Ampthill RUFC

“If nothing else,” probably thought Catherine of Aragon as she was handed her divorce papers in the castle, “at least I’ll put this lovely town of Ampthill on the map”. Sadly, she didn’t. That job has now been left, almost 500 years later, to four Tongans and a Welshman called Paul.

Ampthill in Bedfordshire is probably the prettiest town you’ve never visited. Or, perhaps, never even heard of. If you have, odds are, you couldn’t pin it on a map. 

Surrounded, and indeed at times almost submerged, by England’s most green and pleasant lands, home to thatched cottages so pristine they look like newbuilds despite dating back 200 or so years and the meeting place of a weekly market that started in 1219 (happy 800th birthday folks). Even the houses in Ampthill that aren’t thatched, seem to require pruning as, wherever you look, ivy, trees and other assorted shrubbery gently drapes itself artfully around doorways and windows – like some kind of wistful, return-to-nature post-apocalyptic dream. This is where shops are in old forges and where Union Jacks mean post-war street parties rather than a show of support for Tommy Robinson.

Woburn Street, heading east out of the town, takes you past the thatched houses and to the entrance of the Great Park, some 245 acres of gardens and woodlands. It was also once home to the 15th-century Ampthill Castle, where Catherine of Aragon discovered that marrying your late husband’s brother was a bad idea. It was here – or at least in a castle that once stood here – that it is said she received notice of her divorce to Henry VIII, which then also had the awkward side effect of starting a small thing called the English Reformation.

As if all this shouldn’t enough to put it on the map, a 1970s picture book that acted as a treasure map leading to an 18-carat Golden Hare, causing a global sensation, started and ended in Ampthill. The Golden Hare was buried in the Great Park by Bamber Gascoigne in 1979 and found three years later, albeit in ‘dubious circumstances’ (a story for another day, and another magazine).

But where the most famed divorcee of all time, Bamber Gascoigne and 800 or so years of market trade have failed, a Welshman from Newbridge could well succeed, and bring the name Ampthill into the national consciousness. Or, at the very least, the rugby one.

Today, Ampthill, a town of 14,000 located pretty much halfway between Bedford in the north and Luton in the south, is having one of its biggest sporting days – just across the road from the Great Park. 

In the past decade, Ampthill RUFC have risen from level seven to the precipice of level three and are now six games away from winning promotion to the Championship. 

Level on points with visitors Old Elthamians, whichever side wins today has the destiny of the title in their own hands.  For a part-time club with no stand, no top-flight heritage, and a pitch based in woodland more akin to a game of Pooh Sticks than rugby, this would be quite the achievement.

Paul Turner first discovered Ampthill RUFC during his player-coach days at Bedford in the mid-90s. “I cycled down here with my wife and we stopped at the ground, I just thought it was a proper community rugby club,” he says, as we make the most of Ampthill’s idyllic setting by meeting in the local Costa. “Back then it reminded me of an old Welsh cartoon strip called Aberflyhalf RFC by Gren, where you’d have a club with a bent post, crossbar taped up with bandage, with one post smaller than the other because it had been put too deep in the ground. I never thought I’d be here one day, but there you go.”

Paul’s coaching credentials are without question. Starting coaching at the age of 31 while still at Newport, he moved to Sale as player-coach and, over four seasons, took them to the Premiership. “I had two seasons as a player in the Premiership with Sale before the game went professional,” he explains. “That summer I went to Bermuda to see John Mitchell, who had just finished with Waikato and had been coaching Ireland. I brought him on board with Sale but unfortunately I fell out with the Sale board and left, while he stayed on.”

Frank Warren’s Bedford was his next step, still as a player-coach nearing 40, “I just about got away with it,” he admits of his dual-role, “but you couldn’t play and coach at the top level now.” 

He took Bedford to the Premiership at the second attempt, having been beaten by Bristol in his first year.

Then it was Saracens, as backs coach. “It was a difficult time when I joined,” he says. “Guys like Lynagh and Sella were retiring, they bought in another French guy Alain Penaud, and there were a lot of cosmopolitan cliques around the place: the old Sarries boys, couple of Australians, load of South Africans, and it didn’t quite work. I didn’t stay around there long.” 

As a long-term resident of St Albans from his Bedford days, Paul did give them some advice before he left, which initially went unheeded. “I used to say to them at the time, ‘you want to get up to St Albans there’s a brand new pitch, brand new club’ – and they were like, ‘where’s St Albans?’ which probably summed it up to me. 

“It’s a little bit like back home with Cardiff and Newport and some people never go as far as the other place. All that separated Southgate [where Sarries were based] with St Albans [where they are now] was the M25 but people were like ‘where’s that?’ – it was only eight miles away.”

After the blip at Sarries, Paul joined Rugby Lions where he spent two seasons, getting them promoted to National One. Gloucester and a first-ever Premiership Grand Final win working with Philippe Saint-Andre was the next stop, before four years at Harlequins.

Eventually, about 13 years after leaving as a player, he went home to Newport Gwent Dragons. “It was my region, I was born and brought up in Newbridge, and I’m still the only capped back from the club which I’m really proud of,” he says. “Coming from that I thought they’d really take to me because I had the region’s interest at heart, but there was so much in-fighting.

“We punched above our weight at the time,” continues Paul. “We used to regularly beat Ulster, always Leinster at home, and we regularly beat Glasgow and Edinburgh – I think we went four or five seasons without losing to Glasgow, so frustrating how it went really.”

His train of thought stops as he tries to find the right description for Gwent rugby. “I’m trying to find the right word, ‘disillusionment’? No, not that. It was ‘chaos’ I suppose. Gwent rugby has been like that since 2003 when they had to go a regional side that nobody really supported. I was a big supporter of it, I knew there were things I could sort out. 

“I always tell a story of driving down the M4 [Paul always commuted from his home in St Albans] and as you come past Bath and just as you come down the motorway, you can see the bridge in the distance. I’d come down that hill and there was this big massive cloud over the Welsh valleys and I’d drive into it every Monday. But by the time I got into the cloud I couldn’t sort anything out. I could see what needed to be done, but it was bloody difficult to sort out.”

His stint lasted six years, coming to an end in 2011.“When I left the Dragons, I felt it was pretty unjust,” he says. “I was Magners Coach of the Year in April, then, come the following February, I was relieved of my duty.

“It was more political than anything at the time,” he admits. “I’d fallen out with the union and the Dragons board simply turned their back on me, but it was probably the right time to move on. I had a year left and it probably wouldn’t have gone any better with the squad we had. Proof of the pudding is what happened the year after.”

Shortly after leaving Dragons, Paul received a call from Mark Lavery, the director of rugby at Ampthill. “They were in London One, but they weren’t going to get promoted that season, and Mark said, ‘come and have a look and see what we’re doing’ – it was always difficult to get a new job in February [the month he’d left Dragons], so I went to see them.”

Talk of his plans to develop the club, including new pitches, not to mention discussing the junior section – the biggest in the East Midlands – gave Paul plenty to think about. 

At the time, former Welsh internationals Stuart Evans and Clive Griffiths were coaching, but when the latter rejoined Doncaster in the Championship, Paul decided to take up Mark’s offer. “He had good ambitions,” Paul says of Mark, who’s also a club sponsor. “He was a northern guy who did well in business with cars, Grange Jaguar Land Rover, and had a few franchises in a few locations.”

Joining when the club were in National League 3 Midlands (level five, now Midlands Premier), he took them to promotion in his first season. Moving up to National Two South, they made the play-offs, where they faced Darlington Mowden Park. “That was one of my worst rugby days,” admits Paul. “We were leading going into the very last bit of extra time, it was the 104th minute or something, and we conceded a length-of-the-field effort – it was terrible how it happened.”

The following season, they made the play-offs again, this time defeating Bishop’s Stortford to gain promotion to National One. 

Four seasons of being ‘nearer the top than the bottom’ which included well-funded or resourced sides such as Hartpury and Coventry storming to the title, and Ampthill have their best chance of promotion – not that Paul is entirely happy with their form. “To be honest, this season hasn’t been as good in patches as some of our other seasons,” he says. “You’ve only got to look at some of our results before Christmas, we lost to Caldy away, we got beat by Cambridge at home, we kicked the ball off against Esher when we thought we’d won, but were actually losing 49-48.”

Three Tongan internationals start for Ampthill today, with a fourth in the reserves. Thirty-seven-year-old, 18-cap former Northampton Saints prop Soane Tonga’uiha; 40-year-old, 38-cap hooker ex-Worcester hooker Aleki Lutui and 6ft 5in second row Maama Molitika, the eldest of them all at 44. Coming back from injury is 40-year-old 6ft 6in lock Paino Hehea. 

The quartet have played a key role in the promotion push, but none would have arrived in Catherine of Aragon’s former neighbourhood had it not been for the first Tongan pioneer. “I’d seen Vili Ma’asi years before,” explains Paul. “I always had agents telling me we’ve got to sign this Tongan hooker for the Dragons, but at that time he was too old to bring into the Welsh system given I had two or three young Welsh hookers. We used to play him in pre-season when he was at the Cornish Pirates and he was some player. 

“Anyway, we signed him – I think he was probably about 38 when he joined – and he is the sole reason for what’s happening now.

“He was the glue that made it all happen, he’d been released by London Welsh but he was great for us for three years – when Vili Ma’asi didn’t play we were a completely different side.

“It’s good for England that he’s got three sons around the scene now who have or will play for England at age level,” adds Paul as a footnote. “Suva is probably 20 now and up at Peterborough with Vili [who coaches there]; Samson is an England under-20 up at Northampton Saints – we’ve had him on loan a couple of times – and Ricky is with Harrow and Wasps in the backrow/centre, he’s probably 15 or 16.”

Just before Vili left to take up the role at Peterborough, he ensured there was a successor, in Maama Molitika. “They were mates and he’d been playing out in Calvisano, but I knew Maama from my time at Quins, and he was at Blues too, he was some player as well,” continues Paul. “Paino Hehea, who I’d tried to sign for the Dragons, came along – he’d been at Racing. All of them were at the end of their careers, sort of 36-38.”

Next was Lutui. “I tried to get him at the Dragons about ten years earlier. We wanted a hooker and I remember watching the first game of the Lions tour in 2005, the one where we had one hell of a battle against Bay of Plenty. I saw this hooker for Bay of Plenty and thought, ‘Christ, wouldn’t mind signing him, he’s bloody good’. But we couldn’t get a work permit – two years later he signed for Worcester.”

Ever the patient man, a decade or so later, Paul got his hooker. “They’ve all been good for us,” he says. “The way Lutui joined us was remarkable. He’d played the second half against the All Blacks in a Rugby World Cup game against Newcastle on a Friday night and then, the next morning, he drove down to us, arrived just before half-time and played the second half against Blackheath. Amazing. It was a real physical game too.”

Completing the set, prop Sione Tonga’uiha joined as player-forwards coach from Bristol.

We leave Costa and start our walk out of the town centre via Woburn Street, past the thatched cottages and the entrance to the Great Park. Paul explains the moment his side started to believe they could achieve something big this year. “Mike [Rayer] had asked us to come up and play Bedford on Boxing Day because they had a month without any home games, which is really bad for their revenue,” he says. “We agreed, but we don’t normally play on a Saturday and then Wednesday and so, after our Saturday game, I rang him up on Christmas Eve not really sure about playing – but he told me they’d sold 5,000 tickets.”

The ‘Battle of Bedfordshire’ kicked off with Ampthill on the front foot, taking a 24-7 lead at half-time, Bedford hit back to narrow the gap, but Paul’s side clung on for a 31-28 victory.

“The boys had a gameplan, stuck to it, and we beat them – I think it made them, and the club, think, ‘we ain’t bad, we can go to a higher level’.”

That thought focuses him on today’s game. “I’ve been involved when Newbridge played against Pontypool in front of seven or eight thousand; Newport against Pontypool in front 12,000; a cup final for Newport against Cardiff when there’s 45,000; and Wales against England with 60,000; but today, Ampthill against Old Elthamians, is right up there with them all.”

We turn into the ground and the community feel is immediate. A waterlogged pitch to the right (the former first team pitch) is overlooked by an absolutely heaving clubhouse with changing rooms beneath. As Paul leaves to start his match prep, we’re met by Mark Lavery. 

He first got involved with the club more than 20 years ago, when his two sons joined the minis. “We’ve had some great players come through our system, including Josh Bassett and Lewis Ludlow, but the senior team wasn’t aspiring to what the youth was achieving, so, about 12 years ago, a group of us got together and said, ‘this has got to change’.

“The trigger was when we finally dropped to level seven from level six where we’d been for 20 years. We just said ‘listen this isn’t good enough, it’s not good enough for the kids’.”

Given the club have something in the region of 1,000 in the junior section, that’s a lot of potential going untapped.

In what Mark jokes as the club’s ‘night of the long knives’, the old committee went out, a new one came in and plans were put in place to take the club forward. “There were only two senior teams and the second was really a social side,” explains Mark. “The first thing I did was basically go around the local pubs on a Friday night to tap first teamers on a shoulder and remind them they had a game the next day.”

A new coach, local RFU development officer Dave Marshall, took over and got them promoted to level six, a level they stayed at for a year, before Welsh tighthead Stuart Evans helped them to another league win. “We’d won the division but got ourselves in a bit of a bother at committee level with the RFU and were denied promotion,” explains Mark, adding, “and rightly so.”

Evans finished the job two years later, before the arrival of Paul. “Honestly, for us, where can you find a Paul Turner? He’s still a world-class coach. 

“I think the flexibility we give him, allows him to do his WRU role [Paul is an exiles scout for the union] and private coaching. 

“Watch warm-up today and he’ll be running as the opposition defence and he can still shift our boys quickly at 59 years old. At training, he’s in and participating and you can see the boys looking at him thinking, ‘wow’. He reads the game far better than anyone, he spots things on the sideline that maybe one per cent of rugby population can spot and he makes changes that can win games.”

That Paul has a few clips on YouTube of his playing days – including one fine example of two- footed kicking against Western Samoa – also helps. “Even to today’s generation, we just tell them go on YouTube and look up Paul Turner and then everything changes from a recruitment point of view. 

“Paul’s taken us on a journey that’s frankly beyond our wildest dreams and aspirations. To find ourselves in this position is exciting and a little intimidating as well for a club that gets in 450 to 500 each week. 

“We’ve relied heavily on Paul’s relationships; with Saracens [today four loan Saracens start], with Northampton, with Bedford – frankly, as a small community club, without big brother we wouldn’t be able to do it.”

Like Paul, he gives a lot of credit to Vili. “He really helped – he was Paul’s first real signing, although quite a complicated one. He’d just left London Welsh, he asked for this, this and this, and we couldn’t do any of it. But then, a week before pre-season, he said he needed to come and train with us.”

En route up the M1, his family – wife and five kids – broke down and the club picked him and the other Ma’asis up. “The lease on his house had also ran out,” explains Mark, “so I spoke to a sponsor who sorted him out with a house really quickly and the rest is history.”

It started a Tongan legacy for the club. “Some of our rivals refer to us Tonghill, and we’re okay with that, because what the boys do is give us a professionalism and set an example. They’re obviously enormously humble people off the pitch, but once step over that whitewash, they’re completely different. We’ll always be enormously grateful to them.”

A win today, could make the idea of achieving the impossible very real. “Whatever we do we want to be sustainable,” says Mark. “We know we need to relocate, we have 1,147 playing members and we’ve got four pitches, but only one with a floodlight. Monday night is the only night of the week our pitches rest – they’re being used 17 times more than the institute of groundsman say is healthy for the pitch.”

Mark lists the sponsors that have helped Ampthill to get where they are, including his own firm Grange Jaguar Land Rover, the others are big names too, including wealth management. “They’re all big blue chip companies, but nobody has put a fortune in,” he says. “There’s just enough to make us competitive.”

And if they get promoted? “It’s a real opportunity,” he says. “Probably the only one who’d have similar attendances to us would be Hartpury but they’re doing it in a very different way.

“We think if we can get up and with the way the game is changing, then it’s a huge  opportunity. The game is changing forever with CVC, it’s coming and it’s big, and it’s good for people who are prepared to innovate and do things differently.

“We don’t think it’s all about cash,” he continues. “You look at some of bigger clubs and amount of money that goes into it, that’s something Paul won’t allow us to do. He knows a player’s value, and if a player wants to come for that value and improve, then they can, if not go play elsewhere.”

Structure-wise, full-time professionalism is off the table. “We would follow the Bedford Blues, Richmond model of part-time professionalism,” he says. “We have sponsors who will assist with jobs, a local education system that provides jobs – there’s eight to ten teachers in the squad already. 

“It’s going to be a combination of doing things innovatively and taking opportunity,” he says, repeating the mantra.”

The woodland walk that you take from the clubhouse to their two new pitches could be the setting for a Winnie the Pooh adventure,  it’s Hundred Acre Wood idyllic.Carved out of a windy hillside looking out across beautiful Bedfordshire countryside. Cooper’s Hill wildlife reserve is home to oak, birch, gorse and broom, and, according to the signage, the ‘sunbathing lizard’. 

There’s also some kind of rare newt, we’re told as we walk through, that lives in a hidden location within the reserve. That, we respond, will have to be an adventure for a different time.

On the windswept grassy bank that borders one side of the pitch, a crowd in the hundreds has gathered. Fred Thistlethwaite is among them. At 94-years-old, he’s driven up from Luton for the match. “I used to play front row here in the 1950s,” he tells us, “but I couldn’t handle this lot today. We had a good team though, we had one side that didn’t get beaten for donkeys years.”

“He was part of the best front row in Bedfordshire,” another spectator tells us.

“People keep asking about promotion and facilities, but when you really look at it, what more do you need?” continues Fred, who used to test tractors for John Deere. “I think they will get promoted, but I don’t want them to get stuffed.”

Ampthill roar into the game. A try inside five minutes from a driving lineout, a second inside the first ten minutes as centre Sam Hanks jinks his way through half of the opposition. 12-0. Two penalties in response but a third try, this time from Molitika forcing his way over, takes Ampthill to 19-6. 

Old Elthamians are no pushovers, but a combination of dropped balls, missed opportunities and stout Ampthill defence, keeps them at bay. In the second half, the visitors are locked out completely, while the home side, in windy conditions, run everything from everywhere. They add two more tries to complete a 36-6 rout.

“Anyone see that coming?” asks one fan.  “Nope, absolutely phenomenal,” says another. “Unbelievable,” exclaims a third.

A five-point win puts them the same number of points clear at the top. Win their remaining five games and they join the likes of Cornish Pirates, Ealing Trailfinders, local rivals Bedford, and whichever big gun comes tumbling down from the Premiership in next year’s Championship.

The bumper crowd of 975 has witnessed something special.  “That was real pro stuff, real professional stuff,” says Paul. “We didn’t do a lot but we stayed in their half, and got a bonus point. We don’t normally do that, we usually leave it late.”

Can talk about the Championship start now? “It’s hard to know when to really speak to Mark and sit down, he’s got a lot on his plate with work,” responds Paul. “When is the day we need to talk about this? I don’t know. We’ve got some tough games even after today, this is why it’s just another day really, another game.”

They are a step closer though. “I just think it’s a really good opportunity,” he says, “we’ve put Ampthill on the map really – nobody takes us lightly anymore.”

Director of rugby Mark puts that down to one man. “When you’ve got Paul Turner on your side anything is possible,” says Mark. “If we get up, do I think other teams will come sniffing? Maybe. I can’t believe he’s in National One.”

If things go to plan at Ampthill, home of the sunbathing lizard, pretty soon he won’t be.  

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Daniele Colucciello

This extract was taken from issue 6 of Rugby.
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