Brian Bevan
Career Summary
Position: Wing-threequarter
Born: Sydney
Career Dates: 1945-64
Clubs: Warrington, Blackpool
General Info: Scored world record 796 tries in 688 matches
Inducted into Hall of Fame: 1988
Other great rugby league players are remarkable, astonishing, prodigiously talented, but Brian Eyrl Bevan was a phenomenon, a superb athlete and gifted footballer who, even in his incomparable prime, looked as though he were on his last legs. Bald long before his time, knees heavily bandaged to save on wear and tear, false teeth out and cheeks sucked in, tongue licking at the breeze, otherwise noticeable for his lurching walk, he could be mistaken for a broken-down old chap who had dreamily wandered on to the pitch from the local twilight home. But he scored 796 tries in his first-class British career, and the runner-up (Billy Boston) got no closer than 571. Brian Bevan has been described as the deadliest winger in history, and that was his true identity.
He was an Australian, whom his compatriots never really knew except by hearsay, born in 1924 at Bondi, and he did play briefly for Eastern Suburbs like his father before him, but never in first grade and without making any mark. When the war started, he became a naval stoker, fetching up in the UK aboard HMAS Australia in 1945; and his life was never to be the same again. He had a letter of introduction to Bill Shankland, formerly of Easts and the 1929-30 Kangaroos, latterly of Warrington and the European golf circuit. Shankland advised him to try his luck with Leeds, then Hunslet, neither of whom reckoned much to this ascetic looking twenty-one year old; so Bevan had a shot at Warrington instead. They gave him an anonymous 'A' team trial that November and he scored a try, played in the first team the week alter, was signed on for £300 and went home for a few months to get demobilised.
In his first season at Wilderspool, 1946-7, Bev scored forty-eight tries, which was fourteen more than anyone else in the league. After that there was no stopping him. Within four years he had overtaken the club try-scoring record of 215 that had taken Jack Fish thirteen seasons to reach at the turn of the century. Five times in all, Bevan topped the British try-scoring table and in fifteen seasons he was only once lower than fifth, his greatest year being 1952-3 when he scored seventy-two. Only one man had ever got more in one season, and he was Albert Rosenfeld of Huddersfield, who did it twice after the First World War. Brian Bevan was so phenomenal that it is still a source of surprise that Rosenfeld's record eluded him. A hundred times he scored at least a hat trick of tries in a match; twice he scored seven for Warrington, which is still a club record.
Billy Boston
Career Summary
Position: Wing-threequarter
Born: Cardiff
Career Dates: 1953-70
Clubs: Wigan, Blackpool
Tours: 1954, 1957 (World Cup), 1962
General Info: Scored 571 tries in 565 matches
Inducted into Hall of Fame: 1988
The great measurement of Billy Boston's natural ability is that after only six matches of rugby league, and but nineteen years old, he was picked for the 1954 Lions' tour Down Under. No one else ever came out of rugby union so fast. No one so young had ever gone on tour before. No one yet has scored his first century of rugby league tries in only sixty-eight matches, as Boston did.
Born in 1934 in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, the part down by the docks where boys grow up quickly, Boston was the sixth of eleven children whose father came from Sierra Leone, their mother from Ireland. His ambition was to play for Cardiff, but it was Neath who fielded him before National Service took him into the Royal Corps of Signals at Catterick, who had a famous XV that beat all-comers for a season or two. Playing alongside him were Phil Jackson of Barrow, Brian Gabbitas of Hunslet, and Jimmy Dunn of Leeds as well as Phil Horrocks-Taylor, the future England rugby union fly half. It was after seeing Boston score six tries in the Army Cup Final against the Welsh Guards that Wigan (who had sent a deputation of four directors to watch the match at Aldershot) signed him for £3,000 on Friday 13 March, 1953, which was not an unlucky day for rugby league; only for Hunslet, who had been pursuing him since he was sixteen.
Boston's debut didn't come until that October, when 8,500 turned up at Central Park to see an 'A' team match against Barrow, in which he scored a couple of tries. Three weeks later he was on the left wing for the first team against the same club and scored once. In further games against Liverpool City, Swinton, Latchford Albion (a Warrington junior side encountered in the first round of the Challenge Cup) and Batley, during spells of leave from the Signals, he scored eight more tries. He was touring Germany with an Army XV when the news broke that he was to be one of Dickie Williams's Lions. Boston was the first coloured player the British had ever taken Down Under.
He was easily the biggest try scorer on that tour, with thirty-six, and only Lewis Jones notched more points: not only that, it was more tries than any tourist before him had ever scored, and his four in the First Test at Auckland equalled the record set by James Leytham of Wigan at Brisbane in 1910. Boston was a slimly muscular six-footer when he flew into Sydney, but he filled out in the next three months into 14st. 2lb. of blockbusting aggression whose hand-off was the most discouraging the game would see until Ellery Hanley came along a generation after him to jab, jab, jab opponents away, one after the other. He was strong-minded enough, too, to stand his corner against the directors when they suspended him for nine days in 1956 for reasons that had more to do with an ankle injury than with Billy's 'general attitude'. Off the pitch, however, he was essentially a good-natured man, phlegmatic about colour prejudice even when he was its victim. The most discreditable episode in rugby league history occurred after the 1957 World Cup series in Australia, when Alan Prescott's team stopped off in South Africa to play some missionary games. Boston flew home directly and alone, so that everyone else could coexist with apartheid quite happily.
His exclusion from the 1958 tour of the Antipodes puzzled many (though his replacement, Ike Southward of Workington, had scored four more tries that year), but he toured a second time under his club captain Eric Ashton in 1962, and again got more touchdowns than anyone else. He was twenty-eight by then and had become even more formidable than before, a significantly heavier man without losing his pace or agility. He was to make thirty-one test appearances for Great Britain before he was through, and he scored twenty-four tries at the highest level of the game. But it was for Wigan that he racked up the points endlessly, twice scoring seven tries in a match, against Dewsbury and Salford. Six times he went to Wembley with them, thrice as winner, and when he played his last match in the cherry and white, against Wakefield Trinity at the end of April 1968, he had given them 478 tries across fifteen years. He had a couple of years with Blackpool Borough before retiring as a fifteen-stone second-row forward, with 571 tries for club and country to his name; and only Brian Bevan had scored more in a British career. Then he became landlord of The Griffin, a couple of blocks from Central Park and - as long as he was there - the game's most popular licensed premises.
