A SELECT triumphant, or bloodied, few know the Newlands grounds as intimates of the arena itself, as the field of dreams or of despair.
And the effect, it’s obvious, has always been impressive.
“When you score a try...” Springbok Gio Aplon says, “it’s almost like an earthquake. It’s almost like you are in a room with surround sound.”
This Aplon quote at the beginning of Rugby at Newlands – A History in 50 Test Matches: 1891-2015, is paired with another from a different time.
Forty years earlier, we learn, Welshman and British Lion Gareth Edwards confided ominously to fellow players in the changing room before the 1974 Newlands Test: “When you run on to the field, you will hear the most deafening roar in the world. It will hit you straight in the face and go right to your knees.”
He added: “But when the Boks run out, it will be like an atomic explosion. You will feel like fainting.” (Perhaps his pep talk did some good: the Lions won the game 12-3.)
But there’s another much more numerous category of intimates for whom Newlands is no less vivid, an unignorable part of their affections and their memories.
In his foreword to Rugby at Newlands, the oldest surviving Springbok (1949), Dr Cecil Moss, recalls his earliest experiences of the ground, which was “like a home to me”.
“I remember as a schoolboy,” he writes, “we sat on long benches and when the ball was kicked into our area and you got hold of the ball to throw it back, your mates used to say, ‘Don’t wash your hands! Don’t wash your hands’!”
There is something of this inerasable quality in the genesis of Rugby at Newlands, whose co-author David McLennan (with acclaimed rugby writer Chris Schoeman) savours his own schoolboy experience of Newlands in a recollection of his first Test match, in 1970, joining friends “before dawn at the gates of the famous ground... to secure good places on the hard cement benches” of those years.
He went on to study history, became an archivist, and then rare books dealer (booklovers, and seekers after all manner of rugby memorabilia know him as the proprietor of Select Books in Long Street).
Decades of watching Test rugby in many arenas brought home the distinctiveness of Newlands... “how close to the play you sat, how deafening the celebration could be after a good try; how the wind swirled in its confines and how passionate those who stood around the ground could be”, and he decided he wanted to write about it.
The result is a book – and there has probably never been a rugby book quite like it – that casts more than a century of rugby Test matches at the hallowed ground in the never wholly uncomplicated socio-political settings in which they occurred.
Each of the 50 chapters devoted to the consecutive Tests describes the teams, the game and the consequences in detail, along with fascinating insights into the society, the politics and the daily life of the time.
In 1910, for instance – when newspapers carried reports on speeches by such newsworthy personalities as JW Jagger and Abdullah Abdurahman – there were also advertisements for golf balls, a “new” sport for the freshly minted Union, including a special one best suited to the country’s apparently rather rugged courses. It was called “The Veldt” ball.
At another portentous national juncture, South Africa beat Ireland 24-8 on May 13, 1961, just a fortnight before the Nationalists under Hendrik Verwoerd broke with the Commonwealth, forging a republic.
“While the Irish were in Cape Town,” we learn, “pending apartheid legislation included the General Law Amendment, which Sir De Villiers Graaff, Leader of the Opposition, pointed out would give the government ‘dictatorial powers’.”
The consequences of this and other laws would be felt for a long time. At another of umpteen national low points over the next decades – in 1976 – the effect was felt directly and painfully in the sporting arena itself: South Africa won the September 8, 1976 Newlands Test 15-10 against New Zealand (in an atmosphere of intense and bitter protest), but the All Blacks went home vowing never to return until the country ditched apartheid.
A telling echo of sorts of current times is the intriguing detail that at the time of this match, RW Johnson published a book called How Long Will South Africa Survive? Johnson’s latest book, published this year, is rather similar.
It is called How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis.
By 1994 – the chapter is called Pride Restored – politics was settling into, well, a pattern of new struggles, and, in a way, so was rugby. Should the Springboks still be called Springboks? Or Proteas? The good news for players was that the National Sports Council under Mluleki George lifted all limitations and moratoriums on rugby tours. But were the players up to scratch? One who didn’t think so was former flanker Jan Boland Coetzee who, if he didn’t exactly call the Springboks a bunch of pansies, suggested that they should rather let themselves be called Proteas, for, he said baldly: “They are not worth a Springbok’s ass.”
That said, on June 11, 1994, South Africa beat England 27-9 at Newlands.
In an interview this week, McLennan said: “Readers will find that this is more than just a rugby book – apart from politics, we’ve included a lot of social history, such as food and car prices, and even details about the weather – to give a sense of what it was like at the time.”
If immense affection has gone into assembling the account, he insisted it was “not a book that’s pro or anti the Cape Town Stadium option, or Newlands as the home of rugby.
“It’s a book that’s celebratory; it says, this is what you have, and this is what’s happened here from 1891”.
In addition to being richly illustrated (apart from photographs from newspaper and other sources, the authors’ prominently acknowledged collaborators. Hymie Sibul and Don Vale shared rare items from their lifelong collections of rugby memorabilia), McLennan and Schoeman have been painstaking in accurately captioning photographs, identifying not just the game, but the moment in the game when the picture was taken.
A telling example, McLennan explained, was the shot from the 1997 South Africa-British Isles Test of Matt Dawson “grasping the ball – at a point in the match when the game was in the balance – and, instead of sending it back down the line, he goes for it, and this is the moment.” South Africa lost the test 25-16.
Newlands, one senses, is a little more than just another rugby ground. Historically, it is significant in another sense, too – the authors write that the pitch on which players emerge from the tunnel under the grandstand “has received rugby teams in this manner for longer than any other ground in South Africa and, in its unchanged state, probably any other ground that hosts international rugby anywhere in the world”.
A quaint footnote lends credence to the affection the old arena stimulates in players and others.
When, 20 years after the event, British captain Sam Walker thought back on the South Africa tour of September 1938, it was the last Test at Newlands (South Africa 16 British Isles 21) that stayed with him, and not just figuratively.
He saw it as a “truly Homeric struggle between two great rugby teams”, which helped explain why his “most treasured rugby possessions are a blue No 14 jersey and a tattered pair of shorts, both unwashed and still retaining traces of mud from the famous ground”.
“Thus,” McLennan and Schoeman write, “does a small piece of Newlands turf forever lie in England!” - Weekend Argus