My first memory of a rugby match was watching Andy Irvine landing a penalty in the last minute of a Calcutta Cup game in 1974. Deep into injury time, with England leading 16-14, Irvine – one of the finest sportsmen ever to represent Scotland in any endeavour – was faced with a 45-yard, winner-takes-all shot at glory. He duly nailed it and Murrayfield erupted in the sort of frenzy that you don’t normally associate with the rugby.
I have only two sharp memories from that game. How is a chap expected to kick such an oddly-shaped projectile with any degree of accuracy, let alone direct it between two posts from a pitiless angle on a snell wind while the light was beginning to recede? And then there was the commentator, a man called Bill McLaren. I don’t recall his exact words as the ball made it up to the posts before dropping between them, but I remember the delivery: rich, resonant, full-bodied and of such refined Scottishness that it made you feel slovenly in your unlovely, glottal Glaswegianism.
In the years that followed, my dad would often say that the main attraction of watching the odd international rugby game was listening to Bill McLaren, who covered the sport for The Herald for many years, schooling the world in the proper delivery of the Queen’s English. Years later, working as a journalist in Edinburgh, I would reach for the Bill McLaren glossary when surrounded by rugby types talking rugby. Only he had been able to unlock the mysteries of the gain-line and the third phase and the line-out and what was happening underneath their scrums.
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We were only watching this match because my dad, having picked up the score on the radio, thought we should turn on the telly and watch the final moments of the game unfold. We were a West of Scotland football family, you see and, as such, the game of rugby and all its esoteric accessories passed us by. It was never played in our schools. It was a game reserved for Edinburgh toffs and Borders farmers. For, it had seemed to us then that the men who ran Scottish rugby would rather have forfeited a game of rugby than triumph with the assistance of people like us. And so we left them largely to it with Bill McLaren and his brawny erudition occasionally providing our only means of access.
He has since been described as ‘The Voice of Rugby’, but what I would have given to have heard him provide commentary on a football match. And it’s for this reason that I journeyed down to Hawick, in the verdant folds of the Scottish Borders. Murray Watson, an author and academic, has written a book about the man who is considered to be the world’s finest sports broadcaster. He’s called it the ‘The Life and Times of Bill McLaren’, and underneath the title there’s a picture of the great broadcaster in his pomp, looking at once masterly and shrewd and impish. We meet in the clubhouse of Mansfield Park, home of Hawick rugby club, the pride of the town that reared Bill McLaren and which he never left. “Bill was scrupulously fair in his commentaries,” says Mr Watson. “He never referred to Scotland in the first person: it was never ‘we’. There was not a hint of partisanship.
“There was one game in 1970, I think, where Alan Lawson scored twice for Scotland. Yet, you would not have known that this was his son-in-law. He was popular all over the world. I’ve been asked to go to New Zealand, where he is very popular, to talk about my book.
Bill McLaren was passionate about promoting rugby (Image: The Herald)
"His commentary sheets can fetch up to £10k at charity auctions. Some of the originals are in New Zealand’s Rugby Museum. He was obviously popular in Scotland, especially in these parts, but he’s considered legendary in Wales. I had an email the other day from someone in Cardiff asking when my book launch is to be as we intends to travel up for it. When Bill McLaren did his last commentary, there was a banner help up in Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium which read: ‘Bill McLaren is a Welshman’. There are lots of very funny letters from people in Wales who would send him poems. It's just lovely.”
There have been other books about Bill McLaren, but none as meticulously curated and researched as Mr Murray’s book. In 2015, he was invited to inspect Mansfield Park’s attic and main stand following the floods of that time and discovered a vast treasure trove of memorabilia relating to Bill McLaren who, thankfully for the rest of us, was one of life’s great hoarders.
His home study had been left virtually untouched since his death in 2010 and gave up thousands more documents. This room has been faithfully re-created at Murrayfield by the Bill McLaren Foundation with his books, articles, letters and souvenirs collected from his travels around the globe. I’d always gained the impression that, despite his fame, he always remained rooted in the heart of this Scottish Borders community.
“He was actually a very shy man,” says Murray Watson. “His daughter, Linda told me he that while he was quite happy talking to millions on television, he’d be reluctant to do an after-dinner speech to 12 people.
Bill McLaren in his playing days (Image: Grosvenor House Publishing)
“Also, his relationship with this club is an interesting one. At the end of the war, he played rugby in Italy in Trieste for the British Combined Services, a very high-quality side featuring four internationals. He returned to play for Hawick; had a successful trial for Scotland and then he contracted TB, which put paid to his international dreams. But the minute he became a commentator, he was considered professional, and he was banned from being a member of this club.
“The club found a way round that and made him a life member. I’ve just discovered his membership card, which I found quite amusing. It tells us that membership is open to all and that no application will be refused on other than reasonable grounds. There will be no discrimination on grounds of race, occupation, sex, or religious, political, or other opinion. They should have added ‘unless you’re a professional, or a commentator’.”
In the Borders region, Bill McLaren is as fondly remembered for his teaching as for his broadcasting. He coached rugby in seven different state schools every week and was considered an influential teacher. Among his pupils was a cohort Scotland rugby greats that included Jim Renwick, Colin Deans and Tony Stanger.
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“I remember seeing him at a function in Edinburgh where he was approached by a woman whom he’d taught and last seen more than 30 years ago,” says Mr Watson. “He immediately remembered her name and her time as a pupil. He had an incredible gift of detailed recall and this, I think, was rooted in a genuine warmth and interest in the people he met.”
You hope that the BBC paid Bill McLaren well for providing the world’s best commentary and analysis and ensuring that the corporation was the go-to destination for live rugby coverage. Yet, you hesitate to ask as you kind of already know the answer and you know it’ll depress you. “Did the BBC appreciate him enough,” I ask his biographer. “I think they screwed him,” he says, bluntly, “and they knew they were doing so. I spoke to quite a number of people and quote them in the book. One of them actually admitted this to Bill McLaren. ‘I think we’ve underpaid you all these years’. But Bill was too nice a man to make anything of it and might have felt it was beneath him to have asked.”
To understand how much Bill McLaren was respected at every level of world rugby, you need only look at the detail of his pre-match notes and preparations. “He would go out and train with referees on a cold October night to learn about all of the latest rule changes,” says Mr Watson. “It was why many people who might not have been conversant with the way the game is played and officiated often relied on Bill’s commentaries and analysis to learn about it.”
Bill McLaren was a favourite of fans far beyond Scotland (Image: The Herald)
And when you see those commentary sheets up close with all the little biographical details of each player crammed between two boxes of a hand-written page you understand why the National Library of Scotland has described the cataloguing of the McLaren archive “a collection of national importance”.
Since Bill McLaren’s last live treatise on that afternoon in Cardiff, no other commentator in any other sport has been as eloquent or even as compassionate in conveying the human drama of first class sport. He’s left us a vast work of scholarship, not merely about the art of sports broadcasting, but about the vitality of rugby and how it’s a life-force that nourishes and fosters the values that have reinforced these stalwart lands for many centuries.
Rugby is perhaps the only sport in the world where one of its commentators features high in the lists of the game’s legends and champions. Murray Watson says: “I didn’t want this book to be a hagiography. I wanted it to be an objective assessment of his life and his contribution to rugby and the art of broadcasting, warts and all. It’s just that it was quite difficult to find the warts.”
The Life and Times of Bill McLaren, by Murray Watson is published on October 22. Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd