In August, rugby league lost one of its true greats – a trailblazer and try-scoring extraordinaire. 

ON 13th March, 1953, two representatives from Wigan Rugby League Club turned up at the door of 19-year-old William John Boston in Butetown, Cardiff. They offered him £1,000 to sign for their club. His mother refused on his behalf.

Undeterred, they laid £1,500 in notes on the table. Boston didn’t want to sign – he was happy playing rugby union – but then his mother asked for £3,000, believing it would be refused. The Wigan representatives agreed and she felt obliged to honour her word.

Boston said in his biography that he “didn’t sleep that night wondering what lay ahead”. However, he later described it as the “best mistake his mother ever made”, because he would go on to become one of the greatest rugby league wingers.

Sir Billy Boston, who died in August, aged 92, following a long period living with vascular dementia, last year became the first person ever to be knighted for services to rugby league, 30 years after he received an MBE.

He was the sixth of 11 children born to John Boston, a black Sierra Leonean merchant seaman, ands Nellie, a white Irish mother. He excelled at all sports, but especially rugby union. His speed was coupled with an unusually large frame for a winger – his playing weight was about 15 stones – and one fanciful story goes that his teammates decided to get him to run into the proverbial brick wall, but the wall jumped out of the way. 

He was intimidating, fast – despite his weight – and his hand-off was devastating. Rugby league historian Robert Gate wrote: “The abiding memory was of him careering over the try line leaving in his wake a trail of battered, bruised and bewildered defenders trying to recover their senses. Among these wretches would be those who never got near… and those who wished they had not.”

His performances for the Royal Signals rugby union team while undergoing national service brought him to the attention of professional rugby league clubs. But he had aspirations to play for Cardiff and Wales. However, the ostensibly amateur Welsh Rugby Union in those days operated an unofficial colour bar. 

It was almost certain he would never play for Wales at union and so Boston became one of a long line of black and mixed-race Welsh players from the Cardiff docklands who switched to league to make a living and to fulfil ambitions of playing at the highest level. 

Boston recalled weeping after the Wigan delegation left because he knew he would never play for Cardiff – banned for life from playing rugby union again. Fortunately, it was not something he would regret.

For 17 years he terrified opposition defences in Britain and abroad, winning every domestic honour as he became the game’s second most successful try-scorer, topped only by Australian Brian Bevan. Boston’s 483 in 499 club matches meant he scored almost one per match. He also scored another 88 in representative matches, including 24 in 31 Tests for Great Britain (he was a World Cup winner in 1960), giving him a total of 571. He also, somewhat unexpectedly, kicked seven goals.

His Wigan A-team debut was watched by 8,525 people, a tenfold increase on the normal attendance. He scored 12 tries in his first five first-team games and was picked to tour Australia with the Lions in 1954 after only six games of league. At the time he was the youngest ever tourist and the first black player to tour Australia, challenging the colour bar that operated there.

Unfortunately, though, the RFL did not back up this progressive stance. As Great Britain returned from touring down under in 1962 they played three exhibition matches in apartheid South Africa. Instead of insisting Boston should play, he was instructed to fly on to the UK.

Nonetheless, Boston said of rugby league: “It gave me an opportunity that, in the 1950s, I could never have had elsewhere. When you are on the pitch you are as equal as the other players. And it would have been a stupid opponent who tried to rile me.”

He ended his career with 11 games for Blackpool Borough before retiring in 1970. He became one of nine inductees into the inaugural Rugby League Hall of Fame in 1988 and a member of the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame – once considered closed to league players – in 1989. In 2012 Sporting Equals, the body promoting ethnic diversity across sport worldwide, placed Boston in its top 10 black sportspeople of all time alongside Muhammed Ali, Pele and Jesse Owens.

He is the only rugby player of either code with three statues to his name. The first appeared at Wembley in 2015 where, along with four other famous players, the sport’s contribution to the stadium’s history was celebrated. The second was erected in Wigan’s Believe Square (now to be renamed in his honour) in 2016, while the third was unveiled in Cardiff Bay in 2023 to recognise the rugby ‘codebreakers’ of Wales, who had to leave the country to further their careers in rugby league.

After retirement Boston became landlord of The Griffin pub, minutes from the old Central Park stadium where he made his name, while a grandstand at Wigan’s new stadium is named after him.

Gate wrote: “It is doubtful if any other player ever made a crowd tingle as much as Boston… and who caused a feeling of dread for opposing supporters emanating from the realisation that no matter how well organised the defence seemed, no matter how many opponents barred his progress, the great man was still likely to find a way through.”

His drawing power, even for fans of teams he would demoralise, was huge. Signs would go up around opposition stadiums on the morning of the game: “Boston will play”.

Wife Joan (née Rudd), whom he married in 1956, died in July. He is survived by four of his five children Lisa, Karen, Christine and Stephen. His youngest daughter, Angela, died in 2016.

First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 525 (October 2026)