BIG READ: Barbarians through the gate

When the Springboks met the Barbarians in Cape Town on Saturday night, it capped a long relationship between SA and the world’s most famous rugger pickup team. 

The 54-7 Bok victory also evened the score. Before the weekend, the Springboks had played the Barbarians eight times since their first meeting in 1952, all on foreign fields — three times at each of Twickenham and in Cardiff, once in Dublin and at Wembley.  

The Baa-Baas — their deceptively meek nickname, with even two frolicking lambs on the badge — had held a 4-3 edge, the match at Wembley having been a draw. They have twice toured SA, in 1958 and 1969, with only provincial or invitation teams to overcome. In the rain on Saturday, waiting for the Barbarians at the Springbok gate was finally over. 

Founded in 1890, the Barbarians club — for that is what it’s become even though it has no home ground — was inspired by a desire to play rugby in an attacking, defiant and playful spirit while the game in England was perceived as dull, even if it had a bit of violence to spice things up. The name is said to have been the idea of those early players, many of them classical scholars, who took the reference from Greek and Roman times when barbarians were outsiders, challenging the establishment. 

Winning for the Baa-Baas is said to be secondary, always disingenuous in sport (as if Conan or Attila the Hun would have gone along with that). Certainly, the 1973 match is recalled more for how it embodied the spirit of Barbarians rugby than who won. It’s remembered for Gareth Edwards’ “greatest try ever scored” rather than victory over the All Blacks. It’s worth watching on YouTube (Cliff Morgan providing wonderful commentary).

In 1961 defeat was not an option for the Barbarians in the final match of the Springboks’ four-month tour of Britain. It had become a grudge match. On a fine February afternoon at Cardiff Arms Park, the Barbarians went out to spoil what until then had been an unbeaten run by the Springboks (the only blemish a 3-3 draw with Midland Counties).

What counted against those Springboks was the perception they were on a rugby crusade, “to play and win at all costs within the laws”, according to Welshman JBG Thomas, one of the uncharitable critics of the Boks. “Nothing else interested them, not even the people.”

It was an unfair judgment, but one shared by his British colleagues. Many of those Springboks so maligned later spoke fondly about the people they met on tour, the hospitality received and lifelong friendships formed. 

Yet, bad press followed the Boks and the unbeaten record infected them, especially their manager, Fergie Bergh, an outstanding Springbok in his day with the 1931 Springboks in Britain, a team immortalised in song by David Kramer, even if he did introduce an imaginary hooker.

In his playing days “a forward of the highest quality”, according to Thomas, Bergh was accused of speaking with a forked tongue. He was resented for trying to turn the Boks’ final match into a “gala affair” by mixing the Bok and Barbarians teams, thus preserving the tourists’ unbeaten run. Britain’s rugby panjandrums were having none of it, and the Boks lost 6-0. 

That wasn’t the first contretemps between SA and the Barbarians. On the 1958 tour, some of the upper-class types in the team displayed an aloofness, refusing even to pose for a team photograph.

The tour was given lavish coverage in SA newspapers, which had long ago discovered that rugby was a big seller (though the proprietors paid their writers a pittance). 

About 100,000 came to watch more than the five matches on the 1958 tour, attracted by the promise of carefree, running and often reckless rugby — a rarity at the time on SA fields. The fans also came to see again Cliff Morgan and Tony O’Reilly, two of the outstanding players from the 1955 British & Irish Lions team, which had drawn a then world record crowd of 95,000 to the first Test at Ellis Park. Morgan had dazzled opponents and spectators alike at flyhalf while O’Reilly scored 15 tries in 16 matches, two of them in the Tests, which were shared 2-2. 

Also on that Baa-Baas tour was a Scottish flyhalf, whom Terry McLean might have had in mind when he made his famous wisecrack. The New Zealander, who is the only rugby writer to have been knighted, quipped: “There are only two abominations in life: a nagging wife and a kicking flyhalf.” (The gibe is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Danie Craven, who had experience of both.) 

For all the scorn of being a kicking flyhalf — a species now virtually extinct — Gordon Waddell varied his play against Northern Transvaal with accurate cross kicks and clever grubbers. It was out of character, and it helped the Barbarians to their only win of the tour.

Four years later Waddell would tour SA again, this time with the Lions. Though their second-string flyhalf, he played in two Tests while first choice — and his rugby antithesis — Richard Sharp was recovering from injury. Sharp’s jaw was broken in a head-high tackle by Mannetjies Roux during the Lions’ match against Northern Transvaal, a clear red-card under today’s rules, but then dismissed as “unfortunate”. 

Years later O’Reilly and Waddell returned to SA, the former to buy the Argus Group newspapers and the latter to join father-in-law Harry Oppenheimer’s Anglo American company, become an MP and play a controversial role in local publishing. Both men would be instrumental in the slow demise of SA newspapers. 

Waddell was chair of Johannesburg Consolidated Investments (JCI), Randlord Barney Barnato’s old company that was eventually destroyed by Brett Kebble’s fraud. JCI was part of the Anglo conglomerate, which had gained a controlling interest in 1922.  

By 1985, one of JCI’s acquisitions, SA Associated Newspapers, was in financial and political difficulties. One of its titles, the liberal Rand Daily Mail, was said to be losing money and the owners were under political pressure from the apartheid rulers to close it down. Waddell’s indifference to the Mail’s plight contributed greatly to its closure.

One of those who felt especially betrayed by Waddell’s role was Harry O’Connor, a former deputy editor on the Mail, who had by then become editor of the Eastern Province Herald. Asked about a great newspaper’s death, O’Connor discovered his inner McLean: “What did you expect from a kicking flyhalf?” 

A dour kicking flyhalf to blame, certainly, but also a dashing wing. O’Reilly, having been lavished by those in charge of the Argus Group, changed the company’s name to Independent Newspapers to reflect his Irish print empire. He siphoned off profits to subsidise his other businesses and, on the verge of bankruptcy, sold to a local consortium that had financial backing from the SA government pension funds. 

O’Reilly was an enduring figure in Test and Barbarians rugby. First selected as an 18-year-old for Ireland, he played 29 Test matches over 15 years; for the Baa-Baas he played 30 matches, scoring 38 tries. Between his first Test, against France, in 1955 and his last, in 1970, he was also a brilliant businessman. As the head of the Irish Dairy Board in 1962, he turned Kerrygold butter into a worldwide best seller before moving on to become CEO of Heinz, the food giant whose catchy slogan was “Heinz means beans”. 

Having retired from Test rugby in 1964 (or been dropped), he continued to play club rugby for London Irish and was recalled to the national team, which had an injury crisis among its wings. O’Reilly received a late call-up to play against England and was said to have been dropped off at the Twickenham gates by a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. That remains a nice rugby myth; the Irish would never have allowed him to travel independently of the team bus — unless he’d been summoned late and missed the bus.

As it happened, O’Reilly had a shocker. His presence was “subdued”, according to one report. Another was unkind: a Dublin tabloid, from a rival stable to O’Reilly’s newspaper empire, headlined its match report: “Heinz means has-beens.” 

He was no has-been in 1958 on the Barbarians’ tour, scoring a try against Western Province after a 70-yard sprint. The locals were, however, not impressed. The Baa-Baas were guilty of throwing wild passes and lost 9-8. For the Newlands purists it was basketball.  

One eminent establishment member blamed the Australians. “The Wallabies started it all,” he told Norman Canale of the Rand Daily Mail, “and now the Barbarians are trying to finish it off by giving our rugby that loose, untidy look of the professional game [rugby league in England and anathema to union’s amateurs]. It won’t do our chances against the All Blacks any good.” His cynicism was unfounded: two years later the Springboks beat the All Blacks 2-1 in a home series. 

Meanwhile, a future SA press baron’s first direct connection with local newspapers came in the Baa-Baas’ final match of the 1958 tour. O’Reilly, rounding the in-goal area to score close to the posts, collided with a press photographer and was forced to dot down closer to the touchline than intended. The conversion, from a difficult angle, missed and it cost the Barbarians a draw. They ended the tour in yet another defeat, 18-16 to a Combined Transvaal XV.

O’Reilly and Waddell would have been impressed with the business acumen of the Transvaal Rugby Union, which organised the 1958 tour. With 50,000 watching the first match, the gate takings were £18,500 for a profit of £6,500. By the end of the tour the income was £63,000 from a total gate of 180,000. It easily covered the tour costs of £12,000, of which the players did not get a penny. 

As portent for Springbok rugby that year, the three local victories and a draw over the Barbarians were misleading. The visiting French, against whom Morgan had warned, drew the first Test against the Boks, then won the second. For a Springbok team that had last lost a home series in 1890, it was a warning. The local rugby establishment would have to quickly get its act together before the All Blacks arrived in 1960 and the tour of Britain and France a few weeks later. 

When the Barbarians returned in 1969, the visit was again prominent and was almost treated as a trial ahead of the Wallaby visit that year. 

The first match was a shock for the locals. A strong SA invitation team, the Quaggas, took them on and lost badly. The Baa-Baas’ 29-3 win was believed to have exposed SA rugby’s soft underbelly. The acerbic British critic John Reason was surprised by the local team’s lack of fitness and its brittleness. He even considered one of the local heroes, Jan Ellis, “not a top-class international”.

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Rodney Bryant, a wing for Villagers in Cape Town, who at the time had not yet been selected for Western Province, was invited to play for the Quaggas. He recalls the local team being outplayed. “I scored a try in the first three minutes, then we never saw the ball again.”  

Memory of a match played 56 years ago may be clouded, for even Reason conceded at the time that the Quaggas “had the winning until the second half”. The Northern Transvaal selectors knew where to cast blame. A few days later they dropped one of those Quaggas players, the Springbok scrumhalf Piet Uys. 

After the first match, SA rugby appeared to restore the “hard crust” that Reason believed was missing. Natal beat the Baa-Baas 16-14, and the SA Barbarians won 17-11, neither match being a festival of running rugby. After the second defeat the Barbarians complained that referee Jan van Wyk was not only poor but refused to speak to them in English. Losing, for all the Barbarians’ feigned indifference to the outcome, still rankled.