Aarvod revelled in Varsity culture
ALTHOUGH a fine schoolboy player at Durham, that nursery of many West players, Carl Aarvod went down to Emmanuel College, Cambridge with his studies dominating his faults and perhaps a little bit of College rugby.
As it happened, he caught the rugby bug so badly that he devoted himself to four straight Varsity match campaigns with Cambridge, all successful for the Light Blues who boasted one of their strongest ever sides during this era. Remarkably he also made off with a first class honours degree.
West and the Durham county side were huge beneficiaries of this burst of rugby excellence when he played during the holidays and after Christmas as well as Blackheath later in his career.
It was perfectly normal during this era for an individual to be a playing member of two or or even
three clubs during any one season.
Inevitably international honours soon followed starting in 1927 when he was selected for the British Isles touring side to visit Argentina which has retrospectively been deemed a full Lions tour.
In which case the long striding and extremely quick Aarvold can be credited with eight tries in his four Test match appearances for the dominant tourists and to nobody’s surprise he was soon promoted, at centre, to England’s strong 1928 Grand Slam winning team.
Indeed it was as a classic outside centre that he first made his mark in Test rugby and it was in midfield that he starred for the 1930 Lions on tour in New Zealand where the tourists played a stack of good rugby without much success in a hard fought Test series although there was a memorable 6-3 win over the All Blacks in Dunedin.