Courage under fire shames undignified AB selectors
Donald Cobden’s only test ended in injury.
Once upon a time, an All Black had to be almost on death’s door before he left the field of play.
It so happened in 1937 that Donald Cobden’s All Black career lasted just 25 minutes in front of 45,000 at Wellington.
The Canterbury wing did the unthinkable when playing the Springboks at Athletic Park, stretchered off the field injured, no less after a dangerous tackle. And in those ancient times, stupidity reigned and he could not be replaced, far from the health-andsafety rectitude of today.
Cobden recovered sufficiently to be showered and dressed in time to greet his team-mates as they came off the field at the end.
So the story goes, a selector took great umbrage at seeing Cobden back on his feet, even with a walking stick, suggesting he should have battled on. It all but cast him as a coward and he was apparently not invited to the postmatch nosh.
Cobden got the vindictive message that he would never be selected again, so shipped himself off to England in 1938 to play rugby, including four games for the Barbarians, and earned a commission with the Royal Air Force. He never came home and no, it wasn’t a Murdochian deviation.
Pilot Officer Cobden got into a fray way more dangerous than rugby as a fighter pilot with the RAF in the Battle of Britain. On convoy patrol in 1940, his Spitfire was shot down over the English Channel on his 26th birthday, probably by one of 40 attacking Messerschmitt 110s.
His niece Liz Evans wrote how Cobden bailed out, his parachute dragged him under and he drowned, his body washing ashore in Belgium. The Germans buried him at Ostend, Belgium,
Cobden sending a posthumous message of his gallantry to those irreverent selectors no doubt at home all comfy in front of warm fireplaces.
His brother Alf was a Canterbury rep too. He too was killed – when his army truck ran over a landmine in Egypt.
Seven All Blacks were killed in World War II, against 13 who died in World War I when medicines were less advanced, the enemy used gas and callous British generals sent thousands of soldiers to their deaths.
Two All Blacks were casualties in the same WWII battle, at Sidi Rezegh in Libya in 1941 – Captain Cyril Pepper, of Auckland, and Captain Archie Wesney, from Southland. The New Zealanders had played for the NZ Army rugby team who beat the South Africans two weeks before an entire South African brigade was over-run by the Afrika Korps, leaving the New Zealanders next to cop it.
Pepper, who played 17 games for the All Blacks in Britain, was there, commanding a troop of antitank guns in one of the heaviest tank attacks of the desert war, moving gun to gun exhorting his crews. Firing 700 rounds in three hours, they knocked out an estimated 24 German tanks.
Meanwhile, after earlier being wounded, Wesney led a bayonet charge counter-attack that repulsed the enemy, until a burst to the chest killed him instantly.
Pepper’s luck ran out three days later when some clod driving a staff car backed into his slit trench, where he was resting. Seriously injured, he was invalided back to Wellington, where he tragically fell out of a second-floor window and was deemed to have died of his wounds.
Also at Sidi Rezegh was artillery major Bill Carson, to this day one of seven double All Blacks in rugby and cricket. He didn’t play a test match in either sport, but many sports trophies are named after him.
Out of Gisborne and Auckland, he had served with valour in Crete and North Africa, winning the Military Cross in Tunisia in 1943. In Crete, with bayonet fixed and described as ‘‘that great lump of footballing muscle’’, he was wounded in the famous infantry counter-attack on Galatas, with the men bellowing college hakas from their rugby days.
In Italy late in 1944, when south of Florence, a shell struck his scout car and on a hospital ship en route to New Zealand via Egypt and he died of jaundice.
Canterbury’s George Hart played 11 tests and was an armoured corps captain. The hard yards had been done in Italy when Monte Cassino was overcome and with the Allies on the road to Rome, Hart was hit by a shell and died in a Catholic seminary that had been a German hospital.
Canterbury’s Jack Harris ,an infantry corporal, was killed in Italy in 1944 aged 41 and is buried at Cassino. An All Black in 1925, he vied with the great George Nepia for the fullback position.
It is said Waikato’s Jim Wynyard should have won the Victoria Cross in Crete for rescuing wounded men under fire. He was in the famous New Zealand breakout from Minqar Qaim and, as a captain, he died in 1942 when a shell landed beside his tank in the desert at El Alamein after he had shared a beer with his Te Awamutu mates.