Bill Beaumont: The Autobiography. Bill Beaumont

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СКАЧАТЬ in Wrea Green, a pretty village not far from Blackpool. It is the archetypal English village, complete with church, pub and houses surrounding the village green and duckpond. The captain of the village cricket team was my neighbour, Richard Wilson, and he persuaded me to turn out for them even though I protested that I hadn’t swung a bat in earnest for years. When I dug out my old bat it seemed about half the size of everyone else’s and the same could be said for the kit, which was so tight it almost gave me a squeaky voice, although I did just about manage to squeeze into the flannels! (There was, however, one memorable occasion when I split my trousers and had to nip home for running repairs, holding up play for about 15 minutes. Then it started to rain so the lads claimed they would have won the game if I hadn’t forced the fabric!) It may have been beginner’s luck but I took a catch in the gully off the third delivery of my ‘trial’ game and took another later when fielding at deep midwicket. We lost the game but I made 51 not out and they thought they had discovered another Ian Botham! The Grapes pub served as the clubhouse and, in the euphoria of getting a few runs – and a bravado fuelled by a few pints – I signed up to play for the team on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I never played quite so well again but at least I could walk to the ground from home … and the clubhouse was always a considerable attraction!

      My playing days, apart from in the garden and on the beach, are definitely over now but I enjoy watching our youngest, Josh, playing for the Under-lls side. Golf is more my game these days although I don’t profess to be very good. I got into the game because that’s how rugby players traditionally pass the time when they’re away on tour and aren’t involved in training. Even now, it’s a good excuse to get away with my pals for a few days, although when it comes to competitions I leave Josh to represent the family. As I said earlier, he is something of a natural with a golf club in his hands and won the Royal Lytham Under-17s Championship when he was only ten.

      Daniel and Sam are also good golfers, so I never have any shortage of partners, though that proved costly when I played in a competition with Daniel last year. He wanted a car and I had been planning to buy him a very basic model. Young men have their own ideas, however, and he was keen to have one of the new breed of Mini. As I was pretty confident that my pocket wouldn’t be at risk, I wagered him that he could have the Mini if he beat me in a club competition. My pre-round confidence evaporated on the sixth hole when it took me 12 shots to get out of a bunker. Unsurprisingly, Daniel ended up with the Mini. To my pals at the golf club that sand trap is now known as Mini Bunker!

      My interest in soccer developed through being taken by a neighbour to watch Blackburn Rovers, and my first major sporting outing was to Wembley to watch England beat Scotland in the days when the two nations met on an annual basis. It is a pity that the old cross-border rivalry isn’t given an airing on the field of play these days, as it is in rugby union, but I suppose the opportunity for rival fans to cause mayhem is a good enough reason to have called a halt.

      Even though my father had played for Fylde, my main interest in rugby as a boy, living in Lancashire, was limited to rugby league. Wigan was just a few minutes away so I was more interested in the feats of Billy Boston than in what was going on at Twickenham, although we did watch the internationals on television and I also have a vague recollection of being taken to watch Fylde. While in my final year at Cressbrook, in 1964 I was also taken to Edinburgh to watch England play Scotland at Murrayfield, though I little thought at the time that I would one day lead England to a Grand Slam at the same venue. For all of us it was just a great weekend away from the confines of the school. Sport provided me with many opportunities to escape the academic life. I was a typical lad in many respects, and lazy when it came to school-work. Deep down, I expected to end up working in the family business, so there was no academic incentive, despite the efforts of my grandparents when Alison and I went to stay in their bungalow in Blackpool for the summer holidays. They had turned the front room into a small classroom, complete with three desks, and they gave private lessons. I remember being there one summer when Sir Stanley Matthews’ son, who developed into a good tennis player, was having lessons.

      For some reason the family also had the habit of staying at Blackpool’s Norbreck Hydro for three days every year; a massive treat, because it had an indoor swimming pool. My father would travel with his garden spade in the boot of the car and we would take it on to the beach and spend all day building dams. Those breaks were always over far too quickly, and then it would be back to Kirkby Lonsdale and the school routine.

      Initially, soccer was the winter sport at Cressbrook, and I played in goal. I suppose it linked very well with my wicketkeeper role when playing cricket. I don’t think we won many matches but I was just happy to be involved, preferring the sports field to the classroom. We weren’t allowed to neglect our studies but I had little thought of cap and gown at that stage in my development. So it was perhaps a little ironic that I ended up, much later in life, with two honorary degrees – one from Manchester University and the other from the University of Central Lancashire. I couldn’t help wondering as I received those what my father would have thought could he have seen me standing, resplendent in gown and mortarboard, before 500 students and their parents, while someone delivered a eulogy outlining why Bill Beaumont was being honoured with a degree!

      After initially concentrating on soccer we switched to rugby at Cressbrook and, although I started out at prop, I quickly made a dramatic move to fly-half. They didn’t have anyone else and I fancied my chances because I had quite a good boot on me. I wasn’t that big in those days, only starting to grow rapidly from my mid-teens, but I can’t claim to have been the quickest fly-half in the business. I did have my moment of glory, however, shortly before leaving Cressbrook, when I dropped a goal against a school side that hadn’t conceded a point for two years. I was quite proud of that!

      Most of my contemporaries when they left Cressbrook went to Sedbergh, Will Carling’s old school, but my father had other ideas. The plan had been for me to go to Repton, but that was a soccer school so father opted instead for Ellesmere College in Shropshire, where the headmaster was Ian Beer, who had been at Cambridge University with him. Ian, of course, had a distinguished rugby career and represented Cambridge on the RFU committee for many years, being honoured with the Presidency in the 1993–94 season. From Ellesmere he went eventually to Harrow, where Roger Uttley was the rugby master. I spoke at a dinner in Ledbury for Ian many years later, and when he introduced me he dwelt more on my lack of academic achievement than on my sporting triumphs. In response, I observed that this didn’t say a lot for the teachers. Touché.

      By the time I moved to Ellesmere College I was used to life as a boarder but it still came as something of a shock because I switched from being a big fish in a little pool of 90 pupils to a small fish in a sea of nearly 400 boys. Most of them were older and bigger than I was. Ian Beer’s later comments on the study front were fully justified because I found academic life a real drag and simply couldn’t be bothered with learning unless it was a subject in which I had a particular interest – which usually meant one involving a ball! I enjoyed my rugby at Ellesmere although I had no thought initially of pursuing it seriously. If I indulged in boyhood dreams, they involved opening the batting for Lancashire at Old Trafford. Indeed, I took so little interest in rugby that the only name that meant anything to me was Richard Sharp, the England fly-half. Yet I knew all I needed to know about our leading cricketers and also vividly remember watching England win the soccer World Cup in 1966. Apart from Fylde I wasn’t aware of other rugby union teams but was always keen to discover how Blackburn Rovers and Blackpool had fared in the Football League.

      The sporting facilities at Ellesmere were excellent and that helped me through my school years. If you are into sport then, wherever you are – at school, college or just generally in the community – you will always have mates, and in my time at the college we were a pretty mixed bag. Because we were very close to the border there, quite a few of my rugby mates came from Wales and one of those was Mark Keyworth, who played his club rugby with Swansea and got into the same England team as I did in 1976. We suffered a whitewash in what was then the Five Nations Championship and that was the end of Mark, unfortunately. Those were the bad old days of English rugby when players came and went, often without СКАЧАТЬ