A Memoir of the Club 1962-65, by Andy Forrester

I played for The Polytechnic 1962-65 when I was a student at the college (playing for both club and college sides), stopping after graduation when I moved away from London. I often wondered how the club went on and was puzzled that I could find no mention of it in the Univ. Westminster website and other sources. A GOOGLE revealed the nature of the problem: you changed your name!

Playing
I was never a good rugby player but occasionally rose to the ranks of adequate and turned-out for the As and Extra As, and once hooked in an emergency for the firsts (too short to prop but had a head that was hard enough for the front row). We did well in the scrum as the college and club As had the same front row comprising me at loose head, Sed' at tight head and John Lainie hooking in the middle. Playing twice a week, club and college, we had things nicely worked out and won a lot of ball. Sed' (Raza Abugassim Sederghat) was from Iran, although we called it Persia then, was great fun, a good drinker and rugby player. His brother was a med' student at St. Mary's and played for the hospital - you don't think of Iranians as good boozy rugger men these days... Sed' went on to study at Queens Univ., Belfast where he told me he was popular with both the Protestants and Catholics as they all considered him a "Wog" and therefore outside partisan issues. Lainie was from Guernsey and studied architecture.

The Paris Tour
I think the record on the website is wrong - we did not play a "Paris University team". The fixtures were Sporting Club de France at Colombe and SHAFE (Supreme HQ Allied Forces Europe). Other fixtures were cancelled as it was bitterly cold, well below freezing, and the ground was like asphalt. We were a mixed bag with everybody from the firsts to Extra Zeds but we had not counted on the fact that in France the Ecole Polytechnique is the most elite university of all so our opponents got the idea we were something like a combined Oxford and Cambridge universities side. Then, as the Chinese Whispers continued, it was rumoured that we had a few trialists and ex-England players and so on... Instead of fielding an appropriate mixed bag of drunken toss-pots, Sporting Club turned out a half decent side which struck such fear into our hearts that the rush of adrenalin and pure terror led us to lose by only a scant three points (I seem to remember). Sporting Club were wonderful hosts. The moment the game was over they started chanting "Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq - Zob!" with appropriate phallic gestures and the ladies swarmed onto the ground with great steaming mugs of mulled, sweetened red wine - fantastic in the cold!

We repaired to their club house and I remember being in some lad's Renault, tearing round L'Etoile, shooting up some side road where he did a four wheel drift, sideways into a parking spot that seemed only a centimetre longer than the vehicle. Each of us was "adopted" by our opposite number, in my case a Corsican maniac called Henri Thomasini (of which more later...). Afterwards we repaired to a restaurant, the following extract from a little cook book I am writing tells what happened...

I first had ris de veau in Paris, Christmas 1964, on a rugby tour. Sporting Club de France, our opponents, were wonderful hosts and after the game we decamped first to their club house for some serious drinking and thence to a restaurant near L'Odeon for dinner before a night involving other pleasures. Rugby players have a reputation for "boys behaving badly" but I was unprepared for the antics of our French opponents. The evening became really wild. As the furniture got smashed I asked my opposite number on the French team if the owner of the establishment was not just about to call the gendarmerie and was told that the owner was also a club member and could be seen in the thick of the melee having a good old time beating his mates over the head with the meubles! I ordered ris de veau without really knowing what it was and it has been a favourite ever since. It is even more enjoyable without having to look up from your plate into the nether regions of a naked, hairy arsed, drunken French rugby forward dancing down the centre of the table.

One evening we went to Pigalle where there were marquees with all sorts of side shows and so on, including strippers. We were standing at the back as this girl was stripping off and Henri said that he knew the girl as his mate, Guy had been screwing her recently. Henri started to stir things up shouting at the girl (in French of course) "Hey, I know you, you went out with my friend Guy and he said you really liked to ..." (you can imagine, fill in the blanks...). The poor lass was quite put off her act and the low-lifes that ran the show became threatening so we were forced to go out onto the street. There we found Bernie in the middle of an argument with a guy selling chips (all right, French fries...). Bernie had given him a large denomination note but received change from a smaller note - a royal argument was raging about how much change Bernie was owed and, as Bernie spoke no French and the l'homme de frites no English, the argument was getting heated but not settled. The guys who had evicted us from the strip show waded in on the side of the chip man and we gathered round Bernie - a full scale confrontation. We had a lad on the team called Jim Livingston (also played for the college): a very large, hairy, caber-tossing Scot of mild disposition but certainly not one any sensible person would want to antagonise. Jim was leaning on the chip stall, a circular construction of corrugated metal, and noticed it was quite tippy. As the confrontation crossed the point of no return, Jim turned the whole contraption on its side, along with its occupant and untold gallons of boiling fat. I ran like shit up the stairs to Sacre Coeur, glancing back to see a full-scale Donnybrook going on and boiling fat everywhere...

I stayed on in Paris for a week, hanging around with Henri and his mate Guy, and had one of the most enlightening times of my life. Henri came back to London with me where I found him a flat vacated by student friends for the holiday season and he thereafter set about deflowering the cream of London's maidenhood - something at which he showed great expertise - often telephoning me late at night to get me over with my camera to take photographs... After a while we parted company as there were no more virgins left in the capital, I'd worn out my Leica, my friends had returned to their flat complaining they had had to burn all the bedding, and I was getting tired of fighting people on the underground just because Henri insisted on lighting up Gitanes in the NO SMOKING carriages. Lovely lad...

The City Barge
I have lived in Canada since 1974 and have dropped into the City Barge on visits to London and been surprised there were no Poly people drinking there on a Sat. night - now I know why! Things must have got out of hand because in my memory we were always quite well-behaved as it was tacitly understood that, as we did indeed rather dominate the club and bar billiards table, the Landlord would not be happy if we were too rowdy.

There was one memorable night when - if I remember this correctly - Bill Tovey and somebody else, Wally, I think, stripped-off and swam the river for a bet. Wally swam back but Bill jogged naked up the towpath and across the bridge and back down Strand on the Green to the pub, getting dried-off and dressed just before the police arrived (late night revelers driving home must have sobered-up quickly at the sight of Bill, rumbling naked across the bridge!).

There was also a night when Colin Smith (I think) saved my life in the 'Barge. We had two South Africans in the club called (I think) Stuks and Denham. These lads were tough as nails and good rugby players and wondrously free from any inhibitions when it came to expressing opinions about the political situation in their own country and what was to be done to that other section of society to ensure peace in the land. One of them offered some horrendous account of an incident in which he had been involved "back home". I expect this tale was told deliberately to provoke me - which it did. Seeing I was about to take a swing at the raconteur, Colin moved swiftly behind me, shoved-on a hammer lock, and frog-marched me outside before I could come to any harm. Of course, Colin didn't care a toss for my well being but knew that a first-rate punch up would have got the club booted out of the 'Barge much earlier than it eventually did!

I say saved my life as these S. Africans were tough sods--once, while we were waiting to get into the changing rooms of some club in SE London (Woolwich Poly, I think) and there was a large-ish mob of leather clad yobbos booting a soccer ball around. The ball rolled to the feet of our S. African team mates and the greasers anticipated a gentle punt back to them. Instead, the ball was given a might boot in the opposite direction by the SA contingent who stood there grinning at the advancing mob of scruffs. The ensuing carnage was something to behold, more so as the SA's were outnumbered by about four to one (they were quite happy to handle this confrontation without assistance of their team mates), leaving us to wonder how the hell we ever won the Boer War.

I gave up playing as my final degree exams approached and one Saturday, not having anything much to do, I suggested to my mate Dennis Nash that we go down to The 'Barge and see how the club was going on. Dennis was a Poly student and had clanged his engineering exams and was taking a year out before re-sitting. He had a job delivering for some rag-trade outfit and had a nice little A35 van that the boss let him use at week-ends. So we spent a convivial evening in The Barge and I drank a huge amount as I was not driving and people were standing me pints as they had not seen me for a while. At closing time the fresh air hit Dennis hard who stated he was in no state to drive and tossed me the keys. Why he thought I could drive, having consumed probably twice as much as himself, beats me. But I happily leapt into the van and headed back to the flat in Pimlico as fast as I could. I remember the "Cherry Blossom Roundabout" at Chiswick approaching and making a mental note that a touch on the brakes and a downshift would possibly be required sometime in the near future. At which point I hit the lead in barrier, bounced into the middle of the Saturday night traffic, over corrected the steering and took out a large section of barrier, heel'd-'n-toed down two cogs, shot across 4 lanes of traffic and rolled to a stop up some side road. Amazingly we were all right, and even more surprising, no police arrived. My (drivers') side of the van had been completely removed so the vehicle resembled one of those things you see at the auto show that looks normal from one side and "cutaway" from the other - a sort of convertible but with a side removed rather than the roof. We managed to hide the thing up a side road where it would not attract attention and later got it towed to safety. Dennis got the boot from the job... A week later I was driving with my mother along the same stretch of road and she remarked about all the wrecked crash barrier and said that she was pleased that I was such a responsible driver...

The Cock Tavern
Yes - the club's central London watering hole and, in my day, run but some large ex-Welsh international (I think) with a bald dome and a Maitre 'D who kept the students from the Polytechnic in line like a retired RSM of the Brigade of Guards. I always preferred The George myself...

People and Members
Looking at the website, a few names come back to me, I probably have got a lot of this wrong and maybe confused people (yer brain gets a bit scrambled in the front row and doesn't improve with advancing years...)

- Setterington Sett', a nice guy. Worked for Zeiss - I remember this as I was a biology student and loved microscopes and we talked about optics.
- Wally Cannot remember his surname but expect he is either the Wally Duck or Wally Freeman mentioned on the website. Built like one of those concrete AA gun emplacements that used to litter the London scenery, quiet but lethal when roused. Had a vending machine business I think. One match was really nasty and when our man fell on the ball a charging forwards deliberately kicked him in the kidneys. Everybody saw it, our man was hospitalised. Things got really nasty but while we were all plotting our individual revenges Wally got the whole matter sorted in short order. A rather gorgeous cousin of mine, who I fancied, was throwing a party that evening over in Barnes, not far from our ground, so I called in. A pile of cars rolled up, full her friends from the rugby club - that club - and all in bad humour, nursing their bandaged comrade. They walked through the door and the first thing they saw was me... Thanks Wally!
- Bill Tovey Wonderful guy and huge - the sight of Bill in all his natural glory, blocking out the sun as he lowered himself into the tub was enough to put you off your pint of ginger beer shandy and Rothman's King Size as you luxuriated in the water. (also see comments about swimming the river under City Barge). We had a club supper at some East End pub' owned by an army buddy of either Bill or Wally. Can't remember the brewery but it was fine ale and the food was very simple bangers and mash, beautifully cooked with superb sausages and all in vast quantities. Just the grub to soak up the suds. Never forgotten it... Nouvelle cuisine...Yeah, right!
-Colin Smith Wiry kind of chap with a goatee I think (see also comments under City Barge)
- Vic Taylor Rings a bell, that's all... Maybe he was fixtures sec' and sent us our team assignments for the week.

- Chris Morcher yes. instigator of the Paris tour (see below)
-Hugo and Nigel Couldn't remember their surnames (presume Harris and Cole, respectively) but they arrived together and stayed together. Superb rugby players and a lot of fun, very popular lads. I think they had been playing for Rosslyn Park or Richmond but found it all too "serious" and wanted a club that was more fun. We certainly benefited from this pair. One was dark haired the other blonde and they tore up the opposition something wicked.

- Bernie We had a Jewish lad called Bernie who was a good player and a bundle of laughs - I imagine this must have been Bernie Foreman. He was in the undertaking business and used to regale us with gruesome stories about embalming procedures and all the hilarious screw ups in the business. On the Paris tour Bernie was seriously hung over and feeling nauseous. Somebody suggested that a dash of bitters would fix the problem. Now, you are supposed to put a few drops into a glass of water, that's all. Somebody produced a bottle of Fernet Branca and, as the metro pulled-in at the Chatalet station, Bernie downed the bottle in one gulp, turned every shade on the Windows XP colour palette, jumped-out onto the platform, and treated us all to the most impressive display of projectile, multi colour, wide screen Smellorama vomiting (must have made the station unusable for several hours...). He hopped back into the train with a broad smile and said he "never felt better"... I was in Paris a while ago and as we got out at Chatelet I recounted this tale in detail to my wife who insisted that, along with the account of me drinking a pint of piss in a bet, and crapping myself in the saloon bar of the Earls Court Tavern, the story be filed in the "Archives - Not To Be Opened Until The Year 3000" file. More about Bernie on the Tour section.

Life after rugby
After graduating I went to Reading University to do post-grad work. I tried-out for the university and played a few times but shortly afterwards met a girl who rowed for the Reading ladies fours and eights. A group of us "rowing widowers" decided to do our bit for Womens' Liberation and reverse the stereotypes: instead of beating ourselves to death each Saturday while the women stood on the touchline and cheered, we followed the ladies round their rowing venues and whiled away time swilling suds in the club house while the women flogged themselves at the oars. This has much to recommend it as you "get out" on a Saturday afternoon and have a legitimate excuse to drink beer without any untoward physical effort being required... Only played once after that and it was a disaster...

...and Quintin Himself
I was V-P Internal Affairs for the Student Union and so attended an annual dinner, sitting right opposite Lord Hailsham who had just failed in his bid for leadership of the Tory party in the wake of Profumo and the resignation of Macmillan. I was egregiously drunk and could not resist taking the piss out of Hailsham who was clearly in a bad mood even before I started in on him... The sins of youth...

Ties
I've still got my touring tie: dark blue, silver tankards and red and green stripes. It's looking a little rough - are they still available? I wouldn't mind an upgrade to something a little less scruffy. Where would I get one?

Andy Forester
The Polytechnic/Quentin RFC, 1962-65