ONE OF THE MOST FOUL-MOUTHED members of the opposition faced by the British Lions on their 1974 rugby tour of South Africa was a parrot called Piet. At the beginning of their tour, the Lions camped at the Three Fountains Hotel in Stilfontein, gold mining country in what used to be called the Western Transvaal, where Piet the Parrot was a feature of hotel life.
Andy Ripley, the England number 8 who deputised for Mervyn Davies throughout the tour, would wander down to the breakfast table in the mornings in his sandals and his cheesecloth shirt, book in hand, an unfocused look in his eyes. Piet would see him and immediately unleash a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse.
Ripley would carry on regardless, because Piet’s swearing was in Afrikaans. Ripley might have sensed that Piet the Parrot was less than friendly but it didn’t matter – like a throw-in from the line-out that didn’t reach its jumper – the words flew over Ripley’s head. They flew over others’ heads, too.
The Afrikaans word for swearing is “vloeking”. It’s a grand word, far better than swearing, which is a word put to multiple use in a variety of forms. Vloeking has something vaguely onomatopoeic about it, a word that is as earthy and jocularly literal as the language from which it springs.
So whenever an Afrikaans listener heard Piet swearing at the Lions in Afrikaans they would either grin or chuckle of burst out laughing. We don’t know what Piet actually said – history doesn’t record that – but we know that he swore like a trooper every time he saw a Lion, doing his bit for the Springbok cause and softening them up for the battles ahead.
The owners of the Three Fountains Hotel were a couple called Freda and Doep van Heerden. Freda and Doep were worried about the Lions. They even gave an interview to the Rand Daily Mail to voice their concerns.
They were worried about the pride running amok, trashing their hotel rooms like Led Zeppelin and destroying linen and bed frames, smashing mirrors. They worried about women; they worried about music and general rowdiness. They needn’t have bothered. All that would come later.
At the beginning of the tour, the Lions were well-behaved, almost suspiciously so. Their most expressive act of domestic self-assertion in those early days was to ask the hotel chef to fry their breakfast eggs in butter, not margarine; and, yes, they wanted boerewors with their bacon, they liked that very much.
Otherwise they were model tourists, if you didn’t mind the full ashtrays (many Lions were smokers) or the puke-stained T-shirts and rugby jerseys that came into the laundry after a morning of demanding training.
They also enjoyed their freshly-painted rooms and the manicured grass next to the swimming pool. Freda and Doep made sure the swimming pool itself sparkled like a smile. When they weren’t puking on the edge of the training field the Lions were working on their tans and playing a round or two of golf at the local golf club.
It was within walking distance of the hotel, at the Strathvaal Rugby Club in Stilfontein, that the Lions forged their South African bulkhead. After Syd Millar and Willie-John McBride, both of them rugged Ulstermen, had been chosen to coach and lead the side respectively, astute British rugby observers saw the writing on the wall.
The Lions were going to take on the ‘Boks where they were strongest – in the scrum, the seat of their physical and emotional power – believing this was where they were best subdued. In order to do that they needed to “Scrum, scrum and scrum again” in Millar’s words, and this they did for hours on end in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of Strathvaal.
Shortly before their opening match, a midweek fixture against Western Transvaal which they won comfortably, the players received their first Lions jersey. Up until that point, the Lions had only nominally been Lions, mostly they’d been Welshmen or Englishmen, the countries they represented in the annual Five Nations.
It’s a delicate transition, becoming a Lion, and in this instance it was handled with smarts and delicacy and an appropriate sense of occasion.
The most recent tour by the British Lions (they were still called that then, not the British and Irish Lions) before coming to South Africa had been to New Zealand in 1971. At least half of the players in that victorious 1971 Lions team didn’t come to South Africa.
John Dawes didn’t make the trip; the Welsh lock, Delme Thomas didn’t make the trip and neither did the England skipper John Pullin. John Bevan didn’t either, and neither did David Duckham or the wizard fly-half, Barry John, who died a couple of months ago.
For some, age and injuries were determining. For others, like the loose-forward, John Taylor, politics was paramount. Taylor didn’t like the idea of touring a country in the grip of apartheid, and said so.
There were suspicions that others didn’t like the idea of consorting with apartheid, either, players like the Welshman, Gerald Davies, although they weren’t prepared to say so and simply made themselves unavailable.
So while the side three years later wasn’t entirely different, it was also not entirely the same. This meant that the forging of team spirit along with an almost violent insistence on scrummaging at the Strathvaal Rugby Club. Handing out red jerseys, which contributed to the feeling that Irishmen and Scots were now Lions, was vital, because it made them feel special and different.
The jersey ritual brought together 30 players, two full teams, into what was a rapidly-unifying whole after their first week of intense training. The squad of 30 contained nine Welshmen, eight Englishmen, seven Irishmen and six Scots, amongst them the merrily destructive Scots lock, Gordon Brown, who would go on to be the scorer of eight tour tries.
Brown had received “a mass of letters” from anti-apartheid demonstrators prior to his departure. “I read every single one of them, I respected their viewpoint, but every one of them went in the bin,” he said. “I wanted to go to South Africa – I wanted to see for myself.”
In a narrow sense, Brown made the correct decision to tour. Others did, too. Take the Welshman Gareth Edwards, all-round chirpy extrovert, snappy dresser and the world’s best scrumhalf. Or Phil Bennett, Edwards’ half-back partner, who replaced Barry John, who had been a stand-out in New Zealand in 1971. Bennett looked frail. He was milk-white, with legs as thin as a sosatie stick. Despite his apparent frailty he was a rugby wizard, a man who could see possibility in the most hopeless of situations.
JJ Williams on the wing was a Commonwealth Games sprinter and next to him, well, that was JPR Williams, he of the mutton chop whiskers, white headband and socks around his ankles. JPR was a rugby genius and spent most of the tour straining at the leash of customary decency by spoiling for a fight.
They were a powerful, talented and combustible combination. Great scrummagers, canny loosies, quicksilver backs. McBride had only to keep them from going off the rails, with Millar providing the odd technical tweak.
Other than that they occasionally need to be reminded that the Lions hadn’t won a series in South Africa since 1896. It was more than enough to keep them boiling.
And there was one other thing. The tour to South Africa was McBride’s fifth Lions Tour, and his third to the country. McBride was 33 when he arrived in South Africa and turned 34 on the 6th of June, two days before the first Test in Cape Town.
He didn’t know for sure but guessed that this was going to be his last Lions tour. He wanted to make it count. Making it count meant being brutal when required.
To this end, the Lions pioneered the famous “99” call as a means to deal with opposition thuggery. Referees in those days were generally reluctant to send players off. The Lions realised this. They also realised that if the entire team went ape-shit, it guaranteed their protection because it would be difficult for a ref to identify one player in the fracas.
In some of the Tests it became what TV commentator, Nigel Starmer-Smith called “a giant free-for-all, more fitting for the boxing ring”. One thing was for certain, McBride and his pride in ’74 weren’t going to die wondering.
TV only arrived in South Africa two years later, in 1976, so there was no trial by television and no TV replays. If you all got stuck in, the referee and his linesmen would be unlikely to get stuck into you.
Looking back on it, there’s a kind of brilliant – if dastardly – pragmatism to an entire team getting involved in a brawl. Unlike other Lions teams, who were talented if happy-go-lucky, McBride and Millar’s team were prepared down to the last detail.
Such thoughtfulness served them well. They were also well-served by the fact that South African rugby was in a period of thumb-twiddling introspection. Domestic rugby in South Africa regressed in the early 1970s, something the Lions would demonstrate with brutal efficiency.
The Boks were walking backwards into the past, dew-eyed as they celebrated past victories. The Lions, by contrast, were romping into the future.
After dispensing with the Western Transvaal mielieboere as they were then widely known in their opening match, the Lions received a minor scare at the hands of Jan Ellis’ South West Africa (the Lions eventually winning 23-16). In their third match, they flattened Boland like a runaway steamroller.
Their fourth match was against Eastern Province, a provincial team who had a well-developed reputation for thuggery. The press started talking it up as rugby’s equivalent of a Boer War skirmish, the Daily Mail’s Terry O’Connor making that very comparison, much to the disgust of Doc Craven, South African rugby’s then supremo.
The match at the Boet Erasmus Stadium in Port Elizabeth as it then was, simmered nicely through the first half, only really coming to life shortly into the second when it deteriorated into a pitched battle. You can see it on YouTube if you care for such things.
Referee Fonnie von der Vyfer seemed reluctant to take stern action – how could he, cynics might ask, the fireworks were too widespread – and, after scoring three tries, Province’s resistance wilted. The Lions, with Brown and Slattery prominent, gave as good as they got. In the end, they ran out 28-14 winners.
The Eastern Province captain that day was Hannes Marais, widely – if sentimentally – known in Afrikaans-speaking South Africa as “Ons se Hannes”. Earlier in the year, the rector of the University of Port Elizabeth, where Marais worked, received a clandestine visit from Prof Johan Claassen, the Springbok coach. He was there to ask if Marais could be temporarily relieved of his academic duties to lead his country.
The rector agreed and the slightly reluctant 33 year-old was pressed into service. He regained his fitness by running on the beachfront, occasionally bending down to lift white-washed stones above his head.
The press were already whetting their appetite ahead of Marais’ front-row engagement with the pugnacious Scot, ‘Mighty Mouse’ McLauchlan. Some canny observers wondered if perhaps Marais’ recall wasn’t symptomatic of endemic indecision within Bok selection ranks. It was difficult to say for sure.
The Lions, meanwhile, ran in 16 tries against South Western Districts in Mossel Bay, to gallop to a 97-0 win. Dubbed a “fiasko” in sections of the Afrikaans press, the mis-match was quickly forgotten as fans looked forward to the game against Western Province at Newlands three days later.
Despite the open-air boxing match at Boet Erasmus, the Western Province contest was being read as a kind of key indicator to South Africa’s chances in the four Tests.
The first Test was played a week later, also at Newlands, and the rugby-loving public felt sure that if Province, with barnstorming loose-forwards like Morné du Plessis, Dugald MacDonald and Boland Coetzee in their midst, could give a good account of themselves, it would bode well for the Springboks’ chances.
Such blithe optimism was shattered early – after Western Province’s first put-in, in fact. Taking place in the shadow of the main grandstand, Roy McCallum fed the ball in, but no sooner had the ball disappeared from his hands, than the Province pack were forced backwards. It was a merciless display of power scrummaging from the visiting Lions.
The heel-against-the-head resulted in clumsy ball which Bennett heaved onto the Province full back; Province re-grouped but the clearing of their lines was so frantic that Johan Oosthuizen’s kick sheared off the side of his boot straight into Clive Rees’s hands. He had only to catch safely and sprint over from close to score the try.
Province were not uncompetitive in the match – the try-count was shared at two apiece – but from the vantage point of the present it is fascinating to see the way in which the reporters (and, to a lesser extent, the general public) were seduced by Province’s rangy, open-ended rugby.
The fact that the Lions’ scrumming work at Stilfontein was coming to fruition was quietly forgotten in a mind-numbing act of collective denial.
Instead, the white nation looked forward to the first Test, breathing a very South African compound of hope, ignorance and willed self-delusion, while many black South Africans were eagerly waiting for their white masters to receive their comeuppance.
On the morning of the first Test the Springboks drove down the peninsular from the Arthur’s Seat hotel in Sea Point and had tea at the Kalk Bay hotel. Conversation naturally turned to the weather.
Coetzee, a farmer in the Boland, was of the belief that the wind would die down, and so Marais played with it in the first half. The prediction proved perilously wrong.
The goalposts continued to sway throughout the afternoon. For the Lions, Bennett sailed three penalties through them, while Edwards levered over a drop-kick; Dawie Snyman scored South Africa’s only points through a penalty.
Having been looked forward to for months, the Test was over almost before you could aim your Kodak instamatic at the tunnel. The ‘Boks were shunted in the scrums and Slattery made an incredible nuisance of himself by harrying the Bok halfback pair of McCallum and Snyman all day.
At the end of a muddy, frustrating and, in several senses, unsatisfactory afternoon, the Lions sprinted from the field having burgled a 12-3 victory.
They were beginning to grow into their red jerseys handed out before their first match of the tour against Western Transvaal in Potch.
The mood in the Springbok dressing-room after the Newlands Test was sombre. Claassen was in no mood for equivocation. “Our problem lies with the tight five,” he told reporters, an analysis which came as no surprise to Millar and McBride. “The question that we have to answer is whether there are better players out there that we can use.”
The Bok selectors felt that there were. They made six changes and one positional switch for the second Test at Loftus Versfeld, the most bizarre of which was dropping Ian McCallum and Dawie Snyman for Paul Bayvel and Gerald Bosch as the new half-back pairing.
Still, the penny would not drop for the press. Neither did it drop for anyone but the most unsentimental-like members of the public. While it wasn’t branded as a fluke, it was felt that conditions at Newlands had played into the Lions’ hands.
The ‘Boks would re-group for Loftus, the Lions would struggle on the hard fields of the Highveld, and the natural order would be restored. Just you wait and see.
Even so, the Boks brain’s trust were taking no chances: they trained at Baviaanspoort Correctional Services, gathering a day before they ordinarily would. The atmosphere in the camp in the days’ preceding the Test was funereal. The players were prevented from reading the ‘papers and talking to the media, as they were cocooned in a kind of prison.
Du Plessis, who some thought was lucky to be retained, remembers the silence in the team bus on the way to the ground at Saturday lunch-time. Everyone was tjoepstil.
As the Boks were pulling up to the back of the stadium he remembers turning to see the Lions in their bus, singing Flower of Scotland at full tilt. They waited until their song had come to an end and then trooped into the changing rooms. Du Plessis was overcome with the feeling that there had to be more joy to representing your country.
The Lions camaraderie and sense of manifest destiny inspired them to five tries, as the Boks self-destructed in the second Test at Loftus, the very place where it had been widely – if complacently accepted that the wrong of Newlands would be righted.
It was one of the most shambolic displays in the history of South African rugby, with the forwards out-muscled and the backs out-thought and out-sprinted.
JPR wrote later in his autobiography that he’d never forget the pall of gloom that covered Loftus in the latter stages of the Test, a feeling of complete and utter desolation.
Rapport, the wide-circulation Sunday broadsheet, were unable to contain their contempt. “Sies, wat ‘n kaffirpak” (“Sis, what a kaffir-beating”) they trumpeted. Rugby couldn’t have been at a lower ebb, with the all-white Springboks being compared to an all-black team.
A further ten changes for the defining Test at Boet Erasmus followed, the most absurd amongst them being Gerrie Sonnekus’ move from eighth-man to scrumhalf. It didn’t help.
The ‘Boks were pulverised 26-9, a marginal improvement on their 28-9 defeat at Loftus. Johan de Bruyn, the Orange Free State lock chosen for the Test because of his Bakkies Botha-like tendencies, returned to Bloem with stories of how you didn’t want to hit a ruck because you’d leave more quickly than you’d arrived. It was brutal beyond description, with the Lions in a rare case of being able to intimidate the Springboks physically.
Afterwards, the Test series safely in the bag (the final Test was drawn 13-13), a shoulder-high McBride saluted the dirt trackers watching in the stands. This was the last of his five Lions tour and undoubtedly his finest. He had asked them to rally behind him with protesters outside the hotel doors at their pre-departure hotel in London; he had sung with them, drunk with them, led them.
Later that night he would save them, when they set alight curtains in the team room Port Elizabeth and the hotel manager threatened to call the police. Roused by the fiery Welsh hooker Bobby Windsor, the amiable McBride came to the door in his underpants and pulled on his pipe. “How many of them do you think there will be,” he asked the distraught hotel manager as the party continued around them and well into the night.
