News

Published by The Guardian Newspaper.

Written by Nina Pullman. 

My grandfather Tom Pullman, who has died aged 78, was a prominent rugby player and much-loved figure in the south Wales town of Mountain Ash, where he lived all his life.

He played more than 500 games as a scrum-half for the first team at Mountain Ash rugby club, where he was known for his formidable strength and powerful left-footed kick. He also captained the side for seven years, holding the record for most tries in a season – 23 – and scoring 150 tries over his long career.

Tom was eventually persuaded to retire from rugby at the end of the 1978-79 season, aged 36, and then became club president, a role that included taking the money on the gate for Saturday games and greeting people in the crowd, most of whom he knew personally. 

Born in Mountain Ash to Hayden Pullman, a miner and engineer, and Ada (nee Rowland), a housewife, Tom attended Mountain Ash school before leaving at the age of 15 to deliver coal and milk in two separate rounds. At the age of 17 he met Jill Newman, whom he married in 1964, and at 22 he joined the South Wales Coal Board, working on the trains – attaching engines, shovelling coal and doing other odd jobs.

Declining an offer to play professional rugby league in Yorkshire for Keighley, Tom instead devoted his attentions to his home town club and often said that he had all he wanted to be happy. For the 1969-70 season he briefly joined Swansea rugby club, and during that season played for them against South Africa in a televised match that was disrupted by anti-apartheid protesters. But traveling to and from Swansea twice a week proved too time-consuming, and so he transferred back to Mountain Ash at the end of the season.

At work with the coal board he took part in the miners’ strike of 1984, during which time Jill took on two extra jobs in addition to working on the hat stalls she ran at Aberdare and Pontypridd markets. Tom returned when the strike ended in 1985 but left shortly afterwards to manage a local garage, where he stayed for the remainder of his working life, retiring at 60 after a fall while out walking.

Tom and Jill enjoyed a lively social life and regularly holidayed in their caravan at Saundersfoot in Pembrokeshire or occasionally in northern France.

Warm-hearted, upbeat and full of humour, he never complained about his later illnesses, which stemmed from two rare immune system conditions.

He is survived by Jill, their sons, Michael and Andrew, his grandchildren, Bryony, Elsa, Thomas, Owen, Rhys, Lara and me, and his brother Philip.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/23/tom-pullman-obituary