So, where else can you discover an Olympic legend and Biggles?
(not forgetting those Prince’s Street shenanigans and the day a match was brought forward so the teams could go racing!)
■ DASHING England wing Cyril Lowe, who scored all of his 18 Test tries in the Championship either side of World War I, is thought to have been the inspiration behind WE Johns’ fictional pilot and war hero Biggles. The diminutive but speedy Lowe served in the Royal Flying Corps from 1916 and had nine confirmed kills to his name.
Lowe graduated from an outstanding Dulwich School XV in 1909 which produced five future internationals who all played in the Championship – Eric Loudan Shand and Grahame Donald from Scotland, Ireland captain WD Doherty, future England captain JE ‘Jenny’ Greenwood and Lowe himself.
■ THE term Grand Slam, used to denote a team winning the Championship with a clean sweep of all their game was first used in a
Times headline on March 16 1957 in the preview to England’s final game of the season that afternoon when they marched to a 16-3 victory over Scotland at Twickenham.
The unidentified sub-editor decided to work in a bridge term which is used when a player wins all 13 tricks in their hand. Prior to 1957 there had been 13 occasions when the team winning either the Home Unions or Five Nations Championship had won all their games. Since 1957 their have been 24 Grand Slams with nine coming in the Six Nations.
■ RUGBY, as everybody knows, is not the be-all and end-all of a rugby weekend in Ireland even in the Championship. The match between Ireland and France at Mardyke Pk in Cork on March 24 1913 was therefore moved from an afternoon kick-off to the morning to allow both sides to attend the big race meeting in Cork that afternoon. Ireland won 24-0 with JP Quinn scoring a hat-trick of tries.
Meanwhile in 1887, the only way Limerick forward John Macauley could ensure getting the day off from work for the eagerly awaited game against England was to organise his wedding for the morning of the match at Lansdowne Road. Ireland won by two tries to nil.
■ ERIC Liddell, while a student at Edinburgh University, played rugby as well as starring as an athlete and in 1922 made his Scotland and Championship debut at the Stade Colombes in Paris when the Scots drew 3-3 with France. The only other time he ‘appeared’ at Stade Colombes was two years later when he broke the world record in the 400m to win the Olympic gold medal while he also took bronze in the 200m.
In seven Championship games Liddell scored four tries and was on the losing side just once, in his final game against England at Twickenham in 1923.
■ FATHER Tom Gavin, of Moseley and Cambridge University, is the only serving priest to have played in the Championship although a number of internationals became priests after retiring. Gavin, a forceful centre, was ordained in 1946 and capped twice during the 1949 tournament against France and England before the word came from on high that he should concentrate on his vocation. “I served God and I also got to play alongside Jackie Kyle for a season, I have no regrets,” said Gavin shortly before his death in 2009.
■ JAMES Marsh boasts the distinction of being the only player in the Championship to represent two countries. Marsh was educated in Edinburgh and while a medical student there was twice selected for Scotland, against Wales and Ireland in 1890, when England didn’t contest the Championship. Later that year Marsh, a wing, graduated and set up a GP
practice in Leigh and started playing for the Swinton club from where he earned a cap against Ireland in 1882, again finishing on the winning side.
■ PRINCE’S Street, Edinburgh, has enjoyed a lively Championship over the years, especially as the night wears on after big games. The formidable David Bedell Sivright, a former Scotland heavyweight boxing champion, caused chaos one night when he lay down across the tramline and refused to budge and no policemen could be found brave enough to move him on. He eventually staggered over to the ‘cab rank’ and tackled a horse that was waiting patiently while harnessed to a trap.
Then in 1988 it was where John Jeffrey and Dean Richards managed to reduce the historic Calcutta Cup to the Calcutta Shield after their post-match celebrations got out of hand.
■ WALES’ first win on English soil came against Ireland in 1887 when they agreed to meet Ireland at Birkenhead Park – not far from Liverpool docks – to thoughtfully save the Ireland team the cost of travelling down to Cardiff after their boat from Dublin arrived. And Wales’ first win over England in England came at another unlikely setting, the Crown Flatt playing fields in Dewsbury where local hero ‘Buller’ Stadden – originally from Cardiff – scored the game’s only try for Wales. Stadden was to come to a tragic end, strangling his wife in 1906 and then slashing his wrists before being arrested. He died of his wounds three days later.
■ HOME advantage has been huge in the Championship over the years but never more so than with the great Welsh team of the Seventies. Their unbeaten run in the then Five Nations started in 1968 when, after their 14-9 defeat against France they won their next 27 Championship matches on the trot before it ended in spectacular fashion in 1982 when a rampant Scotland scored five tries in their thumping 34-18 win at the Arms Park.
■ THE first radio broadcast of a Championship match was undertaken for the BBC 90 years ago this season when the former Quins captain Teddy Wakelam provided commentary on the England game against Wales at Twickenham. Wakelam employed the novel system of dividing the pitch into eight squares and while he provided run of play commentary a voice in the background – Charles Lapwroth, whispered the square number. This is the origin of the expression “back to square one”. The BBC also offered the first live TV coverage, the 1938 Calcutta Cup at Twickenham, which could be received by those with TV sets within a 20-mile radius of the ground and at selected cinemas in London.