Harlequins vs Oxford - 60 years on

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mike Simmie, Blue #708 (1965 & 1966). I got in contact with Mike after I found the below programme in the OURFC Archives and recognised a name in the Blues team. Mike is a long-time supporter of OURFC, and as this Friday's match against Harlequins will be the 60-year anniversary of Mike's game against them in 1965, it seemed like a perfect time to sit down with him and chat about both the game and his time at OURFC. Get your tickets soon to this Friday's matchup at www.ourfc.org/tickets, as we expect to sell out!

Rugby fans will recognise a lot of the names in this programme, as both sides are littered with internationals. The Harlequins team boasted six players with international caps in their XV – John Scott, John Young, David Wrench, Colin Payne and Nick Silk (England), and Joe McPartlin (Scotland). Oxford’s XV was loaded with potential, as no player had yet earned an international cap, but five went on to earn them: Bob Hiller, Nigel Starmer-Smith, and Tony Bucknall (England), Ollie Waldron (Ireland), and Bob Brewer (Canada). The link between OURFC and Harlequins was very strong at the time, as nine of the Harlequins players in this game were Blues, and many of the Blues on the pitch for this match went on to play for Harlequins, including Rob Hiller, John Coker, Bob Read, and Nigel Starmer-Smith.

Oxford's 1965 Blues Team - Mike Simmie in the centre of the back row; count the internationals!

Another notable player on the Blues XV was John Coker (#704), the first Black man to win a Blue for either University, or indeed to play for Harlequins. At Oxford to read a Diploma in Economics and Political Science, Coker represented Sierra Leone in the Commonwealth and Olympics Games as a heavyweight boxer – though, at the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Jamaica, they didn’t provide boxing gloves large enough for his hands, so he wasn’t allowed to compete. At over six feet tall, and nearly 15 stone, he was certainly big for a winger! He had a firm relationship with full-back Bob Hiller (#706), also at Oxford for a year to read the Diploma in Education; they would play together for the rest of their careers at Quins. As Coker described it, he had an arrangement with full-back Bob Hiller: “I would do his tackling and he would do some of my running”. (https://www.therugbypaper.co.uk/all/columnists/38659/rugby-matters-olympic-heavyweight-john-coker-was-truly-box-office/)

When I asked Mike his recollections of playing the Harlequins in 1965, he remembers the game as slightly frustrating for him as a winger. The captain at the time, Frederick Craig (#683), was a lock who didn’t much believe in back play, as Mike tells it, preferring to use the forwards to move the ball. In the end the match against Harlequins was a 0-6 loss for Oxford, with the three-quarter backs not seeing much of the ball. The Varsity Match two weeks later was a 5-5 draw. He preferred the play style of the following season, when Springbok Tommy Bedford (#700) captained the team with a 15-man rugby attitude – a style described by one of his coaches in South Africa as an “instinctive, expressive, fantastic brand of rugby”. Oxford won that year’s Varsity Match by 8 points to 6, so perhaps he was on to something! Bedford went on to earn 25 caps for South Africa, with his career rumoured to have been cut short prematurely in 1971 due to his relentless and uncompromising criticism of apartheid. (https://web.archive.org/web/20110713054914/http://www.irb.com/history/halloffame/nominees20th.html).

Frederick Craig and Tommy Bedford, OURFC Blues Captains 1965 and 1966.

This match against the Harlequins functioned for the Oxford side as a warmup for the Varsity Match in early December. Both were played at Twickenham Stadium, and both to sell-out crowds, so the men could use the match to ready themselves for the pressure of Varsity, the highlight of the season. At this time, the match against Harlequins was a traditional last fixture for the Blues before Varsity; the following week, the light Blues would also travel to Twickenham to face the same side.

These players were not strangers to packed-out stadiums, however, as Iffley Road frequently hosted international teams. Memorably to Mike was the match against Australia at Iffley Road the following season, which he remembers as having a crowd of 10,000! (I fear this number is physically not possible for our site, and is more likely around 5,000, but even this number would have felt like The 02 Arena at a ground as small as ours!) In those days, schoolchildren were sat six rows deep on duckboards in front of the East Stand, which itself was standing-only; the rest of the standing areas of the stand would have been full to the brim, and I can only imagine the atmosphere! Infamously, during that match, Oxford’s prop Ollie Waldron (#710) had his earlobe bitten off by the Wallabies’ hooker, Ross Cullen. Reading for his DPhil in Nuclear Physics, it took the club’s Doctor Neil two hours to sew Waldron’s earlobe back on. Cullen was sent home by team management as a result, but the Blues had to play the rest of the match with 14 men, as there were no substitutions in those days, even for serious injury – the result was a narrow 9-11 loss for Oxford. I asked whether Mike thought that there was more foul play as a result, as injuring the opposition would put your team at a huge advantage, but he said it just wasn’t what they did. At the time, teams played two matches a week, each with only 15 men. In 2025, I can’t imagine putting players through this much physical attrition, so I asked Mike what he thought the difference must be in the physicality of the game – he said, “well, for one thing, we tried to run around people rather than through them!”.

The 1966 Blues vs Australia teams, and sat next to each other are Cullen (left, light shirt) and Waldron (right, dark shirt)

We are hoping that the Blues match against Harlequins this week, 60 years after this game, will look like the expressive 15-man style of Bedford, with captain Jack Hamilton (#1302) playing at scrum-half connecting a hard-hitting and experienced forwards pack with a fluid back line, which will include former Saracens centre Josh Hallett and former winner of BUCS Super Rugby with Loughborough, Fergus Dick. We are expecting a sell-out crowd (though modern safety regulations mean it won’t quite be 5,000!), so make sure to book your tickets soon at www.ourfc.org/tickets.