70 years on, it's now tears of joy for Boston

AT HOME in Angelina Street one Friday evening during the early spring of 1953, Billy Boston thought about what he had just done and burst into tears.

- PETER JACKSON

As the Wigan delegation headed off on the long journey north armed with his contractual signature, it would not have occurred to them that behind the front door in the Boston family’s crowded patch of Tiger Bay they left a teenager in some distress.

“When the Wigan people left the house late that Friday, I cried,’’ he told me long ago. “I thought: ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’

“I never saw any of the fivers spread out on the table. My mother took them and that was fair enough because she’d brought me up and she had a big family to look after.

“I wasn’t bothered about the money and I certainly wouldn’t have paid three grand for someone like me, not for all the tea in China. I understood that my mother had to keep her word but I knew I would never play for Wales at the Arms Park.’’

Seventy years on, Billy Boston is about to be moved to tears again; tears not of sorrow from an 18-year-old leaving home with his biggest ambition up the spout but tears of joy from an 88-year-old returning home for a ceremony beyond his dreams.

On Wednesday morning at Landsea Square, the southern tip of South Cardiff a stroll from where the original Angelina Street used to be, a statue will be unveiled in honour of The Codebreakers, a select few of those native sons who began in Union, then enhanced Welsh rugby in its widest sense as League professionals.

Some went out of sheer economic necessity, most notably Gus Risman whose father fled the first Russian Revolution in 1905 to create the rugby dynasty as featured in this column two weeks ago. Others made the switch by chance, like Clive Sullivan who made an impression in Rugby League country while playing Rugby Union there for the Army.