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Frans ten Bos, Scottish rugby player – obituary
Frans ten Bos, who has died aged 79, was an English-born rugby player of Dutch parentage who played for Scotland, winning 17 caps between 1959 and 1963.
His parents returned to the Netherlands when he was a baby, but the family fled when the Nazis invaded in 1940. Frans’s pilot father, so the story goes, was on the Nazis’ “most wanted” list and he drove his family across France to Bordeaux, where they boarded a cocoa boat heading from West Africa to Britain.
Young Frans was subsequently evacuated – alongside, as he recalled, a great many “wee Glaswegians” – to Argyllshire.
Struck dumb by his experiences – not speaking a word of either Dutch or English – the three-year-old Frans was sitting with his mother and some friends having tea at the Rusacks hotel in St Andrews, overlooking the Old Course, when a Spitfire roared over the bay from the nearby Leuchars base.
Frans, in broadest Glaswegian, cried: “There’s mah dah-dy!” His mother, horrified by the accent, quickly packed him off to prep school.
Frans Herman ten Bos was born at Richmond in Surrey on April 21 1937. Later, the family settled in the popular, but up-market, holiday resort of Elie in Fife. Frans therefore spent his childhood and adolescence in Scotland, identified himself with Scotland and retired to Scotland after a successful career in the City of London.
He attended Lathallan Prep School, though it soon moved to the Angus coast after a fire destroyed Lathallan House. He took to rugby and on account of his size and power was immediately a feared opponent on the prep school circuit.
From Lathallan he went on to Fettes College, then the strongest rugby school in Scotland, its First XV not losing a school match in five years. Frans was a dominant figure in that team, though its mastermind was the future Scotland and British Lions fly-half, Gordon Waddell.
After National Service as a second lieutenant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he went to Oxford University, at a time when Oxford and Cambridge Blues still regularly featured in international teams while still undergraduates. It was no surprise when Scotland selected him for the Calcutta Cup match at Twickenham in 1959. He was one of three Fettesians in that Scotland XV, the others being Waddell and James Shackleton. The game ended in a draw 3-3.
Scotland had emerged from the dark days of the early Fifties when 17 consecutive internationals ended in defeat, but the pack, though skilful, was often a bit lightweight, and ten Bos, 6 ft 3 in tall and weighing 16 stone, made an immediate impression. His first partner at lock, Hamish Kemp of Glasgow High School FP, was barely 6 ft in height and weighed less than 14 stone, but in 1961 ten Bos was joined in the second row by the mighty Captain Mike Campbell-Lamerton of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, and for three years the pair were at the heart of a consistently successful Scottish scrum. Yet though Scotland were competitive, they still lost more matches than they won, ten Bos’s record reading: played 17, won 6, lost 9, drawn 2.
Few of the defeats were heavy in what was admittedly a low-scoring period, when defences were on top and the ball could be kicked into touch on the full from any part of the field. In his last season, 1963, he featured in an infamous match against Wales at Murrayfield in which on a wet day there were a 111 line-outs.
But 1962 was a good year. Scotland beat Wales in Cardiff for the first time since 1927, and ten Bos played a significant part in the victory, breaking clear to give the scoring pass to Ron Glasgow for Scotland’s first try. He scored the second himself after Waddell kicked high into the Welsh 22 and he gathered the rebound from a Welsh hand to use, as one report had it, “his considerable bulk” to power over the line. They then defeated Ireland in Dublin and went to England in search of Scotland’s first Triple Crown since 1938, only to have their hopes dashed in another 3-3 draw.
His form for Scotland and London Scottish was so good that year that he was invited to tour South Africa with the British Lions. But, having just married and started work, he declared himself unavailable, his mother reportedly insisting that, with his wife expecting their first child, there were more important things than rugby.
Be that as it may, he dropped out of the international game at the end of the next season. He was only 26, still young for a lock forward, and it is arguable that his best years would have been before him. But that is how it was in the days of amateur rugby, when players had to weigh the demands of work and family against the pleasures of the game.
The broadcaster Bill McLaren told an anecdote about the powerful ten Bos, recalling that after a dinner in Paris, the night before a game against France, he and Hugh McLeod, the “Hawick hardman”, bumped into ten Bos. “Frans,” said McLeod, “ye think ye’re a guid forrit but really ye’re just a big lump of potted meat. If ah was half yer size, I’d pick up the first two Frenchmen that looked at me in the morn and ah’d chuck them right over the bloody stand.”
Ten Bos tapped McLaren on the shoulder and said: “You know, I’d follow him anywhere.” Scotland won a rare away victory the next day.
Ten Bos had a successful printing business in London and, after selling up, retired to Glen Prosen in Angus. There he enjoyed shooting, fishing and playing golf, and was re-acquainted with many of his old school rugby adversaries, some of them still bearing the scars to prove it.
His first marriage, to Pamela (née Prentice), was dissolved. He is survived by his wife Teresa and three daughters from the first marriage.
Frans ten Bos, born April 21 1937, died September 1 2016