Roddy Evans
Rugby player whose lineout skills won him 13 caps for Wales and a tour with the British Lions
RODDY EVANS, who has died aged 81, was a highly regarded lineout jumper in rugby teams for Wales and the British Lions; he won 13 caps for his country between 1958 and 1962 and went on the British Lions tour of New Zealand and Australia in 1959.
William Roderick Evans was born on December 19 1934 in Porthcawl, where he lived nearly all his life. He first came to the attention of Welsh selectors at Cowbridge Grammar School, where he had started as a centre three-quarter, learning passing, handling and kicking skills which were unusual in the lock forward he became in his mid-teens.
In 1953 he was chosen to represent Welsh Secondary Schools and in the same year, still only 18, he joined the Cardiff rugby club. In 1955 he won a Blue for Cambridge, where he attended Christ’s College, then noted for encouraging the entry of talented rugby players. He read Classics, then switched to Law because it gave him “more time for rugby”.
At the end of that season he was chosen for a combined Oxbridge squad that toured South America. Having injured a hamstring in the first game, he had time to indulge his taste for practical jokes. The most spectacular of these was when he rode a polo pony across the tables at a gala dinner attended by the president of Chile.
He followed this up by executing a perfect swallow dive off the 10-metre board at the hotel’s swimming pool before 500 stunned guests.
These antics provoked the president of the English Rugby Football Union, who was present, to say: “Evans, unless you go home immediately, right now, I will see to it that you never play international rugby.” He managed to find an old Dakota aeroplane that took him three days to reach home, stopping off at exotic places en route.
Thirty years later he bumped into the same rugby official at a Cornish hotel. As Evans jumped up to greet him in the dining room, his chair fell apart, crumbling to pieces under his weight. The RFU official smiled and observed: “Evans, you’re still at it after 30 years.”
He played his first game for Wales in a 3-3 draw with England at Twickenham, joining the legendary Rhys Williams in a second row that became one of the strongest lineout pairings in the history of Welsh rugby. He played the whole of that Five Nations championship, which Wales lost to England on points difference. He appeared that season for Cardiff, Barbarian and Welsh teams that beat the visiting Australians three times.
The following year he helped the Barbarians to a famous victory over the South African Springboks in Cardiff. Remarkably, however, he did not appear at all in the international championship in 1959 because he was studying to be solicitor. He also found time to get married.
Even more remarkably, in view of his absence from the international scene that year, he was chosen for the British Lions tour to New Zealand and Australia, the selectors having been greatly impressed by his earlier partnership with Rhys Williams. This was one of the happiest and most popular of Lions tours, displaying the exciting talents of the wingers Tony O’Reilly and Peter Jackson.
Even though the Lions scored more tries, which then counted only three points against five today, they lost the Test series to the kicking of the All Blacks’ full-back, Don Clarke. Evans was outstanding in the first two Test matches, starting a move that led to a try by Jackson in the second, but he was badly injured and had to be flown home after a game against a Maori team notable for dirty play.
This early return home may not have been an unqualified disappointment. His room-mate on the tour, the Scottish prop forward Hugh McLeod, said later that Evans was “hellish homesick” and would have “bailed out” had it not been been for his weekly phone call: “One night at dinner the receptionist came and said he had this phone call, so off he went. When I got back to our room he was writing her a letter. So I dragged him out to the pictures, because he would just have sat there feeling sorry for himself.”
Evans also missed the 1960 Five Nations championship, but returned in 1961, having moved by then from Cardiff to the Bridgend club down the road. He played in seven of Wales’s eight championship matches in 1961 and 1962, his last international appearances.
Evans worked as a solicitor in Bridgend and lived in a clifftop house above Rest Bay at Porthcawl.
He was married to his wife Sue for 57 years. She survives him with their two sons. Roddy Evans, born December 19 1934, died November 6 2016