Brendan Gallagher: One hundred years on…the Varsity heroes are honoured
Rupert Brooke spent a season partnering future England captain and legend Ronnie Poulton-Palmer in the centre in the Rugby School 1st XV before heading to King’s College. He never really aspired to a Blue but his much-quoted poem The Soldier speaks eloquently for that golden, gilded generation and when they were suddenly confronted with the horror of World War 1.
They were not found wanting. When the carnage ceased and the smell of cordite slowly receded in November 1918 the remains of no fewer than 55 Oxbridge Rugby Blues – 28 Cambridge and 27 Oxford – were to be found buried in eight European and Middle Eastern nations in 41 military cemeteries.
The vast majority were on the Western front but they also fell in Iraq, Palestine, Macedonia and Turkey. Corners of a foreign field that were – and are – forever England. And indeed Scotland, Wales and Ireland. With their great privilege and social status came responsibility and when the day of reckoning arrived, my God, they led from the front.
The Great War was absolutely no respecter of class, it was hell for all concerned, but death sometimes seemed to arrive in random clusters. No fewer than 13 players from the 1911 Varsity match perished whereas 28 of those involved in the 1906 game saw the War through. Some teams and groups of friends were destroyed, others randomly survived largely intact.
The Oxford and Cambridge University Rugby Clubs, who with trademark understatement usually rather hide their light under a bushel, are determined to mark the contribution and the sacrifice of those who wore their colours before them, starting this Saturday when a wreath will be laid at the Oxford University RFC War Memorial for Edward Boyd, the first Varsity Blue to fall.
With the War barely two months old Boyd – Durham-born, educated at Rugby School – had already joined the Northumberland Fusiliers and been mentioned twice in British and French Dispatches before being killed in action at Vailly, near Aisne, on September 20 1914. Life moved very quickly once the War started.
Over the coming four years a further 54 wreaths will be laid at the two memorials in sequential order to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of all the Blues who perished.
If Boyd was the first of the 55 to die, the last to succumb was Major Reginald Schwarz MC, one of the most glamorous sportsmen of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. Schwarz played rugby for Cambridge and England and then appeared in 20 Test matches for the South African Cricket X1 after moving to Johannesburg to work on the Stock Exchange.
Having learned how to bowl the googly at the feet of Bernard Bosenquet he was virtually unplayable for a couple of years and was one of Wisden’s five crickets of the year in 1908.
He returned home to join up and had appeared to have survived hostilities unscathed before the Spanish Flu epidemic hit the exhausted troops towards the end of 1918. He died on November 18, 1918, aged 43, seven days after the Armistice was signed.
On four days there will be two wreaths laid at the Memorials. On June 28, 1915 Oxford Blues Francis Thomson and the Rev John Bussell were both killed in action. Fewer than two months later, on August 22, 1915, Oxford lost James Dingle and Cambridge William Wallace. On July 1, 1916 Maxwell Robertson, of Oxford, and Rowland Fraser, of Cambridge, were both killed, the latter just 12 days after he had got married, while on November 20, 1917 Cambridge Blues Robert Ward and Miles Atkinson were both killed in action.
The deaths of all those concerned will also be marked at this year’s Varsity match at Twickenham on December 11 when representatives of their schools and college, and any surviving family will be invited to attend. All the representative teams from both Universities throughout the season will have poppies on their jerseys this season, for which every player will be expected to make a minimum £10 charitable donation.
After bowing our heads and showing due deference we should also celebrate these guys with gusto. Some were among the biggest and most colourful personalities the game has ever seen and there is no legacy unless we remember their lives, as well as their deaths.
Two of those concerned go straight into any Rugby Hall of Fame. Oxford’s dashing Ronnie Poulton-Palmer had just captained England to a Grand Slam in 1914 and with his languid athleticism and effortless excellence was the epitome of Varsity sport.
Sport came easily to Poulton-Palmer, he scored miraculous tries for fun, but at the age of 25 he was about to wind down his rugby career. Despite his personal wealth he was committed to social reform and spent most of his time helping boys clubs and workers at his family’s famous biscuit company. Had the War not taken him he would surely have become a significant figure in the Twenties and Thirties.
Meanwhile the Cambridge captain of 1902 – David Bedell-Sivright – was of a more volcanic temperament altogether, a Scottish medic who was reckoned to be the meanest and most aggressive forward in the game. A Scotland and Lions captain, Bedell-Sivright went looking for combat on and off the field and once tackled a carthorse in Princes Street after Scotland’s post-match celebrations got a little out of hand. He was also an extremely well-respected naval surgeon who eventually died of blood poisoning on HMHS Dunluce Castle off the coast of Gallipoli after being bitten by a insect on shore attending the wounded.
A personal hero from this era is the swashbuckling Cambridge and England forward Alec Todd, the son of a London wine merchant who seemed to joyously roister his way around the sporting world for the best part of two decades before life’s great party ended abruptly. Blessed with Hollywood looks and the most splendid waxed moustache Todd was an unmistakable figure and that was before he took to wearing extravagant full-length fur coats, the legacy of his time as a timber merchant in Sweden and Finland. A prototype Omar Sharif.
Todd’s great mate was the legendary Ireland and Lions forward Thomas Crean VC and between them they cut a swathe through South Africa with the Lions in 1896, although effectively it was an Anglo/Irish adventure, Wales and Scotland declining to send players. Todd eventually married Crean’s sister and had finally settled to domesticity when the call to arms came.
At the age of 41 he didn’t hesitate and as a former captain in the Roberts Horse Brigade from the Boer War, when he was badly wounded at Diamonds Hill, was welcomed into the Norfolk Regiment. Peering over a trench parapet at Hill 60, Ypres on the morning of April 21, 1915 an alert German sniper shot him causing fatal wounds to his neck and chest.
One of my favourite stories from this period concerned strapping Oxford lock Martin Parr who narrowly failed to win a Blue in 1913. Two years later on the Western Front, with shells raining in from all quarters and bullets whistling around, he was amazed to spot the Oxford captain from that year David Bain up to his knees in mud in the trenches. Having fumed quietly for nearly two years Parr suddenly decided now was the time to have it out with the great man.
“Why did you drop me, I need to know,” complained Parr.
“Because you kept holding the ball in the second row,” replied his erstwhile skipper.
“That was never me, that was the other bloke,” protested Parr.
Time was pressing, the shells were still exploding nearby and they agreed to differ and shook hands. A week later Bain was killed in action at Festhubert. Like I say life moved very quickly during the War.
That 1913 game which Cambridge won 13-3, in retrospect, was indicative of Oxbridge’s contribution to the War effort. All 30 players involved at the Queen’s Club that day were to see active service while nine were to lose their lives. The two sides between them garnered eight Military Crosses, two DFCs a DSO, an AFC, two military OBEs and a Belgian Croix de Guerre while further down the line two knighthoods were to follow.
One of those who survived was brilliant England wing Cyril Lowe DFC, MC who scored 18 tries in 25 Tests either side of the WW1. Who knows what his final tally of tries might have been but for the outbreak of hostilities? Lowe, who served in the Royal Flying Corps, is often cited as the inspiration for the popular Boys’ Own hero penned by Captain WE Johns.
They were a tough breed, as typified by Eric Gordon-Shand MC, the Oxford centre in 1913 who survived the War and returned to Oxford in 1919 to finish his degree and to try and resurrect the University Rugby club. Over at Cambridge the Light Blues were struggling as well and it was suggested that John ‘Jenny’ Greenwood be allowed to break with convention and return for a fifth Blue although this would require the permission of the Oxford captain.
No problems there, the two were old friends from Dulwich College schooldays and both duly lined up for the game and were presented to King George V. What you don’t see in the one surviving picture of that occasion is Loudon-Shand’s heavily bandaged mangled right arm, the result of wounds received. The tough Scotsman somehow got through the game but eventually the arm had to be amputated.
“Even though none of us have any connections to the 55 Blues who gave their lives so willingly, we will have something very special in common with them at Twickenham on Varsity Match day,” says this season’s Oxford captain Jacob Taylor. “It is difficult to imagine how things were 100 years ago, but it is easy to respect the decision made by so many young men to step forward to serve their country. It will be a privilege to pay our respects to them.
“One of the defining metaphors for the current Oxford University rugby team is to try to replicate the spirit of the Army in all we do. It is more about utilising that spirit and common bond to make the whole team greater than the sum of its parts.”
Exactly 100 years ago nobody knew the horrors that awaited, young sportsmen thought of the glory not the gore, which is, of course, what inspired the angry play on words when Wilfred Owen concludes in his eponymous poem. “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – It is sweet and fitting thing to die for your country.
No it wasn’t. Their deaths were sudden, brutal and unnecessary. But the rugby players of Oxbridge did that “sweet and fitting thing” anyway because to do otherwise would have been unthinkable.
*This article was first published in The Rugby Paper on September 14.
