The forgotten charm of amateur sport
Obituaries of Dougie Morgan, the Scotland and Lions scrum-half of the 1970s, all recalled how he unsettled the great Gareth Edwards by standing or maybe stamping on his foot as he put the ball into the scrum.
That was in 1973, or perhaps ’75 – both matches at Murrayfield in which Scotland beat the greatest of all Welsh international teams. In none of the obituaries which I read was there a mention of the agreeable irony in connection with the foot-standing: that in his everyday life Morgan was a chiropodist, plying his trade in Jenner’s, Edinburgh’s finest department store.
Rugby was then the last major sport to be amateur, still twenty years distant from professionalism. Of course, the regulations weren’t always rigorously enforced. There was talk of boot money. Expenses claims were sometimes generously padded. Some players found employment not unconnected with their status as internationalists.
Old programmes used to make a point of noting players’ jobs. By the 1970s a surprising number were employed by Building Societies. I suppose that most such Societies were offering the same rates and that anyone with clients’ money to invest as a short-term deposit might choose one where the matter might be handled by a current international player with whom the depositor could talk about rugby, so that later, perhaps at his golf club’s bar, he could impress friends and acquaintances with a display of inside knowledge.
Nevertheless, Rugby Union protected its amateur status jealously, to the extent of adhering to a policy of apartheid in relation to professional Rugby League. Players who had crossed codes were treated as outlaws, even after their playing days were over.
Bill McLaren recalled a great Hawick and Scotland player Willie Welsh, who crossed over to the League game and who, returning to Hawick when he had retired, was keen to help coach his old club. When the SRU got word of this, he was, as Bill put it, “told to push off: as a professional player he had no right to be involved with an amateur club”.
There was an element of snobbery in this, but it wasn’t only snobbery, even if it was the case that most Union players who went over to League came from working-class families.
Cricket had at last abolished the amateur-professional distinction ten years before Dougie Morgan stood on Gareth’s foot. There was opposition from traditionalists such as E W Swanton, by then the doyen of cricket writers, but it was high time. Real amateurism at the top level of the game in England had become unsustainable, even though there was the occasional exception (the Rev D S Sheppard, for instance, taking time off from ministering to souls, in order to tour Australia with the MCC’s England side in 1962-3.
But the truth was that by then almost all those who played County Cricket as amateurs were shamateurs, some notionally employed as their club’s Assistant Secretary. Trevor Bailey told Jim Laker that as an amateur he earned more from the game than Laker as a professional.
The distinction was invidious years before it was abolished. Even so, as late as the 1950s there were examples of outdated snobbishness. The story of Fred Titmus’s first appearance for Middlesex has often been told; an announcement on the public address system informing spectators of a mistake on the scorecard – “for F J Titmus read Titmus F J” – amateurs’ initials appearing before the surname, professionals’ after it.
If there was humour in this, it was absent from the reproof that the Gloucestershire captain, Basil Allen, delivered to Tom Graveney for addressing the not-yet-Reverend Sheppard as “David”: “Mr Sheppard to you, Graveney”. This was unpleasant and absurd. Not only were Graveney and Sheppard young men of the same age, but, in his recently completed National Service, Graveney had been commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, and might have been considered, by Allen’s standards, as at least a Temporary Gentleman.
Now, as a final irony, one finds that, more than half-a-century after the scrapping of cricket’s amateur-professional distinction, the majority of the England Test team were educated at independent schools, even if in some cases only on a sixth form sports scholarship. This may owe more to the lamentable disappearance of cricket from state schools, though one might observe that, as professionals became upwardly mobile after the Second World War, some chose to educate their sons privately – Len Hutton’s boys, for instance, going to Repton, and a son of Denis Compton’s first marriage to Marlborough.
Of course, most sport remains amateur, occasion for enjoyment and recreation. Yet, understandably, the coverage of sport in the national media is almost entirely devoted to professionals. Amateur golf used to get at least as much attention in the press as the professional game, the Walker Cup as much as the Ryder Cup, the Amateur Championship almost as much as the Open. Now, few, I suppose, could name any leading amateur golfers, and indeed young amateurs use the Walker Cup as a stepping-stone that helps them cross the river to a professional career.
Well, that’s the way the world goes. While in these strange days when there is no live sport for the media to cover, this is how is will be when normal life and service return. Dougie Morgan’s grandson, Charlie Shiel, is a professional with Edinburgh Rugby. Like Dougie, he is a scrum-half. I doubt if it has ever crossed his mind to have a career as a chiropodist.