Recalling when all roads led to the sea

AS ANY half-decent student of European history knows, the first Russian Revolution of 1905 paved the way for the end of the Tsars.

- PETER JACKSON

What they don’t know is that it also paved the way for the foundation of an Anglo-Welsh rugby dynasty like no other, one that continues to out-live the Soviet Union by more than 30 years and counting.

Its genesis is to be found in a remote corner of Latvia in the village of Pavilosta, a barely discernible speck on the map of the Russian Empire when Augustus Reissmann or Rismanis, depending on family interpretation of Baltic German or Latvian ethnicity, was born near Riga 140 years ago.

He had been named after his father. Two more of some note, Augustus III and Augustus IV, would follow and thereby hangs a tale and a half.

At 21, the original Risman won a place at the Prussian Military Academy in Kiel, a naval port of global renown offering him the chance to realise his sea-faring ambitions. There he would almost certainly have been enrolled under the Germanic surname Reissmann.

Returning some 12 months later to Pavilosta where he met his future wife, Annette, a native Latvian, he found the waves unleashed by the first Russian Revolution bringing death and destruction as they crashed in off the Baltic. Newly-married, the young couple decided to flee from the mayhem breaking out all around them.

That they re-surfaced in Cardiff, then the world’s busiest port, was no accident. As a merchant seaman probably travelling under the name Rismanis, he had been drawn to the Welsh capital by the prospect of realising his oceanic ambitions and the promise of a better place to raise a family.