TEST MATCH

Harry Mckibbin recalled how Mayne, after drinking copious amount of booze, would then burst into their rooms in the middle of the night.

He would knock the doors off the hinges and smash up all the furniture until “all the chairs and tables and things were just bits of kindling”.

Another legendary story focused on him meeting a team of convicts working on the Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg who were shackled as they slept at night.

Sympathising with one of the men, who said he had committed only a minor crime, he returned after dark and freed him using bolt-cutters.

Mayne’s partner-in-crime was Welsh hooker Bunner Travers and they would go off, dressed as sailors, to get into scrapes at the docks of Durban. Colonel David Stirling, one of those who knew Mayne well, said he was prone to “outbursts of satanic ferocity”.

He believes he had two sides to his character. The action man but also the frustrated, cultured lawyer.

Mayne’s law career had been stifled by playing rugby and then by the outbreak of war in 1939, when he received a commission in the Royal Artillery.

Col Stirling said: “This frustration explained at least some of his violent acts and his black moods. Among its positive effects, it also explained Paddy’s astonishing intuition and inspiration in battle.”

The colonel was the man who recruited Mayne to join what would be da

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