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Davis at a training session in 1979, the year he took over as England coachMike Davis liked to tell the story of how,
before he had his trial for England, his
father had to rush out and buy him a
proper pair of rugby boots. Such was the
spirit of amateurism in the game at the
time, he had been making do with an
old pair of hand-me-down football
boots.
He made his debut for England in
1963, at the age of 20, and continued to
play as a lock, injuries permitting, for
the next seven years, winning 16 caps.
“His black humour was such that he
would say he was dropped more often
than he was picked,” said his son, Peter.
In a further example of how different
things were before the professional era,
Davis needed a job to go with his En-
gland career — so he presented himself
to the Admiralty Board, convened for
recruitment into the Royal Navy. The
interview concluded with him being
told that notification would follow as to
whether he had been accepted. When
he made to leave, a captain asked if he
had his boots with him. Their first XV
would soon be taking the pitch. Davis
realised he needed no follow-up letter
to tell him the navy wanted him.
When his England career came to a
close he left the navy and went to work
as a rugby coach at Sherborne School in
Dorset. He proved so successful at this,
coaching the first XV to four unbeaten
seasons, that he was approached to
coach England and, in that role,
promptly achieved the grand slam in
his first season, 1979-80. This followed a
decade of domination by Wales and
France, and an England grand slam
drought that dated back to 1957.
As well as having a happy knack for
spotting talent, Davis was also an inno-
vator, introducing what he called a
“whoosh” style of rucking, among other
things, as well as team bonding sessions
in which rather senior players were
consulted about tactics.
Not that he had an emollient rela-
tionship with the Rugby Football
Union. “My father had a dream start
but it was a stressful role and it was
ridiculous he and the team were not
paid,” Peter said. “He was driving all
over the place to look at potential inter-
national players and given only petrol
money. Later he was prevented from
publishing a coaching book and hence
earning money out of the game.”
Davis remained England coach until
1983, when they finished bottom of the
Five Nations table with just one point
and he decided to return to full-time
teaching. “It is time for me to get a
proper job,” he said. “I have turned wine
into water.” The reality was that some
of his best players had retired. He stood
down with a record of ten victories,
three draws and seven defeats and it
took England a further eight years to
achieve another grand slam.
Alec Michael Davis — his parents
wanted to ensure his initials did not
spell MAD — was born in Lichfield,
Staffordshire. His father was Alec
Davis, a music hall singer and stuntman
who served in the Welsh Guards in the
Second World War and who played
rugby for Gloucestershire; his mother
was Olive Davis, the sole hairdresser
whom Gracie Fields, the actress, al-
lowed to cut her hair. The family moved
to Torquay, where Davis attended the
grammar school.
Davis took to rugby so well that
sometimes on Saturdays he would play
for the school in the morning and for
Torquay Athletic Rugby Club in the aft-
ernoon. One of his holiday jobs was
working in Torbay hiring out pedalos.
He told two customers that if they ped-
alled fast enough, the engine would
start. They returned exhausted and re-
monstrated that the engine was broken
before they had hired their craft.
He studied physical education at St
Luke’s College, Exeter, played for
Devon and won his first England cap in
the year the team undertook their first
short tour, to New Zealand and Austra-
lia. Davis distinguishing himself by
playing for much of the second Testagainst the All Blacks with a dislocated
shoulder. Replacements were not per-
mitted then and he needed an injection
for pain relief at half-time to carry on;
unsurprisingly he took no part in the
final tour game, against Australia.
In 1966 he led the navy to victory in
the Inter-Services Championship
before joining Harlequins. In 1970 he
returned to Staffordshire, the county of
his birth, leading them to the county
championship. He had embarked on a
career as a schoolmaster as he reck-
oned that teaching in the independent
sector — maths in his case — would
allow him the time to play club and
international rugby.
His first two posts were at Haileybury
and St Paul’s, both schools within reach
of Harlequins. When he became a
family man and wanted more space, he
moved to Sherborne, where he taughtat the boys’ school and, briefly later, the
girls’ school as well.
As England coach he inherited a for-
midable pack and some sprightly backs.
Yet those senior forwards regarded him
with a somewhat sceptical eye. “In his
first year Mike showed himself to be
slightly naive in dealing with senior
players,” Peter Wheeler, the Leicester
captain and England hooker, recalled.
“Initially he approached the job using
the same terminology he had used with
the schoolboys and treating the three-
week visit to Japan, Fiji and Tonga as
though it were a prolonged training
session for the next international
championship. You cannot relate such
a tour to the mud and cold of Twicken-
ham or Cardiff eight months later.”
After his spell as England coach,
Davis returned to Sherborne, as a
housemaster and coaching swimmingas well as rugby. He sang in the school
jazz band and played for the staff cricket
XI, on one occasion managing to run
out the art master, Trevor Boyd, when
he was on 99. “Trevor brought this up
often in my art classes,” Peter Davis
said. It did not, however, prevent him
from pursuing a career as an artist.
After retiring from Sherborne, Davis
became director of rugby at Dorchester
and also coached Bournemouth, Bristol
and, in advanced age, Sherborne Town.
He kept up the singing for which he was
renowned, especially his Elvis Presley
impersonations.
Davis met Jenny Hull when he was a
teacher and she was a nurse in the
school sanatorium at Haileybury.
Within three months they became en-
gaged and, when both appeared in the
staff pantomime, were regaled with
Here Comes the Bride as they came
downstage. They were married in 1969
(their honeymoon was interrupted by
two England trials), moving to St Paul’s
before heading, in 1974, to Sherborne,
where Davis taught for 28 years. They
had three children: Joanna, who is
manager of a framing business; and
twin boys, Simon, who is chief execu-
tive of Walk-In Media and who was
born four minutes before Peter, an art-
ist in Hove, East Sussex.
As England coach, Davis had been
fortunate in the players he inherited or
introduced: Bill Beaumont, his captain,
with whom he forged a friendship; Fran
Cotton, Tony Neary, Roger Uttley and
Clive Woodward in particular. Beau-
mont said the 1980 team was the best
prepared he had known in the game. En-
gland won the grand slam that year
through a 30-18 victory over Scotland
and Beaumont was carried off the pitch
on the shoulders of his team-mates.Mike Davis, rugby player and
schoolmaster, was born on January 23,- He died of complications from
Parkinson’s disease on May 10, 2022,
aged 80
come), Lisl managed to find Sarah and
Eli Bernstein, a Jewish couple who had
no children of their own and who were
prepared to take a stranger into their
home above their wallpaper shop in
Granby Street, Liverpool. The couple
knew no more than that Inge was “a
good girl”, although Lisl did have a
photograph which she showed them.Mike Davis
Innovative rugby union coach renowned for leading England to a grand slam as well as for his impersonations of Elvis Presley
MIKE BRETT/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGESEmail: [email protected]Inge Bernstein
Austrian-born barrister who arrived on the Kindertransport with no English, left school at 15 and rose to be a circuit judge
On the face of it, Her Honour Ingeborg
(“Inge”) Bernstein followed the compar-
atively well-worn path of a successful
professional: school, university, practice
at the Bar specialising in personal injury
litigation, appointments as the chair-
woman of mental health review tribu-
nals, as a recorder and then (after she
had become head of her chambers) as a
circuit judge. She also served on the
Mental Health Act Commission.
Yet the path that she followed was
anything but traditional or well worn
and, although she spoke little about her
early life and made light of the challen-
ges she faced, they were real and
marked her out as a woman of fortitude,
focus and determination.
She was born Ingeborg Schwarz in
1931 in Vienna. Her mother, Anna, died
when she was two and she was brought
up by her grandmother, Regina Politz-
er, and her father, Hermann. Life be-
came increasingly difficult as the
decade wore on. In an interview more
than 50 years later, Inge recalled how
there were reduced food rations for
Jewish people and their children were
not allowed to go to the park to play: she
could not go to school or skate with her
cousins. Then Kristallnacht took place
on November 9-10, 1938.
Her cousin, Lisl Herlinger, was work-
ing as a maid for a Church of England
minister in Liverpool. Following
instructions from Regina (who appreci-
ated how dangerous Vienna had be-
So it was that at the age of eight, Inge
was sent by her family alone on the Kin-
dertransport, the organised rescue ef-
fort of children from Nazi-controlled
territory to Britain that took place dur-
ing the nine months before the out-
break of war.
She later recalled: “I knew I was going
to England but didn’t know much else.
My father took me to the station and he
was very controlled. Elsewhere, there
was a lot of crying and emotion... I was
on my own but I’ve always been
bloody-minded... strangers seeing me
cry? Not on your nelly.”
She spent a considerable part of the
two-day journey on her knees in the lav-
atory being sick and subsequently she
never enjoyed travelling by train.
Having arrived at Harwich, she was
taken to Liverpool Street station in
London, where she waited to be picked
up. Her suitcase was either taken or she
had lost it, and she was left only with a
tiny case and a teddy bear. It was June 15,
1939: a commemorative sculpture of the
Kindertransport was unveiled at the sta-
tion in 2006.
Although she spoke no English when
she arrived, she went to school and,
after a year, was top of her class. When
she was 14, Inge learnt that her immedi-
ate family had not survived the war.
Her father had been deported to Minsk
and her grandmother had been sent to
Treblinka and, from there, to
Auschwitz. Other relatives also perish-ed but her cousin, Lisl, did survive and
returned to Vienna. Inge and her family
visited Austria only once, years later.
Unsettled, Inge left school when she
was 15 and worked with her adoptive
parents at Birkenhead market, learning
to drive in the lorry they used to trans-
port stock. However, she did not inherit
their selling skills and Eli would beg her
to go home rather than disrupt his
successful efforts. Perhaps because Eli
had not had a formal education (hisparents did not have the money to pay
for the uniform needed to accept the
scholarship that he won), he encour-
aged Inge to attend the University of
Liverpool, where she studied law.
She was called to the Bar by Inner
Temple in November 1952, becoming,
in the words of Lisa Roberts QC, the
leader of the Northern Circuit, “one of
the female pioneers at the Bar”. She re-
mained in the same chambers in Castle
Street, Liverpool, for 39 years and was a
common lawyer of the old school, spe-
cialising in personal injury litigation,
acting in large part for trade unions
whose members had been injured in
the course of their employment. How-
ever, she could turn her hand to all as-pects of the work of a busy junior in-
cluding family and criminal law.
In 1991 she was appointed a circuit
judge. On the bench and chairing men-
tal health review tribunals, she was con-
siderate, understanding and kind. If she
offended anyone with her words, she
was the first to apologise. She sat in Liv-
erpool and Birkenhead which, on her
retirement ten years later, the recorder
of Liverpool said she had almost made
her own. He commented that “barris-
ters, solicitors and court staff admired
her judicial qualities and appreciated
her warmth and friendship”.
Bernstein was, however, more than a
lawyer and judge. In 1967, after a long
courtship, she married Eric Goldrein, a
former solicitor who had joined cham-
bers seven years earlier. They had two
children: Timothy, an innovation con-
sultant; and Anna, a content strategist.
Her hobby recorded in Who’s Who
was “domestic arts”. After a day in court
and an evening of preparation for the
next day, she would settle down to
cooking and baking. In recent years, it
would be impossible to escape their
home without several cups of tea and
slices of home-baked cake.Inge Bernstein, barrister and circuit
judge, was born on February 24, 1931.
She died on April 26, 2022, aged 91Bernstein forged a reputation for
being considerate and understandingShe worked as a lorry
driver but her adoptive
father told her to study