Hero Perrett snubbed for his year with League
Fred Perrett’s gravestone can be found in the British cemetery in a corner of northern France not far from Flanders Fields where the red poppies dance. Terlincthun, on the outskirts of Boulogne, is the final resting place for more than 3,000 soldiers who paid the supreme penalty during the Great War, the vast majority of them British. The grave marked by the reference XII.A.18 may look like any other but there is a story behind it that goes far beyond the bald details: Fred Leonard Perrett. Second Lieutenant Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Sunday December 1, 1918. Age 27. Son of George and Emma Perrett of Briton Ferry, South Wales.
Husband of Mrs H G Perrett of 118 St George’s Road, Hull.
Welsh international. Late member of the Hull Football Club. And, at the bottom, a strikingly simple epitaph: ‘One of the best.’
One of more than 130 international rugby players who never came home, Fred Perrett is thought to be the only one to die from injuries inflicted during the last days of the war that was supposed to end all wars, one week before the Armistice exactly a century ago.
Scotland’s death toll from within their international ranks amounted to 30, or two complete teams. Their number included a captain of the Lions, David Bedell-Sivright, a former Scottish amateur boxing champion who, it was said, once brought the centre of Edinburgh to a standstill by tackling a cart horse.
England lost 26, France 22, New Zealand 13, among them an Irishman from Donegal whose family emigrated to New Zealand where the boy grew up to become the captain of the pioneering All Black invincibles in 1905.
Ten Australian Test players perished, nine from Ireland, five from South Africa and 13 from Wales. In some quarters where they cut the Welsh list to 12, Perrett’s was the name to go, believed to be because he had gone north to play Rugby League.
The Germans made no distinction between amateur or pro, Union or League. How shamefully ironic that some back home did, with its nasty inference that playing rugby for a living somehow made the fallen officer less heroic than those who played for nothing. If that was their rationale, it took mean-spiritedness to unchartered depths.
A steelworker, Perrett began learning the multi-dimensional arts of back row play at Briton Ferry before graduating to Neath. He made such an immediate impression that at 21 he played in all five matches for Wales throughout the 1912-13 season starting with the Springboks before Christmas.
By the following season, he had gone to Leeds and Rugby League. According to Gwyn Prescott, the rugby historian and expert on those who gave their lives for King and Country, Perrett was out of work when Leeds offered a solution which proved too good to ignore.
After one season at Headingley before war broke out, Perrett signed for Hull. He enlisted within months, rushing off to the Western Front in the 17th Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and had risen to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant without ever knowing how close he came to returning home and playing rugby again.
Instead, during an attack on an enemy position in a forest at the start of the last week of the war, he suffered severe injuries. Fred Perrett, married with two sons, died in a military hospital in Boulogne exactly 20 days after the guns fell silent.
In recent days the main gates to The Gnoll, Neath’s famous old ground, has been adorned by a single poppy. According to the club’s website, it was placed there by an anonymous blogger in memory of Fred Perrett, left,
Lest we forget.