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Fiji rugby team

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by eaty (U14079852) on Tuesday, 25th October 2011

  Can anyone remember Fiji touring Britain (Wales?} and some of the players actually playing barefoot?

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• Message 2

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  Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Tuesday, 25th October 2011

  They toured the UK in 1964, and beat Wales, scoring 6 tries in the process, but they had stopped playing barefoot before WW2, AIUI.

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  Posted by eaty (U14079852) on Sunday, 30th October 2011

  Thanks for your answer, but my dad insists he saw them play at Cardiff Arms Park, and some of them were barefoot, and it must have been way after WW2.
  I'll check this out with him again next time I see him.
  
  

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• Message 4

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  Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Sunday, 30th October 2011

  Anything on the internet talks of them wearing boots to play in NZ for the first time in 1939, though some still preferred to play in barefeet. It seems unlikely they would have played full games in Britain barefooted, though perhaps some took off their boots towards the end of the game.
  
  I did read just in the last couple of days an article in the neurological magazine I get that studies on memory show that people do take on board other people's memories and incorporate them into their own, and remember things over the years that didn't actually happen. (I'm never very keen to think I remember things wrongly like that myself, but that faith was shaken recently when I realised someone I thought I had met in my town had actually died before I ever set foot in it!)
  
  Cheers, Caro.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 4th November 2011

  Certainly I can recall the reports of the Fijian tour of Wales in probably the late Fifties when many of the team chose to play barefoot.
  
  Ur-lugal has mentioned the situation before 1939 but Rugby in Fiji was- I believe- very much associated with the British Fijian Army which was very proud of its exploits in the Second World War, and probably had officer corps formed in places like Sandhurst. By the Fifties the age was very definitely post-imperialist and I believe that there was a great affinity and affection during that tour associated with some common feeling of emerging national identity between the Fijians and the Welsh.
  
  Contrary to what one might expect the greatest risk was not probably not being trodden on. Our history teacher who taught us rugby had spent some time in South Wales (a Yorkshireman himself) and he used to tell us about the damage and pain to the knees that came from the fact that so many rugby pitches in the Valleys were just levelled out pit heaps with scarcely any loam soil for the grass-roots. Any prop-forwards ended matches with their knees lacerated and ingrained with black that could not be washed out.
  
  But various South Sea societies have folk rituals involving walking on hot coals, and people accustomed to be barefoot get hard souls to their feet.
  
  In fact around the same time the great All Black full back, Don Clarke (?)- a man ahead of his time as a full-back of neo-modern proportions- 16 stone and about 6'4" from memory- was filmed on tour in the UK converting place-kicks from the half-way line barefoot- back in the age of the "toe punt".
  
  This all came to my mind after school in the early Seventies when I was encouraging some of the girls in our under 13 House team who were practising netball. After a little while RB, who had only recently arrived from Ghana, came over with a sheepish smile to ask if it would be OK for her to take off her sports-shoes and play bare foot. The effect was miraculous. One might compare the transformation to a caged bird being set free.
  
  It was around this time that the British athlete Bruce Tulloch (?) surprised the athlethics world by producing world class middle-distance performances while running barefoot. He ascribed it to habits that he had formed growing up in Hong Kong.
  
  Cass

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• Message 6

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  Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Friday, 4th November 2011

  the British Fijian ArmyΒ 
  A strange name for the Fiji Infantry Regiment perhaps?
  
  which was very proud of its exploits in the Second World War, and probably had officer corps formed in places like SandhurstΒ 
  During the Second World War the Fiji Infantry Regiment was initially within the operational command of the New Zealand Defence Force. In 1942, however, it came under the control of the US Army 37th Infantry Division ('the Buckeye Division') commanded by Major General Robert S Beightler of Ohio and saw action in the Solomon Islands.

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• Message 7

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 4th November 2011

  Vizzer
  
  Strange name no doubt.. But my knowledge came especially from David Attenborough's "Zoo Quest in Paradise" in which he describes the most impressive dancing that he was treated to by what he describes as a unit of the Fijian Army that fought alongside the rest of the global British forces during the war, and danced to tribute songs in his honour about their valour and exploits.
  
  There was also the news coverage of the political crises in Fiji during the racial tension between such native Fijians, many of whose leading figures were ex-army, and the increasingly important and powerful immigrant populations from the Indian sub-continent.
  
  Cass

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