Ray Prosser
Bulldozing prop forward for Wales and the Lions who became a tough but revered coach at Pontypool
RAY PROSSER, who has died aged 93, had an outstanding record as a rugby player, winning 22 caps as a rugged prop forward for Wales and playing in a winning British and Irish Lions team in New Zealand; but he will be chiefly remembered as one of the greatest coaches of the amateur era. His name will always be synonymous with Pontypool, where he transformed the town’s reputation in the rugby world by lifting the club out of the doldrums into the champions of Wales.
As a coach he created the most formidable rugby force of its time, the Pontypool front row of Graham Price, Bobby Windsor and Charlie Faulkner, who played as a fearsome unit 19 times for Wales and were known as Viet Gwent (a play on the Vietcong at the time of the Vietnam War).
He also provided Wales and the Lions with other fine players, such as Terry Cobner and Jeff Squire. When Cobner took over as pack leader on the Lions tour of New Zealand in 1977, the side’s recovery to win the second Test was inspired by the telephone conversations he had with his mentor, who was 11,000 miles away in Pontypool.
In the 1970-1971 season, in his early days as coach, the Poolers lost 32 out of 45 matches. In the mid-1980s they won 120 games out of 136, including 50 successive victories on their home ground.
A supporter wrote of this time:
“It seemed as though the whole Valley would empty in the march to Pontypool Park to see opposition teams put through the mincer.” The team was often accused of rough play and at least one club cancelled fixtures against them.
Thomas Raymond Prosser was born in Pontypool on March 2 1927, one of four children of Windsor Jack Prosser and his wife Margaret (known as Ivy). He went to George Street School in the town. Jack, a steelworker, was described as “a larger-than-life character from whom Ray inherited his phenomenal strength and his love of Pontypool and rugby football”.
Outside rugby, from which he earned no money as a player or a coach, he drove a bulldozer at the Panteg steelworks. He played more than 300 times for Pontypool between 1951 and 1961 and coached the club from 1969-1987. He once said, even after his success with Wales and the Lions: “The biggest honour ever to come my way was to wear the Pontypool jersey.”
Of the rugby when he started playing, Prosser said: “It was a rugged, violent game that didn’t require much skill. That fitted in with who I was.” He was described as “a robust and aggressive player, tireless in the ruck and maul, sometimes a little overvigorous”.
He won his first cap for Wales in a 9-6 victory over Scotland in Cardiff in 1956, and in that season he also helped Wales to beat France 5-3 to win the Five Nations Championship. For the next three seasons he was an automatic choice as tighthead prop.
His final game for Wales was in a losing match against France in 1961. He also played against touring teams from Australia in 1958 and South Africa in 1960.
He went to Australia and New Zealand with the Lions in 1959 and, despite his fear of flying and bouts of homesickness during the five-month tour, he became one of the team’s great characters. He was injured early on but appeared in the final Test, which the Lions won 9-6, their only victory in that series and the first time the All Blacks had been beaten at Eden Park in Auckland.
A team-mate said: “Prosser’s reputation for being as tough as old boots was brutally challenged on that tour, with the local referees turning a blind eye to assaults on the Lions.” Prosser told Windsor later: “I thought of going into the scrum backside first, so that they would kick me there rather than in the mouth.”
J B G Thomas, the Welsh rugby writer, described him at this time as “a truly rousing forward, a man who relishes life and seeks to produce the best in himself, on and off the field, a man of unquenchable spirit and unostentatious honesty, admired and respected by the tough New Zealand men who ruled the world of rugby”.
Prosser attributed his success as a coach to what he learned from the All Blacks on that tour, especially their training routines and their concentration on fitness. He said he had learnt two main things: that dominant forwards were the key to success in rugby, and that fitness was 80 per cent of what a good team required: the other qualities were 10 per cent luck and 10 per cent ability. He once said: “I don’t want ballhandlers, I want man-handlers.”
While he was coach Pontypool won the Welsh championship five times and headed the Welsh merit table seven times, as well as winning the Welsh Challenge Cup in 1983. One of his players said: “What he didn’t know about the techniques of forward play wasn’t worth knowing. We all knew to listen carefully when he barked out his instructions.”
He called his players by nicknames he had given them – Dodger, Baldy Bear, Horsehead, and so on. His training sessions were rigorous, especially so for those amateur days, driving his players to exhaustion, forcing them up a steep slope and berating any shirkers, as someone put it, “with the kind of adjectives that attract asterisks”. His aim was to enable players to keep on running for the full 80 minutes of a match.
When one of his protégés, the prop forward Graham Price, on his debut for Wales, showed that he had benefited from that lesson by running 70 yards to score a try to settle victory over France at Parc des Princes in Paris, his Pontypool colleagues waited to hear what Prosser, a man not known for heaping praise on players, would say. The conversation at the next training session went like this:
Prosser: “The prop you played against on Saturday wasn’t up to much.”
Price: “What makes you think that?” Prosser: “Because if he’d been any bloody good you wouldn’t have been able to run that far at the end of the game.”
The coach had an aversion to the limelight and would hide away with old friends after a game and buy his own beer in a corner of the clubhouse to avoid joining the team with their free drinks and food. Windsor explained: “I can see now that he felt that he couldn’t get too close to his players, that his b------ings would carry more weight if he kept his distance.”
On his death Pontypool named the Ray Prosser Stand in his honour, declaring: “He has been, without doubt, the most influential person in Pontypool’s rich and proud history … He made Pontypool the most feared and respected club in equal measure.”
When his wife, Nancy, died in 1983 after several decades of marriage, he lived with their daughter, Beverley, and her husband and family. She survives him.
‘Rugby was a rugged and violent game that didn’t require much skill. That fitted in with who I was’
Ray Prosser, born March 2 1927, died November 22 2020