‘I was ashamed – rugby propped up apartheid’
Fifty years on, ex-wales flanker John Taylor tells why he refused to play the Springbok tourists
When Siya Kolisi became the first black South African captain to lift the Rugby World Cup last month, veterans of sport’s greatest political conflict had reason to look back 50 years to a Springbok tour of Britain and Ireland that became a battleground in the antiapartheid struggle.
Among those watching Kolisi raise the Webb Ellis Cup in Yokohama was John Taylor, the former British and Irish Lions and Wales flanker who refused to play against the Springboks in 1969-70 and found himself marching through Cardiff with “Michael Foot on one side and George Thomas [former Speaker of the House of Commons] on the other – leading this miners’ parade, which was more than I bargained for”. Taylor tells his story in a BT Sport film Stop The Tour, which will shock some viewers born after South Africa was liberated from the obscenity of apartheid. The role of rugby and cricket tours in providing succour to a segregated political system is so disturbing that old wounds are bound to reopen when viewers observe how the “building bridges” defence was really a form of complicity.
Taylor toured with the Lions and soon regretted it. “I was very uneasy about going to South Africa in 1968, but I desperately wanted to be a Lion,” he told me in an interview. “I was 22. I took the easy way out and obeyed the mantra of rugby, which was, ‘We’re not supporting apartheid, we’re building bridges.’ As soon as I got there, I discovered what a load of nonsense that was. By the time I came back I knew I was not going to play against them again.”
Fifty years ago this winter, an all-white Springbok squad played
26 matches in Britain and Ireland and faced protests every step of the way, from a group led by Peter (later Lord) Hain, who was so loathed by the rulers of the country that his liberal, activist family fled for their own safety.
The direct action inspired by Hain was a prototype, with pitch invasions, graffiti, sit-downs and vigils outside the Springbok hotels. It led to running battles with police and sustained abuse of the South African players.
Tommy Bedford, a Springbok from 1963-71 who became a reformer and advocate of nonracial sport, remembers being called “a fascist pig and scum”. In a phone interview, he described how his attempts to engage with the protests led to the end of his Springbok career: a fate shared briefly by Taylor, who was dropped from Wales’s Five Nations squad despite receiving a letter assuring him his boycott of the Springbok tour that year would be treated as a “matter of conscience”. The documentary opens with Kolisi, who came from a township in Port Elizabeth, holding the World Cup in a moment of transcendence to match Nelson Mandela in a Springbok shirt handing the Webb Ellis Cup to Francois Pienaar in 1995. Hain describes South Africa before Mandela’s release from jail as “a police state with a detailed, forensic system of racism”. Cricket and rugby, the old “Empire sports,” were “totally segregated”.
In the late 1960s, Taylor, also one of the finest rugby commentators, was teaching at an ethnically diverse comprehensive in Putney and found South Africa in 1968 “a hundred times worse than I expected it to be”. He saw black Africans “kicked off pavements”. In 1968, too, the exclusion of Basil D’oliveira on racial grounds from the England cricket tour of South Africa provoked outrage, with the country’s prime minister, John Vorster, declaring that he would not have a non-white player “forced” on his country.
This catalyst for the antiapartheid movement led Hain to marshal his forces to ruin the 1969-70 Springbok tour, which went ahead with Bedford warning his team-mates, “who lived in a bubble”, to expect hostility.
There were demonstrations at Heathrow and the opening game at Oxford University was moved to Twickenham, where hundreds of protesters turned up.
Bedford began warning his team-mates “you’re defending the indefensible” and tells the programme-makers: “If you could change the Afrikaner mindset on the sports field, it was a huge step to ameliorating everything else.” As the slogan “no normal sport in an abnormal society” took hold, the Lions toured again in 1974, supported by black South Africans on the basis that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.
South Africa used the tour as propaganda. Similar political battles were fought in Australian and New Zealand rugby as protesters tried to stop tours or disrupt those that did take place. The Springboks’ journey across New Zealand unleashed mayhem.
Bedford points out that six Australians also refused to line up against South Africa.
In the 1980s rebel cricket tours began rolling through South Africa in defiance of opposition from governing bodies and governments. In 1990, a rebel tour led by Mike Gatting was abandoned after one match, a few weeks before Mandela was released after 27 years in prison.
Taylor maintained his bond with
non-racial South African rugby, supporting a township club with Jonah Lomu near Port Elizabeth called The All Blacks, who in 1997 sent young players to test themselves in Wales.
Fifty years ago, though, those in rugby who argued for the ostracism were often isolated figures in what Hain calls “a bitter, hard struggle”. The former Labour MP was sent a letter bomb that would have killed his family had it exploded and a bizarre attempt was made to frame him as a bank robber, with a doppelganger performing the heist.
“I did feel a bit of a lone voice,” says Taylor, who commentated on the 1995 Mandela final. “There was never any hostility or rift between me and the other guys.
“I was sharing a house with Mervyn Davies at the time and I had been to South Africa with the Lions in 1968. All the other guys, like Gareth [Edwards], said, ‘Look I’m a rugby player, I’m not getting involved in politics.’
“I had a very nice letter saying it would be treated as a matter of conscience – but then it wasn’t. It became very political in Wales. South Wales miners got behind [the protests] and made a lot of noise down there. Looking back on it, it was by far the most important thing I’ve done in my life.”
Although non-racial sports organisations began emerging in South Africa from the 1970s, generations of gifted players were denied a chance to compete internationally. Kolisi’s generation are seen as standard-bearers for all those who had their careers stolen at birth. The transformational images from Yokohama were viewed as the culmination of a tragic struggle in which those who stood on the wrong side of history are again being called to account on this 50th anniversary of “Stop the Tour.”
Taylor says: “I was a bit ashamed of rugby and cricket – the traditional Commonwealth sports, the most established sports, the only sports we played with white South Africa – and these were the only sports that were keeping sport going in South Africa. To me it was totally unjustifiable. And I felt that if white South Africans had their rugby, they would pretty much put up with everything else because life was good.
“What people didn’t realise
– and they should have done – was that cricket and rugby were propping up apartheid.”
‘Stop The Tour’ premieres on BT Sport 1 at 10pm on Dec 27 and is the latest in the BT Sport Films series btsport.com/films.