Andy Allen

Imprisoned for drink driving; sharing a prison cell with a man who’d tried to burn down a house with his kids inside; fearing that cancer might take him, like it took his mum; former Welsh lock Andy Allen was put on suicide watch. He’d thought about it before, so much had happened, but this time it was a failed fraudster that helped save him.

Andy Allen turned around to look at his wife, Fay, and his eldest son Morgan, and simply said “I’m sorry”. 

The former Welsh rugby international was in Plymouth Magistrates Court and had just been handed a sixteen-week custodial sentence for driving a lorry under the influence of alcohol. 

In that moment, Andy convinced himself he would never see his family again. “The only thing on my mind on that journey from the court to Exeter Prison was that I was going to commit suicide,” he recalls.

Andy’s introduction to life at ‘Her Majesty’s Pleasure’, heightened his fears about being incarcerated. “When I got there, the first thing I wanted to do was go to the toilet. But I couldn’t. It was blocked and full to the brim. It was just awful.

“I was then placed in a room with eight other men who were being inducted (into prison). Four of them were pacing up and down because they were going through drug withdrawal symptoms. Some of them were screaming. They were half the size of me, but I was shitting myself about what any one of them might do next.

“This was thirteen minutes into a sixteen-week sentence. I thought ‘this is going to destroy me. It is going to kill me.’ But it made me stronger.”

Injury forced Andy to retire from rugby in 1995. He then became a lorry driver. Or at least he was until Saturday, April 21, 2018.

Looking back on a day that would not only change his life but almost certainly saved it as well, “I’d never been in trouble with the police, never so much as had a point on my driving licence,” says Andy, “I went in that day and the guy behind the counter gave me my worksheet. He said [about that day] that I was as ‘calm as you like’. I made conversation, we had a laugh, talked about what we were doing that weekend...”

He may have seemed calm but at several points on the 100-mile journey from South Wales to Devon his 44-tonne lorry set off a warning signal after Andy had veered dangerously into another lane. 

He pulled over into a layby off the A38 hoping that a spot of rest and recuperation might do the trick. The police, who were soon on the scene after receiving calls about Andy’s erratic driving, were in for a shock when they looked at the reading on his breathalyser test.

“I was more than four times over the limit from the vodka I’d drunk the night before,” explains Andy. “My body must have been so full of alcohol. I was sent to hospital and once they got the results of the blood test the doctor said if I carried on that way I would have been dead within six months.”

He knows how fortunate he was to get out of that lorry physically unscathed.

Two days later Andy was in court where prosecutor Caroline Gates said, “We’re very, very lucky that I’m not here to tell you about a serious road traffic accident.”

But there is always another story behind a story. Why would a happily married man, with three grown-up children, a steady job, no financial worries and no history of alcoholism, find himself in such a situation?

To understand how and why Andy wound up in prison you need to go back to when he was nineteen and he lost his mum, Ceridwen, to cancer. “I was never somebody who could handle grief. I’m a happy person, I love laughing,” he says. “I also came from a very masculine environment. My father and my grandad were Grenadier Guards. 

“And life was one big joke when you played rugby for Newbridge and Newport. As a young player, you would get on the field, you would have a fight, you would get on with it. That’s how rugby players get by. We joke about things, we don’t take life too seriously, we take the piss out of each other.

“But when it came down to serious issues, when it came down to issues like your mental health, nobody ever talked about that.”

It was only because rugby was cheaper to play than darts that Andy chose one over the other. But he clearly had talent in abundance.

“I’d played nine games for Cwmbran Youth and got selected for Wales Youth,” says Andy. “And I played just 22 games for Newbridge before I got picked to play in the Five Nations. So I must have been half decent.

“In those days you had to back yourself up or you wouldn’t be able to compete. That is what Welsh coach John Ryan was looking for. He said to me ‘you’re my hatchet man’.

“There had been a massive build-up before my debut (against France in 1990). Normally, you’d never see the press in the Valleys and suddenly I felt like a real star. I remember running on the pitch at the Arms Park and this wall of noise hit me from all sides. It was deafening.”

As he lined up to sing Land of My Fathers, Andy thought about his mum. After getting a green cap for representing East Gwent, he gave it to Ceridwen who, by that stage, was seriously ill. She congratulated him and said, “That’s lovely Andy, but get me a red one.”

“I made my debut against France and really got stuck in, but then Kevin Moseley got sent off. John sent a message down to the pitch to tell me ‘not to punch anyone, we can’t have two players getting sent off in one game’. We lost by ten points but we pushed them all the way.

“Then we played at Twickenham,” he continues, “I’ve still got that game on a VHS tape. I watched it with my sons, and one of them said ‘Dad, you could have been sent off eighteen times in that game’.

“Before the match against France I got into the dressing room and [team manager] Clive Rowlands said, ‘never forget you’re Welsh’. It is something that is drummed into you.”

Indeed, it was also the slogan for a Whitbread Welsh Bitter advert, which was one of the first things the players would see when they ran on to the pitch at Cardiff. “You can believe that all you want but sometimes you simply come up against players who are much better than you,” he says. “England: Brian Moore, Will Carling, Rob Andrew, they washed us away.”

The match was immortalised with a picture of Andy looking up at Moore and flicking the Vs at the English hooker. But it spelt the end for John Ryan who was replaced by Ron Waldron, Andy’s former Wales Youth coach.

Waldron remembered Andy as a 6ft 3in, fourteen-stone teenager who could play as an extra flanker or number eight, who was athletic and big enough to be the middle jumper in the lineout. In the intervening years, Andy had become considerably heavier, hitting the 21-stone mark as he became a no-nonsense lock. 

Waldron dropped Andy for the game against Scotland but recalled him for the final match away to Ireland. “I still felt fit,” recalls Andy. “I was named our man of the match and one of the reports said, ‘Andy Allen belied his generous midriff to be the best Wales forward on show’.

“Wales were going through a rough patch at the time so they decided they would tour Namibia in the summer. It still counted as a full cap. 

“But I said to my wife, ‘I really don’t want to go’. It came at the end of a long season, Morgan was born in March and I had just been offered a job as a sales rep with a local company. Also, at least twenty players in the squad were from Neath.

“I wish I’d gone, I really do, but I didn’t want to spend the summer away from Morgan with a bunch of West Walian bastards.

“Sorry, I’m just trying to be honest.”

When Wales played in Ireland, Andy was the only East Walian player in the team and didn’t speak Welsh. When he tried to be part of a conversation in the bar, they made a point of translating whatever he said. “I pulled Gareth Llewellyn to one side and asked him if he would like to go outside and have a chat. He said, ‘will it be in Welsh or English?’ I said, ‘you’ll find out when you come outside.’

“He declined my offer.”

A narrow defeat in Dublin would be his last game for Wales.

Andy then pauses and takes a deep breath. “You know, when I look back, had I put in a bit more effort I could have been better,” he admits. “I was a fighter, a grafter, a scrummager. Waldron said to me a few years later that had I dropped a few stone I could have done more in the game. But that would have made me a different type of player and I probably couldn’t have got away with playing the way I did.”

He also represented the Barbarians. But Andy’s time at the top level effectively ended two years later when he dislocated his ankle in a training session with Newport. “And if you’re forced to retire early through injury...” he begins. “Look, I coached Adam Hughes and took him all the way from eleven to seventeen. He played for Wales Under 20s, Exeter Chiefs, and Newport Dragons. He had to give up rugby at 28 because he’s had too many concussions. 

“How do you deal with that? People in that situation need some sort of help, even if they think they don’t.”

Andy also eventually quit the game aged 28. “Part of the reason I got myself into this spiral of depression was through harking back to past glories, back to the good days. When I looked through my old scrapbooks and looked at how good I was and some of the players I used to mix with, I felt like I was stuck in a rut while other people were getting on with their lives.”

But what he missed most about rugby was everything that happened around the game. “It was the camaraderie. Since coming out of jail, I’ve talked to the same people I was jealous of, who seemed happy and content in life, and they say ‘we’re all in the same boat, we’re all suffering from the same thing. We miss those days when we were young, we miss those glory days if you like’.

“But I dealt with it in a different way.”

He pauses again, and takes another much longer and deeper breath. “I came very close to committing suicide. It happened just after I finished playing. 

“My brother had died of a heart attack. I was very close to Brian. I went to work and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I was at a point where I simply wanted to be with him. You feel as if you’ve got absolutely no one in the world, even the ones you love.

“I was driving up the M50 in a lorry, and wanted to drive down a bank. I wanted to kill myself. But something inside me said ‘make a phone call to Fay’. I pulled over into a service station, cried and talked to her for over an hour.”

But he never sought counselling or a saw a therapist. That simply wasn’t what you did.

Then, around three years ago, a lump started to develop on his groin. His mum was one of several close relatives who had died of cancer and Andy had convinced himself that sooner or later he would be next.

“I was frightened stiff, but I took the coward’s way out through drinking and not talking to anyone about it. When my mother had cancer, she lost a lot of weight and the same happened to me. But the difference was that I wasn’t eating, instead, I was drinking.

“It’s very, very complicated. My head is spinning around just thinking back to everything that has happened. I was desperate for answers, but I didn’t want to look for them. It’s a strange place to be. 

“The lump was getting bigger and I was getting smaller. I went from 21 stone down to fifteen stone at the point when I went into prison.

“I said to one of the guards, ‘I’m dying of cancer, please look after me’. They put me on suicide watch where they shine a torch on you every half hour. But they also put me through a medical where they discovered the lump was a hernia. 

“If I’d got it checked out months earlier I would have been in a different place. I was scared. I was in denial. It was like being a child all over again, but my mother wasn’t there to make it better.”

He still had to contend with life inside Exeter, a category B prison that is home to some of Britain’s worst criminals. “I was sharing a cell with this young lad. He was such a nasty individual. He couldn’t contact his wife because he had tried to burn down their house when she and her kids were inside. And he couldn’t read or write, so I was helping him write letters to his mum.”

Inmates being slashed with makeshift knives was commonplace. And those who were judged by their fellow prisoners to have stepped out of line were ‘hot watered’ with Haribos that were melted and burned into their skin.

Colorsport/Shutterstock

“But the worst day was when they brought my wife into prison to visit me,” he says. “Again, she’d never been in trouble, she’s a diamond. Fay was in tears as she had to go through the same process as other visitors to prevent drugs or mobile phones being smuggled in. 

“I cried for two days after that. She said she would come back next week and I said, ‘I don’t want you to go through that again’.

“After three weeks I was transferred to a Category D prison. I shared a cell with a fraudster. He wasn’t a very good one because he’d been arrested thirteen times! On the last occasion, he stole his twin brother’s identity. He had a medical after putting in a claim for incapacity benefit but overlooked the fact his brother had an artificial leg.

“But clearly he knew his way around prison, and we would talk for hours. If anyone got me through it, it was him.

“When I came out, I went to GDAS (Gwent Drug & Alcohol Service) in Cwmbran. I also spoke to a therapist and I can’t describe how much she helped me. When you leave prison, you get the routes or pathways to organisations that can help you. I went down every avenue. 

“Unless you hit rock bottom you won’t get that sort of help.” 

While there is now a greater willingness for those who have suffered from depression to talk about it, it is still very much a crisis happening behind closed doors. Men aged between 40 and 49 have the highest suicide rate in the country, while only 36 per cent of referrals to NHS talking therapies are for men.  “You have all these emotions that have been building up for years,” adds Andy. “Nothing can prepare a family for when you finally open up and it all comes out. Even when I talk about these things now it does bring up frustrations about why I didn’t talk about them sooner.” 

He has also found support through the bonds he made with his former team-mates both on and off the pitch. 

“What has also been great, and something of a bonus, was joining a WhatsApp group of ex-players from Newbridge. That was a godsend.

“I was always a very private man. I’ve learned to talk to my wife and sons but that should be a given.

“Having that network of ex-players has been marvellous. When you’re 6ft 4in and eighteen stone, there are only so many people who can take the piss out of you. But when my old team-mates do it I feel warm and happy. It was that banter that I used to get when I was a player that I really missed.”

Another important figure in Andy’s recovery was former Newport full-back and broadcaster Phil Steele. 

He sent Andy a copy of his book, Nerves of Steele, in which he opens up about his battles with anxiety and depression as well as a series of personal tragedies.

“I played against him a few times and I loved to give him a kicking!” says Andy. “But Phil helped me through some of my darkest days after I was released from prison.”

Andy, however, made a point of not relying on the old-boy network to find a job. Getting his life back on track was something he needed to do himself. He secured a job in a factory where nobody knew about his time inside or would pre-judge him.

Now he is trying to look forward, while also facing up to the past.

“I’m still not right, though,” admits Andy. “I do talk to my wife, but before we used to talk about what was on the telly. Now we really get into it. Sometimes it causes arguments when you talk about things that stir up emotions. Then you wake up in the morning after and think ‘it’s good that we had that talk’, otherwise that emotion or that thought would have been suppressed.

“I think my hernia is coming back again and even now I’m thinking ‘should I go to the doctor? Do I ask these questions? Of course, you bloody well do!’

“Anyone out there who has a problem, who feels depressed, talk to somebody, anybody. It could make all the difference.”

A couple of weeks after we talk, Fay is taken to hospital following a heart episode. She is now on the road to recovery, but the incident might have dragged Andy under a few years ago. “Had April 21st not happened, I would be dead. 

“Not everyone gets that second chance. I’m lucky to have my family and my friends. And I can genuinely say I’m in a better place now than I’ve ever been since I stopped playing rugby.”  

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 13 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.