Punch-ups, politics and rugby for Wales: Butler
Eddie Butler has been on rugby’s frontline for more than 40 years. As part of the legendary Pontypool team of the late ’70s and early ’80s, he won 16 caps for Wales and captained his country six times, while also going on a Lions tour to New Zealand. Sinc
Butler was born in Newport in 1957, but, when he was three, the family moved to Raglan, as his father was working in a nylon factory in Pontypool.
After attending Monmouth School, he had a gap year in Spain in 1975 just as Franco’s dictatorship was coming to an end.
He went on to study French and Spanish at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, becoming a triple rugby Blue.
Back home, he had initially tried his hand training with Newport, but without much joy.
Then, in the summer of 1976, came the phone call which changed his life, as Pontypool coach Ray Prosser rang up to invite him on board.
The rest, as they say, is history. “I was shown around the club by Graham Price and felt the welcome was a little warmer and I never played for anybody else,” says Butler.
“Ray Prosser was an absolute giant of the game. We had our set way of playing, which was very much the Pross way, based largely on the observations he had made lying in an Otago hospital bed on the Lions tour of 1959.
“He just formulated this view that rugby was to be played vigorously up front and everybody else had to fit into the mould.
“We never claimed to hold the keys to the mysteries of the universe, but it suited us.
“A lot of it was physical fitness. We trained mercilessly and then we had a very simple game plan.
“Basically, you sold yourself to the collective. There was absolutely no individual glory at any time. You just sacrificed everything for the common good. It was our little commune.
“Pross just treated everyone the same. There were no stars at the club, however many caps you had won. Pricey, Bobby and Charlie were treated exactly the same as everybody else. The method was more important than the personalities.
“Our Achilles Heel was that we overstepped the mark on occasions. We were quite violent really. It was all part of the system. We were quite red of claw.
“It’s just that we were very good at it. “Bobby Windsor was just a force of nature. He was so good at all aspects of the game and that included the dark arts. So you tangled with him at your peril, really, and he had Charlie [Faulkner] as his henchman. Jeez, they could inflict some terrible pain. They were world-class torturers.
“It was just rugby at that time. It was a violent game. When I played for Cambridge University, people used to relish beating us to a pulp.
“It was all part of the fun, really. You sported all those rake marks down your back, but they were very superficial. The trouble was, because we played twice a week, you were always carrying some niggle. Pontypool Park had a fair bit of dog s*** on it. I spent years consuming antibiotics because every nick and cut turned sceptic. There was always something oozing puss on me.”
Butler chooses two scrum-halves – David Bishop and Terry Holmes – as the best players he lined up alongside for club and country.
“The Bish had more natural athleticism and Terry had the ultimate rugby brain,” says the former Pooler captain.
“Terry was so big and so bloody tough. When he was fit and raring to go, God, he was a good player.
“The Bish was more volatile. What you saw was what you got. The Bish was the Bish. He just did some extravagant things on the field, things that very few people could ever do.
“They were chalk and cheese in terms of personalities. They couldn’t have been more different.”
Butler was just 22 when he made his Wales debut at home to France in January 1980, packing down at No 8.
Then, a few weeks later, he lined up against England at Twickenham, where his back row colleague Paul Ringer was controversially sent off.
“My first two games were both spectacularly and overtly violent,” he recalls.
“You talk about the dark arts at Pontypool. Well, it seemed to me, on those two international occasions, it was quite out in the open. It was open warfare. But with the background I had, I just thought ‘Oh well and so it carries on at international level just as it does at club level.’
“I knew no different, so you just got on with it. That’s how it was.
“For that England game at Twickenham, it was just an atmosphere that was really toxic and the game duly delivered on what had been feared.
“I have a lot of sympathy for Paul Ringer. But, unfortunately, David Burnett, the referee, had been so specific in his final warning that even if Paul had missed John Horton, he would have probably got sent off.
“It was just a referee who was teetering on losing control and was waiting for the very next thing in order to reestablish his authority. So it was no surprise, really. The thing was, it didn’t actually stop a lot of things going on. It remained pretty gruesome right to the very end, really.
“The worst one was when Geoff Wheel aimed an almighty hoof at the ball as it was bumbling along the floor and Roger Uttley was stooping to pick it up. His studs just went straight up Roger’s face and it was almost as if his face peeled away.
“It was an extraordinary game and it had a significant bearing on the next chapter in Welsh rugby.
“There was such an outcry after the match. We went from being a side that played a very Welsh way, which definitely included a no-nonsense approach to physical contact and violence, to being told the next person that does anything will never play for Wales again.
“The phrase at the time was they took our spirit away and you can’t play like that in Wales. It’s such a part of the fabric of Welsh rugby. It became very awkward. They were very difficult times after that.
“We didn’t really recover from it until the 1987 World Cup. It had a good five-year impact on Welsh rugby.”
In July 1983, Butler was called up as a replacement during the latter stages of the British & Irish Lions’ tour of New Zealand.
It was to be a brief but eventful stay. “I arrived in New Zealand on the Saturday morning to be told by Jim Telfer that the two No 8s I had come out to replace - John Beattie and Iain Paxton - were both fit!” he recalls.
“I sat on the bench against Counties Manukau in Pukekohe without getting on and then ended up getting involved in a fight in the warm-up afterwards.
“There was a mass brawl where we were assaulted by about 50 of the crowd, as we went lapping around the outside of the pitch.
“I remember it was me, Ginger
McLoughlin and Colin Deans. We were just slowly going round, minding our own business, trying to do a couple of laps.
“Then all of a sudden a couple of cans start being lobbed our way and then a couple of drunken people are jostling us, then they start tackling and then the tackling becomes a bit more full on.
“It just became a bit of a Rorke’s Drift moment in the middle of the pitch and they came at us in quite high numbers. It did kick off a bit.
“I would say drunkenness played a part! I then played against Waikato on the Tuesday before the final Test and that was my lot. It was typical of my rugby career really, a little bit turbulent. I was there about nine days!”
Butler doesn’t have the happiest memories of his first game as Wales skipper, against England in Cardiff in February 1983.
“Oh, that was totally disastrous, 13-all, it was just awful,” he says with a groan.
“We were just rusty and nothing quite clicked. It was an ugly draw.
“The press launched into us, saying it was a shambles and everything.
“I enjoyed being captain of a young Welsh team. We had good fun and had a couple of decent wins against Scotland and Ireland that season.
“But it wasn’t an easy ride. We were generally criticised far more in the media than we were praised, simply because everybody took it for granted that Wales would carry on winning at rugby. It was just one of the givens.
“Public expectation was high and if you didn’t deliver then you were fair game for a roasting. So they were tricky times, no question.
“When we lost away in Romania later that year, God, that was awful.
“Travelling through Ceausescu’s Romania was an experience in itself. We went out there with a very callow team and came up against a pack that did a Pontypool on us. We were lambs to the slaughter.”
Butler’s last game at the helm was a defeat at home to Scotland in January 1984.
“It did get to me then,” he admits. “I thought ‘This is an ordeal now.’ “The captain was fair game if Wales weren’t winning. It just carries certain benefits and certain perils and if you are not winning you tend to suffer a bit. That’s just the way it is.
“So I was quite happy then that Spikey Watkins was given the captaincy and I just carried on playing for that season. England away, in that campaign, is probably my favourite Wales game of all.”
Butler won his final cap in November 1984 against Australia. “They were the best side I played against, they were brilliant.”
The following February, still only 27, he retired from international rugby.
“I had joined the BBC and I was aware I was enjoying work more than I was looking forward to playing rugby on a Saturday,” he recalls.
“There was a definite change in mental preparation and you have got to be totally on the case mentally when it comes to giving your all for Wales and something had just changed.
“So I found it quite easy to say I am done here. I had ceased enjoying it.”
Having worked as a teacher in Cheltenham for three years, Butler joined Radio Wales as a press and publicity officer in 1984.
But that role ended when he “fell out with the sports department” and he went on to work for a property development company, while still playing for his beloved Pontypool.
Then, in 1988, he was taken on by the newly launched Sunday Correspondent newspaper to write about rugby.
“That was a brilliant job,” he says. “It was the Titanic setting sail and we all knew it was heading straight for an iceberg, but boy we partied on deck while it was afloat.”