Miners, millers toast of Coast
The West Coast could lay claim to beingNew Zealand rugby league’s best talent nursery, per capita. TONYSMITH looks at a century of league west of the Southern Alps.
West Coast rugby league chief Peter Kerridge swears his sport has put the Coast on the map ‘‘as much as Monteith’s beer and whitebait’’.
The West Coast Rugby League (WCRL) is celebrating its centenary this spring, marking 100 years since the code’s pioneers swarmed out of mines and mills to make their mark in the 13-man game.
For decades, particularly postWorld War II, the Coast punched above its weight, often surpassing the principal rugby league strongholds, Auckland, Canterbury and Wellington.
The region may not have had a homegrown Kiwi since Runanga scrumhalf Glen Gibb in 1985, but the Coast boasts eight League Legends, members of the New Zealand Rugby League’s hall of fame.
Forty-nine Coasters have worn the Kiwis jersey and a couple more were named but never got to play due to selectorial snub or injury.
Three West Coasters, 60s centre Graham Kennedy and 70s forwards Tony Coll and John Hibbs, have won the NZRL player of the year award,
Not bad for one of New Zealand’s smallest sporting regions. The West Coast’s population now is only 32,000, but rugby league’s catchment is even smaller. The sport has traditionally been strongest in the Grey District with Buller and Westland primarily rugby union areas.
Today, the junior game is still holding its own. Kerridge says the West Coast has about 500 schoolage players, more, per capita, than many larger leagues.
But there are just four premier grade clubs, down from seven or eight in the sport’s salad days, with many players turning out for rugby union teams on Saturday and rugby league clubs on Sundays.
Kerridge admits it’s becoming a battle to field a full-strength West Coast representative team for the South Island championship because ‘‘the rugby union has more resources’’ and can offer a longer national, Heartland Championship campaign with plane flights to North Island venues
But, he says, it’s West Coast rugby league, and the deeds of legends like Geordie Menzies, Jock Butterfield, Charlie McBride and Ces Mountford, that has put Greymouth on the map.
It’s a theme Kerridge, the WCRL’s president and since 1997 and secretary since 2002, hammers when he goes, cap in hand, to the council, sponsors and funding agencies for support.
‘‘I make the point that rugby league has given us a profile beyond the size of the population here. This tiny place is known in the north of England, Australia, France, PNG and other places because of rugby league.’’
Kerridge says the West Coast owes a debt of gratitude to the Canterbury Rugby League, who brought a team over to play a three-game series 100 years ago. The first rugby league game on the West Coast was played at Victoria Park on June 2, 1915.
Wingham Park, just outside Cobden, in the lee of the Apostles Range, is the world’s smallest test rugby league venue.
About 4000 packed the bushfringed ground in 1954 when Greymouth hosted its first and only international between the Kiwis and Great Britain.
English rugby fans were already well aware of the West Coast bastion long before.
An England team, captained by Great Britain great Gus Risman, lost 17-8 to the West Coast at Victoria Park, Greymouth’s main harness racing venue.
Frank Gibson – still the groundsman at Wingham Park at 90, some 75 years after his senior debut for Ngahere – was at Victoria Park on that occasion, which Kerridge rates as ‘‘the greatest day in our history’’.
The ground was ‘"really wet’’ after days of rain and the Coasters handled the conditions better. Gibson, who had just marked the Wingham Park pitch on the day he spoke with Fairfax Media, says Ray Nuttall, the Coast fullback, played a pivotal role in keeping England on the back foot. ‘‘The wetter the ball, the better he would kick it. He liked a heavy ball.’’
Gibson says the West Coast team were ‘‘made up of miners and sawmillers’’. ‘‘They were hard working men and they were reasonably fit. The wet conditions really suited them.’’
‘‘It was a great thrill [to see the West Coasters win],’’ he says. ‘‘It didn’t actually rain during the game, the sun half-pie came out.’’
The Kiwis were the first New Zealand sports team to tour England and France after the Second World War.
The 26-man touring party in 1947 featured seven Coasters, 1946 Kiwis Jack (Chang) Newton, Charlie McBride, Arthur Gillman and Bob Aynsley and new caps Nuttall, Jack (Nippy) Forrest and Ken (Peter) Mountford.
They sailed on a ship ferrying New Zealand war brides bound for America. Forrest, now 91 and still living in Greymouth, quipped to a reporter last year that he got a little tired of rubbing sun tan cream into brides’ backs.
Mountford, later to die tragically as one of 19 victims of the 1967 Strongman mining disaster, had the honour of playing for the Kiwis against a Wigan team containing his brother Ces (later a Kiwis coach), who had moved to England a year before to play for Wigan and study at the Lancashire town’s mining school.
By the end of the tour, McBride was being hailed as the best second-row forward in the game.
Chang Newton, a front row forward as tough as a gnarly beech tree trunk, had scored a try English observers rated as the best in 40 years of test football. His mate McBride and speedy wing Nippy Forrest featured in the lead-up.
Newton was an old-style enforcer who, when once praised as a ‘‘great footballer’’, was alleged to have said he wasn’t sure about that, but he had ‘‘stopped a few [people] who thought they were’’.
From the late-40s to the mid-50s, the Coast had the most formidable forward pack in New Zealand. They beat Auckland in three successive years from ‘46 to ‘48, once up at Carlaw Park.
Further wins followed in 1950, 1954 and 1955 with the mercurial Menzies running the backline behind a pack bolstered by McBride, Newton and, later, Bill (Ginger) McLennan.
Club football could be just as competitive, particularly local derbies between Blackball and Ngahere, on either side of the Grey River.
Blackball boasted the Mountford clan, while six Gibson brothers and a fair few Mulcares wore Ngahere’s colours.
Frank Gibson played senior footy for 17 years between 1940 and 1958. He played against the ‘‘Blackball Bullet’’, silky-skilled Ces Mountford, who he still rates as the best the West has produced. ‘‘He was that fast off the mark, if you didn’t put him down he would be up and away.’’
Gibson still fondly recalls the time when the West Coast could lay claim to two national champion clubs. Blackball had swept everything before them in 1950, winning the West Coast championship, the Thacker Shield contest with Canterbury’s champion, and also beating the best Auckland could produce.
But local nemesis Ngahere was waiting back home. ‘‘When they came back, we played them at Wingham Park and we beat them 2-0.’’
The winning penalty goal was kicked by Jack Mountford, playing against his brothers’ club after he wasn’t selected for Blackball at the start of the season.
The West Coast remained strong throughout the 50s and into the early 60s with Menzies and Kiwis hooker Jock Butterfield, who won a then-record 36 caps, influential figures, followed by young Kiwis backs Reese Griffiths and Graham (Ginger) Kennedy.
They beat Auckland 22-18 at Carlaw Park in 1960 to win the Northern Union Cup (now known as the Rugby League Cup), symbol of provincial supremacy.
But, as the game became increasingly professional, rugby league players joined coal and timber as the West Coast’s greatest exports.
Butterfield and Trevor Kilkelly had to go ‘‘over the hill’’ to Canterbury to become Kiwis in the 50s, although both later returned home. Seventies wing Mocky Brereton joined the exodus to Christchurch after making his Kiwis bow from the Coast.
Some West Coast gems proved as hard to shift as gold deposits in the gullies. Tony Coll, a Kiwis second-rower for a decade between 1972 and 1982, and now a Grey District councillor, and Kiwis prop John Hibbs were particularly loyal servants.
But, a procession of prodigies who got their starts on the Coast had to leave for pro careers in Australia or England and to achieve their dream of a Kiwis jersey. That retinue includes former Canberra Raiders and
Warriors prop Quentin Pongia, wing Whetu Taewa, who won a Challenge Cup final at Wembley, and ex-Western Suburbs and Illawarra Steelers prop Brent Stuart.
Today, Greymouth-raised hooker Slade Griffin is Australian captain Cameron Smith’s understudy at the Melbourne Storm. Jordan Pinnock, a former athletics junior champ, is in the Holden Cup 20s competition with the St George Illawarra Dragons.
Kerridge says the Coast can be proud of its contribution to New Zealand rugby league, off the field too. He rates Tom McKenzie, a long-time WCRL secretary, Kiwis selector and South Island representative player, who went on to become a Kiwis team manager, as the Coast’s stand-out administrator.
James Wingham, after whom the Greymouth ground was named, and Ted Gutberlet also made major contributions, while Kerridge says Greymouth-born authors John Coffey and Bernie Wood played vital roles in chronicling the code’s history.
Kerridge is still researching the West Coast’s rich league history, recently discovering some nuggets about the strength of the sport in the Inangahua district between the world wars.
The West Coast’s rugby league fortunes have flowed and ebbed with the region’s ‘‘extractive industries’’, Kerridge says. Mining and forestry no longer employ large work-forces, hence the potential player pool is shallower.
But Coasters still love their league. About 3000 turned out to watch the Kiwis play an invitation team in 2006 and Kerridge says the 5500 crowd for the WarriorsNewcastle Knights pre-season game at Wingham Park in 2011 was ‘‘the record attendance for a rugby league game on the Coast’’, surpassing even the 1954 Great Britain test.
The 2011 match honoured the 29 victims of the Pike River mine disaster, including West Coast and South Island Scorpions back Blair Sims.
Match proceeds were shared with the Miners’ Relief Fund.
Kerridge still says there are plenty of positives, pointing to the growth in junior numbers and the naming of ‘‘five Coast players in the South Island Scorpions 17s’’. ‘‘There are some good kids coming through, but then you start to lose them to university, or they buy a car and get other interests.
‘‘But we think we’ve got a great game, and it’s up to people like me, and the people coming behind me, to make sure we’ve got the facilities and structure [for future generations].’’
This tiny place is known in the north of England, Australia and other places because of rugby league. Peter Kerridge