The legend at eighty

“Typical Des. He was 86 and he said there’s got to be a party after the funeral. So we all returned to this lovely old house outside Edinburgh and his son sat down at the piano, and his grandson, and they actually handed out song-sheets and we all sang all the old songs. And I don’t think there was the sadness that often surrounds a lot of people’s death. It really was a celebration of a chap who had a remarkable life. We sang for much of the afternoon.”

IN KYLE’S house in Bryansford, a small village on Co Down’s sublime coastline, it’s considerably quieter. He lives alone in a spacious, spotless bungalow — he is many years divorced. He’s almost startled when, at some stage during our 2½-hour conversation, he spots somebody walking down the long drive to read the gas meter.

“I get so few visitors here,” he says. Mostly, people invite him to them — for golf, dinners, reunions and so on.

Nearly half a century since his last darting run, rugby still colours his existence. But there is none of rugby’s noise here, none of its images. The books on the shelves are collections of poetry, historical biographies. There are no team photographs, just landscapes and some crayon work by his grandchildren.

“I lost all my, what I suppose you’d call memorabilia,” he says. It is a rare moment of sadness during our time together.

“It was all in a bungalow in Lambeg, a load of stuff — cuttings and photographs. There was a man called Tony Goodrich, who used to write for the Irish Times, who used to bring me photographs that hadn’t been used in the paper. An amazing collection. While I was abroad, some kids got in and burnt the house to the ground. A shame.”

FOR those of us who are too young, Kyle’s legend is all the more alluring for the paucity of decent television footage. We have only eyewitness accounts, from those who saw him scoop up loose passes and dart through impossible gaps, making big men look foolish.

“They couldn’t touch him,” says McCarthy, the flanker who became Kyle’s outrider. “He’d play games and he wouldn’t need to have his shorts laundered afterwards. Jack was just the best.”

Cliff Morgan, another legendary fly-half and another friend, said: “Of all the fly-halves I played against, without hesitation I know Jack Kyle was the very best, the loveliest of players and the loveliest of men.”

In the southern hemisphere too, he was revered. According to Sir Terry McLean, doyen of New Zealand rugby writers, “Kyle’s football always had the air of genius, whether he was shuffling past a marker, grubber-kicking, or his greatest thing, fooling the opposition into a false sense of security.”

But perhaps the most evocative description comes from Frank Keating of The Guardian, who was a schoolboy when he first saw Kyle play for an invitation XV against Oxford at Iffley Road in 1954. In his book The Great Number Tens, Keating captures what would now be known as Kyle’s evasion skills: “Then, with a dip of his hip, an electric change of gear, he left the floundering cover as rooted as trees and glistened pitter-pat over the mud 35 yards, the sodden turf ringing as he scored almost apologetically under the posts.”

Kyle would like the poetic touch.

Unfailingly modest, he’s willing to admit he’s proud of one compliment he received. It came from Louis MacNeice, the great Belfast poet and journalist. When, in a radio interview in the 1950s, MacNeice was offered one wish in life, he answered: “That I could have played rugby like Jackie Kyle.”

“That I could have written poetry like Louis MacNeice,” says Kyle.

At 11½st, he’d barely be allowed to play a Test match these days. Kyle admits he winces at some of the collisions. He’s a big admirer of fellow lefty Daniel Carter, “a great allrounder”, and was a mite disappointed that Carter missed the final Test against the Lions in Auckland last summer; Kyle was in Eden Park with McCarthy and Tony O’Reilly.

Kyle evidently had Carter’s quick mind and quick feet. How quick exactly? He can’t say. He won an athletic cup over some sprint distances at his school, Belfast Royal Academy, but no times were recorded. Years later when on tour in San Francisco with Queen’s University, he came across Pappy Waldorf, the trainer of Berkeley’s football team, who reckoned Kyle could cover 100 yards in around 11 seconds. He admits he worked at his speed.

“If a young out-half came to me and asked me what I should concentrate on, I’d say speed off the mark,” he says. “That’s what I was told when I was starting off. I asked the advice of Dickie Lloyd, who played for Ireland before and after the First World War. He said, ‘Practise always with the ball in your arms — walk 25, sprint 25, walk 25, and sprint again.’

“The one thing you wanted was a scrum in the opposition 25, and a quick heel. If you can cover 100 yards in 12 or 13 seconds, think about what you can cover in one second. That’s what gets Brian O’Driscoll through.

“Things have changed so much, though. In our day, we were trying to avoid the opposition; nowadays, they’re deliberately running into people. It’s a much tougher game. You need to be able to take the knocks today. I must say, it was sad reading about Jonny Wilkinson in the papers over the weekend and how he’s been troubled by injuries. The inability to get back to the game must be very frustrating.”

THE NOTION of rugby as a job is anathema to him. He reckons it took maybe 10% of his time and devoting even that much occasionally brought censure from his father, who chided him for “chasing a ball of wind around a field”.

When John Wilson Kyle Sr read in the Belfast Telegraph that his 24-year-old son had been selected to go on a tour to New Zealand with the British Lions lasting 6½ months, he wondered aloud at the breakfast table: “Does that young fellow ever intend to qualify in medicine?” His son saw very little of this coming himself. As he tells it, so much was down to chance.

Having played for Ulster Schools in 1943, he was enjoying himself on the Freshers’ XV at Queen’s. During a chemistry practical one Friday, he was handed a note telling him he was playing for the firsts against Bective Rangers in Dublin the following day — Derek Monteith, the first-choice fly-half, had broken his leg.

Two seasons later, and 60 years ago this month, he was making his Ireland debut in an uncapped game against France at Lansdowne Road. His pen-portrait in the match programme reads: J W Kyle — age 19. Discovery of the season. John Wilson Kyle was on the Ulster Schools XV two years ago and proved himself in the top class by his great display for Ulster against the Kiwi Servicemen this November, subsequently confirming that form against the Army. A particularly straight, strong runner, he looks to have a brilliant future.

He still seems slightly bemused by the suddenness of it all.

“Looking back, I had no ambition at all as far as rugby was concerned. I suppose there are certain people in life who make things happen and others things happen to. I was the latter.

“We were very fortunate to be born with certain abilities. It’s a point that most of us recognise. Any kudos or renown we may have got was almost undeserved. And anyway, rugby was really such a small part of our lives, especially compared to the guys today. You kept things in perspective.”

Rugby knew its place in 1940s Belfast. Kyle’s father’s built an air-raid shelter in the back garden of the family home at 17 Glenburn Park. It got plenty of use. “We used to have to go down occasionally if the alarm sounded,” Kyle recalls. “There were two bad raids in Belfast. The one in 1941 killed something like 900 people. The north end got a bad bashing.

“I was actually out of town that night. When the raids started, my father got a house for us near Muckamore, about 20 miles outside Belfast. We’d all pile into the car, father, mother, five kids, drive down every night and back into town the following morning. There was no electricity. There were Aladdin lamps.”

From Maghera in Co Derry, John Kyle Sr was Belfast branch manager for The North British Rubber Company. He impressed upon his children the importance of education and helped his eldest son develop a love of literature.

“He was a man of remarkable energy, whereas I was a dopey sort of kid. He’d look at me and say, ‘You’d be dead if you had the sense to stiffen’. He’d all these phrases of the typical country man. But he wanted us to have the best of everything.

“Where he came from, in the days before motor cars, the men who drove around in pony and traps, who had the edge, who lived what they called the good life and whose advice was always sought, were the doctor, the minister and the solicitor. These men were there because of an education. He really emphasised this to all of us, and I’m grateful that he did. I instilled the same thing in my own kids. I often use Shaw’s phrase, ‘The pleasures of the mind’. Your sporting days only last a certain length of time so you need to extend yourself in other areas. It’s nice to realise that you have realised a certain mental potential.

“I suppose I inherited a love of language from my father. Some Saturday nights, after we’d played partner whist in the study — my brother and myself against my father and mother — he might say, ‘Mother, hand me down the Burns’. And off he’d go . . .”

November chill blaws loud wi’ angry sugh, The short’ning winter-day is near a close Kyle cackles at the memory. “We’d get all that. In those days, my brother and I’d be going, ‘Oh no, it’s the Burns again’. But maybe it’s those small beginnings . . .” There are as many poets and playwrights in Kyle’s story as there are rugby players. When he talks of his preparations for the Grand Slam decider against Wales, he mentions that it was Colin Blakely — later to become a respected actor — who checked his studs at the Belfast Athletic Stores on Wellington Place (“I was quite proud about going to see him”). He remembers Jack McGowran, an actor best known for his Samuel Beckett roles, attending a game at the NIFC grounds in Ormeau. MacNeice was there also, reporting for The Guardian. Kyle gave him a lift afterwards.

HE WON 46 caps between 1947 and 1958 (then a world record), two triple crowns and a Grand Slam — and should have won another slam in 1951, he says. He captained Ireland on six occasions and played for the Lions. By now, the details of the games have become almost incidental.

What remain are friendships and memories of places rarely experienced by most people of his generation. In 1948, for example, Paris was positively exotic. “The Hotel Laetitia was where we had the banquet that night. There would have been six different glasses, a different wine for every course you see, all vintage. I can almost sense it now, the wine waiter coming along, just about to pour and me saying, ‘Non, non merci, avez-vous un jus d’orange, s’il vous plaît?’ The look of horror on his face. And I love my wines, now.

“Then afterwards, we went to the Folies Bergère, or the Folies Bareskins as Bill McKay called them. He actually got up on the stage, I think. It was all so unbelievable — the idea of looking at a woman whose breasts were uncovered.”

His voice drops to a whisper when he talks of McKay, who formed a famous back row with McCarthy and O’Brien. “We shared a cabin on The Ceramic, the boat that took us out to New Zealand. The voyage took a month, so we got to know each other. An incredible sportsman — Roger Bannister only beat him by a yard at a universities meet in Belfast. When he had a few drinks, he’d also tell you stories about fighting in the Burma jungle. He had quite a war.”

Or there was Dr “Dai” Gent of The Sunday Times, the one journalist with the party, who also provided the BBC World Service with reports. A 67-year-old retired headmaster, Gent would offer intellectual conversation for those players who wanted it. “He’d read us poems and short stories,” says Kyle. “A lovely man. Unfortunately, he got homesick during the tour and had to go home.” Kyle had 12 seasons of international rugby and very few regrets. Some said he was wronged by the 1955 Lions selectors, who supposedly imposed an age limit of 30. Rubbish, he says. He was only 29, just not playing particularly well at the time. Neither did he bear any grudges about being eventually dropped by Ireland. After his last game, a 12-6 victory over Scotland, chairman of selectors Ernie Crawford suggested he make a retirement speech at the post-match meal, to make it seem his decision. He declined politely. “I said to Ernie, ‘Everyone knows I’m being dropped. I don’t want to stand up and say I’m retiring. Look, I’ve had a wonderful innings. No one could ask for a better or a longer time in the game than I’ve had’.” Besides, his professional career was about to start.

HAVING spent 34 years and three months as a surgeon in Zambia, Kyle was often described as a missionary medic. He says it had little to do with altruism. He’d seen a lot of the so-called civilised world and just reckoned it would be far more interesting to work in a third-world country. He spent two years in Sumatra (“God, it was an interesting country”) before political unrest forced his departure in 1964. After two years at home, he saw a job in Zambia, with the Anglo-American Corporation. It looked interesting. It was.

“Zambia had just got independence. When I got out there I found out I was the only surgeon in the town and the only surgeon in the next town. We treated everybody — not just the miners and their wives and families but the whole community. It was an amazing experience to find yourself in a country where out of 10 million people there was no neurosurgeon, no official chest surgeon, no heart surgeon, vascular surgeon, and so on.

“You’re told, ‘There’s a guy here with a brain haemorrhage, I think he needs a burr-hole in his skull,’ or, ‘There’s a woman here needs a Caesarean section.’ I’d never done a Caesarean. “You get on with it. I was like the old country surgeons in the 1920s or 30s who turned their hand to everything. It certainly was an amazing experience and a very enjoyable life. A very good life. “I always felt I wanted to earn enough to give my kids a good education and fortunately the company I worked for educated them up to the age of 10 or 11 and then sent them back home to Ireland for boarding. They were flown out for school holidays. “I tried to pretend to people I was the second Albert Schweitzer but I’d a golf course literally at my back door. We had good servants. While that sounds rather colonial, when there’s no welfare benefit of any description, these people are actually queuing up to work for you. I had cooks all my life out there. When I came back home, my son gave me a wok.”

KYLE NOW cooks his own meals and irons his own shirts. He has good friends, enjoys a Tuesday fourball with Stuart Pollock, Derek Flood and Terry Robinson at Royal County Down, just 10 minutes away. He is often invited to club dinners as guest of honour. Last year, Newbridge RFC presented the surviving Grand Slam players with a DVD of old Movietone clips from Ireland games in the late 40s and early 50s. It would be nice to be able to look through all the old cuttings, the black and white still photographs, the letters sent and received during the tour to New Zealand. But his memories are vivid and they are accompanied always by lyrics, by poems and by songs.

“We spent so much time on buses and trains and there was always someone to sing a song,” he says. “Tom Reid was a great singer and Noel Henderson, my late brother-in-law, had an absolutely magnificent voice. I was introduced to all that culture of Irish folk music: The Shannon River Meets the Sea, The Rose of Mooncoin. Bill McKay used to sing The Charladies’ Ball.” And Kyle starts to sing: At the Charladies’ Ball said one and all, ‘You’re the belle of the ball, Mrs Mulligan’ We had one-steps and two-steps and the divil knows what new steps We swore that we never would be dull again, by dad.