On Friday, the second last night of the Proms happened to coincide with the opening of the Rugby World Cup in Paris, but I guess it was no mere coincidence that the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra opened with Arthur Honegger’s second Mouvement Symphonique, Rugby. Apparently rugby was Honegger’s favourite game. I certainly found myself imagining the development of play during a lively orchestral interlude. That sounds like a line-out, now a ruck, a smuggled ball, a rolling maul, now the ball flashed out to the backs, a tackle on the try line, a forward pass… scrum down. It was all very vivid.
On Saturday, The Herald published a glossy, as it is intermittently wont to do, talking up some of the private schools in Scotland. And, in turn therein, somebody wrote about the sport of rugby, and its importance in the school ethos, as informing the other disciplines of the school in terms of esprit de corps, teamwork as well as personal endeavour, perseverance, courage in adversity, determination, grit, and so on.
And then on Sunday, marrying these two themes, BBC Radio 4’s Morning Worship came from Rugby, the school, where the game was invented precisely 200 years ago, and this time the ethos of rugby became inextricably bound up with Christianity. There is a story, apocryphal for all I know, about a boy named William Web Ellis who, playing soccer one day on the school pitch, “The Close”, and “with a fine disregard” for the rules, took it into his head to pick the spherical ball up, tuck it under his arm (he probably realised immediately that an oval ball would be more convenient), and run for the opposition’s line. Thus the game of rugby was born. I don’t know whether the masters at Rugby immediately recognised an act of originality amounting to genius; but had he done it at my old school, woe betide him, he would have been given short shrift. But apparently he was to be praised for breaking the rules, or, as they subsequently became known in rugby, the laws. Laws have been defied magnificently at other times in history. In 1905, Einstein defied Newton’s Laws and created the Special Theory of Relativity. In 1955, Rosa Parks defied the municipal laws of apartheid in Montgomery Alabama, when she sat down in a seat reserved for white people. And of course Jesus was the biggest law breaker of them all. He was continually getting up the Pharisees’ noses.
So breaking the rules can be an admirable thing to do – yet not, however (the man from Rugby hastened to add), if these rules happen to be the ones current at Rugby School. Ha!
Then one Naomi, BBC Young Chorister of the Year, sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot, accompanied by a music teacher on piano. It was quite magnificent. I almost warmed to the Rugby ethos.
But not quite. I have never liked rugby. I played rugby at school. We were pathetic. Posh schools used to rack up scores like century breaks in snooker against us. Our school was much better at football. I was only vaguely aware at the time of the class division that separated the gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and the hooligan’s game played by gentlemen. I remember playing football in the street with my pals one day, and a smartly dressed young gentleman of the Muscular Christianity constituency passed by and remarked, “Don’t like the shape of the ball you’re playing with, chaps.”
When I was about 14 years old I got thumped in the head during a rugby match one Saturday morning. I got carried off. I developed an impressive swelling over my right eyebrow. I think the PE teacher drove me home, but I can’t remember. The doctor came, and I remember he subjected me to the “serial 7s” test. You subtract 7 from 100, then 7 from 93, 7 from 86, etc., down to zero. Well, down to 2, if you get it right. I didn’t get past 93. The GP announced that I was concussed, but I would get better. Well, I suppose he only had two options – watchful waiting, or a craniotomy. CT scans were yet to be invented.
I remember I was rather proud of the black eye I could show off at school on Monday morning, and the surrounding bruise, all the colours of the rainbow. I got better. Or did I? My third year at secondary school marked the apogee of any academic excellence I may have aspired to. After that, everything was a struggle. My exam results became mediocre, I was easily distracted, chronically disconsolate, and I couldn’t remember a thing. Now, with the increasing physicality of the game, the Rugby Union wonder whether there might be a correlation between repeated head trauma and early onset dementia. Duh. Incidentally, when the RU refer to “physicality”, they actually mean brutality, or violence.
I lived in New Zealand for 13 years. When I bought my house in Devonport on Auckland’s North Shore, the real estate agent was an ex-All Black. The New Zealanders are obsessed with rugby. Of course the posh schools play rugby, but it’s much less of a class thing there because the society is much more egalitarian. The Maori and the Polynesians, who live in disadvantaged South Auckland, are very good at rugby. Kids play from a very early age, and their parents yell at them from the side lines urging them to be more aggressive. I remember in the emergency department tending a kid who broke his neck on the rugby field. His master leaned over the spinal board and said, “Never mind, Darryl, you played a blinder.”
In New Zealand, my colleague Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange voiced the opinion that rugby is a metaphor for the First World War, played at the Front. A war of attrition. The backs are the officers, and the forwards are the other ranks. There is an impasse – the scrum. The Big Push. Then there is a mid-field incident of bloodiness, the ball gets flashed from the scrum half to the stand-off, and you’re in Berlin by Christmas. Or maybe not.
“Physicality” in rugby is not against the laws. The big no-no is the forward pass. In the next war, Herr Hitler took the allies by surprise by developing Blitzkrieg, rapid armour, the technique of the forward pass. The bounder. In his own way, he was the Reich’s William Web Ellis.
Not for me. I got out. I escaped the Saturday morning purgatory by joining Glasgow Schools’ First Orchestra which met on a Saturday morning. I see that in the current World Cup Scotland and New Zealand, my two homelands, both lost their opening games. Scotland will be relieved the trouncing wasn’t worse, while New Zealand will be in deep mourning. For myself, I am indifferent. I still favour music over rugby. On Saturday at the Last Night of the Proms, Sheku Kanneh-Mason played Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, and accompanied soprano Lise Davidsen, along with the cello section of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in Heitor Villa Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras Number 5. Magnificent. I hope Sheku never goes near a rugby pitch, but protects his fingers, and his God-given talent.
jamescalumcampbell 