Arresting sight of Coulman's solo gallop

AT Twickenham more than 50 years ago, Mike Coulman did something that had not been seen there before or since: a prop galloping ‘fully 30 yards’ for a solo try.

- PETER JACKSON

That it proved just enough for England to retain the Calcutta Cup on a spring day in 1968 made his stampede all the more significant. The Moseley loosehead went careering over as if he had flicked a turbo-charger into overdrive, leaving the Scots so far in his slipstream that, according to Dan Stansfield’s The Who, When and Where of English International Rugby, ‘nobody laid a finger on him’.

Who was Coulman, this supposed donkey who dared to find the gas and the imagination to impersonate a centre-threequarter? He was at least 30 years ahead of his time, a British Police sprint champion, that’s who.

No criminal ever got very far running away from Coulman.

The Lions were sufficiently impressed by his explosive power in scoring the only try of the England-Scotland match to pick him the next day in their 30 for that summer’s tour of South Africa.

Someone else had also been struck by Coulman’s thunderbolt, a businessman with the financial clout to have a more profound effect on the then 24-year-old policeman from Stone. Brian Snape, watching at home in Cheshire, had seen the prop flash across his television set and began to make inquiries.

A Manchester businessman then in the act of transforming Salford Rugby League club, Snape made a name for himself on both sides of the divide the previous year, prising Wales captain David Watkins from Newport for a world record fee of £16,000, worth more than £300,000 today.

Now Snape wanted an English Lion to join the Welsh one for the glory of Salford as immortalised in the song Dirty Old Town composed by one of its most celebrated sons, Ewan MacColl.