Arthur Dorward epitomised the manliness of rugby as it was played in the 1950s. The first person from Galashiels to captain Scotland, he was competitive to the point of remonstrating with one of his team-mates for shaking hands with an opponent at half-time.
Dorward won 15 caps at scrum-half between 1950 and 1957 — following in the footsteps of his older brother, Tom, who won five caps before the Second World War but was killed while on active service with the RAF in 1941.
Arthur Dorward captained his country three times but it was a period of inconsistent selection in which the players had to pay for their own boots and suffered 17 consecutive defeats. Nonetheless, he was then regarded as the best scrum-half in the Scotland and was good enough to be chosen for the Barbarians when his partner at fly-half was the great Welshman Cliff Morgan (obituary, Aug 30, 2013), who later commentated on rugby for the BBC.
Dorward was also known for leading the post-match drinking and singing. If he returned home having drunk too much beer, his mother, a teetotaller, would be given the impression that he had eaten too many post-match pies.
The Hong Kong Sevens’ customary post-match imbibing resulted in Dorward and some team-mates being late for a ferry in the harbour, where there were strong currents. Jumping on to the wheelhouse, they managed to change the course of the boat before the crew, who were caught off-guard, regained control.
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Once, when representing a combined Oxford and Cambridge universities XV tour to Argentina, he and others decided not to fly but to go by ship. They were short of funds and, with no sponsorship available, they arrived a week late for the first fixture.
Arthur Fairgrieve Dorward was born in Galashiels in 1925. He was educated at Sedbergh in Cumbria, where he was head boy, and at Cambridge, where he read French and German. He won rugby Blues in each of his three years and was captain in his final year.
Alhough he was only 5ft 8in, he first played for Gala when he was 17. His party piece in the bar after a match was the singing of The Wee Man. Another song he belted out (reasonably tunefully) was Bread of Heaven, a great rugby hymn in Wales.
Always competitive on the field, he would tell his scrum that if they did not feed the ball back to him properly they should not expect him to play it. Dorward also believed wholeheartedly in supporting the officials. “No referee wants to have a bad game,” he said.
Dorward combined playing for Gala until the age of 32 with working on the sales side for the family’s textile and clothing business, Messrs J and JC Dorward, which made hats and caps of pure wool. He became a director, and stayed on after it was taken over. His playing days came to an end when he suffered a pelvic injury in a road accident through hitting a telegraph pole on his way back from Edinburgh. He also represented Galashiels at cricket, hockey, tennis, squash and golf, which he played off a handicap of five.
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In retirement, when he was not supporting independence for Scotland, he could often be found encouraging young rugby players. He enjoyed walking and working as a rescue boat volunteer on St Mary’s Loch, between Moffat and Selkirk. He met his wife when they played hockey together when she was 17: her father, Jack, a bus driver, sometimes drove the Gala players to matches. Campbell, their son, lives in Troon and works for Punch Taverns. Lesley, their daughter, is married with three children and lives in Buckinghamshire.
Dorward’s finest performance for his country was thought to be against Wales at Murrayfield in 1957. “On a dry and sunny afternoon, an enormous crowd that included many thousands of Welsh supporters saw a hard, fast and exciting match,” wrote the author Kenneth Bogle.
The outcome was uncertain until the end when the score was 6-6 and Ken Scotland, the Scotland full-back, missed a penalty. “Scrum half Arthur Dorward took the ball and, completely unexpectedly, dropped a prodigious goal from a long and difficult angle (at least 40 metres out and ten metres from the touchline). It was said that the cheers of the astonished crowd were heard in Princes Street.”
Arthur Dorward, rugby player, was born on March 3, 1925. He died on August 4, 2015, aged 90