Peter Jackson: You’re lucky George, they said Lewis sold his soul

Lewis Jones remembers what it was like when he left Llanelli, how all hell broke loose over his transfer to Leeds Rugby League club. “They said I'd sold my soul to the devil and other ridiculous things like that,” he recalls, chuckling at the absurdity of it all. “I bumped into one of the Big Five selectors and he told me, ‘you've lost your freedom'.
“It was made very clear that I wasn't welcome back in Wales. So I didn't dare go back for quite a while. It's all long since been mended. My word, how times change.”
Jones was 21 when he crossed the Rubicon from Stradey Park to Headingley in November, 1952, for £6,000, then a world record.  George North, 21 yesterday, had no Iron Curtain to cross before joining Northampton for £250,000, as revealed by The Rugby Paper three weeks ago.
There were some subtle differences. When Jones went north, from amateur Union to professional League, the money went into his bank account. In the case of North going east, the transfer fee went to the Scarlets as compensation for their prize asset having another year to run on his contract.
In 1952, there was nothing the Welsh Rugby Union could do to stop their best young players leaving other than help find them better jobs and rail against professionalism. When the money talked, those who took it were treated like lepers.
A Test Lion at 19, Jones' status as an all-time great in both codes cannot be denied. “I went purely for financial gain,” he said. “I wouldn't have gone otherwise. The game was amateur then but now that it's professional it's a bit sad to see young players leaving Welsh rugby.
“I still play golf three times a week and at the end of the Six Nations I had a great time. I went round all my golfing mates singing, ‘we are the champions, my friends'. I must have sounded just like Queen.  They know I'm Welsh but after being up here 60 years, it was good to give them a reminder!”
There was no such thing back in the Fifties as a Professional Regional Game Board to help keep Jones at Llanelli. North could be forgiven for thinking that there is still no such thing despite the WRU setting it up during the first week of December.
The third of the eight major objectives, as trumpeted back then by WRU chief executive Roger Lewis, was “to help retain senior Welsh internationals playing in Wales where appropriate”. The board, he said, would “be based on a collaborative approach and will meet monthly to review and deliver progress”.
Since then it has delivered nothing but acrimony. The board, a joint Union-regions initiative, has not met since before Christmas and still there is no credible explanation from the governing body. Nero fiddling while Rome burned during the great fire of the first century springs to mind.
From his home in Leeds, Jones can only hope that history is not about to repeat itself, that another Wales full-back from the same treasure trove in Gorseinon will not be lured by the pots of gold always on offer in France. Leigh Halfpenny is in the same position as North in terms of a contract running out next season and therefore the Blues are as vulnerable as the Scarlets to a transfer fee.
“Leigh comes from the same village as me,” Jones said when I called to wish him a happy 82nd birthday on Thursday. “His family used to live round the corner. I'd hope he'd be paid well enough to stay with Cardiff although I'm amazed when I hear about the money being offered in France.”
When Jones arrived in Leeds, John Charles was already there, in the embryonic stages of proving himself the greatest of all Welsh footballers. “John was a great friend of mine,” Jones said before embarking on his last 18 holes of the week. “I asked him one day how much he was earning and he said, ‘twenty quid a week'.
“Twenty quid? I told him it was my ambition to earn that much.  Then you look at what they're paid today and it makes you wonder …”
At least Jones can play his golf, which he did until recently off a handicap as low as 12, oblivious to grubby Welsh rugby politics. They have now reached such a state of grubbiness that Ospreys lock Alun-Wyn Jones voiced his disapproval, bemoaning the public airing of “dirty linen”.
He also made the point that the players are “mere pawns” in any political game. Or, as a former England player with a World Cup winners' medal in his collection, was fond of putting it: “We're just a lump of meat.”
The Scarlets made sure they got their pound of flesh for North once he had refused to commit beyond the end of next season. In times as hard as these nobody ought to blame them, even if the WRU did just that.
Bad enough that Wales should be losing players like Jamie Roberts and Danny Lydiate in their mid-20s prime. To be losing them at 21, not just the gigantic North but Scarlets' fly-half Owen Williams to Leicester to boot, is a whole lot worse.
Even Nero would have stopped fiddling by now …