One hundred years ago this month, a rugby match brightened Easter in wartime Paris. Ron Palenski explains.
When Roger Dansey led a haka on the slopes of Gallipoli in 1915, one of the consequences was that a Turkish newspaper ran this sentence: "For the first time in history the Straits have had to endure attack by cannibals."
The Straits the paper mentioned were better known in the English-speaking world as the Dardanelles, or the Hellespont in the ancient world, the grand prize of the Gallipoli campaign.
When the New Zealand soldiers, and Dansey and his Maori Contingent in particular, heard of the Turkish reaction, they roared with laughter, according to a report in The Times.
The next haka for which Dansey was well known was in entirely different circumstances. It was before an Easter Sunday rugby match in Paris, organised by a newspaper to provide some Easter entertainment for Parisians tired by war.
The New Zealand Division had begun organised rugby matches in 1916, as it had other sport, with the aims of maintaining soldiers’ fitness and morale and giving them something to do when not involved with military duties. The division’s best players had been assembled at a base camp and mixed rugby training with instruction courses such as grenade-throwing and machine-gunning.
Over the winter of 1916-17 the New Zealanders had big wins over all their opponents, except a Welsh Division, which they just managed to beat 3-0 (the significance of the score not being lost on rugby people who knew well the outcome of the test against Wales in 1905).
The programme of seven matches was to be preparation for a trip to Britain and a game against the best British Army team, the Royal Army Service Corps. But the war came first and the New Zealanders, wanted for training for the Messines battle, could not go. So they went to Paris instead for a game against French soldiers and airmen, many of them released from military duty just a day or two before.
The players were of the highest standard; some of them All Blacks, some pre-war provincial players and some whose first-class careers continued after the war. Some could not return to New Zealand. Others came back changed men.
In the early games, the division’s fullback was George Scott, who had been a notable Otago player for several seasons, first of all from the Taieri Rovers club and then from Kaikorai. He was unavailable for the Paris game but within months, his career was over. He was shot at Passchendaele in October and lost sight in both eyes. (A benefit match, Otago against Otago University, was staged for him at Carisbrook in 1919. It raised, in today’s terms, about $50,000. He died in 1931 from a combination of meningitis and osteomyelitis, delayed consequences of the gunshot that cost him his sight).
According to the newspaper Le Journal, which of course as sponsor had a vested interest so its crowd estimate could be suspect, 60,000 people crammed into the ground at Vincennes in the east of Paris for the game. Some papers, including in New Zealand, reported it as a world record attendance for a rugby match.
Among the 60,000, or however many it really was, was military top brass (including the New Zealand divisional commander, General Sir Andrew Russell) from all the allied nations, clustered together, uniforms gleaming, in the front rows of the stand. Dansey in his army uniform stood a couple of steps in front of the players as he led the "ka mate" haka, first of all facing the main stand and then turning, Dansey and players in unison, so the rest of the crowd could see, then swivelling to the front again.
Dansey was a well known and well liked figure. He worked in Dunedin for an engineering company before continuing engineering study at University of Otago, all the while playing rugby for the university, for New Zealand Universities and for the national Maori team. After his Gallipoli heroics, he and a couple of other Maori soldiers were accused of cowardice and sent back to New Zealand in late 1915. New Zealanders knew such a charge was a mistake or a misunderstanding and Dansey was able to rejoin his unit in France in 1916. (The accusation seemed to centre on an English-born officer not liking his orders being superseded by Dansey’s initiative). Dansey was gassed during the Somme battle in September 1916 and spent some time in hospital in England. He never completely shook off the effects and died in 1938, aged 53.
The rugby, meanwhile, was a one-sided contest, with New Zealand winning 40-0. Le Journal called the performance a masterly lesson in athletics.
"Our men had to bow to world champions who beat the Irish army, the Welsh team and the British air force. The result of 40-0 was nevertheless honourable and was proclaimed in a storm of cheers and a burst of fraternal esteem."
One of the All Blacks, Reg Taylor, was killed a few weeks later at Messines; another of the forwards, Tom French, had to have an arm amputated after Passchendaele. The French captain, Maurice Boyau, was a soldier who had transferred to the French air service. He died in September 1918.
The sponsoring newspaper organised another soldier, Georges Chauvel, who was a sculptor in peacetime, to fashion a trophy. He produced a statue of a French soldier in the act of throwing a grenade and called it, "le Lanceur de Grenades". But the New Zealand and French footballers called it the Somme Cup, or the Coupe de la Somme, and that is what it remained.
The "cup" itself is now the only survivor of that distant encounter, sitting on the mantelpiece of a private home somewhere in New Zealand. It has briefly been on public display at the National Army Museum in Waiouru.
