Brendan Gallagher looks back on the 1969/70 Springbok tour to England and the huge opposition it generated

SPORT’s important role in the anti-apartheid movement and the eventual “emancipation” of South Africa is unquestioned but sometimes it needs the distance of decades to absorb it all and put properly in perspective.
The Springboks tour of Britain and Ireland in 1969-70 is a case in point. Journalism as we know is the first draft of history and it was very newsworthy at the time but as the decades pass it appears much more fundamental and significant to the ca...