Scotland rugby internationalist
Born: June 5, 1934;
Died: September 20, 2016
WILLIAM John Hunter, known as Billy, who has died aged 82, was a rugby player who became one of the stalwarts in the fearsome Hawick pack of the 1960s and early 1970s, which established “the Green Machine” in the forefront of Scottish club rugby.
He won seven Scotland caps between 1964 and 1967, but knowledgeable rugby men will tell you he ought to have won more, even at a time when his competition for the two boilerhouse places in the national pack included British Lions Mike Campbell-Lammerton and Peter Stagg, future national captain Peter Brown and the young Alistair McHarg.
Billy Hunter was Hawick to the core, not merely a Hawick man - a “West-end Man”, the real Hawick worthies. Rugby was in his blood, at Hawick High School, through the youth club, Hawick PSA then on to Hawick Linden, before, in 1952, aged just 18, he first pulled on the famous green Hawick jersey.
His timing was spot-on, Hughie McLeod, behind whom Hunter packed, went off to the 1955 Lions tour of South Africa and returned determined to bring some of the professionalism in preparation and tactics he saw there, and again in New Zealand in 1959, to the Hawick set-up. Hunter became one of The Abbot's fiercest disciples, as Hawick upped their game.
He made his South debut in 1956, but the SRU selectors were less impressed by his form and he was almost 30 when he won the first of his seven caps, against France at the start of the Five Nations. Two weeks later he was in the Scotland team which held the All Blacks to a 0-0 draw, the closest Scotland has ever come to beating the New Zealanders. His immediate opponent that day was the legendary Colin Meads.
Campbell-Lammerton displaced him after the Welsh game that season and he had to wait until 1967 to complete his caps collection, by playing throughout the Five Nations, as a lock pairing with the giant six foot ten inch Peter Stagg, who dwarfed the not-insignificant six-foot-four inch Hunter.
In time, Hunter would pass the torch onto another Linden product, Ian Barnes, who said: “I felt immensely honoured to lock the scrum with Billy when I was just 18. He was very laid-back, but a total Hawick man and one of the guys who set the standards for the club”.
Hunter spent his early working life in the “Skinyards” in Hawick, taking the raw sheepskins and preparing them as the first stages of turning out the high-quality knitwear for which the town is famous. This was hard, dirty work, but Billy Hunter relished it.
Former Scotland and British and Irish Lions centre Jim Renwick once recalled that it was sometimes hard to Hunter to combine his work in the skinworks and his rugby and said his trainer Hugh McLeod took a hard line.
“I remember a story that Billy Hunter told me about playing with Hughie," said Renwick. "Billy was always turning up late for training and Hughie wasn’t best pleased. Billy protested one night that he was working at the skinworks and finished at 6pm and with training starting at half past he struggled to get down in time for the start. Well, the next day he gets home from work and there’s a bike at his door."
Hunter later became manager of the Hawick slaughterhouse, before starting his own business breeding dogs and running a boarding kennels.In addition to playing for Hawick for two decades, he represented Scotland and the South, he was a Barbarian, joining that elite invitation side in 1965, the same year he captained his beloved Hawick.
After he hung up his boots, he spent many happy hours on the golf course, where he was a single-figure handicapper, often playing with the legendary Bill McLaren, while his life-long friendship, a little and large affair, with former Hawick scrum-half Harry Whittaker was another joy.
He also bred and showed canaries to national standard, and, as a West-end Man, he participated in the Hawick Common Riding, taking great pleasure from Stuart,his youngest son, being Acting Father to Cornet Ritson in 2013.
Billy Hunter is survived by his wife Helen and by sons Alan, Derek and Stuart, three grand-daughters and one grandson and two great-grandchildren.
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