THE publication of sports historian Tony Collins’ biography of the great Roy Francis (‘Roy Francis – Rugby’s Forgotten Black Leader’) reminded me once again of the historical debt rugby league has owed to Welsh converts from rugby union in the days before the union code turned professional in 1995.
And, at a time when Sir Billy Boston has been recognised by being awarded a knighthood by King Charles III, it’s fascinating to reflect on how many black players came north to escape the Welsh Rugby Union’s stance that no black player would ever play for Wales.
I doubt that the policy was ever set out in any official documents, but some wonderful black Welsh players, including Roy and Sir Billy, certainly got the message at a very young age and they proved to be very easy to entice to rugby league, to our eternal benefit.
I’ve often heard the suggestion that the Welsh Rugby Union might care to apologise for its treatment of those players in the era before Glen Webbe became the first black player to be selected for them in the 1980s, but the apology has yet to emerge in any formal sense.
On the other hand, perhaps the RFL should issue a statement thanking the WRU for its stance and for therefore gifting rugby league so many wonderful players.
But it wasn’t just the WRU that was at fault.
As Collins makes clear, soon after the First World War in 1919, parts of Wales were disfigured by racial riots, notably in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and Newport.
Two young lads who would later come north lived through those riots in Newport.
George Bennett was ten years old at the time and ten years later he left Wales for Wigan and eventually become the first black international rugby league player when he was selected for Wales.
Alec Givvons also lived in Newport and he signed for Oldham and also went on to play for Wales.
In the 1930s the two Cumberbatch brothers, Jim and Val, were two other black players who made a name for themselves, both playing for England.
Roy Francis joined Wigan at the age of 17 in the 1930s before moving on to Barrow, becoming the first black player to represent Great Britain in 1947. He later became one of the greatest coaches rugby league has ever seen.
He guided Hull FC to the Rugby League Championship in 1956 and 1958 and ten years later he won the Challenge Cup with Leeds in the famous ‘Watersplash Final’ at Wembley against Wakefield Trinity.
Subsequently he had a spell in Sydney as the coach of North Sydney, where he enjoyed a bright start to his time with the Bears but then ran into difficulties. As Collins makes clear, he didn’t get on well with his captain, the great Ken Irvine. A difficult relationship between a coach and captain normally spells disaster for any club and when you add the fact that Roy was a black coach in charge of an almost exclusively white squad of players, it’s easy to see how that vital relationship could break down.
One of the fascinating elements of Collins’ book is what it tells us about Roy’s origins and his family background. He was the illegitimate son of his father Lionel, a 37-year-old Trinidadian miner and Alice May Evans, the 19-year-old daughter of a farmer.
Despite that, Lionel’s wife Rebecca agreed to raise Roy as her son, even though she and Lionel had effectively split up. She was a remarkably loving mother who gave Roy a wonderfully warm start in life, even though the family was desperately poor.
Perhaps the secret to Roy’s success lies in the genes he inherited from his father.
Lionel was a noted preacher in South Wales as well as being a miner. But he had higher ambitions and in 1920, a year after Roy’s birth, he emigrated to the United States, leaving his family behind and completely reinventing his own life story.
He moved to Philadelphia and styled himself Dr Lionel Francis, claiming to be a physician who had studied at the prestigious Howard University in Washington DC as well as claiming to have been educated at Oxford and Edinburgh. He became the President of the Philadelphia branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, under the national leadership of Marcus Garvey, who was possibly the most famous black man in America in those days.
Lionel had left his life in Britain and his family far behind him. He later migrated to the central American state of Belize and play an important role in public life there. And as Collins writes: “Nor would he ever know of the achievements of the boy he abandoned in Brynmawr. Yet the same qualities that had made Lionel a prominent public figure – intelligence, charisma and an instinctive sense of leadership – would soon begin to manifest themselves in his son.”
Roy’s life, like his father’s, was an extraordinary story that Tony Collins has opened up for us. We should all be grateful to him for having done that.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 510 (July 2025)