TREK OUT OF TROUBLE - Noel Holmes; Whitcombe and Tombs, 1960.

Mistake #1 of reading a book - don’t hype it up in your mind before you’ve even read it. This is what happened as I started to turn the pages through this insight into the 1960 All Blacks tour of South Africa.

This was the first tour to South Africa which had a large section of New Zealanders actively against it. Protestors on the runway, secret ballots at NZRFU headquarters, security measures - this tour had it all. Holmes only briefly touches on this aspect, with the first chapter set aside for the animosity and politics before the tour.

The final paragraph of that chapter gives an idea of Holmes' view.

"We New Zealanders are often accused of placing too much importance upon rugby football. The accusation is probably correct. Yet, even as a football lover, I couldn’t agree that the game has such standing that we should base our foreign policy as a nation upon it. That is what our critics were asking us to do,’’ he said.

This sums up Holmes’ writing style - simple, easy to read, and, even in 2005, a rather engaging style. The one major drawback of this book is Holmes was not a specialist rugby writer - rather a general reporter given the task of covering the tour. Hence, some of his passages on the matches are muddled, and scant at best.

Throughout the book, Holmes writes about his conversations with white South Africans, and appears to go out of his way to meet and greet black South Africans, which gives a small glimpse into what they were up against.

One conversation with a white farmer summed up the attitude the natives were up against.

Holmes writes:

"Over a glass of beer I heard for the first time the expression the expression of a philosophy with which we were to become increasingly familiar: ‘I tell you man, we Afrikaners understand the blacks. I’ve got blacks who were born on my farm and their fathers and mothers were born there. I love them and they love me. But I tell you, man, they’re just animals, just savages. What could they do with the vote? They’re not human beings, man. That’s what people don’t understand when they tell us how to run our country. They’d like to treat the Bantu like human beings. They just don’t know the niggers, man…’ "

The book clears up a fair bit of history for the reader - Clarke is shown to have just as many off-days with the boot as the next kicker, Whineray (weighing in at a MASSIVE 90-odd kg) switches between #8 and prop in some games and the travel finally starts to be less of a factor between venues.

The All Blacks appeared to be having a running battle with the South African press (no surprises there) and Holmes has a fair old go at them, even threatening - through a column in one South African paper - that the All Blacks would not come back again if the kind of rubbish that had been in the media continued.

While slightly under whelmed by the book (entirely my own fault), I certainly enjoyed it - and the player profiles at the end are delightfully 1950s-1960s.

Have a flick through it if you get a chance.