In April 1937 the Auckland Rugby League Gazette noted the versatility of Verdun Scott, a young North Shore Albions outside back who had dashed off from his club game at Carlaw Park to knock up 22 runs in the final cricket match of the season at Eden Park. It suggested its readers keep an eye on this enthusiastic and talented sportsman who was showing potential at both his winter and summer codes.
Scott went on to make tours to Britain as a skilled fullback and centre with the 1939 Kiwis and 10 years later as a resolute top-order batsman with the New Zealand cricket team. He remains the only New Zealander to be chosen for his country at cricket and rugby league and, now that both sports are fully professional, he is certain to remain unique among our double internationals. He might also be the only person to have played at Carlaw Park and Eden Park on the same day.
It would have been less surprising had Scott busied himself with water sports. After all, his father, Matt, was a ferry captain for 40 years and excelled as a swimmer (saving two lives), a yachtsman and a rower in whaleboat racing. But Matt did enjoy a game of rugby too, and his three sons were no strangers to the oval ball. Or the round one, for Verdun was also good enough at soccer to represent Auckland B.
Scott’s two tours could not have been more contrasting. The 1939 Kiwis spent five weeks sailing to England on the Rangitiki all too aware that ominous war clouds were looming over Europe. They maintained their fitness on board ship as best they could in preparation for three test matches with Great Britain and 24 other fixtures against the professional clubs and counties. There was also the prospect of an historic first tour of France.
Optimism was high that this team would emulate the on-field triumphs of the original All Golds, who won their test series in 1907-08. Scott was one of 17 new caps, the others including former All Blacks Dave Solomon, Hawea Mataira and Harold Milliken. The Kiwis were captained by Rex King, a Cantabrian who had spent four seasons playing for Warrington, and boasted a champion goalkicker in Jack Hemi.
They landed in England on August 29, travelled on to their headquarters at Harrogate, and beat St Helens 19-3 on September 2. But the banner headlines on Monday, September 4, proclaimed that Britain and France were at war with Germany. Their tour in tatters, the Kiwis offered to assist the war effort any way they could. They were issued with gas masks, filled sandbags to protect a nearby hospital, and were placed on a round-the-clock stand-by to embark for home.
But the Rangitiki was being fitted with a naval gun and cloaked in wartime grey paint. On September 9 the Kiwis beat Dewsbury 22-10, the match being allowed to go ahead only because that west Yorkshire town was out of range of German bombers. Gate receipts were donated to patriotic funds and the Kiwis went back to filling sandbags until the Rangitiki was ready to sail on September 19. They were part of the first convoy to leave England during World War II. Team managers and players were rostered to keep submarine watch, two at a time on two-hour shifts in daylight hours. The ship was blacked out at night.
Only one of the 26 players, Auckland centre Arthur McInnarney, returned to Britain with the 1947-48 Kiwis. Another, Laurie Mills, was killed in action in Egypt. Rex King, the Kiwis captain, appropriately rose to the army rank of Captain and earned the Military Medal before being captured in Crete.
Verdun Scott, however, had a second string to his sporting bow. His first-class cricket career had started with a century for Auckland against Canterbury in 1937-38 but was put on hold for four years while he was on war service in Egypt and Italy. Scott made his test debut against Australia at the Basin Reserve in 1946 when, on a damp and devilish pitch, New Zealand succumbed for just 96 runs in two completed innings. Scott top scored in the first innings with 14 out of a total of 42.
On that same 1945-46 Australian tour, Scott batted at number five for Auckland and scored 41 not out (of a total 138) and 56 not out (of 261) in reply to an Australian innings of 579 which featured centuries to Sid Barnes, Keith Miller and Lindsay Hassett. After bowling to Scott for a long time without reward, frustrated Australian spinner Bill (Tiger) O’Reilly proclaimed that he would throw a party if he could get a ball past the batsman’s defences. One wonders what O’Reilly would have said had Scott not run out of partners.
As if to make up for what happened in 1939 – when Scott was unfortunate not to have played against St Helens or Dewsbury because Hemi’s kicking prowess meant he was the fullback in both games – Scott went on to appear in 27 of the 32 matches for captain Walter Hadlee’s celebrated 1949 cricketers on their tour of England.
This was the team which earned New Zealand respect as a cricketing nation, and Scott’s opening stands with prolific left-hander Bert Sutcliffe were the foundations of so many big innings. The New Zealanders lost only once and held their own with the best professional and amateur players England could assemble in four drawn test matches. Scott did not have the flair of Sutcliffe, Hadlee, Martin Donnelly or a young John R Reid but his contribution was just as valuable.
As R T Brittenden wrote in his book, New Zealand Cricketers: ‘Sutcliffe’s batting was usually so beautiful it looked insubstantial, Hadlee’s attacking methods might be stepped up because he found his side 20 runs behind the schedule he had set, but Scott seldom gave the bowlers the slightest hint of encouragement. His bat became an entrenching tool. He threw up his earthworks, got in behind them, and was content for some considerable time thereafter to smother the opposition cannonballs and dump them gently about the region of silly mid-on. But at the end of it all, it would be discovered that the runs had been coming gently, imperceptibly, steadily.'
Sutcliffe and Scott shared test opening partnerships of 122, 89 and 121 on that tour. In all first-class matches Scott scored 1572 runs at an average of 40, including four centuries, six half-centuries and a highest score of 203.
Brittenden detailed two other outstanding test innings by Scott on home soil. He made 60 out of 189 against England at the Basin Reserve in 1951 when he stood tall despite being hampered by a badly pulled muscle. And he registered his highest test score of 84 in a total of 160 with another defiant, and at times uncharacteristically cavalier, hand against the West Indies at Eden Park in 1952. Scott retired soon after that with a lifetime first-class average of 49.73 and a career average for Auckland of 60.10.
It took Verdun Scott a long time to realise his dream of playing for his country. His first attempt, at rugby league, was thwarted by the lunatic Hitler. Undeterred, Scott took himself off to war before returning home to take guard again and get on with his sporting life. His example is a lesson to any young man who might be impatient that success is seemingly not coming quickly enough. Scott died, as he had lived, in Devonport in 1980, two days after his sixty-fourth birthday. His was an innings superbly played.