Pied-piper John helped launch three dynasties

ONE of the great pleasures of the Rosslyn Park Sevens every March – alas cancelled for a second year due to Covid – used to be wandering around the team mini buses and sharing a thermos of coffee with various school coaches.

They always know stuff. They were rugby professionals long before Rugby Union ever seriously contemplated professionalism.

Among those was Campion's John Davies who I linked up with again this week in connection with our School of the Week feature. John is a remarkable character and was involved, at the sharp end, in three of the great rugby renaissance stories of modern times and I would suggest that probably isn’t coincidence.

In the mid and late 60s he was the diminutive rubber ball scrum-half who used to recycle the ball at lightning pace as London Welsh, under John Dawes, redefined what could be achieved by total rugby.

In the 70s and 80s while coaching at Campion he helped pull off arguably the greatest achievement in the history of English schools’ rugby. Starting from scratch at a new state-aided comprehensive in a football daft area of north London he made Campion into one of the top three or four rugby schools in the country.

John was an ebullient pied-piper figure. He coached the team expertly, enthused the staff and parents, organised massive tours, smoothtalked big schools into playing the new kids on the block and then soothed their ruffled feathers with his Welsh charm when Campion took them to the cleaners.

And then, in the early 90s, he was the coach that helped point Saracens in the right direction and produced a team worth investing in as professionalism hoved into view. After that others took over.

He took his hybrid London Welsh/Campion style to the club and indeed many of his former Campion stars such as Tony Diprose, Daren O’Leary, John Green and Dan Dooley.

Heavily involved in the England U16 set up, John had also seen the world-class potential of a young flanker called Richard Hill before anybody else and it was to the ramshackle Bramley Road that Hill headed when many expected him to join Quins or Wasps.

The modern-day history of Saracens is an extraordinary and sometimes controversial blockbuster of a story – some would say soap opera – but we shouldn’t overlook Davies’ important cameo role in the early chapters.