Barry John, legendary Welsh fly-half nicknamed ‘The King’ who quit rugby at the height of his powers

‘What frightened me was the intensifying public movement towards my own deification. I began to scream inwardly…’

Barry John, who has died aged 79, is regarded as one of the finest fly-halfs ever to play rugby. The elusiveness of his running and the pinpoint accuracy of his kicking have persuaded many judges that among the rich pantheon of great Welsh No 10s of the past century – Cliff Jones, Cliff Morgan, David Watkins, Phil Bennett and Jonathan Davies – the thin man from Cefneithin deserves the crown.
He was, in fact, named King John by the New Zealand press and public when he starred in the first Test-series victory by the British and Irish Lions against the All Blacks on their own soil. It was a nickname that haunted him on his return to Wales: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
That was in 1971, his annus mirabilis, when he had also helped Wales to their first Five Nations Grand Slam since 1952. At the end of the following season, in which Wales were again unbeaten, John sealed the championship with four penalty goals in a 20-6 victory over France in Cardiff and set a new individual points-scoring record for Wales.
He then shocked the world of rugby by announcing his retirement at the end of that match, his 25th for Wales, aged only 27. As he said himself: “I was at the peak of my career at the very top of world rugby.” He was giving up what he called “a supreme experience, a ride on a kind of magic carpet”.
Later he explained: “What began to depress me – and, in the end, to frighten me – was the intensifying public movement towards my own deification. I began to scream inwardly. I don’t have much talent for coping with hyper-adulation and its suffocating side-effects. The pressures became more than I could stand.”
These pressures included the tsunami of invitations he received to speak or attend lunches and dinners, to the detriment of his family life. He also resented the physical intrusions of fans prodding his chest, pulling his hair, tugging his clothes and taking his shirt buttons. What finally freaked him out was women curtsying to him in the street. “I had been turned into a circus act.”
Gareth Edwards, his scrum-half partner for Cardiff, Wales, the Lions and the Barbarians, said: “It’s not how good he was; it’s how good he could have been. I honestly feel that an even more glittering future lay before him.”Barry John was born on January 6 1945 at Low-Land, a smallholding at Cefneithin, about 10 miles from Camarthen. His parents, William and Vimy, had four sons and two daughters; Barry was the second son. The father worked for 28 years in the Great Mountain colliery at Tumble, a few miles away. In one Cefneithin street of 24 houses, 21 were occupied by miners.It was a warm community, Welsh-speaking, chapel- and rugby-loving, in the valley of the River Gwendraeth. John wrote later: “I wouldn’t want to change a day of my childhood.”
All four boys played for the village team, and three of them for Llanelli. One brother went on tour with Wales and another played for Wales B, and would have gone further had he not suffered a serious injury. One daughter married Derek Quinnell, who was in the same Wales and Lions teams as Barry John, establishing another Welsh rugby dynasty.
At the village primary school, the head and one of the teachers had played rugby for Wales. In the same village lived Carwyn James, who won two caps for Wales as a fly-half before becoming a highly successful coach, beating the All Blacks with Llanelli, the Barbarians and the Lions. Although 16 years older than Barry, he threw a ball about with him from an early age, taught him to dummy and sidestep, and mentored him as his rugby talent emerged.
John passed the 11-plus at the second attempt and went to Gwendraeth Grammar School at Drefach, four miles from home. Aged 12 he was playing for the school under-15 team, even though he was only seven stone. He first played for Cefneithin when he was 16. On a Saturday he sometimes played rugby for Cefneithin in the morning and football for another local village, Porthyrhyd, in the afternoon.
He was equally good at football, scoring eight goals in one match, and drew interest from several senior clubs. Like Gareth Edwards, he could have made it as a professional footballer. He attributed some of his rugby skills to the other game: “I had an ability to dodge and feint, to make my opponents go the wrong way, and when they got possession I had a good idea of the way they were going to move.”
His west Wales background made rugby an inevitable choice, though, and at 18 he was invited to play for Llanelli, but could only appear during the school holidays. He then went to study for a teaching diploma at Trinity College in Carmarthern, where he met Janet Talfan Davies, daughter of a leading Welsh lawyer, Alun Talfan Davies QC. She had been to Cheltenham Ladies College and went to on be a teacher. They married in 1969 and had four children, though they later separated.
He made his debut for Llanelli two days before his 19th birthday in 1964 and his debut for Wales two years later, while still at Trinity College. He became a regular at Stradey Park until the 1967-68 season, when he moved to Cardiff and began his hugely productive half-back partnership with Edwards.
When they first practised together, Edwards grinned: “You’re as confident and as big-headed as I am.” They were contrasting figures – Edwards always dynamic and restless, like a coiled spring, “an explosion waiting to happen,” as John put it. He himself was more aloof, with an air of cool superiority. As the Wales and Lions winger Gerald Davies put it: “While the hustle and bustle went on around him, he could divorce himself from it all: the game would go according his will and no one else’s.”
John said: “Our partnership was a natural and instinctive thing. We hardly ever talked tactics and our moves were spontaneous, not hatched in the dressing-room or at a blackboard.”
Having missed out on selection for Welsh Schools, John was determined to represent his country at senior level. His ambition was balked initially by the established Welsh and Lions fly-half, David Watkins, to whom he was reserve in four internationals.
He won his first cap in 1966 in a 14-11 defeat to the Wallabies, but made up for that a month later by scoring a try and a drop goal in Llanelli’s historic 11-0 victory over the tourists.
This try was described on air by Cliff Morgan: “This is Barry John again … going for the break … Oh no, he can’t make it this time … Yes, he can … he’s broken one tackle … he’s broken two … he’s inside again … is he clear? … 10 yards to go … can he get there? … what a try!”
He was chosen again for Wales against Scotland at Murrayfield, but misguidedly played while carrying a leg injury and was replaced in the next match by Watkins. In 1968, however, Watkins signed for the rugby league club Salford for a record fee and John became his automatic replacement in the Welsh side for the next four years.
He got a job as PE teacher at Monckton House School in Cardiff, but he had to give it up at the end of the 1968 season when he and Edwards were chosen for the Lions squad for South Africa. John broke a collar bone on the hard ground at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria in the first Test and took no further part in the tour.
On his return to Wales he signed on the dole because he had lost his teaching job and could not find any other work. When his plight was reported in the media, he was offered a job by the Forward Trust, a finance house in Cardiff, where he worked as a rep for some years while living in crowded digs with friends who included Gerald Davies.
He turned down tempting offers from two big rugby league clubs, Wigan and St Helen’s, mainly because he could not bear the thought of leaving Wales.
The following year he helped Wales to win the Triple Crown, thrashing England in Cardiff 30-9, John scoring a try and a drop goal. Edwards recalled John’s try as “pure magic”: when a Welsh attack broke down, “the maestro from Cefneithin scooped up the ball, and he ghosted, he glided, he weaved, coming off his right foot and his left foot, leaving the England defence in an embarrassed heap as he crossed the try line. It was a moment of individual brilliance.”
This ability of John to move silkily past would-be tacklers was described by the sports writer Frank Keating: “Barry John came like a ghost in the night … He was an insouciant natural sprite with a pale face and an apparently frail body … Sometimes, as he glided through ferociously hulking enemies, he made it seem they were actually mesmerised.”
For all the praise heaped upon him, John was a modest and rather shy young man who was embarrassed when fans or the media recalled his most memorable feats. When he first played for Wales he was worried about how he should address the captain, Alan Pask – “Mr Pask”, “Sir” or just “Alan”. This apparent bashfulness was in sharp contrast to his self-confidence on the field.
In 1970 Wales lost only to Ireland; after that, they never lost a game in which John played for Wales. The Grand Slam of 1971 was followed by the record-breaking victory in New Zealand, of which John was the brightest star. He had to rid himself of bad memories of an earlier disastrous tour with Wales, which John described as “my worst performance in top-class rugby”.
In the first Test in 1971 he won the match with the deadly precision of his kicking game, pulling the veteran All Black full-back Fergie McCormick all over the field. His curling kicks rained came down persistently just out of McCormick’s reach as they spiralled and twisted in the air. The great All Black was humiliated and never played again. The Lions won 9-6, including two penalties by John.
The All Blacks hit back powerfully in the second Test, winning 22-12, thanks mainly to the power of their scrum-half, Sid Going. For the third Test Derek Quinnell was brought into the back row to mark Going out of the game, which he duly did. The Lions put on 13 points in the first 18 minutes, in which Davies and John scored tries and John dropped a goal and converted both tries. They held on to win 13-3.
All depended on the fourth Test, which was a 14-14 draw, giving the Lions the series. John’s kicking was likened to that of a chess master pushing his opponents towards checkmate and making them battle defensively just to survive.
He was the unquestioned star of the tour, playing in 17 of the 26 matches, scoring 30 of the Lions’ 48 points in the Tests and a record 191 points overall. In the Universities game he scored a remarkable try which is still talked about in New Zealand. He received the ball from a scrum on the opponents’ 22, with their whole team in front of him. The waited for one of his trademark drop goals, but instead he danced right through them to score under the posts, stunning the home crowd.
Summing up the tour, the captain John Dawes said: “Barry took New Zealand by the scruff of the neck. His tactical awareness, allied to astonishing self-confidence, was the key to our success.”
John returned to win the three Welsh games played in the 1972 Five Nations (a trip to Dublin was cancelled because of the Troubles) and then announced that he was retiring to write a rugby column for the Daily Express and comment on HTV, which he continued to do for many years.
He was immortalised in the words of the official history of Welsh Rugby Union: “He was the dragonfly on the anvil of destruction. John ran in another dimension of time and place. His opponents ran into the glass walls which covered all escape routes from their bewildered clutches.”
He was entered into the rugby halls of fame for Wales, the International Board and World Rugby, but unlike his partner, Sir Gareth Edwards, he received no honour.
Barry John is survived by three daughters and a son.
Barry John, born January 6 1945, died February 4 2024