Bill McLaren:IT WAS said that Bill McLaren, who has died aged 86, was the voice of British rugby. Of course, it was never said quite like he would have said it himself, in his honeyed, Scottish Borders burr, tinged with the impishness that suggested that none of this was to be taken too seriously. He would never have said anything about himself in such a way, for he was famously modest, a son of Hawick for whom a day away from his home town was a day wasted. But in truth, he was much more than rugby's voice, more its full-blown orchestra, devoted to the works of the Romantic movement, and only the Romantic.
For a year short of a full half-century, first on radio and from 1962 on BBC television, Bill’s voice washed over rugby union, soothing and harmonious. He saw no evil and spoke no evil. If there was violence, it was never anything more than “brief shenanigans”, and nobody ever kicked a ball badly, but merely made it look a bit like one of Bill’s own “scruffy nine irons”.
He played golf every day, come hail or shine, with his wife Bette, whom he met at a local hop in 1947. When his body – never his voice – began to show signs of age and the second finger of his right hand curled down permanently into his palm, he was told that a simple operation might restore it to the vertical. He decided to leave well alone, since it seemed to improve his grip on his clubs.
As a rugby player, he was, to borrow one of his phrases, a “tearaway flanker”, a forward with the Hawick first XV, hugely promising by all accounts and fanatical from the day his father took him to see the New Zealand All Blacks at Mansfield Park, Hawick. I remember interviewing him once about his early influences, and he mentioned being impressed by the great Jack Manchester, captain of the All Blacks, in 1935.
The son of a knitwear salesman, during the second World War Bill found himself in Italy, a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. He was a forward spotter deep in hostile territory, often on his own. One day, drawn by the smell of decay to a village cemetery, he rounded a corner and was confronted by a mound of 1,500 corpses. The image would haunt him for the rest of his days.
In 1947 he was back in Hawick and playing in a Scottish trial. But that year he contracted tuberculosis, and so began the second fight for his life. At the East Fortune sanatorium in East Lothian, he was selected as one of five patients to take part in trials for a new antibiotic, streptomycin. Three of the five died. Bill survived.
While he convalesced, he began to commentate on table tennis for hospital radio. When he was discharged, he supplemented his work as a PE teacher with rugby reports for the Hawick Express, and was recommended from there to the BBC, joining in 1953.
He had some tests along the way, especially when his son-in-law, the scrum-half Alan Lawson, or later his grandson in the same position, Rory Lawson, were playing for Scotland. Or when some of his former pupils, such as Jim Renwick, Colin Deans or Tony Stanger, scored for Scotland. But his impartiality was never questioned. The Welsh golden age of the 1970s would not have been so gilded without the soundtrack of Bill to the exploits of Gareth Edwards.
Bill’s preparation was meticulous and involved a lot of card-play. He would shuffle a deck and flash through the cards, matching a player with a number. Having memorised the names, he then liked to watch the players in training. It hurt him just before his retirement in 2002 that he was once denied access to an Australian training session. Professional rugby has not always been kind to the romantics.
In 2000 Bill and Bette lost their daughter Janie to cancer. It troubled him that he was not by her side when she died, but Janie had ordered him to the commentary box.
It was there that Bill became music. Rugby for orchestra and full voice, and nobody made a sound quite like Bill McLaren.
He was appointed CBE in 2003. Bette and his daughter Linda survive him.
William Pollock McLaren: born October 16th, 1923; died January 19th, 2010