It is her wisdom that I will miss. And her spirit. You couldn’t crush her. It
didn’t matter how bad things seemed to you, she saw them getting better.
Most of all, she believed: in her family, in the goodness of people, in
life. When the cancer was diagnosed two years ago, she didn’t think for a
second that she wouldn’t come through it. She wouldn’t talk about it much,
as if she felt slightly embarrassed that a woman as strong as her could be
knocked down.
She had been treated on and off until, more than two months ago, aged 70, she
was given the all-clear. But soon the cancer returned and she deteriorated
quickly. It never stopped her being positive.
Three weeks ago she came to Windsor Castle to be present when I was receiving
my OBE award. Having her there, knowing how unwell she was, was one of the
proudest moments of my life. A few days later she was in hospital, and the
last three weeks have been tough for all of us, especially Dad.
The last part of her life was spent in Charing Cross hospital, where, as an
NHS patient, she was incredibly well looked after. Doctors, nurses and all
the staff made things as good as they could be.
Two weeks ago I was at her bedside when Prince Harry came to see her. They had
become friends at England rugby matches and, like lots of people, Harry knew
my mother as “Mrs D”.
She would have told him that Francesca, my sister, had once danced for his
mother and there was a little bond between Harry and Mum. That day he spent
two hours with her and brought a smile to her face. Even if the last weeks
were tough, Mum never stopped being herself: Mrs D, fighter.
“Nine of 10,” she used to say, referring to her place in the working-class
family from which she came. If ever a person was a product of her
environment, my mother was a child of London’s East End, the second youngest
in a big family that had more than a hint of Irishness.
“Francesca,” she used to say of my beloved sister, the youngest of the 51 who
perished in the Marchioness riverboat tragedy on the Thames in 1989, “is the
diamond. She sparkles like the star that one day she will be. Lawrence is
the emerald, like the Irish side of my family, full of laughter and the love
of life.” Well, with my mother, you had to laugh sometimes.
The fact that she was very ill over the last few weeks didn’t stop her being
herself. When I was at her bedside one day, she began: “Lawrence, Wasps lost
again today.”
London Wasps are the rugby team for whom I played until my retirement last
May. Although they are English champions, they have had a few bad results
recently.
“I know, Mum, but they’ll turn it round.”
“No, they need you back. Can’t you play?”
“No, Mum, I can’t play. I’ve retired. It’s finished for me.”
“Yeah, I know that, but you’ve just got to go back for a few weeks and sort
them out.”
“That’s not my job, Mum. Wasps have great coaches, great players, you know
that. The results are going to get better. And I haven’t been down at the
training ground for weeks.”
“Can’t you just turn up, then, and give them the team talk before the next
game, just help them get through these weeks?”
“Mum, it doesn’t work like that.”
MY mother was very proud of where she came from but also very proud of where
she got to. If you are the ninth child in a family of 10 from the East End
and you have to leave school at 15 to begin your working life, the challenge
is pretty formidable. Her first job was for the local authority in Tower
Hamlets, where she was the general dogsbody until she was moved into the
accounts department.
After that she became a dental nurse, then a driver for a company called Car
Mart, a chauffeur for Lord Bowater and an air stewardess with British United
Airways for six years.
When I was young she would have two or three jobs going at the same time. I
remember her and Dad running a newsagents’ shop on Commercial Road in the
East End and needing a loan to expand and improve the shop. She went to her
bank.
“And what collateral can you put up against any prospective loan we might
offer you?” asked the bank manager.
She looked at him and laughed: “If I had collateral, what would I be doing
here looking for a loan, you stupid sod?”
Even though she was driven and an incredibly hard worker, Mum still managed to
be at home most of the time and was a huge influence in my life and the
young life of my sister.
Where we lived in Barnes was close to a council estate and, although I was
sent to a good school in Richmond, I liked to hang out with the kids from
the estate when school was over. I didn’t always obey Mum’s order to be home
before dark and she would come looking for me, making sure she embarrassed
me in front of my tough friends.
I was far from the model son, always getting in and out of trouble.
“Lawrence,” she would say, “when you behave badly at school, you offend me.”
It was the one sure way she had of getting to me because that was the last
thing I wanted to do.
Francesca would always intervene on my behalf: “Mum, don’t worry about
Lawrence, he’ll come good in the end.” And over the last few weeks, when Mum
was poorly and Dad needed us, I’ve thought of Francesca and how brilliant
she would have been because she always knew the right thing to say to Mum.
I have thought, too, of all the great times we had with Mum, how her
extrovert, fun-loving nature would light up a room, how she loved to tell
stories and not be afraid of a little embellishment. She would talk about a
try I once scored against Wales and if you believed her, I carried half the
Welsh team over the line before getting the score.
Her faith gave Francesca and me the confidence to try things, to expect that
if we worked hard we would achieve what we wanted.
If things weren’t happening quickly enough, Mum was always there to push them
along. I got my first cap for England against South Africa in the autumn of
1995, coming on as a replacement with 18 minutes left. It all passed in the
blink of an eyelid and I hardly remember a thing from that first experience
in an England shirt – except that we lost.Yet I’ll never forget the scene
after the game.
Mum, not the biggest woman you had ever seen, marched up to Jack Rowell, the
England head coach – all 6ft 5in of him.
“It’s obvious what you need to do,” she said, “get him [me!] in the team from
the start.” And I’m there, gently pulling her away, as I used to years
before when we’d be at a market stall and she’d be haggling over a price. At
the next match I made my first start for England, so I don’t know if I
deserved it or if she had intimidated Jack.
That was the thing about my mother: she was never afraid to nail her colours
to the mast, especially if they were her son’s or daughter’s colours. She
strove for something better than she had known in her childhood. It wasn’t
social climbing, but a more fundamental need to ensure her children had
better opportunities than she’d had. This was a philosophy shared by Dad and
I can never forget the sacrifices they made to send Francesca and me to two
of the best schools in England.
Francesca had the talent and the work ethic to get a scholarship to Elmhurst
dance school and that lessened the burden for our parents. I wasn’t
similarly blessed and, relative to what they earned, they paid staggering
amounts to send me to Ampleforth college in Yorkshire.
A year before I started at Ampleforth, Mum wrote to register me. A letter from
the school soon arrived: “Dear Mrs Dallaglio, if we register Lawrence his
name would go on the third list. We have three lists and normally complete
our intake from the first list. Occasionally, some are taken from the second
list but rarely is it ever possible to accommodate any of those on the third
list.”
Mum replied to the lady in question: “As it was by divine providence that I
wrote to you in the first place, please register his name, because if it is
the wish of the Almighty God that Lawrence is to attend Ampleforth, then it
really won’t matter what list he’s on.”
That was Mum. She believed Ampleforth was where I should go and nothing was
going to stand in her way. It meant money was tight. When we went over to
the East End for a family get-together, she would mention to her younger
sister Maureen that I was going back to Ampleforth the following day and
didn’t have any money for the next two months. And my Auntie Maureen would
take me round the men: “This is Lawrence, he’s going back to that fancy
school up north next week and he hasn’t a bean.”
The men would say, “Is that so?” and take out their wallets, which were always
full of cash. It was the East End way: you didn’t travel light and credit
cards and chequebooks were for the birds. They were generous people, very
generous. Money didn’t rule their lives; it didn’t come easily but it went
easily and, when it was gone, they worked hard to get more. By the end of
the evening I’d have collected about £300 or £400 and, for about a month or
so, I’d be the richest boy in Ampleforth.
Sometimes I glance at East-Enders, the television programme, and I don’t
recognise any of the East End characters of my mother’s family. Mum’s people
weren’t as remotely troubled as that lot on the television. In the East End
that I knew, the glass was always half full.
“The Lord will provide,” Mum used to say when a terrible bill arrived in the
post and she was right. She always wanted us to do the things she never got
to do: “You’ve got the chance to go skiing? You have to take it, I never
skied.”
ONE of the reasons my mother wanted me to go to Ampleforth was that it was
considered the best Catholic school in the country. She also wanted me to
get into a network of people who would be able to help me after I left the
school.
I always thought it was ironic that it was that same network of people who
slammed the door in her face when she went in search of justice for
Francesca and the other 50 Marchioness victims.
The years she devoted to that cause are her legacy as much as her family is.
She and a small number of other Marchioness activists forced the authorities
eventually to admit that the Marchioness disaster was not an accident but
was caused by the negligence of two companies, Ready Mixed Concrete and
Tidal Cruises, and that 51 young people on that boat were unlawfully killed.
Murdered, if you like.
As Mum used to say, “They were killed on a bright, moonlit summer’s night not
a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament.”
It took years to establish the fact that they had been unlawfully killed when
the Bowbelle, the dredger owned by Ready Mixed Concrete, ploughed into the
Marchioness. But Mum would want us to be optimistic and to acknowledge that
the Thames is now a far safer river to sail than on that August night.
If my mother poured her heart and soul into the pursuit of justice, and used
that struggle as her way through overwhelming grief, it wasn’t without its
cost on our family. Dad grieved in a very different way; quiet, stoical, he
found he was now married to a woman whose life was measured in inquests,
hearings, appeals, meetings with MPs, meetings with barristers, endless
meetings with the Marchioness Action Group.
She spent afternoons in the public library, where she pored over the merchant
shipping laws of 1894, learning what was expected of a prudent master taking
his boat onto the Thames estuary and realising what had not happened that
night.
She learnt about river currents, arcs of vision, strobe lights – the stuff,
she said, that befuddled the layman and allowed people in authority to
whitewash their mistakes.
She bought one share in Ready Mixed Concrete for £25 and for 10 years she
spoke at the company’s annual general meeting and reminded the directors
that they were responsible for the Marchioness disaster, something they were
refusing to accept. At one point, when the company was announcing pretax
profits of £260m, it was refusing to pay for headstones for the 51 people
killed.
Mum had 14 boxes of legal papers related to the case and for 10 years spent
£600 annually in storage costs. At those Ready Mixed Concrete AGMs she would
be as nervous as hell, but wouldn’t show it. Before speaking she would go
into the ladies, get on her knees and pray to God for the strength to say
what she had to say. She was an incredibly brave woman.
At the inquest in 1995, Michael Mansfield QC said to her: “The best we can
expect from this jury is an open verdict.”
She replied: “You and I both know Francesca and 50 others were unlawfully
killed and if you can’t convince them, I will.”
When the “unlawful killing” verdict was eventually reached, Mum was asked how
she felt. “How do I feel?” she said, “I feel as if I have been
psychologically and emotionally raped over a period of time. That’s how I
feel.”
Through the years of agitation and aggravation, she had argued her case
passionately and intelligently, so much so that people would tell her she
should have been a lawyer. “I wouldn’t have been able to stand the injustice
of it,” she used to reply.
Mum was, of course, part of a great group of campaigners. People like Barbara
Davis, Billy Gorman, Tony Perks and Margaret Lockwood-Croft gave so much of
themselves in return for justice for those lost on the Marchioness. Because
of their work, one part of London is now a much safer place for us and our
children. It’s something they can all be deeply proud of.
I HAD just turned 17 when my sister died and I didn’t know how to grieve.
Denial and a lot of anger found their outlet in a rebellious attitude. Mum
and Dad, to their eternal credit, stayed with me and eventually I came
round. Whatever rugby career I’ve had, and whatever I am now making of my
life, is down to them.
I have always seen my career as being underpinned by a pyramid. You are the
narrow bit at the top. Underneath you are your teammates and coaches;
underneath them the coaches and teachers you had at school; and, finally,
the widest and strong bit at the bottom, the foundations that keep the
pyramid upright, that’s your family.
When the intense grief began to subside for me and I heard Francesca’s voice
asking me what I was making of my life and if I was doing the things that
would make Mum and Dad happy, rugby became the centre of my life.
Mum and Dad started going to Wasps’ matches, became Wasps’ supporters and I
was able to use some of my experiences of life to fuel my desire to be
successful.
What motivated me was a need to honour the memory of my sister, to give
something to my parents. Everything I’ve achieved is a reflection of what I
felt about them. This is not to play down the fact that my career could
never have been anything without the great players and coaches I
encountered. I have long believed you achieve nothing in life on your own.
Mum would come to Wasps in her yellow jacket and shatter Dad’s eardrums when
all he wanted was to watch the game and enjoy a quiet cigar. The Wasps
community embraced her, listened when her Marchioness crusade had met
another setback, then gently moved her on to the subject of rugby.
She got on great with Shaun Edwards, the Wasps coach – loved him. They were
two peas from the same pod, both from working-class backgrounds, both
Catholic, both very spiritual and passionate people, full of belief, and
both completely mental.
I am left with so many memories. In my mind I celebrate her life far more than
I lament her passing.
In the old days I would say, “Mum, I’m going out, can I have a purple one?”
meaning £20.
She’d say, “What do you mean, a purple one?” Twenty, I would tell her.
“Haven’t got a purple one.” “How about a brown one?” “What’s a brown one?”
Ten, I’d answer. “I haven’t got a brown one,” she’d reply, “but I’ll tell
you what, I’ll give you a blue one.” Blue, of course, was a fiver.
The truth about Mum, though, was that she would give you the last note in her
purse.
The Dallaglio family would prefer no flowers but donations to Cancer
Research UK at www.justgiving.com/eileendallaglio
