Bill McLaren RIP

Bill McLaren, rugby football’s most revered commentator, the ‘voice of rugby’, has died, leaving rugby richer for his many years of commentating and poorer for his passing. He was 86.

Somehow you feel a family member has died, and if rugby is a family it is true. This is the death of a close and special relative, a favourite uncle. It is in a way surprising that this man, so loyal to his family, his Hawick, his Borders and his Scotland should have been so accepted and loved by all of rugby. It is not really surprising because those tight loyalties he had extended to the whole of the game. He loved rugby football and respected it; in turn rugby football loved and respected him.

Once at Cardiff a sign read: “Bill McLaren is Welsh.” It made sense, for Bill McLaren belonged to all rugby and all rugby was proud of him.

He loved rugby football and respected it and so he went to meticulous trouble to get the minutiae of commentating right, down to the correct pronunciation of players’ names. Once he and his wife Bette were there to meet the arriving Springboks to find out how Ruben Kruger wanted his surname pronounced. because he loved and respected and because he was so thoroughly prepared, he did not have to resort to smartness and nastiness; he was not a man for the cheap shot.

He was methodical. He used playing cards to recall players’ names by their numbers. He did research, for he believed that to commentate you needed to be as prepared and keyed up as players. There is a story that once he was in the commentators’ box at Murrayfield for the Sevens. Latvia were playing and two younger commentators thought they would play a trick on him. They pretended to be commentating while Latvia were playing. Just as a Latvian player had a run down the wing they said: “And now we’ll pass you over to Bill McLaren.” Without missing beat McLaren took over and was able to tell the audience that it was no surprise that this Latvian was a good player as his father had been a famous flank when playing for Riga.

He had method and he had style. Many of his sayings became famous – “That’s coming down with snow on it”; “The scrumhalf is getting ball delivered to him like chocolates out of a machine”; “He’s like a demented ferret up a wee drainpipe”;  “He’s as quick as a trout up a burn”; “It’s high enough, it’s long enough AND IT’S STRAIGHT ENOUGH!”;  “When they get going, it’s like watching cattle stampede, huge fellows who thunder about the paddock like made rhinos” [Springbok pack in 1951;  “He plays like a runaway bullet” [Grant Batty of New Zealand].

And he had a sense of humour. Asked the advantages of being a commentator, he said in that gentle voice:  “I’ve hardly ever had to pay to get in.”

Bill McLaren grew up loving rugby, learning about it from his eager Dad and the club at Hawick and then up to Murrayfield. He played, and then World War II broke out and he served in the artillery in North Africa and Egypt. The disaster struck when he contracted tuberculosis.

At the time he contracted TB, Bill McLaren was 24, vice-captain of Hawick and a Scottish triallist. But his playing career was over. In fact his life was nearly over.

It was not all bad fortune. Home on demob leave in 1947 he went with his sister to a dance in the Hawick Town Hall. He wrote: “People tend to laugh about love at first sight but there has never been any doubt in my mind that from that very first moment that I saw Bette I was in love with her.” She saw him through TB when he was in a sanatorium in Bangour for 19 months and they became as close as a married couple could be. He would not go to any function without Bette but they would play 18 holes of golf every day..

Bill McLaren started imitating commentators before he was a teenager but it was in a sanatorium that he first started commentating. He got patients who could play table tennis and similar games to play and he would amuse the patients with his commentating.

Out of the sanatorium he got a job on the Hawick Express whose editor, John Hood, pushed Bill McLaren into going for an audition with the BBC as a rugby commentator. The match for the test was South of Scotland vs South Africa in 1951. A career was born, brought up on love, respect and unflagging enthusiasm.

The South African centre, André Snyman, was once asked what his greatest rugby ambition was and he said: “To play in a match commentated by Bill McLaren.”

Bill McLaren and Bette had two daughters, Linda and Janie. Linda married Alan Lawson, capped 15 times for Scotland at scrumhalf, and one their three children, Rory, has played scrumhalf for Scotland. Janie married Tommo Thompson of racing fame and their son Jim plays in the backs for Edinburgh. It was a huge blow when Janie died of cancer in 2000 at the age of 46. He was at her bedside but she insisted that he go off to commentate. Match done, he rushed back to the hospital but she had already died.

Trained in physical education and a schoolmaster, Bill McLaren is best known as a commentator and as a commentator he travelled the world though he said: “I’m a very domesticated animal, never happier than when at home with Bette or in the company of our family.” For him every day out of Hawick was “a day wasted”.

In 1979 Bill McLaren was made MBE, OBE in 1992 and CBE in 2003. Why he was not knighted is a mystery. He was the first non-international inducted into rugby’s Hall of Fame.

William Pollock McLaren was born in Hawick on 16 October 1923. He died in the community hospital in Hawick on Tuesday, 19 January 2010. He is survived by Bette, Linda, his sons-in-law and five grandchildren.

From rugby365