How the 1956 All Blacks deployed a boxing champion to rough up the Springboks

The South African media covering the Springbok trials in 1956 could not believe their luck when the juiciest of stories landed in their laps.

You have to picture the scene. A pack of rugby reporters are in a lounge at the Avalon Hotel in Cape Town, awaiting a news briefing, when two brawling Springboks crash through the doorway.

It was the meanest lock enforcers in Springbok rugby, Salty du Rand and Jan Pickard, and Sunday Times writer Norman Canale had the job of separating the two. The colourful Canale would dine out on the episode, saying it was a good job that he had spent most of his career covering boxing.

Witnesses say that a Du Rand worse for liquor was the aggressor and Danie Craven later made him apologise. The two shook hands in front of the rest of the players, but this scuffle divided a Bok squad about to depart for a series with the All Blacks.

To give some background... In 1956 two of the biggest rugby personalities were the Northern Transvaal captain Du Rand and arch-rival Pickard, the Western Province skipper.

They were the figureheads of an enormous north-south divide in provincial rugby.

Another significant factor was that in this post-World War 2 era, there was a split between English and Afrikaans rugby players because most of the former volunteered for the British army and the majority of the latter did not.

Both Du Rand and Pickard had a good shot at captaining the Test team, more so Du Rand, who had 15 caps to Pickard’s two.

Also, Du Rand’s robustness was ideal for leading from the front against an All Blacks team on a war footing after losing 4-0 in South Africa in 1949.

After the tour, Craven admitted that the original plan had been for Du Rand to captain the team with Pickard his vice-captain, but because of the friction, the captaincy went to the affable Basie Vivier, who would prove to be an ineffectual leader in what became a Test rugby war zone.

So what happened at the Avalon Hotel?

On the first day of the trials, Du Rand had suffered a deep head gash and could play no further part. The story goes that he drowned his sorrows and came back to the hotel in a menacing mood.

A witness was Clive Ulyate, the flyhalf, and he said Du Rand verbally attacked Pickard for having joined Hamiltons, an English club in Cape Town. He called Pickard a “baster Engelsman” (bastardised Englishman) and a traitor to his Afrikaans heritage. 

Pickard told Du Rand: “Jy het geen karakter nie.” (You have no character), which resulted in a right hook from Du Rand that left Pickard with a badly broken nose.

A handshake between the two could not mend the tension and Craven said this was a major reason for the Springboks’ first series loss since 1896.

The Avalon punch-up was hardly the last setback for the 1956 tour, which seemed cursed from the outset. It began with an ill-advised pre-tour training regime that saw lead strips fitted to the players’ boot soles to prepare them for those heavy fields.

Instead of building up leg muscles it broke them down, to the extent that one of the nicknames for the 1956 Boks was “Doc Craven’s Hamstring Band”.

This Bok squad was the first to travel by plane rather than sail and it nearly ended in disaster. The plane refuelled in Mauritius but on the way to Australia one of the propellers stopped working and with worried reconnaissance planes following them, the Boks limped to Darwin on a wing and prayer.

The biggest problem was the injury epidemic. It was so bad that the uninjured players formed a Survivors Club and by the end of the 29-match tour, it had only six members from a tour party of 30.

Again, a big contributor was meddling with the boots. The Boks wanted to play in lighter footwear and a South African doctor advised them to remove part of the heel but this only resulted in more hamstring injuries.

Maybe it was the same quack that convinced Craven of the “benefit” of drying out his players (to make them lighter), meaning they were not to drink water before the game, with the result that energy levels plummeted from dehydration.

But let’s not discount New Zealand’s fanatical desire for revenge. They won the first of the four Tests, but when the Boks levelled the series, they went to war in the third Test by recalling retired prop Kevin Skinner, a heavyweight boxing champion.

Skinner had one task only — to bash into submission the Bok front row, which he did by switching between tighthead and loosehead prop during the game so that he could “fix” his opponents.

Props Jaap Bekker and Chris Koch, both of whom had been superb in the second Test, took a terrible battering.

The bloodied Bekker had to spend 24 hours in a hospital observation room because of severe concussion and had been so confused in the change room after the game that he took swings at any teammate who attempted to placate him.

The fourth and final Test was an equally bitter affair. The All Blacks won 11-5 to win the series 3-1 and claim the unofficial world rugby crown.

All that was left was for Craven to address the delirious Eden Park masses after the final whistle regarding that crown. He wistfully said: “It’s all yours New Zealand. It’s all yours. Our consolation is that you know how it feels.”

Footnote

In that fourth Test at Eden Park, the All Black Tiny White was rendered unconscious after a brutal forward scuffle. He was stretchered off and the furious All Blacks yelled at the referee that the big lock had been kicked by a Springbok, whom they could not identify.

For decades it was a mystery as to what had happened to White until... Jaap Bekker confessed shortly before he died in 1999. He said he had confused White for Skinner!

This story is an extract from Mike Greenaway’s best-selling book, The Fireside Springbok. He also penned Bok to Bok, the story of the Boks’ 2023 World Cup victory.