A mop-top Gower rises from the past
It’s amazing the faces that sometimes stare back at you when you trawl through old school magazines and team photographs Take this week for example when I was researching a few bits and pieces for our school of the week feature on King’s Canterbury (P30-31) when I suddenly came across the unmistakable blond teenage mop of David Gower grinning away in the back row of their First XV photograph for the 1974-1975 season.
Now I have occasionally heard Gower mention that he played a little rugby at school and enjoyed watching the game but I’ve never heard any claims on his part to any sort of ability or competence.
It appears, however, that despite already being the best schoolboy batsman in the country and a stand out in the school’s successful hockey team, Gower managed to squeeze in the best part of a season at fly-half for the King’s First XV which enjoyed quite a tough fixture list at the time.
The recently digitialised school magazine the Cantuarian notes that “David Gower played fly-half for most of the season. He has a good pair of hands and his place kicking was very useful on occasions”.
The young Gower enjoyed a stand out performance in their 36-3 win over Colfe GS, kicking two penalties and converting all five tries, one of which he scored himself while his three nerveless penalties were instrumental in a fine win over the highly-rated KCS Wimbledon team. He also slotted over two penalties in a 10-6 victory over great rivals Eastbourne.
Other matches didn’t go quite so well. In the 18-3 defeat against St Paul’s, the anonymous magazine correspondent is slightly censorious when noting that although “Gower kicked a fine penalty the same player was off the field (doing up his laces) when St Paul’s scored again to record a resounding victory. A wonderfully David Gowerish moment.
Meanwhile if anybody has ever wondered where the Gower sporting genes came from you need look no further than his father Richard who enjoyed a stellar school career before his work in the colonial office took him to Tanganyika. It is all there in the Cantuarian archives.
A skilful fly-half/centre, Gower senior spent three years in King’s First XV although he was injured for much of the final season when he had been appointed vice captain. He skippered the hockey Xl, captained the fives squad and was a regular up front for the football Xl, and led the school to victory in their annual tennis match against the masters.
He was also a consid- erable if erratic cricket talent prone to highs and lows. One golden summer in the lower sixth yielded 777 runs at 86 including a scintillating 174 not out against Eastbourne when the next highest score was 25. His son’s best summer at King’s resulted in 638 at 53, including two centuries.
Having taken in the familiar face of David Gower another visage also started to nag away at me from this photo, seated in the front row on the right hand side of the skipper as we look at it. What do you make of it?
Even 47 years on it looks uncannily like the Rugby Paper’s own esteemed correspondent Nick Cain… mainly because that’s precisely who it is.
Nick gets a very good write up in the magazine: “Nick Cain led the pack well, was a real competitor and thrived on hard work. We missed him terribly after his injury”. There is, however, a more general mention about the forwards giving away far too many penalties and costing them games. I can’t imagine for one second that Nick was involved in any of that nonsense, can you?
As for the injury he had, in fact, broken his fibula but, as was not uncommon at the time, a faulty diagnosis – badly pulled muscle – saw him play on for a number of games as it became increasingly painful. Eventually he was forced to stop and another X-ray revealed the full extent of the damage.
And David Gower the rugby player? Nick says: “David was already on Leicestershire’s cricket books as a brilliant schools prospect, and it would be fair to say that on the rugby pitch he was very much in the 1970s Barry John/Les Cusworth mould of nontackling fly-halves!
“However, that great timing he displayed as a batsman was definitely evident in some of his kicking, though occasional lapses of concentration, such as the laces episode against St Paul’s, suggest he would possibly have preferred to have been in sunny climes wielding his magic wand.
“He played just the one season for our First XV, and I also enjoyed two seasons in the hockey team with him. He was very good. Cricket was always his destiny though, for early on at school there was this assumption from all concerned that he would play for England sooner rather than later.”
