Michael Charton hopes his story helps South Africans to feel connected to Ireland.
Murray Kinsella Reports from Johannesburg THE BRITISH AND Irish Lions had a difficult job on their hands in 1938 when they toured South Africa.
Markötter was renowned for his ability to recognise talent and he had a simple solution to Walker’s woes.Walker took the advice and started all eight of the Irish players on tour in the final Test. The Lions gave up a big early lead but then overhauled the mighty Springboks to win one of the greatest games played on South African soil. Driven on by their Irish core, the Lions showed that the Springboks were not invincible.
Charton is a storyteller. He hails from Cape Town and worked in finance until he took up a degree in history and realised that he knew nothing about South Africa and that no one else around him – doctors, lawyers, accountants – did either.In 2011, he was telling a friend about the 1937 Springboks who won in New Zealand. Intrigued by the anecdotes, his friend asked if Charton would tell the story in a pub the night before a big Springboks Test against the All Blacks in Johannesburg.
The history extends up to the 1990s when all sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland were invited to South Africa for reconciliation talks before the Good Friday agreement was signed. But their history with South Africa also demonstrates an uncompromising edge, including the notorious battle in Pretoria in 1998 when fists flew every few minutes.“While the Irish do play rugby for joy and fun, they do not take a step back,” says Charton. “There’s a long history of Irish people with the spirits to stand up to the Springboks on the hard grounds of South Africa. The Irish have always stood toe to toe.
The extraordinary Paddy Mayne, a County Down man who was one of the founding members of the SAS, was on the 1938 Lions tour when he got up to all sorts of mischief in South Africa.
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