1967 proved to be a good year for Guernsey rugby. Rob Batiste looks back at that rare Siam win and a few since FORTY years ago, in the days when the home of Guernsey rugby was still Les Vauxbelets, national league competition was a pipedream and you got only three points for a try, something special happened.
Guernsey won a Siam.
It does not happen often now and nor did it then.
But Jersey’s finest came over and were despatched 9-5, falling to the boot of home skipper Brian Chapman and a hooped-shirted home pack that dominated a dour, hard struggle, so typical of the annual rugby encounters of the time.
Brian Preston, for more than three decades head of PE at Les Beaucamps Secondary, was playing his first Siam having arrived from the north of England the year previously.
It was the scrum half’s first of only two Siam appearances, a broken leg at the very end of the following season ending his rugby career and allowing him to concentrate, very successfully, on a more sedate cricket one.
‘I kind of remember it vaguely,’ he admitted yesterday.
‘I know Les Vauxbelets didn’t look as good as it does now.’
Running through the Guernsey XV to jog his memory, he stops me on reaching the name Paington.
‘Miles Paington was a New Zealander on his travels and he was pretty outstanding.’
League rugby for Guernsey was many years away but there was no shortage of action, recalls Preston.
‘Almost every week we had visiting teams and they stayed at the Carlton.’
As for the game, not a lot happened, in truth.
Guernsey led 3-0 at the break thanks to a penalty from Chapman, but a Jersey winger, Langlois, raced over for a converted try to make it 5-3 early in the second.
Chapman restored Guernsey’s advantage with a 35-yard penalty to the right of the posts but there was just one point between the sides until five minutes from the end when, following a scrum infringement, Chapman took the chance to settle it from just 15 yards.
‘The Guernsey forward were in good form, particularly Muxworthy and Leafe,’ the Evening Press reported in a low-key appraisal of the whole match.
Chapman recalls the match clearly and is adamant: ‘we were the better team’.
‘That was my fifth Siam. I then left for England for 15 years and didn’t play again.
‘Rugby was different then. It was Guernsey forwards against the Jersey backs.’
It was 21 years before the greens won again, although they did hold on for a draw in 1978.
Of the 88 12-8 away win, then rugby correspondent Anthony Warlow wrote: ‘It was done by a performance so emphatic that it seemed Jersey’s time-worn superiority was a myth.’
Guernsey virtually won the match in a ’startling’ opening 22 minutes.
John Traill, the left wing playing his first Siam, scored under the posts and Brian Queru added the kick for 6-0.
Queru made it 9-0 soon afterwards and by half-time he had added another for a 12-0 lead.
Jersey, with the wind, came back strongly in the second half but their huff and puff were rewarded by only one try and a penalty.
By the time Guernsey won again on home soil, 28 years had passed since the Les Vauxbelets victory.
Tries from Mike Smith, Steve Burt and Adie Relph were the basis for a 24-13 success, but it was Jock Quesnel who walked away with the man-of-the-match award.
Article posted on 5th May, 2007 - 12.00am
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