SPECTATOR SPORT
Twick treats and twits
Frank Keating
IT WAS good to begin the winter proper at Twickenham on Saturday when the All Blacks of New Zealand announced them- selves with a pulverising debutants' show Which surely had Scotland and England even more tremulously waiting for the two international games at the end of Novem- ber.
When the tourists return to Twickenham on the 27th, I must remember my camera — to get an evocative shot for the scrap- book of the last remaining grandstand at the ancient, splintery and cabbagy-green Old amphitheatre. I first crocodiled in there With an awestruck line of schoolmates 40 Years ago this January — to see the daunt- ing 1954 All Blacks, as it happens. Olde Twickers will soon be unrecognis- able. Already three sides form a towering Concrete horseshoe, vast and even hand- some in its own modern idiom, but identi- cal to 50 other arenas round the world. They are now to bulldoze the West Stand, the last remaining relic which haughtily looked down on, you might say, more than four score years of scores . . . by Adrian Stoop and W.J.A. Davies, Prince Obolen- sky and Wilson Shaw, right up to Duck- ham's against the Springboks and Blanco's beauteous 'creation' of a couple of years ago. The King did the honours when the ground was opened on 15 January 1910, for England's match against Wales, and the Illustrated London News reported the fol- lowing week that `throughout the morning, the throng continued to pour into the pic- turesque country village of Twickenham'. Thereafter the place, its game and adminis- trators, seemed content to keep themselves to themselves in a well-stoppered bottle of aspic — opening up two or three times a year for chums of its own freemasonry wearing officers' tash, British-warm great- coat (or, at least, decently cut and toggled duffel), hipflask in one pocket, spare pipe and St Bruno in the other; and, sometimes, a headscarfed and cashmered, over-rouged 'brick' of a good lady wife bringing up the rear with the tartan travel-rug and thermos. 'An international at Twickenham,' wrote Alec Waugh more than half a century ago, 'is more than a mere spectacle: it is the gathering of the clan.' Ivor Brown revelled in Twickenham as 'the last fortress of the Forsytes'. Only two decades ago in these pages, the late and still missed Dal-the-Box, John Morgan, nailed it perfectly when he described
. the caps, the coats, the accents that mark a man from Kuala Lumpur to Salisbury; in the carpark the Bentleys and the TR3s; and all along the touchline screaming boys in blazers, and in the stands, men with unmis- takable faces and pretty women in camel-hair coats. How did the middle classes manage before Twickenham was built?
Such a question seems ludicrous now. Saturday's record crowd for a tour's pipe- opener was testament less to the aura of the mighty All Blacks than to a spectators' revolution, fuelled by the 1991 World Cup and coinciding almost exactly with the Eng- land XVs strutting top-doggery of the past four or five years. In his unmissable weekly notes in the Indie in 1989, Alan Watkins was first to record the visible signs of the new Twick twits — leans, a ski-jacket, training- shoes and a can of beer . . . whistling at opposing place-kickers, booing the referee and generally displaying ignorance of the game'. Twickenham on Saturday was full of them. They want only two things — a skin- ful of beer and a home win. The corusca- tions of the tourists were lost on them.
Philip Toynbee wrote in the 1930s, `A bomb under Twickenham's West Stand on an international day would end fascism in England for a generation.' Another genera- tion and Prof. T might have belatedly hit the very button. By which time enrapturing, chord-touching old Twickers will have long been buried anyway.
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