The Grudge - Part I: Telfer driven to success by a fear of failure

Published on Friday 19 February 2010 22:26

Scotland coach's modest upbringing made him rail against the privileged . . .

• Jim Telfer on the training ground prior to the 1990 Calcutta Cup match

JIM Telfer often said that if he'd been knocking about in the 1930s he'd have been a communist. He knew what he was talking about, for he had one in the family. His stepfather-in-law, Ken Harrington, might have been a little too far to the left for Telfer's liking but they still spent many happy hours in each other's company.

Ken had a brilliant brain. He was Cambridge University, but one of the good guys. He ran rings around Telfer intellectually but Jim loved listening to him. He even let Ken take his boy, Mark, on a trip to Russia once.

They discussed politics and the state of society. Telfer was a Labour man but he wasn't impressed with the leadership of the party. He thought Michael Foot had been a clown and Neil Kinnock a vacuous showman.

"Full of wind and piss, that Kinnock," Telfer would say.

"Wedgwood Benn is the best of them," Ken would reply. "A man you can trust."

Looking back he can see clearly how the seeds of his socialism were sown.

His father, a quiet and determined man, left school when he was 14. Didn't matter if Willie Telfer was bright or not. His path was clear. He was going into service for the Duke of Roxburghe in the Scottish Borders.

Peggy, Jim's mother, a gentle and bright woman, was a servant in the big house. She, too, had finished school at 14, despite showing promise. The pair of them were brought up by parents who were subservient to the landed gentry. 'Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir'. That was how it was done. It was the way of things. The way of things grated on Telfer from as early as he can remember. The Duke this and the Duke that, the doffing of the cap and the knowing their place – it wasn't for him. Whenever the landlord paid a visit they were expected to line up to greet him. Telfer could never understand why. "I'd think, 'What's he done that's so great?' I'd wonder, 'Why is he being treated like he was special?' I just didn't get it."

As a young man he got confused when a group of other children suddenly appeared in the fields one Christmas, stayed a while and then disappeared again for months on end. It took him time to work out that these were the landlord's kids, who had parachuted in from boarding school in Edinburgh during the holidays and were then driven back there when the holidays were over. Day trippers to the land, they were. Tourists. These people with their private educations and their big houses and their new cars were living it up off the back of his parents' hard work, his parents who rarely had a day off, who didn't have fancy things. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair.

"I was a farm worker's son so I was never going to be a farmer. Had I been a farmer's son it would have been different, but I wasnae. I was a shepherd's boy, just like my father before me. Och, my dad was never given a chance. In a way I resented it, aye. He walked the hills all day. Never got a break. Never had the chances that others had. Resentment came into my head, that's true. Privilege. I've hated it since I was a lad trying to make sense of why some people had so much and some had so little."

• Jim Telfer and Ian McGeechan celebrate with the Scotland team in the Murrayfield dressing room

The Dukes and the Lords and the clan chiefs. Telfer thought the ordinary people of the Borders had been sold down the river by absentee millionaires. "They're crafty, they only look after their own," he'd tell his mother. "They're living down in London, living in luxury, living off the sweat and honesty of people like us."

Telfer remembers Peggy saying: "Oh, Jim, don't be talking that way", but she knew he was right. She knew lots of things. She knew what she wanted for her son and it didn't involve lambing or shearing or that lovely job that Willie had to do with the pigs from time to time: hitting them over the head with a hammer to stun them before slashing their throats with a butcher's knife.

Peggy wanted her son to make his money sitting down. She pushed him into education, not that he needed much pushing.

He was clever and inquisitive. The land was never going to hold him. A job in a bank was nirvana to his mother. Or something that required a collar and tie and a briefcase, instead of a jumper and trousers and a shepherd's staff passed down the generations.

In time, Peggy's dream came true. Jim left the farm and went to college in Edinburgh, took the first steps down the road to a career as a chemistry teacher.

In the capital he stayed with his aunt and uncle. His daily route – or the route he chose – took him by George Heriot's, one of the city's more illustrious private schools. The place oozed history and opportunity and wealth. And it preyed on his mind.

On the footpath outside the school he made his statement, a little message to the people he'd grown to resent, the significance of which was known only to him. When the uniforms walked towards him each day there was no way on earth he was getting out of their way. He would not alter his course to let them past, not by an inch, not by half an inch. He would not break stride to let a boy in a blazer through. If it meant a collision, so be it. In his mind it was a point of principle about the privileged classes.

"When I was making my way I developed a huge fear of failure that was always with me. It drove me on as a player and it drove me on as a coach. I had and still have an inferiority complex. Aye, I do. Coming from the background I came from, I suppose it was inevitable. Raised in an environment where the landlord and the Duke were the kingpins made me feel small, despite me railing against it. It made me a bit of a rebel to be honest with you. I saw that you were judged on what you have rather than what you are and I didn't like that. I didn't like it one little bit."

In the late 1980s Scottish nationalism was on the rise but Telfer didn't much like the people in charge of the SNP either. There was a growing tide of anti-English sentiment washing about the place, but Telfer had no truck with that.

"Things were festering, aye. Around the country people were saying, 'Oh, we're Scottish and we hate the English', but if anybody had cause to hate the English it was us here in the Borders. We fought them for hundreds of years. So if anybody is entitled to hate them it's Borders people but we get on quite well. All that anti-English stuff was stoked up by the politicians and the media."

Still, Telfer could see where the hate was coming from. Tory rule had angered Scots in their millions. It angered him, too, if truth be told. "I'd sooner be dead than vote Tory," he said. "I had no time for Margaret Thatcher."

IT WAS a measure of the way things were that by March 1990 an unwitting 24-year-old rugby player was deemed one of her great supporters. Rebranded her blue-eyed boy by the Scottish media purely because he was quintessentially English, Will Carling felt that the Scots truly hated him.

"I was sitting there reading some of this stuff," said Carling, "and I'm thinking, 'There's some serious political shit going on here that I'm in the middle of but know absolutely nothing about'."

John Jeffrey, the Kelso and Scotland flanker, had a theory about the anti- Englishness that swept around Edinburgh in Grand Slam week 1990, and the hostility that followed in the years after. It goes back to football and Scotland's annual meeting with the Auld Enemy.

Seven months before the 1990 Five Nations began, the annual international football fixture was abandoned. On 27 May 1989, in the hours before Scotland met England at Hampden Park, the streets of Glasgow were overrun by hooligans.

There were running battles and hundreds of arrests. It was the biggest ever security operation at a domestic football match.

The Scottish newspapers spent the week castigating English hooligans and calling for their national football team to be banned, just like their club sides. Ever since 1872 the Auld Enemy had played each other every season, the cycle of matches only being broken by two world wars. In 1989 the plug was pulled for good.

"There was a vacuum there," said JJ. "The Calcutta Cup was now the only time that Scotland faced England in a sporting context. The game assumed a profile and a harshness it didn't have previously. It attracted people that might not otherwise have been that interested before. I'm not talking about hooligans. I'm talking about ordinary people with chips on their shoulders about the English and what Margaret Thatcher was doing to Scotland, who used sporting contests as an opportunity to release some of that resentment. I'm also talking about the tabloid media.

It was football-obsessed. Before the match was cancelled, it didn't matter what us rugby players were doing. If the soccer lads broke a nail it was a headline in the red tops. But now the tabloids with their readers in the hundreds of thousands suddenly had an interest in rugby. In the week of the England game they were leading the charge, firing people up, taking it into another dimension, making it political."

The Grudge - Part II: A Walk on the Wild Side

The Grudge - Part III: England sent homewards as Scots make Grand Slam history

• Copyright Tom English 2010. Extracted from The Grudge: Scotland vs. England, 1990 by Tom English, published 4 March, Yellow Jersey, 12.99.

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