The Butler did it! Day Eddie was in the dock

PETER JACKSON

THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW

AT the crack of dawn on Thursday, September 6, 2001, the highest-powered disciplinary tribunal ever assembled in the name of the Lions began converging on Dublin.

Austin Healey had been charged with bringing the game into disrepute as the supposed author of what has since become the most notorious piece of literature attributed to a rugby player. As BA flight 7297 took off from Cardiff under a sky of blazing blue, Graham Henry in seat 2A turned to the passenger next to him.

“Of course you know who should really be in the dock,'' Henry said, removing a sheaf of documents from his briefcase and turning to yours truly in seat 2B. “Eddie Butler. That's who. And now you'll have to excuse me.”

The much-loved broadcaster's sudden death in the Peruvian Andes prompted a torrent of tributes and memories without mention of his most daring escapade, one which required some nerve on his part.

Eddie had written Healey's column for The Guardian throughout an often troubled tour, on the face of it a menial task for a wordsmith from Cambridge University. They seemed an odd couple, ‘Educated Edward' and a Scouser who could talk as good a game as the one he often played which took some doing.

Yet by the end their friendship was such that Healey's ghost had almost become his alter ego: scribe and scallywag fused into a lethal partnership. Those who like their Anglo-Australian sport to sound as though it's come straight from the sledgers' mouths lapped it up.

The Welsh scholar ensured that between them they took the old tradition to new heights. For example: “Well, spin this you Aussies: up yours. Is that enough to get into the Sydney Morning Sun Telegraph Herald load of s*****.”

There followed more in the same vein, describing his Wallaby bête noire Justin Harrison as an ‘ape' as well as a ‘plod' and a ‘plank'. When the monkey business came boomeranging back in time for every morning under the sun in Australia, the headlines hit Henry between the eyes before he could crack open his boiled egg.

He was livid. The Lions had given the enemy all the motivational energy it needed on the day of the series decider. Two months later, the Lions captain, Martin Johnson, flew over from the East Midlands, tour manager Donal Lenihan drove up from Cork to join Henry for the trial for what appeared on the face of it to be an open-and-shut case.

It was nothing of the sort. Butler wrote the column, as he always did, but without, as he conceded, ‘bothering' to run it past Healey, thereby denying him the option to tone down the language, or not.

“If he (Healey) had had that opportunity he would certainly have found it unacceptable,” Henry said. “I found myself feeling a lot of sympathy for Austin. I could see it was causing him genuine distress. This was Eddie Butler's fiction of the tour shoved into Austin Healey's mouth unknowingly undermining the common cause.”

Despite that, they found Healey guilty and fined him, refusing to say how much. Guesstimates at the time of £3,000 fell some way short of the real figure.

Butler, waxing lyrical about traditional Lions' tours as ‘a warm-hearted, emotional, passionate affair,' wrote, in his inimitable style, that Henry had ‘brought the warmth of a North Sea cod'.

The ghost-writer's mea culpa appeared in his book of the tour: ‘Sorry, Justin. Sorry, Austin. He didn't ask me why I had written the final blast. I had said I wouldn't drop him in it and I had.''

The guilty verdict in Dublin wasn't the end of the saga. Healey refused to pay having made the not unreasonable request, according to Butler, about The Guardian settling the fine.

Healey coughed up under duress more than 18 months after the Dublin hearing. “I paid the fine,” he tells me. “I wasn't going to pay it until I had a call from Clive Woodward saying he couldn't pick me for the World Cup unless I paid up.

“The Lions kept sending me legal letters. My Lions contract ended on September 5, the day before the hearing. The lawyers told me they didn't have a legal leg to stand on.

“So I laughed their letters off and said: ‘See you in court'. What Clive said left me thinking that it seemed a small price to go to the World Cup. I'd torn my ACL that April and I didn't get picked. But for Clive's intervention, I'd have had £5,000 more in my pocket.”

Like so many of us, Healey felt a sense of devastation over his ally's death. “I loved Eddie. Such a top bloke, such a sad loss. At first I didn't believe it and then it appeared on the BBC website.

“I found him one of the wittiest, mischievous men I ever worked with in rugby and I include myself in that. He had a wicked sense of humour. Working with Eddie is what got me started in television.

“The same goes for Justin (Harrison). Without Eddie's use of the vernacular – plod, plank and ape – who'd have heard of him? Justin and I get on fine. It was all tongue-in-cheek.”

And who should win the series, stealing Keith Wood's throw to Johnson at the front of a five-metre line-out in the last minute? Why, Justin Harrison. Some plank…

If only, if only….