felt that I would never make it to a church. Not much of a vote of confidence for someone who, despite arriving a month earlier than expected, had still weighed in at a pretty healthy-sounding nine pounds.
The will to ‘hang on in there’ must have been pretty strong, even at that early age, because I confounded medical opinion by coming through the crisis, aided by a new drug so revolutionary that doctors had to obtain permission from the Ministry of Health in order to administer it to me. That wasn’t the end of my medical saga, unfortunately. Hospital staff expressed concern that I couldn’t keep anything down and was throwing up with messy regularity. If they were puzzled by this phenomenon, my mother certainly wasn’t. Having seen it all before, she was able to make an instant diagnosis: I was suffering from a hereditary condition – that had also afflicted her brother – known as Pyloric Stenosis, which occurs when a skin forms between the gullet and the stomach, preventing anything from being digested. A fairly simple operation rectified that little problem – my uncle had been less fortunate, spending his first 12 months being fed minute amounts of food on a tiny salt spoon.
My wife Hilary and I have three sons and, thankfully, none of them inherited the condition. Quite the contrary, they’ve never had a problem digesting anything and have been eating us out of house and home ever since!
So, after a longer than average sojourn in the hospital’s baby unit, I finally made it to the family home in Adlington to join my parents, Ron and Joyce, and sister Alison. She was two years my senior and brother Joe arrived four years after me.
Adlington was a working Lancashire village where everyone seemed to be employed at either the local weaving mills or at Leonard Fairclough’s, a large construction company responsible, at that time, for building bridges on the new motorways that were mushrooming all over the place. It was a small community and we were a tight-knit family with our own lives tending to revolve around the family textile business – a cotton and weaving mill founded in nearby Chorley by my great grandfather, Joseph Blackledge, in 1888.
My mother’s family, the Blackledges, had always made their way in the commercial world but the Beaumonts were academics. A succession of teachers, who had the unenviable task of trying to impart knowledge to a largely unresponsive pupil, would suggest that I leaned more towards my mother’s side of the family, despite the fact that my paternal grandparents were themselves both teachers. My grandfather, Harry Beaumont, had started teaching at Blackpool Grammar School – the Alma Mater of my old adversary and friend Roger Uttley – after the First World War and started a rugby team called the Bantams. He had been badly wounded fighting in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, and was awarded the Military Cross. My father carried on the academic tradition by winning a place at Cambridge University after serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He had been put in charge of a motor torpedo boat so maybe it was from him that I acquired my own interest in boats. It all started when the family owned a house on Lake Windermere, and I’ve been messing about in them ever since. When they sold the property some time later we rented cottages in the area for summer holidays, and Hilary and I still keep a caravan on the waterfront in the Lake District because the boys took up my interest in water-skiing, although I spend most of my time in the boat these days. I even ventured back into the world of learning that I spent so much of my youth trying desperately to escape from, in order to study navigation. Lakes are pretty straightforward but I fancy myself as something of a seafarer these days and I reckon it helps if you know what you’re doing!
My grandparents fully expected my father