Extract from

CARWYN  REES  JAMES

1930 - 1983

Wales’s greatest rugby coach.

He died with cruel, mystifying suddenness in a nondescript Amsterdam hotel early in 1983, but that coaxing, mellifluous voice can still be affectionately heard, when we listen hard enough, on a hundred Welsh touchlines. Carwyn, just Carwyn: the name continues to bring a glow of treasured reminiscence, followed by those eloquent, perplexed sighs. There was never a greater influence on the way rugby should be played in Wales. Yet, for complex, contrary, needless, self-induced reasons, he was not appointed the national coach. He was the man everyone knew – and no one knew.

Along every valley, in every pit village, every tucked-away rugby ground of steaming winter breaths amid Saturdays’ animated throaty ritual, they doted on his wisdom and the melodic words - about sport or life – which he gave so freely to anyone who asked. They basked in his coaching triumphs for Llanelli and the Lions. They travelled miles, many of them miners’ sons like himself, to hear him speak. They revered him as a chapel deacon and a white-robed druid. Many contended he was a rugby guru without equal. They were conscious of the lyrical quality that he insisted on bringing to the game, whether first as an instinctive outside half and then as a gentle, single-minded coach, the mentor to so many. What few of them knew was the measure of the pain he suffered in his privacy.

Perhaps it is the voice that we remember best of all. It was musical and sweetly-tuned, too calm, one would have thought, for the biting winds of an exposed touchline. That voice, fashioned by the hymnal, was rarely raised in rebuke at the expense of a player; it increased fractionally in decibels only when someone, in his cups, took a sly, insensitive dig at Carwyn’s undeviating political zeal and ‘Welshness’. The voice could be mesmeric, full of crochets and quavers and classical allusions, as his unbridled conversation weaved joyfully in and out of literature, the arts and the brotherhood of man. He loved talking, philosophising, paying homage to genius, whether he saw it at the time as Beethoven or Phil Bennett. He had a reasoned opinion about most things. Backed by scholarship and a sharp brain, softened by the chuckle that was seldom too far away, he was not easily shifted from his stance. There were moods of silence and torment, often obscured from his friends and the general public. To them, the voice of Carwyn James was never idle. If not articulating the most practical, cunning or ingenious manner of stifling the All Blacks’ pack, it was occupied at tenor-pitch in the chapel pews.

No Welshman, maybe few anywhere, carried out more speaking engagements. On his return from that glorious Antipodean tour of conquest in 1971, when 22 of the Lions’ 24 games were won, he was inundated with invitations to rugby club dinners, socials and sports forums. Everyone, even those who had taken an overtly sceptical view of his compounded acclaim, wanted to hear how he had done it, how he had moulded and motivated his Lions to outwit the All Blacks. Some of the invitations involved tortuously long car journeys back to Wales in the middle of the night. Often he was given no more than petrol money, or less. No-one would ever imply he was avaricious. By today’s standards he could have had an agent and earned an affluent living from after-dinner speaking alone. But hadn’t he once rejected an offer of £20,000 to coach the professional World XV? There was much talk at the time about the looming all-professional exhibition matches. JPR Williams and Gerald Davies had already been sounded out. Carwyn had no qualms about turning down the inducement. With a fierce integrity to reinforce the traditional attitudes then of Rugby Union, he said with old-fashioned sincerity: ‘It’s strictly an amateur game. I don’t want their money.’

The invitations, more often pleas, that came by every post for him to address small and big clubs were hardly ever ignored. If one or two anxious social secretaries waited in vain for a response it was from no lack of courtesy on James’ part. His sense of administration was chaotic. He was hardly ever at home, so the letters piled up on the mat. Some remained unopened for weeks; he was a wayward correspondent. Those friends he invited back for a late-night drink discovered the letters, along with his countless ties and books, strewn around the flat.

But he did his best, none too successfully, to be organised. He fulfilled his dinner and speaking engagements as conscientiously as he could. He enjoyed them once he was there. He had learned how to project himself from his days as a teacher and lecturer. He got on his feet and talked as long as they wanted; he wouldn’t have known how to be remotely boring. Carwyn spoke without a note, interspersing his appraisal of Welsh rugby and all that it urgently needed to do to improve coaching methods and introduce a more imaginative leadership, with anecdotes plucked at random from his spectrum of experience as a player and coach, at Stradey Park or on the other side of the world.

He could hold a rowdy, beery audience silent and enthralled as he talked seriously, compellingly, about the game they all loved. ‘And never once, boyo, did Carwyn tell a joke in bad taste. He left others to trot out the dirty stories.’

In some winter months he was accepting four or five invitations a week. Latterly he was juggling this with his broadcasting and journalism. It was too much for him and he confided to the handful of people really close to him that he frequently felt exhausted. He talked, none too convincingly, of taking a complete break from rugby. “We know how busy you are Mr James, and we are only a little club up the valley. But can you possibly come along and talk to us?” So many requests like that: a commitment too many most weeks. It left him weary and contributed to the bouts of depression that dogged him in his 40s and early 50s. The public never knew.

My acquaintance with him was relatively brief, though I like to think warm. I had been enjoying his evocative, highly personalised Friday pieces in The Guardian and at one of our Christmas lunches – I was a freelance cricket writer on the paper – in the Cheshire Cheese (sawdust and decent beer) off Fleet Street, I found myself sitting next to him. It was a convivial, decidedly liquid occasion, wondrous for me because he didn’t stop talking. Yet, I recall, he was not a selfish conversationalist and encouraged me to tell him about my undistinguished schoolboy career as a prop forward who took the kicks in house matches. That amused him.

The lunch went on deep into the afternoon and I worried about whether the paper’s sports pages would ever come out that evening. When John Arlott, then our number one cricket writer, got up to say the few words that were expected of him, I couldn’t decide whether he or Carwyn James looked the more flushed. But they were both in wonderful, anecdotal form and I, a country writer romantically seduced by the Dickensian surrounds, was in awe of both of them.

After that I met Carwyn a number of times, either at St Helen’s, Swansea, or Sophia Gardens, Cardiff, where I had gone to cover county cricket and he had wandered into the press boxes to join us. He, too, liked his cricket and had done the occasional match for The Guardian. It only occurred to me much later that he might have felt I was perhaps intruding on his new journalistic preserves. But from my experience, he was a man generous in spirit and there wasn’t the merest suggestion that he would have liked to be writing about Glamorgan those days instead of me.

On one of my visits to Cardiff, long after the close of play, the two of us were drinking together in the small bar above the dressing rooms. Everyone else had left; the players had sunk their solitary pints and gone. I looked anxiously at my watch and told Carwyn it was time for me to motor back to my home in Bristol. ‘Not yet … not yet. Let’s have another drink together. We have much to talk about. Tell me about Bristol Rovers. Or Mike Procter. Or John Blake’s Bristol – did he really have that lovely rugby team of his running all the time?’

There was almost a kind of desperation in those cascading questions, as he blurted out the disparate potential starting points of conversation. Before I had offered any kind of reply he was at the bar, buying us another double-gin. I was flattered, of course I was, that he wished to stay chatting with me. At the same time, I came to one irreversible conclusion. He was a painfully lonely man.

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