Samoa Quarters
Seventy Years On, England’s Prince Obolensky Is Still Remembered
Red roses for a white Russian. Crimson blooms of English rugby’s traditional floral emblem will this weekend begin to be strewn on or around the imposing new statue in Ipswich’s Cromwell Square. Last Saturday evening in Paris, romantics could be forgiven for imagining the England rugby team’s sudden invigorating try out of the blue and down the left touchline could itself have been an emphatically colourful stroke of remembrance in apt commemoration of the notable imminent jubilee.
Prince Alexander Obolensky, son of an officer in Tsar Nicholas’s Imperial Horse Guard, was sent to Britain as a toddler to escape the Revolution. At Trent College he made a mark in the Midlands as a schoolboy sprinter. At Brasenose he won the first of his two Oxford Blues in 1935, ever intriguing the gossip columns by the variety and dazzle of society girls on his arm as well as his habit of gaily downing champagne and a dozen oysters before Oxford’s matches. On the field, “he glides with the easy sinuosity of an antelope at full speed”, wrote leading sportswriter EHD Sewell.
The All Blacks toured in the winter of 1935‑36 and England, who had never once beaten them, waited with trepidation on the first Saturday in January. Twickenham put up boys to play the men: 20-year-old Barts medical student Peter Candler at fly-half; two 21-year olds at centre, Peter Cranmer, Warwickshire cricketer and future journalist; and Ronnie Gerrard, Somerset batsman and soon-to-be posthumous war hero – and Oxford’s devil-may-care 19-year-old with the bright corn-stoop hair and smile to match on the right wing, who would at once bring the 70,000 throng to its feet by nervelessly showing New Zealand a clean pair of heels for England’s opening try at his right corner flag.
Just before half-time came the score to smithereen the bounds of orthodoxy with which the British game had saddled itself – and happily there was a British Movietone news camera in the West stand to record in flickeringly fuzzy sepia Obolensky audaciously stepping in off his wing to change left into right in a stride, and outrageously wrong-foot the cover which, to a man, screechingly had to pull up like infuriated cartoon cats. The dashing boy was off and away, untouched, to the left corner and immortality.
Three-quarters of a century on and Obolensky’s so bonny, brazen and singular sally remains so firmly embedded in lore that the most venerable of old timers insist it is still bestest of the best ever seen at Twickenham. Better than the merry dance England’s Peter Jackson led Australia in 1958 or the dazzling Twickenham brace by two other Englishmen – both against Scotland: Richard Sharp’s string of dummies in 1963 or Andy Hancock’s marathon gallop two years on. Yep, better even than David Duckham’s spring-heeled solo, a Barbarian sinking the Springboks in 1970; or Saint-André’s sealing of France’s epic against England 20 seasons later. Or Rory Underwood’s polished gem against Scotland in 1993; Obo even bettered the day Jonah Lomu left white shirts floundering, flattened in his wake with his fearsome 50-yarder in 1999.
On the outbreak of war, Obolensky began training as a pilot with the RAF’s 504 squadron – but on 29 March 1940 he became the first of 111 rugby internationals to lose their lives in the conflict when, taxiing on landing his Hawker Hurricane on the turf airfield at Martlesham Heath, east of Ipswich, the aircraft’s wheels snagged a rabbit warren and, having loosened his harness, the pilot was catapulted out of cockpit and, in an instant, had broken his neck.
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