The Scottish xv that faced "the Colonials" at Inverleith in 1905 included two Glasgow Accies--T.Sloan and Louis Greig

SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

Originals and still the best

TOM ENGLISH


THEY set sail from Wellington on Sunday, July 30, 1905; 26 five players, one coach, one manager, all destined to write themselves into the history books for the historic deeds they were about to perform. On the 16th day of the voyage, they rounded Cape Horn, on the 36th they stopped in Tenerife. Forty-two days after leaving New Zealand, the SS Rimutaka docked at Plymouth Sound. It was six o'clock on the morning of Friday, September 8 when the tourists stirred in their cabins and took their first steps in the land of their forefathers.

They called them the Colonials, but soon they had a different name: All Blacks. In five months, they played 35 matches in the four corners of Britain and Ireland, winning 34. They scored 976 points and conceded 59. They were feted as superstars, just as their successors have been down the ages, and Tana Umaga's men are now. They needed police escorts to get them safely through the crowds, but sometimes the constabulary simply couldn't stop the tide. Dave Gallaher, their great captain and war hero, was born in Ireland. On their arrival in Dublin, the throngs broke down the gates and hailed Gallaher and his team on the station platform. But by then they were used to it.


On the evening of Thursday, November 16, their train pulled into a freezing cold Edinburgh for the 20th match of the tour. On the Saturday - 100 years ago last Friday - they would play Scotland for the first time and among their squad there was an excitement beyond anything that had gone before. Stepping into the mist and the fog of the capital that night were Duncan McGregor and Billy Wallace, who played wing and full-back for Wellington, Alex McDonald and William Johnston, loose forwards from Otago, Bill Cunningham, a lock from Auckland and Jimmy Duncan, the coach from Otago. Some of these, or all of these, had Scottish blood. It's not hard to imagine what coming here would have meant to them.

But this was a strange kind of homecoming. Previously lauded wherever they went, things turned hostile in Scotland. "We were about as popular as a plague of the smallpox," wrote Wallace. What happened to Gallaher's Originals, the first New Zealand team ever to set foot in Britain, is a deeply heartwarming tale until Scotland's role in it is examined. In their brief time here, they were the victims of the most horrendous gamesmanship on the field and subjected to the worst excesses of the tight-fisted SRU off it. It is safe to say that, having arrived with their hearts beating fast, men like McGregor and Wallace, McDonald and Johnston, Cunningham and Duncan couldn't get out of the place fast enough.

TO MAKE THEIR TOUR PAY, THE NEW ZEALAND RUGBY Union had to gather a war chest of £4,000 and they asked each home union to guarantee them a sum of £500 as an advance against expenses. All obliged expect the SRU. To them, £500 seemed an extraordinary amount of money for a team with no pedigree, a bunch of unknowns that would do little to entice the supporters through the gates at Inverleith. Instead, they cut a deal. New Zealand would get nothing up front but could take the entire gate on the day of the match. Whatever that came to, the SRU reasoned, it wouldn't be within an ass's roar of £500. They were right. It was closer to a thousand.

In their 19 games before the international in Scotland, the Colonials had out-scored their opponents by 612 points to 15. Only four teams had managed to break a duck, the superiority of the tourists was the talk of the Empire. Former England international Leonard Tosswill wondered if the Colonials were "born and bred on a higher mental and physical scale" and he wasn't the only one in awe of them. At every ground there were sell-outs and lock-outs to testify to the greatness of Gallaher's team.

By the time the New Zealanders arrived in Edinburgh, everyone at the SRU knew that this game at Inverleith was going to be the biggest in their history. They had a plan, though. They downgraded the match from an international to a challenge. No caps would be awarded. They halved the ticket price, putting a hole in the Colonials' profit at a stroke. Maybe they hoped their morale would be damaged, too If the Kiwis weren't already convinced that the Scottish enmity was genuine, they got another reminder at their hotel. Leaving their boots out to be cleaned overnight, they woke in the morning to find them filled with mouldy bread. Then, according to Kiwi legend, the SRU set about getting the match abandoned.

A terrible frost bit Edinburgh that weekend and normal practice in those days would have been to protect the pitch with straw. For some reason it was left undefended and was frozen solid on the morning of the game. New Zealand were informed that the ground was dangerous or, according to a report of the time, it "had an unpleasant quantity of bone". The Scots wanted the game abandoned, but the Colonials wanted to play. The record crowd of 21,000 cheered the decision - "much to the disgust of the Scotchmen", wrote Billy Wallace.

Wallace, we can assume, did not enjoy his trip "home". "When we were in our togs and ready to go on the field there was an argument about the lengths of the spells [the first and second halves]. Finally we compromised. Then there was an argument about the ball. The Scots reckoned we should have supplied the ball, but we had not brought one with us. At last they brought out an old thing shaped like a torpedo.Where they dug it up from I don't know."

Wallace was later knocked unconscious by a dangerous tackle - "a foul charge" that was avenged in full. "Naturally our fellas were very wild and I am afraid this particular player came off very badly later in the game in a merry mix-up."

Ultimately, the Colonials won 12-7, but only after staring defeat in the face with ten minutes to go. The winning try came from the multi-talented George Smith, a great wing, a champion sprinter and apparently the winning jockey in the 1894 New Zealand Cup. "GW Smith," reported the Scottish Evening Despatch, "was embraced and literally wept over by his fellows and, if they did not kiss him, well, they came very near to it."

When the final whistle went, the atmosphere matched the weather: chillingly cold. The teams went their separate ways. The SRU held a function, but their opponents did not attend. Some reports have it that the union snubbed them, others say it was the other way around. Whatever the truth, it simply added to the ill-feeling. Instead of rubbing shoulders with Scottish captain "Darkie" Bedell-Sivright and his team, Gallaher took his men off to the Australasian club and, it is said, Wallace, enjoyed a "royal time" in the company of their host, a Dr Leighton.

The Colonials marched on to Ireland and returned to the welcoming arms of the masses. Wales were the only team to beat them, but only after a New Zealand try was controversially, and probably wrongly, ruled out. They returned home via Paris and America and on March 6, 1906 they arrived like kings back into Auckland harbour.

But if they thought they had heard the last of the Scots, they were mistaken. Two years after the tour concluded, the SRU learned that the Colonials - working class almost to a man - were paid the trifling sum of three shillings a day in expenses. In Edinburgh, they had a word for that: professionalism. "There can be no halfway house in rugby football," said JA Smith, the secretary of the SRU. "The daily allowance made to the players is directly antagonistic to the true spirit of amateur Rugby football. The payment means that, in addition to every possible expense, including uniforms, laundry, entertainments, gratuities and medical attendance, each player has received at least £1, 1s. a week for himself, and my committee consider that this payment is tantamount to professionalism in a very insidious form."

The SRU called for a halt to "Colonial engagements", but the RFU passionately disagreed. As a consequence, in 1909 the Scots temporarily broke off relations with England, refusing to play them in the championship that year. New Zealand, not surprisingly, lambasted the SRU. Wray Palliser, their representative in London, said that the Scottish union "has a very strongly expressed dislike for visiting teams from our colonies".

"To be told that it [three shillings a day] is a 'wage' or a 'broken promise' or some other such nonsense is really too ridiculous," he said. "We have not the leisured class in the colonies," he added. "That they [the players] should be branded as professionals is a very serious slur on a body of amateurs who came to this country [Scotland] solely for the express purpose of seeing their 'home'. It will be a sorry day for us all if the action of 'little' Scotland should prevent that splendid bond of imperialism in sport."

When New Zealand returned to these shores in 1924-25, they went to England, Ireland, Wales and France but little Scotland was not on their route. The wounds of 1905 did not heal until years later.

When the modern All Blacks were in Ireland the week before last, a group of them, led by Tana Umaga took time to travel north to Ramelton in Donegal, the home town of their founding captain, Dave Gallaher. A veteran of the Boer War, Gallaher was a company sergeant major in the Great War when, on October 4, 1917, he lost his life at Passchendaele. He was 44. His age exempted him from conscription, but he had enlisted anyway.

He was that kind of man and his team were made in his image. They were the Colonials, The Originals. The first All Blacks. A century on, they are still not forgotten.

This article was originally posted on 20-Nov-2005, 11:55 by Hugh Barrow.
Last updated by Hugh Barrow on 20-Nov-2005, 11:57.