The day Meredith made history

PETER JACKSON

Courtenay Meredith spent the last 71 years of an exceptionally long life with something to shout about over what transpired on the Saturday before Christmas 1953.

A year of monumental events topped by the Queen’s coronation is best remembered in Wales not for Stanley Matthews winning the FA Cup, nor Len Hutton’s England regaining the Ashes but the All Blacks losing at Cardiff Arms Park.

Meredith’s death, a few months before his 98th birthday, severs the last living link to a match which has assumed still more historic significance with every defeat inflicted by New Zealand over the last seven decades. He was, by common consent, the most destructive scrummager of his generation, so good that he mastered the different techniques of propping the scrum on both heads, tight and loose.

Just as the All Blacks of 1953 couldn’t live with the Welsh All Black from Neath, neither could the Springboks two years later when the Lions ended their four-match series level at 2-2. Yet when Meredith retired, nobody ever heard a peep from him.

Two calls approximately 48 years apart, hardly enough to provoke accusations of pestering, elicited the same response. It was as if I had dialled a Trappist monastery by mistake.

A mining engineer by profession whose accent sounded more Oxbridge than Neath, Meredith made it clear that the rugby part of his life had gone and that under no circumstance was he the least bit interested in discussing any aspect of it whatsoever.

Courtenay did not wish to be disturbed. Besides he had better things to do which explained why nobody could ever remember seeing him at the Arms Park on big-match day, let alone hob-nobbing with the WRU hierarchy.

His place in Lions’ folkore has been secure now for seven decades alongside the all-Welsh Test front row of 69 years ago. Stoker Williams, the Swansea loosehead, died 11 years ago at the age of 83 but the hooker, Newport’s indomitable Bryn Meredith, is still going strong at 93.