REQUIEM FOR RUGBY MEN
Donald Trelford remembers
some of the sporting heroes he has known
RAY Stone would have been 50 in March. I thought of him on the day of the Scotland-Wales rugby international and raised a glass in silent toast to his memory. For Ray was my fly-half, or stand-off as we called them in those days. His sleight of hand and foot, and an intuitive under- standing we developed at school, had carried the pair of us to minor representa- tive honours that would otherwise have been beyond a scrum-half with my ex- iguous frame. We had an elaborate code of signals, like furtively tugging a sock or scratching an armpit, which told the other one which way to go at strategic moments in the game. When I saw Roy Laidlaw, the Scottish scrum-half, circling like a dog around Murrayfield in a desperate search for John Rutherford, I knew exactly how he felt, for I too had been programmed with just that homing instinct.
After school we went separate ways, he to play for Imperial College and Surrey, I to the RAF and Cambridge. We tried to get together again in vacations and played a few times at Coventry, then as now a great rugby city. On that fateful winter weekend in 1958, Ray had fixed himself up with a game for neighbouring Kenilworth while I turned out for the Old Boys. We had agreed to meet later in Broadgate, the city centre, to go to the pictures. I recall that evening vividly. He was late and it was raining. I sheltered in the entrance to the Owen and Owen depart- ment store. Then, along the pedestrian passage by the side of the store, I saw him in the crowd coming towards me. He was wearing his usual fawn raincoat with the collar turned up in the fashion of the time. Curiously, however, he didn't spot me and seemed to be staring past my shoulder. I cried out to him, but he was carried past in the surge. I waited a while, then, rather crossly, decided to go home to see if he'd called. On the bus I pulled out the 'pink', the Saturday sports edition of the Coventry evening paper, to read the match reports. One of them began: 'Both teams stood for a minute's silence before the game in memory of Raymond Stone, the Kenil- worth player, who was killed around mid- night last night when he drove his car into a tree near Stoneleigh on his way home from a dance. He was 21.' I realise, of course, that I didn't really see Ray Stone coming towards me in Coventry city centre on the Saturday night. I couldn't have done, could I, since he had already been dead for over 18 hours? Because I didn't know that at the time, and was impatiently expecting to see his face at the moment, I obviously mistook someone else for him in the crowd. Yes, I know . . . I've been telling myself that for nearly 30 years.
These sombre memories have been prompted by the recent deaths, in too rapid succession, of three more of my schoolboy rugby heroes. Jack Pilbin had been the youngest of our inseparable rugby quartet at school. (The fourth, Rick Mel- ville, went on to score 300 tries at wing- threequarter for Coventry, a British club record until it was beaten by Morley of Bristol two seasons ago. His replacement in the school first XV, incidentally, was a boy called Eagan, now Sir John, the chairman of Jaguar Cars.) Jack Pilbin, a large rumbustious figure who loved nothing better than to declaim by heart every verse of 'Eskimo Nell', surprised us all by marrying a piece of delicate Dresden china from the local convent school. He became the best- known teacher in Coventry. When he killed himself recently at the age of 48, desperately in debt, the story was not just reported on the sports pages, for he had been coach to the Warwickshire rugby team, it was the 'splash', dominating the whole front page of the Coventry Evening Telegraph, to the exclusion of any news that day about Mrs Thatcher, President Reagan or Mr Gorbachev. It is hard to think of any other school teacher anywhere these days who could command such head- lines or be canonised in this way as a local hero.
His funeral service had to be relayed outside to the crowds who couldn't get in. I saw a battered prop forward, a past inter- national, crying openly at the cremator- ium. I recalled the day Jack had once called to see me when I was off school and had found me standing before an open fire in my dressing-gown. 'By the way, pld son,' he'd said to me unhurriedly as he settled in the comfortable depths of an armchair, 'did you know your backside was on fire?'
I first glimpsed Peter Robbins, who died suddenly last week, through the door of the visitors' dressing-rom in my school pavilion 35 years ago. He was already a schoolboy legend and we marvelled at his rippling physique and his huge rubbery face. Once, when I ran straight into him after a forlorn break from a scrum, he turned me upside down and dropped me gently on my head. He went on to become arguably the best English open-side wing- forward since the war (Budge Rogers, who succeeded him, and Tony Neary would be the closest rivals).
When I saw him first, he was playing for Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield, which was shortly to produce another star in J. R. C. Young, the British Lion wing and Olympic athlete, now an important figure in the Stock Exchange. Young once won the Warwickshire public and grammar schools 100 yards sprint in 9.9 seconds, with Rick Melville behind in 10.1 and yours truly third in 10.3. The previous record had been 10.5. He once hit me for a six at cricket while wearing white shorts, which somehow seemed especially insulting.
When Robbins • first turned out for Coventry, he played at centre- threequarter, where he made his mark with some powerful bursts and his crushing strength in the tackle. But the incident best recall featured him as flanker in an evening game against a visiting team from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He tackled the opposing fly-half, who just managed to release the ball along the line. Peter, on his knees, sized up the situation at a glance. He got to his feet, put his head down and, without looking to left or right or checking where the ball had gone, raced blindly to the corner-flag and arrived there just in time to hit the winger at full stretch into the crowd before he could put it down for a try. I can still see that huge body bent urgently forward at an angle as he ran. If he had hesitated for a second, he would never have got there in time. It was a piece of extraordinary anticipation.
He was an intelligent reader of the game, a talent that served him well in later life as a rugby correspondent for the Financial Times and the Observer. He was an inspirational captain at Oxford, but never led England, winning all his caps under Eric Evans and Dickie Jeeps. I can still recall my dismay and disappointment when he broke his leg just before a Lions team was selected. Like his friend Clem Thomas, whom he resembled, he was a fearsome marauder among opposing half- backs and centres. But he also had a huge and reliable hands, unlike some wing- forwards — Winterbottom, for example — who can be butter-fingered when they arrive at a breakdown in top gear.
Robbins died only a week after Ivor Preece, the former Coventry and England captain, who was one of the most graceful fly-halves in the decade after the war. Ray Stone and I used to try to model ourselves on Preece and his regular scrum-half part- ner, Norman Stock. But no one could emulate Ivor's devastating jink and his prodigious drop-kicks with the heavy old ball. He beat the French with a drop goal at Twickenham in 1949.
Early in 1973, en route to the Bahamas, I happened to mention Ivor Preece's name to the man I found myself seated next to on the plane. He was a Welshman, then living in Dublin, who had himself played in the back row for Coventry after the war.
`I'll never forget,' he said, 'being at Ivor Preece's house one day, soon after the birth of his first child. The baby was lying on a mat in front of the fire, kicking away and flailing its arms around. We were so amazed by all this activity that we got down on the floor alongside the child and tried to go through the same physical motions. Even though we were both fit enough for first-class rugby at the time, we soon collapsed with exhaustion while the baby went merrily on.'
My companion and I sat in silence for a few moments. Then I had a thought. 'That baby must have been Peter Preece,' I said. `Did you know that he wins his first cap for England on Saturday?'
Donald Trelford is editor of the Observer.
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