‘The rugby tour gets down to the bedrock of New Zealand’s sporting life’: The 1950 British Lions in late imperial context

Abstract

This paper examines several dimensions of the tour to New Zealand and Australia by the 1950 British Lions. Firstly, in a direct comparison with the British Empire Games staged in Auckland in January 1950, it considers the tour within an evolving New Zealand identity in which enduring devotion to Britain was being challenged by Cold War and other global imperatives. Secondly, with reference to the previous and somewhat controversial British rugby tour to New Zealand in 1930, the paper assesses the overall ‘health’ of New Zealand rugby in the two decades following the abolition of the wing-forward and a general curtailing of ‘colonial innovations’ to the laws of the game. These decades also witnessed decidedly mixed fortunes for the national game including the loss of all six test matches played by the All Blacks in 1949. While New Zealand had finally secured a seat on the International Rugby Board in 1948, the extent to which the New Zealand Rugby Football Union and its followers were confident in the state of their game at mid-century is debatable.