Battered Sandy takes his secret to the grave
Every now and then, whenever the x-certificate stuff reared its ugly head during a Lions tour, Sandy Carmichael would answer his phone with unfailing patience and courtesy. No Lion in living memory had been beaten up quite as badly as the unflinching Glaswegian at the hands of the ‘Butchers of Canterbury’. He could have managed without the periodic prompt to recall a barbaric Saturday of long ago and yet each inquiry brought him a satisfying reminder that what happened had not been forgotten.
Sandy would choose his words carefully, shredding the faintest trace of embellishment so that the facts were cut to the bare bone, stripped of all the emotional trimmings. He had not publicly identified those who pummelled him out of the historic 1971 tour at the time, nor was he about to break his omerta.
And so last Wednesday, 50 years, four months, one week and three days after the crime, Sandy Carmichael took the name and names with him to his grave. A pair of Irish teammates, Fergus Slattery and Willie-John McBride, may have identified one assailant but the victim himself always pleaded the Fifth.
Carmichael did so not because he didn’t want to rock the boat but because he wanted to keep the story alive. Despite the systematic assault, he refused to retaliate lest that would cause him to be sent off, a fate which many of his generation regarded as an indelible stain on their character, one to be avoided no matter what the price.
The punishment Carmichael took that day brought his tour to a sudden end, cruelly denying him his starting place for the victorious Test series. Ironically, the one man responsible for protecting both teams from excessive violence was a general practitioner from Upper Hutt, Dr Humphrey Rainey.
Instead the referee turned a blind eye, his one concession to the gratuitous violence limited to a brief warning to the captains, John Dawes and Canterbury’s Ian Penrose, telling them: “It’s up to you to sort it out.”
From that the Lions deduced that ‘Humph’ had got the hump and opted out of sending anyone off. They interpreted his comment as a tacit admission that Canterbury could carry on punching with impunity although Dr Rainey, who died six years ago, denied that he meant any such thing.
“I’ve never named names and I never will and the reason is that if I tell, then the story ends,’’ Carmichael says in the book Behind The Lions. “I don’t want them ever to forget and if I leave it this way, then they can’t forget.
‘’The only other person who knew is dead and that is (the Lions’ manager) Dr (Doug) Smith who promised not to tell anybody. I got a phone call from New Zealand when the Lions were there in 2005 asking me about it and that’s great because they haven’t been able to draw a line under it.
“For years and years, British teams had gone across to New Zealand and South Africa and had the sh*t kicked out of them. After what happened in Canterbury, the Lions were fairly angry and the Test side decided they were not going to sit back and take it anymore.’’
Unable to protect his face in the scrum, Carmichael took such a beating that estimates as to the full extent of the damage have fluctuated wildly. X-ray examination revealed at least five fractures to the same cheekbone.
Slattery, who was also punched, estimated the number as more than five times as many: “About 27.” The Irish back row forward was not slow in identifying the principal puncher as Canterbury’s All Black prop Alister Hopkinson: “He just kept punching him in the face. ‘’
“It happened early on when I got a backhander at a lineout right across the left of my face. I went down and the medics came on to check it out before I played on. There were punch-ups all over the park and the story about the ref saying: ‘I’ll referee the game and you can do what you like’ is true.
“He denies it but that did happen. Not long after that I drove into a ruck, hit the deck and fed the ball back. Then I got kicked in the other eye. It was the backhander that caused the real damage.’’
Carmichael’s telling of a conversation with his compatriot and fellow Lion Iain ‘Mighty Mouse’ McLauchlan revealed the extent to which some of his features had been rearranged. “By the time I came off the pitch, both eyes were pretty well shut so they sat me on the bench and put ice packs on my face.
“McLauchlan came towards me to see how I was just as I went to blow my nose but it was blocked and because the sinus was cracked the air blew into my eye socket which inflated like a balloon. That was the first time – and probably the last time – I ever saw fear in Iain’s eyes.’’
Once Carmichael had been put back together, he returned as good as new to resume life with the Lions in South Africa three years later. He would find out soon enough that it still guaranteed a punishing experience, this time in the form of so-called ‘friendly fire’ from the English giant, Fran Cotton.
The incident happened on the training ground during a scrummaging session. “Things became heated when I suddenly stood up and hit Sandy Carmichael out of sheer frustration at not being able to shove him back as much as I felt I ought to,’’ Cotton said. “I immediately regretted it and apologised to Sandy.’’
That was more than anyone from Canterbury managed half-a-century ago or at any time since. Hopkinson died from cancer at the age of 57, Dr Rainey in old age at 89. Now that the most noble of Scottish props has gone at 77 his memory will live on as a shining example of dignity in the face of a brutal assault.
In his hour of need, the game let Sandy Carmichael down. Shamefully so, not that he would ever have dreamt of saying so.