A play inspired by a rugby hero
At Greenwich Theatre from 13-31 October is Hugh Salmon’s debut play ‘Into Battle’.
It tells the story of a bitter feud at Oxford University which involved Ronnie Poulton-Palmer, England captain in their last match before World War One.
Postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the play is a timely reminder of how people can be brought together by adversity. The Great War was to take Ronnie’s life, those of five of his team mates in that Test match, and in total 27 England players who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Hugh has faced his own battle, having had several surgeries for a fractured spine from a complex rugby injury, and wrote Into Battle despite chronic pain and lying on his back.
Celebrating the life of one of England’s greatest rugby heroes, a special performance attracted rugby supporters, with invites to Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone, Ronnie’s great-niece and other members of his family.
The play begins set against the 1910 backdrop of one of the most divisive general elections in British history. After Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ was rejected by the House of Lords, Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, asked King Edward VII to create 300 new peers to overcome a potentially catastrophic political conflict.
These national divisions were reflected at Oxford’s Balliol College, where 18 of 53 freshers in 1906 were an exclusive group of Old Etonians. They engaged in a bitter feud with those who had not been to Eton. The play looks at how Ronnie tried to broker peace between the Eton Rowdies and the rest.
By 1912, the feud had become a personal one between the Hon. Billy Grenfell and the more socially aware Keith Rae, who had dedicated his university career to the Balliol Boys Club, which helped the underfed ‘scruffs’ from the back streets of Oxford.
At Rugby School Ronnie played in the first XV with the war poet Rupert Brooke. He later became an advocate of social justice and, like his best friend Keith Rae, helped the Balliol Boys Club. As England captain, he put his position on the line by standing up for broken time payments, supporting players who could ill afford to lose earnings by representing their nation on the rugby pitch.
Although the feud was so bitter, it was touchingly resolved on the battlefields of the First World War. By the spring of 1915 Lieutenant Ronald William Poulton Palmer was at the front in Flanders. While supervising engineering works in a trench just north of Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium he was shot by a sniper on 5 May. His last words were reputed to be: “I shall never play at Twickenham again.”
He is buried in the Royal Berks Cemetery, Hyde Park Corner, in Belgium. In recent years, soil from the Twickenham Stadium pitch was taken to the cemetery and, with the help of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, scattered on Ronnie’s grave by the RFU’s First World War Commemoration ambassador and former England captain, Lewis Moody, who brought soil back from the grave to bury beside the Twickenham Stadium pitch.
