John & Richard wrestle with Gareth & Merv
After our recent visit to Twickenham to deliver the Groggs for the World Rugby Museum I was reminded of a similar trip we made in the late 1970s to the BBC in Shepherd’s Bush with the largest things ever made in the Groggshop. Although technically the giant Front Row is the largest Grogg we ever made, as it was made of clay, the giant papier-mâché figures of Gareth, JPR, Mervyn and Gerald have yet to be beaten for sheer size. The Mervyn Davies in particular was almost eight foot tall beating the real thing by a good eighteen inches.
Tommy David & John chat over a cuppa while watched over by Gerald & Merv!
Once again it was one of Dad’s ideas. We’d been told that the Groggshop could be somewhat intimidating to enter as a building and Dad thought we needed an attraction outside to help people understand what was on the inside of the old converted pub on the Broadway. So, he roped in our old friend Ron Masson from Treforest Foundry to make some giant armatures and we got to work on the chicken wire muscles and rugby kits. It was a painful business and very time consuming work, twisting the sharp chicken wire into human forms but the papier-mâché work was great fun. There’s nothing better than squishing old newspapers in buckets of wall paper paste and slapping it everywhere. Pretty soon we had a giant Mervyn finished and it did the trick and quite literally stopped the traffic. We continued with the other three giants and they pretty soon became as popular as their smaller clay versions.
The late-great Broon from Troon with JPR & Gerald
The next thing we knew we had a call from the BBC in London to say they had heard about the giants of the Broadway and would we be interested in bringing them up to the Blue Peter studios. Having been brought up with Johnny Noakes, Peter Purves and Valerie Singleton in our living rooms I thought it was a hoax call. People may forget that television output was somewhat limited in the seventies so everyone of a certain age watched Blue Peter….it was hugely popular and ground breaking in some of the things they made poor Johnny do. The call turned out to be the real thing and the road trip was on! The only difficulty was getting a van big enough to transport these giants of welsh rugby, but we eventually found one and trundled off up the M4. I’ve often heard people on TV quiz shows saying they’ve had a wonderful day and I can guarantee that in our case it was true. I was a teenager by then and had been “officially” working at the shop for a year or so but even my grumpy teenage self was blown away by watching these icons of children’s TV at work.
JPR Williams MBE & his daughter
Gerald Davies CBE & Gerald
I even saw Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier in dressing gowns queuing for cups of tea! We had a full tour of the studios and offices and got to meet the enigmatic Johnny himself who did the piece on the giant Groggs. It was famously filmed live in the studio back then and we got to watch it all happen. There were no teleprompters in those days, so Johnny stuck his notes on JPR’s back and Lo and behold Cathy found them in the attic last week. I thought they’d been lost forever like so much of our memorabilia including the Giant Groggs themselves. They slowly decayed from the typical Welsh weather they were exposed to on a daily basis.
Dad also blamed his double hernia on having to put them in and out each day to stop people running off with them. In the end they were chopped up and skipped and only the photographs remain. But I’ll never forget that day in London and I’m so glad we found Johnny’s handwritten notes again, so I know it was all true!
