Ian McLauchlan: ‘I loved the physicality or rugby and lived for it. I would have played every day if I could’

Ian McLauchlan in the thick of the action against Wales in 1979. Picture: Colorsport/Shutterstock

It was 1973 and McLauchlan had just been appointed Scotland captain and, surveying the SRU hierarchy for an ally, Monro seemed the likeliest candidate. The Scots were hosting Wales at Murrayfield where it had been tradition until that moment for the president and the selectors to visit the home dressing-room and remain there for the big speech. But, rather than going with the flow to ease himself into the post, Mighty wanted the blazers banished.

“I’ve nothing against boozing but these guys on match days reeked of the stuff,” he recalls. “Aye, the game was amateur back then but Murrayfield was open terracing and a huge crowd were waiting on us. Hector was a smart boy but he said: ‘This is going to be tough.’ ‘I want it done,’ I said.

“The selectors were known as the ‘Big Five’ and they were a bit dischuffed. Their faces were tripping them as they filed out. Then I said my piece to the players.”

Ah, the speech: according to Andy Irvine one of Murrayfield’s all-time spinetinglers. Could he possibly revive it for the Saturday Interview since Wales are back in town today? “I knew you’d ask this but I honestly can’t remember.” Then: “Wait … what was it big [Alastair] McHarg said to me after the beaks had left? ‘You’ve really done it now. And you know we’re going to have to win this game otherwise you’ll never play for Scotland again.’ Yes, I think that was the key passage of the text. Beat the best team in the world or my bum’s oot the windae!”

And Scotland did: a 10-9 victory which made the giant comedy leeks droop and ruined Welsh hopes of a third Grand Slam in a row. “I’m sure another thing I would have said that day was: ‘Be ready for war.’” For McLauchlan at loosehead prop, rugby was always that. And he’s just remembered something else: “I definitely would have referred back to the last time Wales came to Murrayfield. We wanted revenge for that.”

The greatest game of them all? That was 6 February ’71 to my schoolboy eyes. A glorious, careering riot of a match, a six-times lead-change ding-dong, electric and ghost-like runners like Barry John and Gerald Davies at their absolute best and even muckle forwards getting in on the act with McLauchlan’s front-row buddy Sandy Carmichael plunging for a try and John Taylor striking the most heartbreakingly beautiful kick to win it for the Welsh, 19-18.

Says McLauchlan: “The greatest conversion since St Paul, the Welsh like to say, and I hated John with a passion for it. I told him so after the game. I told him when we toured together with the Lions. And years later in Australia when he was working as a journalist I said to him: ‘Life is no different now, John, from what it was like before.’ ‘Why’s that?’ he said. ‘Because I still bloody hate you!’”

The 1970s was a rollicking, rumbustious era for rugby, a time when our man was forced to come off injured and take himself to hospital in a taxi, the official assigned to accompany him being reluctant to leave such an exciting contest. McLauchlan was back playing two weeks later - despite having suffered a broken leg. It was a time when, on tour in New Zealand, a place like Buller “resembled the Wild West … you expected John Wayne to come moseying along on his horse”. A time when, according to a “very, very” posh friend of McLauchlan’s wife Eileen: “If one wanted to be invited out for dinner then one went to the cricket club. But if one wanted laid one went to the rugger club.”

I never need much excuse to recall that ’71 classic but what a thrill on the 50th anniversary to be doing it in conversation with McLauchlan - my old PE teacher no less. Because of that I feel I can ask this normally irascible fellow what it felt like to be left on his backside by Barry John.

“Not great,” he says. “But do you remember him coming back inside from a ruck and me chasing him 40 yards? I was sure all I needed was just another half-step. The next day I sat my children down for the highlights on Rugby Special and gave them the big build-up: ‘Watch when your dad keeps pace with God-like genius.’ But guess what? I was left on the cutting-room floor!”

The master-pupil relationship at Edinburgh’s Broughton High School, however, had counted for nothing thus far. All previous attempts at interviewing “Sir” were rebuffed, a couple of times during his own SRU presidency when he felt he couldn’t speak his mind. I wouldn’t have wanted a neutered Mouse anyway but, in his 79th year, amid the peaty distilleries of Islay, I’ve finally smoked him out.

“It’s been nothing personal,” he says of his coyness, not evident during his pomp. “I’ve never watched the half-dozen recordings I’ve been given of my big games and I’m not a fan of those pieces: ‘An old git looks back … ’ I like to look forward, to the youth and what they might do in this great game of ours.” Not just the future but the present, and maybe I’ve caught him at a good moment, what with Gregor Townsend’s team smashing the Twickenham hoodoo, for Mighty was thrilled about that.

“England are a big side but our boys simply took their forwards apart,” he rasps down a crackly phoneline to the Inner Hebrides. “My team won at Twickenham a long, long time ago [the same ’71] and while you’re proud to set a record, you’re also delighted to see one broken. That’s what the world’s all about - progression. These boys have just made me even more obscure!”

McLauchlan was never that while winning 43 caps as a ferocious scrummager and - though he didn’t quite catch the wing-heeled John - being animated in the loose. “I was playing for Scotland, the most exciting thing I could do in my life, no quibble,” he confirms. He also starred for the British & Irish Lions, diving for a famous try to help conquer the All Blacks and go unbeaten in South Africa.

So here’s my stupidest question ever: Mighty, did you enjoy the physicality, the aggro of it all? “Immensely. I loved it. I lived for it. I would have played rugby every day if I could.” Fellow pack members also included the Browns, Gordon and PC, and Rodger Arneil but McLauchlan - once thought too wee for the game, although he was strong enough to hold a lawnmower in position to cut his garden hedge - was a law unto himself, notwithstanding that the scrum was a pretty lawless place. “Nairn MacEwan used to say to me: ‘I actually hate you. Most of us before a game are quiet, thinking about what’s ahead, a bit tense and worried we might make a mistake. Whereas you always bounce into the room and go: ‘Right, let’s get into these bastards.’

With Gordon Brown at a '71 Lions training session

“Well, I was never in any doubt I could play against teams like Wales. I was never fearful of anyone.” Maybe that was the ex-boxer in him. Maybe that was because he’d once peered down a coal mine and experienced real fear.

McLauchlan is not the first son of a pitman to have his father shock him into concentrating on his studies with the warning that the alternative future was located in the belly of the earth. Gareth Edwards, another great Welsh rival, once told me how he returned home from school having failed his 11-plus to find a miner’s helmet and boots in his place at the kitchen table. In Tarbolton, Ayrshire, McLauchlan’s father Hugh went further than that and took him underground.

“He did that there because there were plenty of boys older than me in the village who couldn’t wait to get out of school and down the mines. It was big money and at 16 these lads could buy motorbikes. Then came the girls, the flash suits, dancing on Saturday nights. I worked as a farm labourer weekends and holidays from the age of 13 but, shawing turnips, I was never going to be able to afford all of that. When Dad thought I could be tempted by the money he showed me what a miner’s life was like.

“Darkness like you’d never believe, the constant dripping of water, all the time digging on your belly - it was inhuman. When we got back up Dad said: ‘What do you think of that then?’ I said: ‘Horrible. Never in my life will I go down there again.’ ‘Good,’ he said, ‘that’s why you’re at Ayr Academy.’”

Now Mighty is laughing: “Probably this won’t surprise you but I liked boxing and thought l was pretty good. Although I was a wee guy I could compete with bigger boys up at the YMCA in Ayr - most of them were puddings. Then I took part in an exhibition match with this lad who’d just turned pro. He was like an irritating wasp, buzzing round my face, dunting me on the nose. If I’d been able to get close enough I would have killed him - but he could have killed me. I stopped boxing because I needed weight for rugby and I preferred that.” His mother Minnie, who hated waving him off to his bouts, was delighted.

McLauchlan loves the tranquility of retirement on Islay - his wife Eileen’s birthplace - but wouldn’t you just know it, his favourite among the locally-produced whiskies is called Black Art. With a bit more coaxing he’ll talk about the sinister scrum techniques he learned, also those he brought with him. “There are folk who, knowing I boxed, thought I took my fists onto the field with me. It’s true that I didn’t mind a scrap but honestly when you played in New Zealand, South Africa or Argentina you didn’t survive otherwise.” Argentina was first for McLauchlan, a notorious unofficial tour in 1969 recalled by all present for the gunfire of civil unrest in Buenos Aires and pretty hairy scenes on the field as well.

About to introduce the team to the Queen before the 1976 Calcutta Cup.

“Jim Telfer was our captain. In club games against him you used to say: ‘When he goes down on the ball give him a kicking - he loves it.’ Well, he took a boot to the middle of the back on that tour and none of us had ever seen him go off injured before. His parting words were: ‘Somebody should die for that.’

“After another match - and I played in them all - when there had been a couple more nasty incidents, my room-mate Duncy Paterson said: ‘I’ve been in some violent games but that was the worst.’ ‘Aye, they had some dirty boys,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I meant you. Away from the pitch you’d have got nine months!’”

Then, just two years later, he was a Lion. With him on that momentous tour of New Zealand were Carmichael and “Broon frae Troon”. McLauchlan laughs: “I’ve always wound up Sandy about the fact he went to Loretto School. Went is all he did, I say, for they didn’t educate him. His father could have had them up on the Trade Descriptions Act. Gordon? He was rooming with me before his Scotland debut. ‘Do you snore?’ I asked him. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Well, I said, ‘do it tonight and, no question, I’ll punch you in the face.’ He always used to say he was so scared he never slept a wink.”

Argentina had been seven weeks; the Land of the Long White Cloud was four months, one week after the birth of McLauchlan’s middle son, and requiring him to sell his car and ask the bank to defer his mortgage, the 15 shillings daily allowance not getting him very far. Never backward in thundering forward, he told Lions coach Carwyn James he had no intention of simply being a “Wednesday player” and wanted a Test place. Injuries including a horrific one for Carmichael - “I thought his eye had popped out” - brought him his chance. In his autobiography, which under amateur rules ended his rugby career, McLauchlan wrote: “I had gone to New Zealand as second choice, and was going home a man among men.”

Imagine, then, the excitement of him turning up at Broughton. “Lovingly we name thee, proudly we acclaim thee,” goes the school song. Mighty could teach the kids about rugby, he chuckles, but not the wider world. “I remember taking a class to the local swimming baths and sitting in the gallery where I was chatted up by two young women. As I wasn’t yet an old git this was very flattering. The next week it happened again and became a regular thing. One afternoon some kids from the class were in the minibus I was driving through to Greenock for a basketball match. They were teasing me about my friends and then they said: ‘You do know they’re prozzies, Sir, don’t you?’ It was then that I remembered something I’d been told at teacher-training college: never to be surprised at how much children know.

“These kids knew which Maths teacher was secretly going out with which fourth-year girl. At least I found out about the third-year girl whose boyfriend was a civil servant, a friend of another teacher at the school. In this pub the fellow had just finished telling me how what she didn’t know about sex wasn’t worth knowing. When he pointed her out to me and I told him her age he turned pure white. ‘I could get the sack,’ he said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you could get the jail.’ Crazy days at Broughton High!”

And here’s me thinking I was advanced for my age for smoking cinnamon cigarettes and liking the complicated chord sequences of Jethro Tull! Broughton, lest we forget, also played rugby, and McLauchlan signs off with a tale from Tuesday afternoon practice: “The giant of second year, a real beast, was charging towards the tryline. In his way was this snivelling, shivering boy, his knees knocking with fear. ‘Tackle him!’ I shouted. The wee lad shouted back: ‘No way. You f****n’ tackle him!”

Then Mighty Mouse says: “Hey, that wasn’t you, was it?”

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Saturday Interview: Ian ‘Mighty Mouse’ McLauchlan on rugby’s physicality - ‘I loved it, lived for it and would have played every day if I could’

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