As the Welsh rugby team was preparing to face England at Twickenham in 1950, their captain slipped out of the dressing room to give a ticket to his father, who had travelled from Monmouth, only to find the doorman would not allow him back in because he did not have a pass. When John Gwilliam explained that he was the captain of Wales, he was told three people had tried that method of entry already. He was eventually let back in and, as if to prove a point, he led his side to victory, beating England 11-5.
The doorman cannot have been a rugby fan, nor can he have been easily intimidated, for Gwilliam was a man of stature who exuded authority. Not only did he go on to captain Wales to two Grand Slam rugby triumphs, he also quelled long-haired indiscipline as a headmaster in the 1960s.
During the Second World War he had fought behind enemy lines with the Fifth Tank Regiment. When asked by his commanding officer one day why he had not shot the sniper he had captured, who he was holding by the collar, he replied: “No, no, sir. Much too small.”
Compassion and tolerance came to the fore throughout Gwilliam’s multi-faceted life. Strongly influenced by the Scripture Union, he read the Bible every day and carried a copy with him when landing at Normandy as a 21-year-old in 1944. He took it with him as he moved eastwards through Ardennes and Arnhem before crossing the Rhine into Germany. He refused to play in rugby matches on Sundays, and once turned down an Oxbridge tour to South America on account of the fixture scheduling. “John was very religious, a good-living man,” said Peter Ford, his Gloucester team-mate.
As with several amateur sportsmen who excelled in the 1950s and 1960s, his professional career and his outlook were informed by his Christianity. After leading Wales to those Grand Slam victories in 1950 and 1952, he concentrated on teaching at Dulwich College in south London, where he was head of the lower school, before becoming headmaster of Birkenhead School on the Wirral.
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Regarded as a disciplinarian who was Cromwellian in outlook, he was to remain at his post for 25 years. By the time he left, every member of staff had been appointed by him, including individuals he had taught.
John Albert Gwilliam was born in 1923 and educated at Monmouth School and at Cambridge, where he won an exhibition worth £30 a year to read history. He had been there only a year when he was called up and sent to Sandhurst, where Matt Busby, later to manage Manchester United, was in charge of PE.
Commissioned into the Royal Tank Regiment, Gwilliam landed in France in 1944 as a second lieutenant on a Mulberry floating harbour made out of concrete blocks. He inadvertently cut through the German lines at the Falaise Pocket as a result of his lorry driver losing his way. “He was hopelessly lost. We were informed that we were the first reinforcements to arrive from the wrong end. It took us a long time to live down, especially when the driver had embellished the story by describing the difficulty we had negotiating minefields,” Gwilliam recalled.
His regiment had greater success in helping to capture a Tiger tank, which they were able to do because one of their soldiers was a German émigré who, pretending to be a German officer, was able to ring the mayor of Sulingen in north Germany, asking him where to send reinforcements.
The response was not to bother because the tank had broken down and the crew had fled. “It was John’s idea,” said General Roy Dixon. “Tigers were by far the best German tanks and could not be knocked out. John was a most delightful man and when I played rugby with him for the regiment, we could tell he was an international in the making.”
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Lieutenant Gwilliam returned to Cambridge after the war and won two rugby blues. He was awarded the first of his 23 Welsh caps against the Wallabies in 1947. Five of his first six caps were as a second row forward, but thereafter he played at No 8. “His nickname was ‘Bucket’ because he had very big hands,” said Ford. “He would come round the back of the line-out where I would touch the ball on to him.”
In 1950 Gwilliam became the 59th person to captain his country. Rees Stephens and Bleddyn Williams were unfit, and one of the selectors, upon appointing Gwilliam, added that he was quite free to play his own game, then promptly listed what he should not do. “These provisos contained almost all my limited ideas on winning a rugby match at the time,” Gwilliam said. Nevertheless, Wales, with six new players, beat England that day.
Wales then defeated Scotland 12-0, Ireland 6-3 and France 21-0, securing their first Grand Slam and Triple Crown since 1911. “Wales, above everything else, even perhaps the men who scored the tries, owed their hard-earned victory to Gwilliam, the leader of a magnificent pack who, for all their slight advantage in the line-out and rushes, were by no means masters in the tight and might have become rattled and led to make serious mistakes but for the cool general who kept them together,” wrote The Times rugby correspondent. Wales beat all four countries again two years later, earning Gwilliam a grand-slam record for a Welsh captain that still stands.
In 1953 Gwilliam was given permission to arrive on the morning of a Wales match against Ireland owing to the birth of one of his children, only for the train to break down outside Swansea. He had to run along the track, carrying his boots, before catching a taxi to the ground. Other teams he played for included Edinburgh Wanderers, London Welsh, Llanelli, Wasps and Gloucester, and he might well have captained the Lions in New Zealand if he hadn’t chosen to teach instead. In 2005 Gwilliam, who was part of the last Welsh team to have beaten the All Blacks in 1953, was inducted into the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame.
“He inadvertently crossed German lines when his driver lost his way
Gwilliam taught at Glenalmond and Bromsgrove (he thought nothing of travelling from Scotland to Wales for international matches) as well as Dulwich College before his appointment as headmaster of Birkenhead in 1963. He had to contend with the Labour government’s opposition to the direct grant system. For some schools this proved disastrous; for Birkenhead it meant a return to independence.
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A new classroom block, a sixth-form centre and a hall were built, and the prep school was relocated. After a quarter of a century on the Wirral he retired to Wales with his wife, Pegi Lloyd George, a distant relative of the prime minister and a fellow Cambridge undergraduate he had met after she watched him play for the university, who taught maths at Birkenhead High School.
They had five children: Catherine, who became a teacher and married the football writer Steve Tongue; David, an accountant, who predeceased his father; Peter, who teaches at King’s School, Worcester; Philip, who became an actuary; and Rhiannon, who lives near Llandudno. Four of Gwilliam’s children went to Cambridge. The family owned a holiday home in Moelfre, Anglesey, where he liked to preach at the Congregational Church.
One of Gwilliam’s pupils was Nick Pollard, who went on to work for Sky as head of news, and at ITN. “I was always pretty terrified of him, and left having achieved little apart from making a nuisance of myself. Years later I went back to give a lecture about journalism and broadcasting to the sixth form, and for some reason wrote him a letter effectively apologising for my dismal performance both academically and personally.
“To my surprise I received a wonderful and gracious letter from him saying that he had followed my career with interest and had seen potential in me while I was at school. Great man.”
John Gwilliam, rugby player and headmaster, was born on February 28, 1923. He died on December 21, 2016, aged 93