Whenever I drive up the M5 nowadays I do wonder how I used to travel up from the family farm, near Taunton, to Bath and back again, twice a week. But the commute wasn't an issue back then, I loved training and loved being at the club at what was a special time.
From Wednesdays onwards, it was exciting to be up there preparing for a game as we continued to try and push our standards higher and higher. Anyway, the journey was never dull. Normally it was Dawesy (Graham Dawe) who used to drive and it was always what you might call eventful. He was usually late in picking me up so he'd hammer his old Vauxhall to hell down the back roads in a bid to make up lost time. If there was half a gap, he'd go for it. I think he thought of himself as a bit of a rally driver.
I joined Bath in 1979/80 after Frank Thomas, the chairman of the Somerset selectors and also a Bath member, introduced me to Dave Robson, the Bath fitness coach. That first season was a record-breaking year for the club and we went from strength to strength winning far more games than we lost until I eventually left to go back to Wellington in 1992. Dave was always keen to have us in for training, even when a lot of other sides weren't and I think our superior fitness levels had a lot to do with our success. We never knew when we were beaten because we always had 80-90 minutes in us.
We'd often do an extra scrummaging session up at Lambridge on the Thursday if we had a big match coming up at the weekend. It always seemed to be muddy there so conditions were never great but I enjoyed preparing for the next big challenge and the battles that would be coming your way. Players didn't tend to move much in those days so you built up personal rivalries. Paul Rendall, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago, was a very strong player, a very good technician. Those Wasps games were always big.
I played in the first three Cup final wins (in consecutive years against Bristol, London Welsh and Wasps), missed the second one against Wasps when David Sole played instead of me, but was back in the starting line-up for the one against Leicester in 1989.
Being the first, Bristol in '84 was the one that sticks out in my mind most. It was very tense and pressurised and it seemed to go on and on for ever. It went down to the final kick of the match and I can see it in my head now, Barnesy (Stuart Barnes) standing there lining it up. It wasn't a bad kick, he just missed it! It was a special day for Bath because it was our first piece of silverware and also for us Somerset players who had lost to a lot of the same Bristol players who were playing for Gloucestershire the year before in the County Championship final.
Roger Spurrell was captain for the first two finals. He joined around the same time as me and we'd sometimes pick him up in the Mendip Hills where he'd got a job as a shepherd. Roger was a wonderful leader and very aggressive player, bordering on the line of being completely nuts. But he was a very constructive and well-educated man who was always thinking about what direction we should be going in. It wasn't a suicidal hit-them-in-the-guts type of approach, it was always calculated with Roger. He had a tremendous work-rate and with his blond curly hair, he always stood out.
Like Roger, I didn't quite make it into the international bracket but most of the players around me in the Bath team did. Jeff Probyn had a good game for England B against France at Bath one year when I was on the bench and he got called up into the senior team and pretty much made the position his own after that. It would've been nice to have been capped but it wasn't the be-all and end-all and I did get to play for the Barbarians and the South West in the old Divisional Championship. Anyway, playing for Bath, it often felt like you were playing for a Test team. Sometimes you'd have internationals replaced by internationals. We had some good times, and I was very lucky to be a part of the game at that point.
Recently, I was watching a murder mystery drama on TV and a lot of it was filmed in Bath. They showed The Boater (the pub next to The Rec), which we used to frequent quite a lot. If ever we were feeling a bit down on our luck, and that wasn't very often, old Johnny Horton used to say, ‘there is only one thing for it' and that was a couple of quick pints in The Boater. Everything seemed better then. I remember getting dropped for one of the Cup games at Orrell and me and Simmo (Paul Simpson) drowned our sorrows in there one Wednesday night. Great player that he was, Simmo once got dropped by England – after losing to Ireland – and Bath in the same week, and so the joke goes, he went from playing at Lansdowne Road to Lansdown Hill, which was where the 2nds were based at the time.
For much of my time at Bath, I was known as “Oafy”. The nickname came about when we were on tour in America. We were going across the Everglades in Florida and the journey went on that long we drank ourselves sober. As you'd expect with a group of bored blokes, we started talking about all sorts of nonsense to pass the time and, for some reason, Charlie Ralston admitted he hated bananas. Well, that was just asking for it in my book and I force fed him a couple, which he wasn't best pleased about, and called me a bloody Oaf. I could have been called a lot worse but you tend to know what sort of background people are from by the nicknames they give you. Not that long ago we were invited to my daughter's in-laws' family gathering and one of the guests said out of nowhere, ‘you're Oafy, aren't you?'. Christ, that put me back in a certain place! It turns out he used to have a flat on North Parade and used to go and watch Bath games.
With young John Mallett coming through and Victor Ubogu at the club, I found it difficult to get a regular place in the team after I'd been out for six to seven months with a hamstring injury. So that's when I decided to go back to Wellington, which is where my son Daniel, a flanker, has been captain for the last three years. Guess who the coach is? Good old Dawesy! It's always nice to see him and all the others and reminisce about what was a fantastic time in our lives at Bath.
