Merthyr
Merthyr Tydfil was once a global capital of industry, a master of steel, iron and coal, the envy of the world. And then, it wasn’t. New industries came, but then went. Television shows even began to mock them. But, the people of Merthyr are made of stronger stuff, and, through rugby, a new generation has been inspired, with the help of Sir Stanley and a man known as ‘Chief’.
The journey to Merthyr Tydfil is idyllic. The train winds its way through steep-sided tree-studded valleys with lush, green fields at their base, bordering the River Taff, a constant on your trip, flowing beside the route north from the River Severn estuary in Cardiff.
“It’s a really beautiful area,” says Paul Lewis, a stalwart of Merthyr RFC, who’s spent his whole life in Merthyr Tydfil. “You’ll have seen that when you come in, it’s just stunning and so many people don’t realise.”
Instead, for those that haven’t visited, their view could have been coloured by its reputation, one crafted with the help of research reports branding it the ‘third worst’ place to live in the UK and television shows designed to portray the negative, while handily ignoring the positive. “I don’t want to say it’s rough,” begins Paul, “but the town has been through very hard times, especially when it comes to industry.
“Like when the Hoover factory closed down, that was a massive blow,” he explains. “When I started there in 1976, there were 5,500 people working there so losing that was a big body blow for Merthyr.
“It went five years ago, and I think there were about 1,000 people working there at the time.”
The town’s heritage had been in iron, with all the raw materials needed right on its doorstep. In the 1830s, the ironworks was the world’s biggest, employing 15,000 people and the town had grown hugely, from less than 8,000 at the turn of the century to 22,000 in 1831 and 46,000 in 1851, making it the biggest town in Wales. The dawning of the railway age, dramatically reducing transport times to Cardiff, only enhanced the town and its reputation for iron and steel on the global stage. Not to mention the production of the tracks themselves with 50,000 tonnes of rails leaving one ironworks in 1844.
Coal mining in the late 1800s boosted it further and by 1911, the population peaked at 80,990, almost twice what it is today.
Even as coal, iron and steel declined, post World War II other industries replaced them, including Hoover. But when they, and others, left, the town struggled. “We all lived for Saturdays,” says Paul. “You knew you’d be out for the day, you’d play your rugby and, if you won, you’d get two beer tokens, which we all thought was great – free beers.
“Then you’d be out all night, dying on Sunday morning, but then back to the club to talk about the night before.”
The rugby club has always been strong, but never as strong as it is today. The artificial pitch is as good as you’ll see, there’s three senior teams for the first time in a long time, the minis have quadrupled in size and there’s plans for a ladies team too. On the pitch though, the side have cut a swathe in recent times, rising not only to Welsh rugby’s premier club division, but then winning three times on the bounce, and picking up a cup along the way. That’s despite the presence in the same division as some of the sport’s most famous names, including today’s visitors Pontypridd.
Ironically, the reason they’ve risen to the top is because of a Channel 4 series called Skint, where they focused on the troubles of a group of people in the town. To give you an idea of the content, you need only look at the programme’s preview for episode one, telling the stories of a mum of seven, a 23-year-old who’s ‘never had a steady job’ and a man who left school at thirteen unable to read or write. “People always run the town down,” says Paul, “but the best thing to happen to us was Skint, because Sir Stanley Thomas, who came from Merthyr, watched it and was upset about how the town was portrayed.
“When he came along we were in Division One East [the third tier], but he brought in Lee Jarvis as coach and, credit to Stan, he invested in the club, a new [artificial] field, a new clubhouse, a new gym, new floodlights.”
Signing big-name players such as former Welsh internationals Andy Powell and Matthew Rees caught headlines, but the Ironmen rose quickly, winning promotion to the Championship [level two] in 2014, together with the Swalec Plate; then two seasons later, they were promoted to the Premiership in 2016.
Pontypridd’s New Zealand-born legend Dale ‘Chief’ McIntosh took over as head coach in 2017, and built on Jarvis’ work, taking the side to three Premiership titles from 2017-2019. Technically the side are the reigning champions, as the last campaign was cut short, meaning league leaders Cardiff couldn’t claim their crown.
Unlike many, if not most, millionaire backers of rugby clubs, Sir Stanley goes to every game. “Home and away,” says Paul. “I often have to ring other clubs so they can save a space for his Rolls Royce.”
Today is no exception. “I love coming to games,” Sir Stanley tells us after duly arriving in his chauffeur-driven Rolls. “The best thing for me is seeing all the children having such a good time.
“For me, the biggest impact of my investment has been to get children off the street and playing some kind of sport,” he continues. “We’re going to build a second pitch before next season, our third team just started and I’d like to see a ladies team here too, to keep the momentum going. Everybody is quite excited.”
Which is not how Sir Stanley felt when he saw the show Skint. “I took exception to it because I’d known these Merthyr people so well all my life.
“They were talking about drink and drugs and picked on eight people in a particular part of Merthyr, and it didn’t show the town up to be the wonderful town it is with the wonderful people that live in it; it just wanted to call it the worst town in the UK and I think a lot of people were upset about that.”
Sir Stanley, who built up a fortune in property and baked goods, reported to be worth £230m, with his brother Peter [who was heavily involved in Cardiff Blues as chairman] grew up in a different Merthyr Tydfill. “I was born in Edinburgh but came to live here after the war when I was five. My father was born here,” explains Sir Stanley, who played rugby for Merthyr as well as Ebbw Vale and Cardiff. “Everybody seemed to have a job, there were companies and factories being built by the likes of Hoover and so many others.
“The industrial revolution started here,” he continues. “It built up a great town and people came from all over to work in coal, iron and steel: Spanish, Italian, Cornish.
“And I just had a great Welsh family too, we all knew each other, and I don’t mean just family but close neighbours and friends from school too.
“I just felt that something should be done particularly for the young children,” he says, about his own response to Skint. “I thought about investing in sport and, as I knew rugby, it was a good place to start, and it’s carried on for six or seven years. At the time [when he first invested], we probably had 30 or 40 young kids playing rugby here and now we’ve got nearly 200.
“We were down in the second and nearly went to the third, but each year we’ve won a competition and I got rather excited about watching Premiership clubs such as Pontypridd and enticed a few people to join us...”
None who’ve had quite the impact of Dale McIntosh. “These guys will go down in history,” says Sir Stanley, of the coaches and players that have been part of the journey. “Momentous characters, Dale in particular, and we’re playing his old side today.”
At 52, Dale McIntosh still looks as if he could hold together a pack by himself. Testament to the fact the Merthyr RFC DoR still works out six times a week.
Stories come thick and fast with the giant Kiwi. And with kick-off a couple of hours away, we have time to cover all manner of topics. We hand him a copy of Rugby Journal, with Mako Vunipola on the cover. “I knew his dad, Vuni – well, that’s what we called him [Fe’ao] – and he didn’t push himself, but he was an outstanding player, fuck he could hit. He was a perfect size for a hooker, he was like a block: dynamic, highly skilled, but he often stayed in second gear.
“He was a bloody good man but the mum was a big influence, she was the boss, in a nice way. His [Mako’s] father always said, ‘I need to send Billy home.’ ‘Why? He’s doing well’. ‘Nah, he’s too soft – big boy, but he picks his fights.’ I said ‘that’s not a bad thing...’ ‘Nah, we need to get him back to New Zealand...’”
Conversation with Dale rolls with the punches, sometimes literally. Every interview you ever see or read with him, always ends up somehow in Brive, 1997, when Pontypridd faced the French giants in the Heineken Cup. What transcended was an all-out scrap that saw Dale red-carded, although as one paper pointed out, it could have been waved at almost anyone on the field. That Pontypridd lost just by a single point, 32-31, was remarkable in itself. “I always say that the best thing that happened was that we had a scrap, because we knew we could scrap and probably win that, but nine times out of ten, we couldn’t beat them at rugby, because, fucking hell, they were a phenomenal side. Look at the players they had; God they were good.
“And there wasn’t a try either,” he adds. “And we got a draw at home, so they never outgunned us and we had young guys coming through, like Martyn Williams [then 21], Gareth Wyatt, Kevin Morgan.”
Dale’s Ponty were a force to be reckoned with. “We had Bath come down here, they had Jason Robinson, they just thought ‘ah, we’ll run out, win, it’ll be fine’ and we battered them. “I remember Dean Richards, whether it was tongue-in-cheek, saying, ‘Ponty? Sorry?’ [as if he didn’t know who they were] and we beat them [Leicester, 18-11] at home and he said afterwards ‘we’ll welcome them to Welford Road, that’s all I can say’.
“And I know he was irate because it was quite claustrophobic at Ponty, especially those days,” says Dale. “It’s really tight, bit like Grenoble in France, where they [the fans] can spit on you and hit you right between the eyes, it’s a bit like that at Ponty.
“We went to Leicester and Austin Healey charged down a kick to win the game, and Dean Richards said after the game, ‘this side is unbelievable, best one we’ve played this year’ and that was the year they were cleaning up.”
One story leads to another. “Martin Johnson, who was playing then, is a friend of mine,” says Dale. “I played with and against him in New Zealand. He was captain of the under-21s, and I was in the same training camp.
“And when I played against him, we both got sinbinned. He wrote something about it in his book, something about me doing a head-high tackle, so I said to him, ‘bro, you did a head-high tackle, and I slapped you mate’, and he said ‘well, I wasn’t going to put that in the book was I?’.
“Anyway, he came running back on, and he tried it on again, so I banged him again. It was the days when sinbinning meant you had to stand under the posts and the funny part of it was, I got sinbinned, he got sinbinned, and my mum is behind us and shouting ‘oi, you’.
“Mum always wore these orange wellies, so when I saw them coming I knew I was in trouble. So, she’s behind us shouting at me, ‘oi you, leave that English boy alone’. ‘Mum, He’s 6ft 6in...’ ‘Well, I see what you’re doing to him,’ ‘But mum, he’s doing it to me’...
“She’s like, ‘no, no, no.’”
“And then this guy went on to become an absolute icon, but we knew he was good. He played for College Old Boys, which is the other side of Taupo [where Dale grew up] and they’re highly influenced by Maori, and he loved it... He’d talk to me about these hard bushmen he played with and how much he learnt. Both of us were only seventeen and they didn’t give a shit how old we were, they’d kick us just as hard at seventeen as any age.”
Dale has been part of Welsh rugby for more than 30 years. His brother had come to Wales first, in the late-80s, before returning to Taupo and bringing with him two Welsh players, Ceri Jones and Gavin Jenkins, who then duly persuaded Dale to come back with them. After much badgering, he gave in. “To cut a long story short,” he says, “I was coming over here to get on the piss.”
He spent a season in Pontypridd before returning home, only to get an offer from the club.
“They offered me a package which, as an 18-year-old, you’re like, ‘you can’t do this man, you’re going to offer me X-amount of money a month, plus a place to stay, plus pay my electricity.’ I said, ‘are you sure?’ Kenneth Thomas, the top man then, said, ‘yeah, we want you back’.”
Meeting a Welsh girl and then having his first child in Wales [he’s now got three and a grandchild], by the age of 22, cemented his decision to stay in Wales. Due to his Scottish father, he was called up by Scotland, and played for Scotland A, but feeling as if his heart was in Wales, he opted to switch to his adopted country. “First and foremost,” he says. “I can’t thank Scotland enough, I went to Scotland because I was a McIntosh, but my heart was Welsh.”
Called up initially by Wales before he was even eligible, he eventually had to wait far longer for his first cap. “They chucked in a new law, which meant you can’t play for another country if you played for an A team, so I had to wait seven and half years to play for Wales,” he says. “I think I qualified for Wales on 9th November, then played for them on 15th November [against South Africa in 1996].
“I’d been playing some of the best rugby I’ve played in that seven years before, so I’d have been capped more but I was ineligible, so I only had two caps. And, even when I could play, I fucked that up, because I was scrapping all the time.
“I had a big fight in Swansea, the big fight in Brive and I was told I was bringing the game into disrepute. I said, ‘look, if someone smashes a bottle over my brother’s head, I’m not going to fucking stand by and say, “sorry can’t help you mate”, I’m going to wade in and do something...’”
Ironically, in the 1997 Five Nations, he missed caps due to a broken jaw, not caused by a punch, but by slipping in a game of touch rugby. He did manage to return in time to face England in a 13-34 defeat.
“Methin Davies, the hooker, is a very Welsh man, very patriotic, a great friend and to this day he says, ‘you shouldn’t have put that jersey on Chief’. I always say, ‘Well, I couldn’t say ‘no, hang about, Meth won’t be happy with me...’”
“One story I always say, is that Meth didn’t drink but loved being out with boys, so he’d give me a lift home, but I’d always get him to drop me on another street, and then walk 100 yards. When he asked why, I’d say ‘because you’re a cottage burner, and because I played for Wales, I don’t want you burning my house down’. That’s the type of people we are, funny but we love each other.”
Facing his old club has never been easy for Dale. “I’ve got a job to do,” he says. “This is my job, and this is where my focus is channelled, to win the game of rugby for Merthyr, end of story.
“But you cut me open and I’m black and white, that’s just fact. I want to win for Merthyr. Will I be disappointed if we lost? Good God, yes. But at the same time, there’s not another team in the world I’d rather lose to [than Pontypridd].
“The first time I played against them, I’m not gonna lie, I cried,” he says. “I was in the changing rooms, and I was talking to the Merthyr boys, and we had a very, very good squad, and we had about seven players that had been Ponty players.
“I was speaking about what we were looking to achieve,” he continues. “But then also about the respect and what that badge means to those boys, because I’ve been in that changing room.
“I said, ‘you might think that they’re underdogs, but they’re not, that’s exactly where they want to be, with that underdog tag. So, by making them underdog you’re actually giving them a gun to shoot you’.
“Then as I was speaking, I was getting emotional because obviously that’s my club, and it was the first time, I’ve never done this before. I also had guys in the room that were getting emotional because they had been in a changing room with me when I was coaching them and winning.
“But, as I say, I’m sorry, I’m here to do a job and win a game. And, as of late, we haven’t done too well [against Ponty], we’ve lost the last three.”
They don’t make it four in a row, as Merthyr win 61-32. Dale, who had to cut our chat short earlier to prepare his team, comes back to finish the conversation. “I don’t like seeing 61 points put into Ponty,” he admits, “but if they’d turned it on and did it to us, they’d be over the moon, so yeah I’m pleased with the performance.”
Dale’s coaching journey began with an eye-opening stint in development rugby in the valleys while still a player. “I was really fortunate coming through the coaching development scheme,” he says. “So I used to do a development job, which meant coaching kids all the way through from minis to seniors, it meant I was to take skills and break them down, but it was also about treating people at different levels.
“Some of the experiences though are mad,” he says. “We had a boy from Mountain Ash, and one day, he wasn’t at training and I asked where he was and was told, ‘ah, you won’t see him for a while Chief, he’s just stabbed and killed his father’.
“It was actually his stepfather who’d been beating on his mother, so he killed him.
“Another boy from Merthyr kept coming to training with black eyes, and I found out it was his stepfather, so I took him home, and told the stepdad, ‘if he comes to training with another black eye, I’ll break your neck’. Because that’s how you’ve got to deal with people like that.”
The values of Dale are praised by everyone who comes into contact with him, but the fighting does cause some problems, especially when it comes to discipline and your own players. “What you can say is, ‘I’m telling you not to do this, because I know the repercussions because I’ve done it.
“A funny story,” he begins. “We played Ulster in the British & Irish Cup and I went downstairs on my own to the hotel bar for a pint and this Irish Gaelic footballer – big boy, 6ft 4/5in – comes up and sits next to me
“And he’s like, ‘where you from then?’. ‘Oh Wales, Pontypridd’. And he had a bit of an attitude with me, so the barman comes up me and said ‘you alright?’ I said ‘yeah, what’s up with this guy?’.
“So, after two pints I went to my room, but stopped at the toilet on the way. The boy comes in, looks over me, I look at him and he swings at me. So, as you do, I gave him a hiding. There’s blood everywhere, the boys come in, three of them, Cory Hill and two other boys, they see the boy on the floor, and I shouted at them, ‘what are you doing up, you should be in bed’.
“The bouncer has then come in and said, ‘he’s a handy boy, but he’s a troublemaker’. ‘Well he owes me 50 quid for my shirt he’s just ripped.’
“The next day, I’m in there talking to the boys about not drinking on a Friday night and Cory Hill pipes up, ‘how’s that boy from last night anyway, Chief?’”
“The point being, sometimes your behaviour is your behaviour and it can be hard to tell people not to do something,” he concedes. “But, again, there’s also the fact that because of my experience I know that it doesn’t work.”
Chief hasn’t just coached at Welsh Premiership level, he’s also had stints with the Blues and at Rugby World Cups with Namibia in 2019. “What an experience and how religious and humble they are as people,” he says. “They don’t have a lot, but what they’ve got, they so appreciate. We take for granted what we’ve got in our lives and just looking at them and looking what they go through and the poverty, it was an eye opener.
“I learned a lot about myself in Namibia. I always knew I was a tosser,” he laughs, “but that just clarified it for me! No, we can all be selfish, but in the company of those guys it made me appreciate the values that they actually had and my forefather, my mother and father have too.
“Just to be in the company of those guys was phenomenal, I can see why Phil [Davies] stuck around because the rugby time was hard, but coaching those guys was worth it.
“I think I made a bit of an impact on them as well because you know, I enjoy life and even in their world, they think I’m nuts – but I was nuts in a very, very respectful way.”
And he got to coach against his original home country “Oh my God, I know my mum was so proud of me to just be sitting in the opposite box to them,” he says, “and then, all of a sudden, we’re leading them after fifteen minutes and I thought, ‘oh, Lord, please make something happen to end this game now’.”
It didn’t, and they would lose 71-9, but the experience was still there. Dale loves his lot, and loves Merthyr. “They’re good guys here, I’ve made great friends, but guys like [committee member] Huw Williams, they’re priceless, you know. They’re voluntary and they just do not stop working.
“Huw has got two farms, but he’s down here doing everything. At the moment he’s cleaning the shit out of the toilets, because the toilets have burst you know what I mean? It’s crazy.
“Merthyr people are good people,” he continues, “they’re great people, they haven’t got chips on their shoulders. They’re crazy, they’re like anyone else, you know, they enjoy life. And they don’t mind showing that.”
Story by Alex Mead
Pictures by Jame McNaught
This extract was taken from issue 16 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.
