Roy Francis – Rugby’s Forgotten Black Leader, by Tony Collins
(Published by Bloomsbury, RRP £18.99)
League Express editor MARTYN SADLER reviews a welcome addition to the Rugby League bookshelves
TONY COLLINS has done Rugby League a great service by writing about a man who was an outstanding individual by any measure, with many great achievements to his name and with a life story that surely deserves to be told not just in a written biography but also in the world of film.
It’s the story of a man who overcame great obstacles to carve out both a playing and coaching career that saw him reach the heights of glory, while also experiencing low points, often related to the fact that he was a black man in an almost entirely white world, whether in Wales, his birthplace, England or Australia.
From Brynmawr to Wigan
Collins is a noted sports and social historian and my only regret about this book is that his subject didn’t live long enough for Tony to have met and interviewed him personally.
Instead he relies on several sources, including surviving members of Roy’s family, to construct the narrative of a complex but brilliant man who was a natural leader and who found an outlet to fully express himself in Rugby League.
The man we have to thank for luring Roy into Rugby League is a Wigan scout called Arthur Fairfax, who spotted him playing rugby union for his village side Brynmawr (where Roy now has a statue) when he was just 17 years old in 1936.
Fairfax organised a trip to Wigan for the young Welshman, who played one trial game in the Wigan ‘A’ team and impressed sufficiently to be offered a £400 signing-on fee, which would be worth roughly £36,000 at today’s monetary values.
He accepted the offer immediately and he was on his way to Central Park, following in the footsteps of so many other Welsh rugby players, with the greatest of them all being the incomparable Jim Sullivan.
The Black Welsh Rugby League diaspora
Interestingly, Roy wasn’t alone in Wigan in being a black man among white players. Wigan already had George Bennett on their books, the former Newport player who had joined them in 1931. Bennett was a star in Wigan, having played at stand-off half for them in the 1934 Championship Final triumph against Salford and in the following year having made his international debut for Wales against France, making him the first black Rugby League international.
It was never a coincidence that so many black Welsh players would sign for Rugby League clubs as they faced the grim institutional racism of the Welsh Rugby Union, which decreed that they would never play rugby union for Wales, at least until the 1980s, whereas there were no similar restrictions in Rugby League.
Roy made his first-team debut for Wigan in the 1937 Good Friday derby against St Helens, which Wigan won 16-3, with Roy scoring one of the tries.
The following day he scored a hat-trick of tries in a 51-10 demolition of Leigh, while off the field he found lodgings near to Central Park in a boarding house run by Ernest and Rachel Austin, and he soon found himself falling in love with their daughter Rene, who he would marry in the local Registry Office in July 1938. The couple would stay married for their rest of Roy’s life, while bringing two sons into the world.
From Wigan to Barrow
After his first two games for Wigan, it would be reasonable to suppose that he became a first-team regular, but it wasn’t quite that simple. In fact he only played twelve games for Wigan before being transferred to Barrow on 14 January 1939 for £450.
That transfer came not long after the Australian journalist Harry Sunderland arrived at Wigan in October 1938 to become the club’s new secretary-manager. Francis would only play three times for Wigan under Sunderland before being on his way to Barrow.
Speaking to the historian Robert Gate almost 50 years later, Roy suggested that his move came about because Sunderland didn’t like the colour of his skin.
That may have been true, for all I know, but the curious thing is that there is no clear evidence from any other source that Sunderland had racist views.
Known disparagingly by some as the ‘little dictator’ because of his small stature and domineering personality, I suspect that Sunderland didn’t take to Roy because of his keen intelligence and willingness to put forward his own opinions rather than meekly accepting what he was told to do.
War was looming, however, and in October 1939 Roy was called up to serve in the Royal Army Service Corps as a motor mechanic and driver and he was stationed at an army camp on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire until December 1941.
The Army PT Instructor
While there, he signed to play with Dewsbury as a guest player during the war. But, crucially for his later coaching career, Roy was accepted into the Army Physical Training Corp in September 1942 and he was now a ‘Sergeant Instructor’ teaching military fitness to combat troops.
“His future coaching career was shaped by his experience in the APTC,” writes Collins.
Talking to the Manchester Evening News reporter Jack McNamara many years later in 1968, Roy himself recognised this point.
“You not only had to make their bodies right, but their minds right as well …. You had to start at the brain and work down – and this, I believe, is the basis of coaching.”
After the war Roy returned to Barrow and was then transferred to Warrington, playing for them in their 13-12 defeat to Huddersfield in the 1949 Championship Final in front of 75,194 spectators at Manchester City’s Maine Road stadium. As a curious aside, referenced by Collins, “due to an administrative error” the designated referee failed to turn up and the match had to be refereed by one of the touch judges. I would love to know what the administrative error was.
Glory days at Hull
Later that year he was transferred to Hull FC, where he would play out his playing career and embark on the next phase of his career, initially as a captain-coach but later as a coach with the power to select his team personally, which was unusual in Rugby League in those days but which reflected Roy’s ability to argue his case with the club’s directors.
Roy’s emphasis was on physical fitness and positional awareness on the field, while off the field he wanted to involve players’ families in the club as well as its fans, with his wife Rene taking a significant role rallying the players’ wives around the team.
“We players looked up to him as a father figure,” said the great Johnny Whiteley of Roy, who wouldn’t tolerate players ignoring fans, for example, who were queuing to get their autographs.
“More than any other British sports coach in the 1950s, Roy focused on the whole player on and off the field,” writes Collins.
In an interview on Australian TV, when asked about the basic requirements of a coach, Roy replied, “Knowledge, dedication, honesty and sincerity”, and when asked what was required from players, he replied, “Exactly the same”.
His first major trophy as a coach came when Hull defeated Halifax 10-9 in the 1956 Championship Final at Maine Road. The following year they were in the Championship Final again, with another one-point margin, but this time Oldham were the winners, defeating Hull 15-14.
In 1958 Roy led Hull to their third successive Championship Final and this time it wasn’t close, as they defeated Workington 20-3 at Odsal.
But, having won the Championship, his next focus was on winning the Challenge Cup and he led Hull to Wembley in both 1959 and 1960, losing out to Wigan and Wakefield respectively.
Sadly, those defeats had a massive impact on Roy’s self-confidence and he would ultimately suffer a nervous breakdown. Collins discusses the possible causes of Roy’s mental anguish extremely well.
On to Headingley
Fortunately Roy was able to bounce back from his difficulties by accepting an offer to coach Leeds from November 1963, with a mandate to rebuild an ageing squad, which eventually reached its zenith in 1968, when Leeds hammered Wigan 25-4 in a Challenge Cup semi-final at Swinton’s former Station Road ground.
“Roy must have sat there and thought ‘this is perfection’, and it nearly was,” said Leeds winger John Atkinson many years later.
Leeds would go on to beat Wakefield 11-10 at Wembley in the famous ‘Watersplash Final’, when Don Fox missed a last-minute conversion attempt that would have won the Cup for Wakefield.
Roy was desperately disappointed to have won the Cup in that way, so much so that he missed the club’s gala dinner to celebrate the win and he ate alone with Rene in his hotel room.
“For 32 years, as a player and a coach, Roy had striven to win Rugby League’s most glittering prize. Now the Challenge Cup was his, but the glory was not,” writes Collins.
Roy’s future career would take him to Australia to coach North Sydney and then back to Leeds.
The difficulties he experienced are movingly covered in the book, as is his eventual physical and mental decline before his death in 1989.
We all owe Tony Collins a debt of gratitude for this biography of one of the greatest of Rugby League coaches.