Farewell to England’s greatest scrum-half
On a wintry Saturday at Old Deer Park more than half a century ago, Dickie Jeeps made a point of introducing himself to a Welsh schoolboy.
England’s record-breaking scrum-half got there early to watch the morning curtain-raiser — a final Welsh Under 18 trial — before appearing for his club, northampton, against London Welsh in the afternoon. Viewed through the prism of history, it can be seen as the day the sorcerer met his apprentice.
Jeeps singled the teenager out in the clubhouse before heading back to the family fruit farm in Cambridgeshire.
‘You played very well,’ Jeeps told him, scrum-half to scrum-half. ‘Keep up the good work.’ ‘Thank you, Mr Jeeps. Can I have your autograph?’ ‘Certainly. What’s your name?’ ‘Gareth Edwards.’
The finest Lions no 9 of his day would never forget the name, not least because the 17-yearold succeeded him as the best scrum-half of the next generation and every generation thereafter as rugby’s Player of the Century.
Edwards told the story yesterday of that first chance meeting during December 1964 in response to learning of Jeeps’ death after a long illness at the age of 84.
‘I am saddened by the news of his passing,’ said Edwards. ‘You cannot speak too highly of Dickie Jeeps as a player and a person.
‘ That first meeting happened by pure coincidence. I’d played in the morning, then stayed on to watch him play in the afternoon never realising that he’d watched me.
‘I was with the other boys and we were bowled over that he took the trouble to talk to us. For someone of his standing to say he thought I’d played well is something I’ve never forgotten.
‘I’d read about him during those Lions tours in the Fifties but you had to go to the cinema if you wanted to see them — and then it would only be a few brief clips towards the end of the Pathe news.
‘Dickie had such a great passion for the game that he’d probably got there early that day to cast a beady eye over who was coming through on the Welsh scene. all I wanted was his autograph.’
Jeeps, then 33, had retired from the Test arena two years earlier, captaining England for the last time in March 1962 and the Lions five months later in Bloemfontein at the end of their four-match losing series against the Springboks.
It guaranteed him a unique niche in the game’s folklore — the only player to start and finish his international career with the Lions in South africa.
On the celebrated 1955 tour, Jeeps made the trip as the third scrum-half behind England’s no 1, Johnny Williams and the redoubtable Trevor Lloyd from Maesteg. What they didn’t know was that the uncapped Jeeps had made an indelible impression on the Lions fly-half, Cliff Morgan, during a northampton versus Cardiff match earlier that season.
as Jeeps told me many years later: ‘I had a terrific match against Cardiff and luckily the best fly-half in the game liked me. That helped me a lot. Johnny Williams had a longer pass than mine but sometimes it was too high. Cliff wanted the ball thrown in front of him so he could run on to it.’
Born and bred in the village of Willingham on the edge of the Fens, Jeeps packed a competitive ferocity into his 5ft 7in, 12st frame which made him as tough as old boots. Morgan, the mercurial ringmaster of the only drawn series in Lions history, said of him: ‘He served you like a dog, he was tough and he knew the game.’
Jeeps knew it well enough to have seen the future that morning at Old Deer Park. If it didn’t dawn on him that the advent of Edwards would bring the bleakest of out- looks to anglo-Welsh relations from an English perspective, it soon did. In 11 matches against England, Edwards won 10.
‘He was so complete as a scrumhalf that he didn’t have a single weakness,’ said Jeeps. ‘after his first match against us, I thought, ‘‘The sooner that so-and-so goes to rugby league the better it will be for England’’. and then I said, ‘‘We’ll start a fund for him to go. Here’s my half-crown’’.’
The youngest RFU president at 44, chairman of the Sports Council for seven years until 1985, Jeeps was ahead of his time, criticising the Lions for their ‘buggins turn’ selection policy, lambasting coaching in the English club game as ‘a joke’ and helping lay the foundations for overdue national success in the nineties.
It is a measure of Jeeps’ enduring stature that his 13 Tests in three Lions tours — three more than Edwards managed during his three tours in the Sixties and Seventies — still stands as a record and always will.
Richard Eric Gautrey Jeeps will forever be untouchable.