Letter to North Wales Weekly News showing the growing interest for RGC 1404
Colwyn Bay rugby stadium should mark teacher's contribution
Jan 21 2010
LAST week you headlined a letter from a former pupil of Colwyn Bay Grammar School (Rugby boost is great news for North Wales) in which he remembered his time as a young player at the very ground in Eirias Park where the Welsh Rugby Union is to set up its new North Wales team centre.
There will be many more of us who were taught to play on this pitch in the 1950s and 60s and will remember those times with pleasure when we can come to support the North Wales Rugby Team (the Gogs?) at their soon to be built Colwyn Bay HQ.
What many readers may not know is that, we sixty-somethings were actually attending a school which had no rugby tradition whatsoever.
In fact it was not even taught as part of the PE curriculum. So how did it come about that your correspondent OP Owen and many more of us received the instruction which was to enable us to enjoy rugby for the rest of our live?
It is all down to the unpaid after-hours coaching provided by the School’s Latin master: Bernard Vickery.
A distinguished rugby and hockey player himself, he single-handedly unlocked the magic of rugby to all-comers (even the most unpromising of players like myself) right there in Eirias Park.
Had he lived long enough, he would no doubt have been proud to watch the emergence of the new North Wales club on this site.
Such a development provides us with opportunities to acknowledge the debt which so many of us feel we owe to this man for sharing his rugby knowledge and enthusiasm with us: naming a clubroom bar after him for example, or a spectators’ stand, perhaps?
I hope that what is now Eirias High School will reap huge benefits from any relationship which it may develop with our new North Wales Rugby Club, and that we can one day join together to commemorate the School’s former staff member of whom we can all be proud.
Roger Lee
Colwyn Bay
