In the final fixture of that year’s Five Nations, Wales travelled to the Stade Olympique Yves du Manoir in Paris on Easter Monday.
Six years earlier, the stadium had witnessed Olympic gold medal-winning performances by Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell that would form the basis of the film ‘Chariots of Fire’. (As a cinematic aside, the stadium was the setting for 1981’s ‘Escape to Victory’, although the tale of a POWs-versus-Nazis football match wasn’t actually filmed there.) In that year’s Summer Games, the USA won gold in the competition’s first ever rugby event, beating the hosts in a raucous and violent final that ended in a pitch invasion and the Americans needing police protection.
In some ways, the climax to the 1930 Five Nations proved equally eventful. There were no clear favourites going into the match, with France suffering their only defeat of the tournament in the previous round, losing 11-5 to England.
Wales had lost twice, by eight and three points to England and Scotland respectively, although just prior to the game in Paris they had beaten Ireland 12-7 at home in St Helen’s. They were captained by Swansea centre Guy Stewart-Morgan, who hailed from the mining village of Garnant in Carmarthenshire, and a year previously had won his fourth Cambridge Blue.
But the game itself will be remembered for off-field matters, much of it owing to the public’s clamour to get into the ground.
L’Illustration newspaper reported a match of “extreme brutality” both on the field and in the public enclosures. Twenty thousand fans had been unable to enter, and many of the 50,000 in the stadium became so pressed together that “volunteer workers became nurses”.
Regarding the on-field “brutality”, which is understood to have been initiated by the hosts, this particularly physical era of French rugby was named “rugby de muerte” following a number of unsavoury incidents (the worst of which had sometimes resulted in death). In fact, it was Alain du Manoir, brother of the man after whom the stadium is named, who decried the “anti-sporting, anti-educational, anti-moral attitude” of the game in his country.
From all this, Wales emerged the winners by 11 points to nil, thanks to a try from Cardiff prop Archie ‘The Butcher’ Skym, the pride of Tumble, and drop goals from Stewart-Morgan and mercurial London Welsh scrum-half Wick Powell.
As for the tournament’s outcome: Wales’ victory saw the title awarded to England. France, who in that year’s Championship had beaten Ireland 5-0 in Belfast, would have to wait 17 years until their next Championship win on British soil.
In 1931, it was revealed that some French players were being paid by their clubs – in breach of the amateur ethos of the game, and described as “administrative deficiencies” – which resulted in the national team’s exclusion from the Five Nations for eight years. By the time they were readmitted, World War Two had broken out, and they wouldn’t feature again until 1947.
Wales, in contrast, went undefeated in 1931 as they claimed their ninth Five Nations title.
France v Wales, 1930 Five Nations:
France – Maixent Piquemal; Fernand Taillantou; Georges Gerald, Rene Graciet; Robert Samatan; Christian Magnanou, Lucien Serin; Rene Bousquet, Albert Ambert, Joseph Choy; Andre Camel, Richard Majerus; Alex Bioussa, Eugene Ribere (c), Jean Galia.
Wales – Tommy Scourfield; Howie Jones; Guy Stewart-Morgan (c), Claud Davey; Ronnie Boon; Frank Williams, Wick Powell; Archie Skym, Bert Day, Edgar Jones; Tom Arthur, Ned Jenkins; Harry Peacock, Norman Fender, Arthur Lemon.
