Old Lizzie’s Story: A Rugby Life in Exile and Return

By 73 year old Elizabeth, as shared with United Rugby Fans.

Born in Huntly, North-East Scotland, in 1952, Elizabeth’s rugby journey began long before she ever touched a ball. In December 1956, at the age of four, she boarded the Captain Hobson in Glasgow with her parents, older brother Les, and baby brother Alistair for the six-week voyage to New Zealand. Her father, a plumber, had secured work at the new freezing works in Invercargill , a job that guaranteed passage, housing, and the promise of a fresh start in a post-war world.

“I started school in April ’57,” she recalls. “Invercargill was cold, but it was home.”

Three or four years later the family moved north to Feilding. Then, on 1 December 1961, nine year old Elizabeth was rushed to Palmerston North Hospital with a swollen knee. The initial diagnosis  “fluid on the knee, some sort of bone disease” was revised when the specialist returned from holiday: rheumatic fever. Strict bed rest was ordered.

While she lay in hospital, her restless father uprooted the family again. Rather than leave her behind, Elizabeth was flown  strapped flat to a stretcher with a nurse in attendance  from Palmerston North to Rotorua. En route, the nurse loosened the straps so she could sit up and glimpse Mount Egmont rising beneath the wing. “She told me it was twinned with Mount Fuji because both have perfect elliptical summits,” Elizabeth laughs. “Travel broadens the mind, eh?”

She was discharged on 23 March 1962, three weeks before her tenth birthday, to a new house in Ngongotaha and a new school. The rules were non negotiable: no sport, no swimming, and on wet days she carried slippers in her bag , damp feet could send her straight back to hospital. Daily penicillin tablets continued until she was 21.

“New Zealand is sport-mad,” she says. “Sitting on the sideline while everyone else ran around was torture. But I became Mum’s right hand woman for five younger siblings, so there was always plenty to do.”

At 18 she left home, flatted, worked, and dated her first rugby player. Life was opening up. Then, at 52, her father died suddenly. Her mother took the younger children “home” to Scotland. Elizabeth followed a different path to Australia, living with cousins in Geelong and spending Sunday afternoons at the footy with the Cats.

Two and a half years later she flew to the UK to visit her family, stayed to support her mother, then drifted south: Oxford (another rugby playing boyfriend), London (perfumery business), and in 1985, Europe. She landed in Den Haag, married, divorced, and settled in Rotterdam.

“Within weeks I’d tracked down the local rugby club,” she says. “It was my social lifeline.” There she met a group of young Kiwi lads on a work exchange scheme the beginning of lifelong friendships. “Those exchange programmes changed lives,” she reflects. “Imagine rolling them out globally  lads like Fabian Holland getting a season in the NPC, learning the craft, bringing skills home. It could transform pathways.”

Twenty-five happy years in the Netherlands ended in 2010 when she returned to Scotland to care for her dying mother. Mum passed in 2011. In 2017 Elizabeth moved to Cornwall to be near her older brother Les and his wife both now in their seventies, so they could look after one another.

Through every posting, every hospital bed, every new postcode, rugby has been the constant: the game on the radio, the club at the end of the street, the Kiwi voices in a Dutch bar, the boyfriend who taught her the offside rule. She never played, but she lived it.

Old Lizzie’s story is the story of every rugby exile who carried the game in their heart across oceans and decades. 

And now, at 73, she’s still talking scrum half lines and conversion angles proof that the oval ball rolls on forever.

Got a story of your own? 

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