With a modern-day winger and Super League star producing plenty of points, our time machine tracks the exploits – and eccentricities – of the wideman who became rugby league’s most productive player ever, Brian Bevan.
RYAN HALL’s recent scoring feats have brought bumper try tallies firmly into focus.
Back in June, the Hull KR ace who will return to Leeds at the end of this season overhauled Danny McGuire’s previous Super League record of 247.
And over his career as a whole, with the help of 39 in an England shirt, powerhouse Hall is well into the 300s.
There are hopefully plenty more to come for the popular 36-year-old Yorkshireman who played his first match for Leeds back in 2007.
But it’s fair to say he won’t get close to the game’s all-time leading scorers.
Right at the top of the chart, by some distance, is a Warrington legend who last played 60 years ago and died aged 66 in 1991, but whose name remains in rugby league consciousness through the title of the podcast ‘What would Brian Bevan say?’.
Like Hall a winger, although with a markedly different physique, the spindly Australian notched a remarkable world-record total of 796 tries.
Of those, 740 came in 620 appearances for the Wire between 1946, when he was signed after rejection by Leeds, and 1962, during which time he helped the club win three titles and two Challenge Cups and understandably established himself firmly in 13-a-side folklore.
Surprisingly, Bevan was never selected to play for his country, although he did feature for a number of representative sides, crossing 39 times, with 26 of those for the Other Nationalities team.
His other 17 tries came with Blackpool Borough, where he spent his last two seasons as player-coach, although it wasn’t an especially enjoyable experience for one of the game’s more unusual characters, far removed from the stereotypical rough-and-ready Aussie larrikin.
The younger players struggled to get the grips with the unusual ways of the quiet, early-balding man who was noted for his fastidiousness, was once mistaken for a clergyman at a Warrington club function and spent hours practising on the piano (he would often play at care homes and hospitals).
And he later reflected: “It was sad really. I might have been called a star player, but somehow I never had it in me to pass on my skills and experience to others.”
Born in Sydney in 1924, he was a son of Eastern Suburbs player Rick Bevan, and as a child, as well as honing his rugby league skills, spent many hours on Bondi Beach, surfing, swimming, running and developing an initially frail body into an athletic, if slight, frame.
During the Second World War, he was on the books at Easts himself, but his appearances were limited by service with the Australian Navy.
It was while visiting England soon after the end of hostilities that he sought a trial at Leeds.
When that was unsuccessful, former Warrington captain and compatriot Bill Shankland, who was a family friend, arranged a run-out with his old club’s ‘A’ team – and the rest is history.
Bevan made his first-team debut early in the 1946-47 season, and with his phenomenal burst of speed and ghostlike swerve, was soon establishing himself as sporting box-office gold in a period when the public were thirsting for entertainment after the struggles of the War years.
He remained very much his own man, with ‘Bevan’s corner’ of the home dressing room at Wilderspool, Warrington’s former ground, well known to his teammates and adorned with different lengths of sticking plaster which he patiently applied pre-match.
The club’s secretary-manager Chris Brockbank once revealed more about Bevan when he said: “I’ve never dealt with such an odd but lovable character.
“Sometimes he would come unannounced into my office and just sit in a corner without saying a word for an hour or more.
“I knew he’d have something on his mind and it would all come out in good time. Then after airing some imaginary grievance, he’d go away quite happy.
“Brian might have been a bag of nerves, often moody and reticent, but he was a magnificent player.”
Meanwhile kitman Jack Hamblett explained: “Brian’s temperament was such that even of there was nothing for him to worry about, he made sure there was.
“I could guarantee that in the first ten minutes of a match, he would come over to the bench saying his bootlaces were all wrong, his shorts were too tight or some other triviality.
“Once I’d attended to his so-called problem, he’d trot back onto the field, happy as a sandboy, and usually give a fine display.”
Those displays helped ensure teammates were more than willing to put up with his eccentricities.
Centre Albert Pimblett said: “You could never give Brian enough passes.
“He’d say ‘I may as well be at Haydock Park races for all the ball you’re giving me’.
“But he could so often produce a try out of nothing or snatch an interception just when the other team were going in for what looked like a certain score.”
While hungry for tries and wins, Bevan was far from selfish.
He once took part in a close-season £100 handicap sprint event in which he beat the renowned North-East athlete Albert Spence.
Afterwards, Bevan said Spence had been over-handicapped, and insisted on sharing the then-hefty prize money.
With rugby league a part-time sport when he was playing, the man who married a Warrington woman and had two daughters worked as a printer before training as a hairdresser and establishing his own business.
A Hall of Fame member in both this country and Australia, Bevan, whose younger brother Owen, a centre, had a 55-game spell at Warrington in the early 1950s, is commemorated by a statue originally placed at Wilderspool then relocated to the Halliwell Jones Stadium.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 499 (August 2024)
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