Pilgrimage to Murrayfield which is still going after 60 years

AT six o’clock last Wednesday morning a bus pulled away from the Miners Arms out into Lewis Street on a pilgrimage north over 400 miles of motorways.

Pontrhydyfen RFC were off on the biennial trip to Scotland, re-enacting an ancient ritual once shared by community clubs nationwide but which has left those no longer able to make the trip clinging to memories of a time long gone.

The Scottish Trip, as celebrated by Max Boyce’s song of the Seventies, recognised the working men who had dutifully saved a bit every week for two years to afford time off for the biennial expedition in the vague direction of Murrayfield. So many have fallen by the wayside that Pontrhydyfen believe they stand alone.

They left the Afan Valley in the dark of pre-dawn and arrived at their destination in the Scottish Borders in the dark of early evening. They did so buoyed by a sense of history, fulfilling a long-distance fixture which goes back 60 years.

“There used to be no end of matches between Scottish and Welsh clubs to coincide with the international between the countries in Edinburgh and Cardiff,’’ says Pontrhydyfen secretary-cum-cook and jack of all trades, Stephen Owen. “But we believe ours is the only such fixture which has never been broken.

“A lot of others have fallen by the way but we’ve kept ours going since 1963. Covid made it impossible for other clubs but we kept going through the lockdowns by re-arranging the Kelso match at different times when we were allowed to play.’’

That they got out of their village, let alone reaching nearby Port Talbot long before the M4 reached as far west as Wales, was an achievement in itself during the worst British winter in living memory. The surprising aspect of the trail-blazing journey wasn’t that it took them almost a whole day through Siberian conditions but that they arrived at all.

“My uncle (Alun Jones) drove the bus because his father owned the company,’’ says Owen. “I’ve seen photos of the players getting off and on the bus every now and again to help the snow ploughs find a way through.’’

They did so without a former player who struggled to make the 1st XV. In 1963, Dick Jenkins’ boy, alias Richard Burton, was appearing on a nationwide basis in Cleopatra, the film that transformed him into a Hollywood superstar.

“It came about as the result of a chance meeting during the Empire Games in Cardiff in 1958 between my grandfather, Tom Owen, and a Scottish businessman from Kelso, Ian Henderson.

“It’s an escape from whatever is worrying us in life. It’s about the whole experience of a few days away for the young, the not-so-young and the decrepit.’’