Dennis Gethin would have been highly amused had someone told him that his 12-year presidential reign on this side of the Atlantic equalled Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s on the other; not bad for a boy from Seven Sisters born the year before FDR died in 1945.
As one of the rare breed who live their lives with a brimful of bonhomie, Dennis would have punctured the slight absurdity of the comparison with his own brand of self-deprecating humour. And yet the multitude of mourners sensed the historic nature of his funeral in Cardiff last Thursday.
It was all around them, a phalanx of internationals young, middle-aged and old spanning each of the last eight decades, from the most venerable, 90-year-old Cardiff fullback Alun Priday (capped 1958) and Newport‘s 88-year-old Brian Jones (capped 1960) to Sir Gareth Edwards (capped 1967) and the WRU’s new president Terry Cobner (capped 1974). The pall-bearers – Alun Wyn Jones, George North, Sam Warburton, Ken Owens, Rob Howley, Robin McBryde – bore Dennis’ coffin, draped in the black and green of Seven Sisters RFC, on the shoulders of serial Grand Slammers.
It all helped make the service as memorable as the man himself, thanks not only to the great and the good but, most of all, to his widow, Jan, for a beautifully sculpted eulogy right down to the final sentence: “Nos da, my lovely boy….”
