Kayaks revel in rewriting history
Another jubilee celebration takes place next weekend, a diamond occasion for a diamond of a club founded at the end of the Second World War in Tiger Bay. The Kayaks – Cardiff International Athletic Club – has long been a rugby brotherhood like no other, never slow to stand up and be counted against injustice of any kind. It reinforces their entitlement to a unique status, a club from the League of Nations whose sense of fair play has never known any boundaries.
Formed in the Welsh capital’s dockland to ‘embrace all races and religions reflecting the make-up of the local population,’ they have been true to their word through thick and thin. Not that long ago their backs included a Malayan scrum-half, an Arab fly half, a pair of West Indian centres, wings of Irish ancestry and a Jewish full back.
Franklyn Parris, now elevated to the presidency after a lifetime’s service, is proud that they have had players from everywhere on God’s earth except Alaska. “Every nationality has represented us on the field except the Eskimo,’’ he says. “We’re always on the look out…’’
Down the years, the club has never lost sight of its motto Unsus et Idem (One and the Same) despite suffering from the kind of bigotry which most clubs, mercifully, are never subjected to.
Fred Campbell, whose father settled in Tiger Bay from Jamaica a century ago, came home from the war hungry for work. Needing a little extra to top up his pay from the steelworks in support of his young family, Fred signed for the new Cardiff Rugby League club in 1950.
They went bust two years later, leaving the former Kayak to serve a life-ban from Union for being paid to play League at a time when some supposedly true-blue amateur clubs were allegedly slipping some players brown envelopes to keep them sweet. The most famous Kayak of all, Billy Boston, can vouch for such hypocrisy. “I got a fiver when I played for Neath,’’ he told me of a time shortly before he signed for Wigan. “It only cost me three shillings and nine pence (less than 20p) to get there and back.’’
After some years as persona non grata in Union circles, Fred Campbell received a letter out of the blue, from Cardiff RFC inviting him to an old players’ reunion at the Arms Park. “Dad was thrilled to get the invitation,’’ his son Stuart, a lifelong Kayak, said.”He thought it would be brilliant to catch up with all his old team-mates.’’
Fred duly turned up at the Arms Park, as invited. The way Stuart tells the story, the doorman at the members’ clubhouse stopped his father from entering.
‘’You’re Fred Campbell. You played Rugby League. You can’t come in here.’’
Not a word of compassion, let alone an apology. Fred had been treated the way all those who had gone from Union to League used to be treated, as social outcasts.
‘’When dad got home, I knew from the look on his face that something had gone wrong,’’ said Stuart. “He could have kicked up a fuss but he didn’t wanted to cause a scene so he just walked away.’’
Boston makes no secret of his belief that the colour of his skin explained why he was never asked to play for Cardiff. When the CIAC’s youth XV were subjected to more overt forms of racial abuse during a match in the early Sixties, their coach, the late, legendary Sammy John, took his team off the field.
The protest extended to their withdrawal from the Cardiff & District Rugby Union. Instead of local fixtures, the Kayaks broadened their horizons across the length and breadth of the South Wales rugby belt and found new ones.
That they travelled with their own band headed by one of Tiger
Bay’s best-loved characters, the jazz guitarist and trumpeter Vic Parker, made them all the more popular. “We always had two coaches for the away trips,’’ says Stuart Campbell. “One for the players, the other for Vic and his musicians.’’
Not long after returning to the Cardiff & District fold, the Kayaks made another stand over racism, one which thrust them onto a global stage. They joined the anti-apartheid demonstration and chose one of their very own to head their march against the touring Springboks.
Joe Erskine, a member of the same Cardiff Schools’ team as Boston, had abandoned a career as a promising outside-half and been crowned heavyweight champion of Britain and the Empire in 1957 after the second of his five fights against Henry Cooper.
The Kayaks action took some moral courage given the Welsh Rugby Union’s lily-livered refusal along with the rest of the rugby establishment to sever relations with apartheid South Africa, something they didn’t get round to doing for almost another 20 years.
“We led the march and we got a bit of abuse for our trouble,’’ said Arthur Duarte, a founder member of the club whose ancestors settled in Tiger Bay from Cape Verde.
During the bitter ‘Winter of Discontent,’ the club stood four-square in support of the miners’ strike without waiting to be asked. By then, several Kayaks had followed Boston north to star in Rugby League, most notably Johnny Freeman, Colin Dixon and the Great Britain Test centre David Willicombe.
The club etched their names in gold lettering into their history alongside those who stayed at home like Carl Smith, probably the best back row forward not to have been capped by Wales. Yet they were still being denied official recognition.
“During my time as club secretary, we put in so many requests for WRU status that I began to lose count,’’ says Stuart Campbell, a retired surveyor. “After we’d been rejected for the fifth or sixth time, I wrote to the president of the Cardiff & District Rugby Union asking: ‘Where are we going wrong?’
“It became clear they didn’t like that we’d mentioned the Rugby League players in our history. They said: ‘We’re a Rugby Union organisation. Do you think you could look at that stuff about League players?’”
They were asking the club to rewrite their history, preferably to expunge all reference to Boston, Freeman, Dixon and Willicombe who spread the Welsh gospel throughout the grimey mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
“We said: ‘How do you expect us not to mention those players just because they chose to go north?’ We didn’t change a word of our history and we are now a member club of the WRU.’’
Another chapter will be written next Saturday night, at the very clubhouse where they turned Fred Campbell away all those years ago…