Haydn Morgan
Flanker for Wales and the Lions who was known as the ‘Red Devil’ and enjoyed practical jokes
HAYDN MORGAN, who has died aged 81, was an outstanding flanker for Wales between 1958 and 1966 and went on two tours with the British and Irish Lions to New Zealand and South Africa.
He was known as the “Red Devil”, partly because of his flaming ginger hair and because he had been a paratrooper on his National Service – not in fact with the “Red Devils”, the display team of the Parachute Regiment, but with the Airborne Division of the Royal Marines.
Haydn John Morgan was born at Oakdale, about 10 miles north of Caerphilly, on July 30 1936, to Harold and Eunice Morgan. His father was a miner at Oakdale Colliery.
As a boy he was involved in a serious traffic accident when he stepped off a kerb and a bus ran over his foot. He was in hospital in London for nine months. His father refused to allow the doctors to amputate the foot and he eventually made a full recovery.
He was educated at Newbridge Grammar School, where he played as a centre. The Army switched him to open-side wing forward; the Welsh Rugby Union, in a tribute, said he was “a superb tackler who had the pace and the hands of a three-quarter.”
He enjoyed practical jokes. He once took his sons and some friends on a camping holiday and startled them by coming out of the dunes with nothing on and encouraged them all to go skinny-dipping. While they were in the water he scooped up their clothes so that they had to walk back naked to the camp along country lanes.
He once drove the Abertillery team bus to Ireland, then broke his wrist on the field. He insisted on driving the bus back, with a colleague changing the gears.
He won 27 caps for Wales, fewer than many judges thought he deserved. He had joined Abertillery Rugby Club on leaving school and stayed loyal to them throughout his career. This may have cost him his place on some occasions to players of lesser ability who belonged to bigger and more fashionable clubs.
He was first selected for Wales at the age of 21, playing in a 3-3 draw against England in 1958. He was the first player to make a debut for Wales without wearing the proper strip: at Twickenham the team discovered that they had only brought red practice shirts, without the national crest.
He retained his place for the rest of the Five Nations Championship, scoring a winning try against Ireland. For the next two seasons he was in and out of the side, but became a fixture in 1961 when he was chosen alongside his Abertillery back-row team-mate and friend, Alun Pask, with whom he played 17 matches in a powerful Welsh back row.
The pair continued together in 1962 and 1963 until Morgan was unaccountably dropped for the 1964 season in which Wales shared the Five Nations Championship with Scotland. He regained his place the following year in the Grand Slam team led by Clive Rowlands. His last game for Wales was against Australia in 1966, when Wales were again Five Nations champions.
He played in two Tests in the star-studded British and Irish Lions team of 1959 that lost the series unluckily to the All Blacks after playing some dazzling rugby, falling foul of some inexplicable decisions by biased home referees.
On this tour Morgan shared a room with the legendary Irish player Tony O’reilly, who swears that he awoke one night to find the Welshman, who had been a mechanic, fiddling with the springs under his bed, “dreaming that he was back in the garage fixing cars.”
Morgan was chosen again for the unsuccessful Lions team of 1962, vying for the open-side berth with England’s Budge Rogers; they each played in two Tests against South Africa. Commentators were shocked that both Morgan and Rogers were left out of the 1966 Lions tour to Australia and New Zealand; even more so that Morgan’s friend Pask, though selected as a player, was overlooked as captain.
After his international career was over, Morgan went to live in South Africa, where he played for the Wanderers club in Johannesburg and for Transvaal B, then moved to Durban as a car salesman with Nissan.
He returned to the UK with his young family in 1986, but went back to South Africa in 1993, launching a firm building concrete blocks. In 2011 he was back in England, living in Portsmouth, before going to live in Monmouth, where he died. His wife Betty, to whom he was married for more than 50 years, died in 2013.
He leaves two sons, Andrew and Allen, who live in South Africa.
Haydn Morgan, born July 30 1936, died July 24 2018