THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW
Ray Glastonbury spent most of his sporting life unaware that he belonged to a squadron of wings who flew up among the stars and floated back down without a parachute.
What they achieved on an unprecedented scale as reward for daring to cross the Rubicon from Union to League ensures that their names liveth for ever, from Johnny Ring in the Twenties to Martin ‘Chariots’ Offiah six decades later.
Ring, whose magic for Aberavon inspired the Evening Post’s man in Port Talbot, Bill Taylor, to call them ‘The Wizards,’ took his wand to Wigan one hundred years ago and waved it about to such bewitching effect that he scored 41 tries in his first season.
Exactly ten years later, Wigan found another gem of a Welsh wing in Jack Morley, a dentist from Newport who held the distinction of being the first Lion to tour Australia in both codes. Like Ring, he had a knack of making opponents disappear in a puff of smoke, so much so that he raised his compatriot’s record for a first-season Union convert by six to 47.
The Fifties saw two of the greatest exports from Cardiff ‘s famous League of Nations club, the CIACS (Kay-aks), take League by storm on opposite sides of the Pennines. Neither Billy Boston nor Johnny Freeman began tearing through the record book as immediately as Ring and Morley but they rapidly made up for lost time. Over the course of 1956-7 they scored tries galore. Boston’s 60 for Wigan fell two short of Ring’s alltime club record for the most in one season. Freeman’s 48 for Halifax has withstood the ravages of time for the best part of 70 years and it still stands to this very day.
Two seasons later another import from Union, the Springbok Tom van Vollenhoven, touched down 62 times over the course of a single domestic campaign. He did so at the second attempt having signed the previous year. Glastonbury, by contrast, needed no time to adjust to a new stage far removed from Cardiff Arms Park where, as a teenaged flyer, he broke into a first-team bristling with big names. Five years later, in the summer of 1962, he cashed in his Union chips and relocated to League’s Cumbrian outpost at Workington.
After a try on debut against Blackpool Borough, the uncapped Welshman scored five more in his second match, against Rochdale Hornets. He finished the season with 41 from 43 appearances, the most by a post-war newcomer to League.
It stood for 11 years until Keith Fielding hoisted it to 46 during the England wing’s debut season at Salford following his £8,500 transfer from Moseley. It survived Offiah’s initial challenge after the Londoner had been spirited away from Rosslyn Park by Widnes coach Doug Laughton under the noses of the RFU hierarchy.
Offiah began with 42 tries from 35 games for the Merseysiders in 1987-8, a quarter of a century after Glastonbury’s 41 at unfashionable Workington. The numbers put him in company of the highest class: Ring, Morley, Boston, Freeman, van Vollenhoven, Fielding, Offiah.
“He looks fit enough but that cannot dilute the poignancy of his illness”
No matter how hard he tries, Ray cannot understand a word of it and probably never will. A widower who will be 84 next month, his trademark handshake remains as bone-crunchingly vice-like as in days of yore.
He looks fit enough to give men 30 years younger a run for their money but that cannot dilute the poignancy of his illness. The famous names with whom he rubs shoulders in the record book, as guarded by the noted Rugby League historian, Robert Gate, mean nothing.
Martin Offiah? “I know the name but nothing else,” he says with the perplexed look of a man searching for something he cannot find. “What was he like?”
He taps his head by way of good-humoured explanation, as if hoping that somehow, somewhere a bell will ring and click his memory into gear and sweep him back to the sights and sounds of the glory days before injury finished him at 30.
Ray Glastonbury is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It has stripped him of his memory and left those nearest and dearest to him, notably daughters Janine and Lyndsay and his grand-children, nursing a family tragedy.
His has been a slow deterioration, painful and cruel in equal measure. A few golfing friends began fearing the worst some years ago at a restaurant in a rustic corner of the Algarve far from the beaten tourist track.
After a day when the Glastonbury 5-iron split every fairway like arrows from a bow, the topic over dinner turned to questions of sport like: “Name the Welshman who held the record for the most tries in his first season of Rugby League?”
Ten minutes later, after all the usual suspects had been and dismissed, one of the group asked: “Do we know him?”
“Know him?” came the answer. “Well, he’s sitting at the table…”
How Ray laughed. Maybe he knew the answer all along and an innate humility persuaded him to keep schtum to see the rest rack their brains.
“I did score a few,” he said, still laughing at the memory of Workington in the Sixties because back then on that warm autumn night, some of it, at the very least, was still there sharply in focus in his mind’s eye. Ray now lives in a cosy room at a residential care home on the outskirts of Cardiff. A few treasured photographs hang on the wall, of Cardiff RFC 1958-59 when, as a 19-year-old, he had the world at his feet and another clutching a trophy to mark his 41 tries at Workington where the veterans think the world of him and always will…
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