Clergyman who guided '38 Lions

THE Reverend George Cromey made a hefty sacrifice in order to afford the privilege of playing for the Lions. He sold his treasured Baby Austin motor car.

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Its enforced disposal enabled the 25-year-old clergyman from Bushmills to pay his way like everyone else. The thought of his current fly-half successors being paid circa £100,000-a-man by the Lions would have driven someone less abstemious to reach for a stiff glass of the whiskey distilled in George’s birthplace.

Lions of his 1938 vintage had to stump up £80 (worth around £7,000 today) as insurance against any tour emergency and buy their own dinner suit, costly pre-requisites which may explain why a number of international players made themselves unavailable for selection.

As amateurs, many could not afford to down tools and join expeditions lasting as long as six months. Cromey, right, ordained as a Presbyterian minister the day before leaving Belfast for Heysham on the first leg of his Lions adventure, spent most of his Sundays preaching at churches all over South Africa. One paid him a fee of 31 shillings, worth £130 today.

A copy of his diary, forwarded to The Rugby Paper by the Ulster historian Robert Corbett on behalf of the Irish Lion who discovered it, Stewart McKinney one of the 1974 Invincibles, offers a rare insight into a 24-match tour by boat and train stretching from mid-May to early October.