Interview: Legendary Welsh wing Gerald Davies on a ‘nervous’ week before the call-off and why Wales-Scotland games were his favourite

Gerald Davies jinks past Ian Smith to score a try in his country’s thrilling 19-18 win over Scotland at Murrayfield in February 1971

Certainly the greatest he graced when Scotland were the team with the near-impossible task of stopping Wales’ wing wizard. That’s saying something because there were many fine encounters between these teams in the 1970s and at least two other solid-gold classics.

Murrayfield ’71, the dying minutes, and incredibly Scotland were winning. But then the ball was flung out wide to the  fellow with the Dennis Hopper/Easy Rider moustache…

“Murrayfield was my favourite of all  the international grounds I played,” adds Davies. “In my day it was open-ended. Now it’s enclosed but we’d emerge from the dressing room and before us was all this wonderful space. That was important  for a winger, even if it was an illusion, just  in my imagination. I always thought  Murrayfield offered more room, and in that game it seemed there was just enough for me to run round Ian Smith and sneak into the corner.”

Too bad we didn’t roof the stadium earlier in the – doubtless futile – hope this might have made Davies claustrophobic. Too bad Scotland full-back Smith, when diving full-length in his – definitely futile – bid to stop the score, resembled nothing so much as a sack of tatties being thrown off the back of a lorry. And too bad our captain, Peter “PC” Brown, banged an upright with a kick a few minutes beforehand because John Taylor’s conversion of the try sailed between the posts and Wales triumphed 19-18.

“PC – what a marvellous chap,” says Davies. “Very eccentric kicking technique. I don’t think I ever saw anyone place the ball then turn his back on it. And I’m pretty sure no one ever made a point of blowing their nose just before the run-up.”

Then Davies laughs. “Just as well PC’s long retired like me. If he was to wipe his snotters in the middle of the game at the Millennium on Saturday he’d most likely get a yellow card!”

The coronavirus. Davies apologises for the black humour because the first thing he says at the start of our conversation is: “I’m nervous.” With very good reason. His anxiety as president of the Welsh Rugby Union concerned a Cobra crisis meeting in Downing Street but while the latest instalment of Wales vs Scotland survived Thursday’s deliberations the game was postponed yesterday. Davies in any case had been anticipating empty seats. “Folk were phoning me to say they wouldn’t be coming because it was too risky. They were panicking… ”

We agree – as even Boris Johnson must do – to leave COVID-19 to the experts and return to something he’s eminently qualified to discuss and which I had the thrill of sneaking into the schoolboys’ enclosure to observe: Wales as the supreme swashbucklers, all that flair and hair, all those sidesteps and sideboards, the Carmarthen Globetrotters, Real Pontypridd. “But sometimes,” he stresses, “your boys won.”

Now 75, Davies is a Red Dragon immortal. He can walk through the valleys needing only his first name. Gareth Edwards is Gareth, Barry John is Barry and the man in the No 14 shirt who played with little wings on his ankles is “Gerald … it’s quite soft and feminine, don’t you think? Maybe lots of boys got called it because of me… that’s quite a responsibility.”

Generally it was Davies’ boyos who won. Three Grand Slams, five Triple Crowns, five Five Nations and another two which were shared. Besides the Murrayfield try there were 19 more from him, plus another three as a member of the greatest British Lions team who, also in ’71, conquered the All Blacks.

His mantelpiece might have groaned with even more honours if he hadn’t twice decided to walk away from rugby. Three years after New Zealand he declined to join the Lions for the tour of South Africa. “I was a teacher in West Sussex, just about to move back to Wales and buy my first house with my wife Cilla, so these were considerations, but the main reason I didn’t go was apartheid. I’d visited South Africa twice before. It’s a wonderful, beautiful country, but the way the black man was treated wasn’t part of that beauty. I didn’t make a fuss or try to change the minds of others. It was my  decision.”

Earlier, in 1970, Davies missed all of the Five Nations to concentrate on his degree at Cambridge. “I was studying English Literature. Squad training had just started for Wales but there were no motorways so I was having to travel five hours, cross-country. I just thought: ‘They’ve accepted me at this great university, a collier’s son from a little place on a hill above Carmarthen Bay, so I have to give the course my absolute best because it won’t come round again’.”

His old dad would have been pleased. “Do you remember Tony Blair’s big speech about ‘Education, education, education’? That was Father to me back in the 1950s.” Tudor Davies was a miner whose days began with a two-mile walk to catch a train to his pit. “He was up so early and back so late that in winter he never saw the sun until the weekend. Then he had to give up because he had too much dust in his lungs. There was a great feeling of community among colliers but he didn’t want me following him underground so he stressed the importance of having a good education.

“I’ve heard of boys being taken down the pit by their fathers possibly to scare them. That didn’t happen to me but when I was captain of the Cambridge XV and we were about to play Oxford in the annual varsity match I took the team over to Aberavon and arranged for them to see inside a mine. They were amazed. A number of them were from public schools. They still talk about that day whenever I bump into them.”

In Davies’ home village of Llansaint – “llan” means church – the religion was rugby. “After chapel on Sunday – and everyone went – all the menfolk would gather outside for a big discussion but it wouldn’t be the sermon they’d just heard: they all wanted to talk about Llanelli’s game the previous day at Stradey Park.” Every boy dreamed of playing for Wales but Tudor wasn’t keen on that either.

“He knew the game, loved the game and had played it himself but he was worried I might get injured in a way that could alter the course of my life. He didn’t actually try to stop my rugby but was hoping his mantra about education would get through to me. I listened but I also kept playing. Then when I started doing well, getting picked for Welsh Schools, he became a great supporter.”

The mantra obviously had the desired result with entry to Cambridge although it took the young Welshman a while to find his feet. “The place was high academia, serious and intense, everyone else seemed so much more clever and I thought: ‘Gerald, you’re not cut out for this’. There was one day when I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. The university outfitters, Ryder & Aimes, would display the rugby teams in the window and a few of us were studying them. A college name next to one of the players confused me. “Where’s Magdalen?’ I asked, pronouncing it like Mary Magdalene because of all those Sundays spent at chapel. This fellow sneered as he corrected me. Then he asked: ‘Where’s Gonville & … ’ He couldn’t pronounce ‘Caius’. I’d watched University Challenge so I was able to get my own back!”

The famous mouser took root at Cambridge. “Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, flower-power – that was the inspiration for it. What a great time to be a young man! The clothes were crazy and the music was wonderful: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan… ” And Davies was enraptured by Eng Lit, too: “Shakespeare obviously, DH Lawrence, Austen, Dickens and the poets Yeats and Keats. I loved all of that stuff then and I still do now, especially the poetry. It’s not quite true, by the way, that all Welshmen can sing because I’m the exception and I’m much more likely to recite a poem.” He offers up some of the other Dylan, who else but Dylan Thomas: “Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green… ”

Young and easy Davies was three days shy of his 22nd birthday on his first visit to Murrayfield, a win for us in 1967. By the following year at Cardiff Arms Park Wales had the Edwards/John half-back combo fully operational and gained revenge. “Gareth and Barry were the dream team. I’d known Barry from grammar school matches and it was a sad day when he stopped. I think of him as typifying the difference between rugby then and now. Now it’s hard and tough and physical and there was nothing like that in Barry. Bill McLaren called him a little phantom which was a perfect description. We all thought he gave up too soon but Phil [Bennett] came along and we won two more Slams.”

Back on the open prairie of Murrayfield in ’69 John and Edwards grabbed tries in another Welsh victory. Then, after Davies’ interregnum, they both crossed the whitewash again. The fifth time in ’71 that the lead changed hands Scotland seemed to be heading for a famous victory but there would be one final twist. “Time was almost up but I remember our captain, John Dawes, telling us quietly and calmly that we could still win.” With Davies on the far flank he was right.

So, that sidestep: nature or nurture? “I copied Carwyn James. Our Lions coach in New Zealand, when he was playing up at Stradey Park, was the first guy I saw do that jink. Every training session I worked on my sidestep and without sounding boastful it seemed to go into my DNA and became natural. I didn’t have to think about it.”

That’s too much talking about himself so Davies ponders the team lists and plucks out a few doughty opponents in dark blue: “Billy Steele… John Frame, we’re friends… Jock Turner, lovely player, so stylish. Our games against Scotland were always full of movement, invention and adventure.” There have been few more adventuresome moments in rugby than Edwards’ incredible solo try in ’72 when the chasing of his own punt took the scrum-half into the red mud of the perimeter track and he emerged as if from a bloody battlefield.

“I couldn’t catch Gareth,” says Davies, “but I was first to congratulate him on the walk back.” Then Scotland enjoyed some successes with home victories in ’73 and ’75, the latter being the game of the then world-record 104,000 crowd. Did fans crouched on the grass to escape the crush possibly cramp his style and stop him running free? “I don’t think it was that. Your team played very well. But what a gathering that was. Murrayfield was the big trip for our fans. Flying to Paris or Dublin was out of reach for miners and steelworkers. Yes, they went to Twickenham but Edinburgh was always special. A few of the team would take a stroll along Princes Street on match-day morning and it would be a sea of red. The supporters would return to Wales with great tales – that is, when they eventually got back home.”

The defeat in ’75 would be Davies’ last in the fixture. There was another memorable clash in ’77 when Scotland were gallant losers, undone by another stupendous score, this time by Bennett. “Just before then your lot had run us ragged. Andy Irvine led the charge and we didn’t get our hands on the ball for ages before I was able to pass to Phil.” You’re underselling it, Gerald – you sidestepped three of our men, left them for dead. “Well I’d run into the middle of the park to try to help our cause where it’s always more crowded than out on the wing. Bill McLaren, I found out afterwards, had remarked: ‘What’s Davies doing there?’

“I must say I miss Bill and his commentaries dearly. Andy and I went to see him before he passed away. He did as much as we fellows ever did to popularise rugby – folk tuned in just to hear his voice. His use of language was colourful and poetic and his love of rugby shone through.”

Davies’ final game against Scotland, in ’78, was completed just as Cardiff was engulfed in snow. “That was a cold, cold day – especially for a winger stuck out on the touchline – but it was worse for the Scottish fans who got stranded. The Angel Hotel next to the Arms Park was our HQ and the manager allowed as many as possible to sleep in the corridors. That was a lovely gesture as some other places shut their doors and it summed up the spirit of this wonderful fixture.”

Circumstances are different, drastically so, but the world has darkened and Scots are adrift in the Principality again.

Some day, though – admittedly no one knows exactly when – the two countries will play rugby  once more.