The couragous No.9 who just relished battle
Peter Jackson remembers the extraordinary Dickie Jeeps, one of rugby’s greats
Dickie Jeeps will forever remain unique in the folklore of the Lions, the first uncapped player to appear throughout a four Test series. There will never be another.
When England belatedly got round to picking him, against Wales at Twickenham in January 1956, he and his novice fly-half partner from Oxford University, the future England cricket captain MJK (Mike) Smith, met for the first time in training at Richmond the day before the match.
The way Jeeps told it, he asked Smith: “How do you want the ball?”
And, according to Jeeps, the cricketer told him: “Not too far in front of me, I can’t see too well...’’
Smith, hale and hearty at 83 and still a Leicester Tigers season-ticket holder, ‘doubted’ the veracity of the story. “My eyes were not 100 per cent because I wore glasses,’’ he said. “It affected my judgement of distance but, for all the mickeytaking, I never thought it was a problem.
“Obviously, I could see well enough. Unfortunately, we both had poor games and as far as I was concerned that was it. I always considered myself better at cricket than rugby.’’
No sooner had England’s new half-backs been initiated than they were rejected, victims of a Welsh win. Jeeps recovered, of course, to play an integral part in the Grand Slam campaign the following year under Eric Evans’ captaincy before stretching his Lions’ Test appearances to 13, a figure exceeded only by Willie-John McBride.
And yet, half a century after the Lions’ safari to South Africa in 1955, the greatest of English scrumhalves gave me a damning verdict on that tour and the one to New Zealand four years later. The Lions, he argued, had beaten themselves before they started by picking the wrong management and the wrong captain.
From his perspective, it was all a crying shame. Jeeps swore, almost to his dying day, that had they got it right the Lions would have changed the course of history and beaten the All Blacks in 1959 as due reward for a team revered by those still alive who saw them play.
Four years earlier they drew the series 2-2 despite kicking the grand total of two penalties in the four matches for which there was a dismal explanation. The selectors, in their infinite wisdom, failed to pick a specialist goal-kicker.
“We had no place-kickers so they organised a competition on a training day early on in the tour,’’ Jeeps told me for the book Lions of
England. “We all had to have a go. We started off with a kick on the 25-yard line straight in front of the posts that proved too much for our three appointed kickers.
“They dropped out and the rest of us had one kick from each touchline. To finish it off, we had a shot from the ten-yard line. On the way to the first Test match, they presented me with this cup engraved with the words: ‘Dickie Jeeps, place-kicking champion, 1955 Lions’.”
His one attempt for real, against Rhodesia, barely got off the ground. They never asked him again but by then Jeeps sensed the Lions were labouring another self-imposed handicap.
“The management of the Lions, in my experience, was usually terrible. In South Africa we took Danny Davies, a Welshman from Cardiff. He was supposed to be the assistant manager coach. Nice man but we had to do our own training and our own thinking.
“The Lions back then picked their management as a way of rewarding people for their long service in the game, not because they were necessarily the best people for the job. That didn’t appeal to my competitive nature.
“In my time, the honorary manager and the honorary assistan manager were chosen on a Buggins’ turn basis. It wasn’t the man who was best qualified or best equipped. It was done because it was the turn of a particular country to provide the manager. Nearly always, they were not English.’’
Not one to suffer fools gladly, Jeeps never wavered in his belief that the 1959 Lions would have been the first to win a series in New Zealand, fully 12 years before John Dawes’ team did the trick thanks largely to the ghostly genius of Barry John.
“We had the wrong captain and I say that quite outspokenly,’’ Jeeps said of the ’59 team. “Ronnie Dawson, the Irish hooker, was captain. The other hooker, Bryn Meredith, was a better player.
“He’d played very well in South Africa. He was very quick at the front of the line-out and he knew how to obstruct them as well. But there was no way he could get Dawson out of the side. Meredith probably should have been captain.’’
Until Alzheimer’s took it ghastly grip, Jeeps never forgot how the Lions succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the second Test at Wellington where they saw an 8-6 lead vanish in the last minute.
“We’re ahead with a minute to go and we get a penalty. Terry Davies (Lions full-back) says: ‘Right, I’ll have a kick at goal.’ Ronnie Dawson says: ‘Ok.’
“If we’d kicked it into touch, it was the end of the game. Don Clarke (New Zealand full-back) caught the missed penalty and they scored a try at the other end to win the match. Sorry, we just played with no brains.’’
Jeeps’ memory was playing a trick with him. What happened was that Davies kicked for touch as per Dawson’s instruction only for the Welshman to miss, a costly one in a series which the Lions lost 3-1.
The fans, more than 800,000 of them, followed the Lions round New Zealand in numbers that have not been matched since. They loved Jeeps almost as one of their own, an admiration mirrored by the fact that down the decades many made the pilgrimage to his home in Suffolk.
Terry McLean, the most authoritative journalist on all matters All Black until his death in 2004, wrote of Jeeps: “It was a common occurrence for him to wind himself up to a reckless courage and in this mood he became a combination of Horatius, Wild Bill Hicock and the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all around had fled.
“He had the torso and the arms of a heavyweight and with his courage he would take on anything. He had a furious temper, too.
“He hated to be beaten and everything he could raise went into every game. I admired Jeeps greatly as both an outstanding scrumhalf and a fine team player and it was astonishing to discover that some of his teammates did not entertain a similar regard either for his football or his personality.’’
A man far ahead of his time, the Cambridgeshire fruit farmer ran into trouble with the RFU as England captain because of a letter he wrote to his 14 teammates before a final trial, asking that they report for a special training session at Richmond.
The RFU hierarchy saw it as a breach of the amateur regulations forbidding teams to assemble more than 48 hours before a match. “Boy did I get a rollicking from Colonel Prentice, the RFU secretary,’’ Jeeps said. “He also sent me a letter saying this was against the spirit of the game and all that. I tore it up. We went ahead with preparations as planned.’’
In his many post-playing guises, as the youngest RFU President at 44 and chairman of the Sports Council, Jeeps was never afraid to speak his mind. And when that meant a public spat with the Duke of Edinburgh over HRH’s criticism of the Sports Council, Jeeps didn’t shy away.
He died at 84 after a long illness, survived by his daughters Deborah, Caroline and Louise and eleven grand-children. His funeral takes place at Holy Trinity Church in the Cambridgeshire village of Bottisham at midday next Friday.