By Peter Jackson

At Murrayfield 70 years ago, Wales played the role of polite guests to perfection, enabling their supposedly hopeless hosts to end the longest losing run British rugby had ever known.
Scotland had won after 17 defeats in a row over four years, a sequence which goaded their most famous forward of the inter-war era, the mighty John Bannerman, later ennobled as the Liberal peer Lord Bannerman of Kildonan, into a discreet intervention.
His Lordship persuaded the selectors to pick four new caps, among them Fin Smith’s grandfather Tom Elliot from Gala, drop almost half the team ...