An ode to George Dunkerley

BY STEVE MASCORD

DAVE Hadfield had a story for every pint of bitter upon which he sipped. This is my favourite today. In the weeks and months ahead, as more and more of these yarns come to light, it may not even make the top 10.

Before I go on, I want to add a caveat. There are few things more tiresome than obituaries that are not about the dearly departed at all, but about the writer. This will be, in parts, about me. So it’s not an obituary. Officially – so it says above – it’s not even about Dave but his alter ego – under which he wrote for Rugby League Week – George Dunkerley.

I don’t want the responsibility of writing an obituary.

So … one day Dave, the greatest rugby league writer of my lifetime whom we lost aged 70 last Tuesday, was catching a train. Rucksack slung over his arm, he bought himself a paper and a box of biscuits and looked to find a seat in the platform cafe.

There was one seat available at a table otherwise occupied by a man of similar vintage. Dave asked if he could sit there. The commuter, with his own nose in the newspaper, nodded.

Just getting stuck into the back page himself, Dave heard a rustling sound in front of him. Peering over the top of his Independent, he was astonished to see the man opposite him take a biscuit from the packet on the table between them.

Dave was outraged but also momentarily befuddled. To make a fuss over a packet of biscuits would be unseemly. Perhaps he should have offered to share them anyway. On the other hand, though, this stranger’s impertinence was completely outrageous.

Hadders tried to stare down this insolent fellow traveller but the man would not meet his eye. So he hit upon a plan. He reached out and grabbed the second biscuit in the packet.

This got the attention of a character contemporary Australians would refer to as “old mate”.

Glaring back at Hadfield, he quickly snatched the third biscuit. Now the men were involved in a telekinetic, silent war, burning holes in each other’s souls with their eyes. Hadfield snatched the fourth, the stranger the fifth and so on until the entire packet was empty. At this point, a departure was called over the PA and Hadfield’s nemesis got up and left. Soon after, Dave did the same.

Judging by a story the journalist Daniel Lane recounted in the aftermath of Dave’s death, Hadfield would not have been so calm if a third party had been involved and he thought the biscuits were being stolen from an innocent bystander.

Daniel recalls that when Dave was in Sydney, he once witnessed a schoolboy being picked on by a pack of bullies as a suburban bus made its way up Old South Head Road. Hadfield not only admonished the scallywags but ordered the bus driver to stop and not move until they all disembarked.

Public transport was a recurring theme in Dave’s amazingly colourful life. He once travelled around the UK on a pensioner’s bus pass and wrote a book about it. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans – or waiting for a ride.

“I made my first Great Britain tour as a 19-year-old and he sort of took me under his wing, him and Ray French,” recalls the greatest British player this century, Adrian Morley.

“I used to enjoy hanging out with the press more than the players, really.

“After every Salford game – he didn’t drive – he’d walk up to Irlam which is Salford to get the bus back to Bolton. We’d have a few pints and it would always be the Joseph Holts pub.

“He had a great knowledge of rugby league but he loved his music, his folk music. He was a big Bob Dylan fan like myself and we used to talk about Bob Dylan regularly over a pint.”

I (sorry, I warned you) first met Dave in 1988 on a train from Sydney to Newcastle for Great Britain’s tour match against the Knights, then having their first year in the Sydney Premiership. The first words I said to him were ‘George Dunkerley!’. You could hear the exclamation mark, too. His travelling companion, the writer Neil Hanson, didn’t have the heart to tell me that wasn’t his real name – at least not until we got out of the Central Coast and into the Hunter. Knowing there was no George Dunkerley was only slightly more disappointing than finding out why I had to ask my mum and dad for what Santa would bring.

I remember, that first day, Dave commenting about the beauty of the Hawkesbury River – “there is certainly something to be said for this country in terms of its physical appearance” – and the irksome popularity of AC/DC in Britain (“Yes, they have a following”).

But as I recounted on Friday to the guests at the Capital Challenge, a rugby league event in the middle of London where corporates put their hands in their pockets for the sport once a year, Dave didn’t become my hero until two years later.

I was a gormless 21-year-old doing a month at Australian Associated Press’s London office and Dave was the local rugby league correspondent for that wire service. It was tradition that he be shouted lunch the day before the Challenge Cup final at Wembley.

At the Golf Club on Fleet Street (there was no golf course but editors used to hit balls from the roofs of neighbouring newspaper offices), we must have had between six and eight pints. In the middle of the day. I could barely see. Sitting straight was a task, standing unthinkable.

Standing, though, is what Dave eventually did, announcing: “Sorry I have to go now. I have to do some drinking.”

He had me from that moment. Our dear mutual friend Andy Wilson once remarked that I would sometimes be like a giggly schoolgirl in his presence. Dave spoken at my wedding (I was too nervous about my own speech to recall any of what he said). I once saw him try to convince a reveller on the train from Wigan to Bolton that was not, in fact, Dave Hadfield.

“You are! You 100 per cent are.”

It strikes me that we can remember so many things about those who have died these days because of the digital age but what someone was actually ‘like’ remains elusive. Those of us who remember Peter Frilingos running his finger down the corner of his mouth while saying the word “dribble” will soon join him in the hereafter and he’ll be just a name.

For instance, we will never know if George Washington picked his nose or Ghenghis Khan had a stutter. Even if we are talking someone like Lucile Ball or Elvis Presley, we can never know them the way their friends did.

Rather than describe Dave’s mannerisms, his wit that was as agile in person as in print, I’d like to highlight the waiting for a bus, the getting up at dawn after a long night on the turps in Perpignan to go walk along a dried up riverbed.

Dave allowed his life to breath. He left gaps in which to savour it. He was not, as I was, willing to sacrifice an hour of socialising after a game to listen to the tape of the press conference back and make sure every quote of significance gets in.

In living this way, I’d like to think Dave’s life felt like it was longer. His genius and inspiration as a writer came from the times most of us no longer allow ourselves to have. And the fact he was able to achieve this level of Zen balance, to absorb the community and culture around him and describe it so vividly, is probably the real reason he was my hero – and always will be.

Dave was about real ale not lager, red wine not Red Bull and vodka.

And after boarding the train described in the early paragraphs of this story, he did indeed feel a bit peckish and thirsty. Unsure what was at hand, he rifled around in his rucksack and was pleasantly surprised – but surprised nonetheless – to find an unopened packet of biscuits.

HIS packed of biscuits

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