Ireland rugby star Jack Kyle to be commemorated with blue plaque

By Claudia Savage (Press Association)

Jack Kyle, voted Ireland’s greatest ever rugby player, is to be commemorated with an Ulster History Circle Blue Plaque at the Affidea Stadium in Belfast.

Kyle was key to Ireland’s international success in the postwar era, including a first-ever Grand Slam, secured at Ravenhill in 1948.

Aged just 23, and still studying to be a doctor, Kyle was selected for the 1950 Lions tour of Australia and New Zealand, where he entranced the home crowds with his instinctive style of play.

Jack Kyle, or Jackie as he was affectionately known, was born on February 10 1926 on the Antrim Road in Belfast.

He went to Belfast Royal Academy and played for Ulster Schools and club rugby for Queen’s and North (now Harlequins).

Already playing for Ulster, he made his first appearance for Ireland and scored a try at the age of 19, playing the British Army XV in an unofficial international at Ravenhill in December 1945.

One commentator described him as “the discovery of the season… a pale, freckled medical student with crinkly ginger hair”.

Kyle’s first cap in an official international was against France in 1947.

Edmund van Esbeck, author of the definitive history of Irish rugby, wrote that prominent among Ireland’s strengths was “the sheer genius of Jack Kyle, surely among the greatest of all rugby players”.

Kyle’s international career lasted until 1958 in which time he gained 46 caps with Ireland and played in six Tests for the Lions.

He was a member of the Ulster team that dominated the Interprovincial series in the 1950s and was made an OBE in 1959.

In 1962 he got a job as a consultant surgeon based in Sumatra in Indonesia and a few years later he was in Zambia, in the small mining town of Chingola, not far from the border with the Congo, where he was to spend almost 35 years.

In her book, his daughter Justine Kyle McGrath wrote: “So many people during my life have told me how much Dad helped them when they were ill… Many people have actually told me that if it wasn’t for dad, they wouldn’t be alive.”

For his work in Africa, Kyle was given a lifetime achievement award by the Irish Journal of Medical Science and the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland.

Kyle was inducted into several halls of fame, including the Texaco award in 1977, the first rugby player to be given the honour.

Ms Kyle McGrath said her father, who died in 2014, “would have been delighted to receive this honour of a blue plaque in his name”.

“It is especially fitting that the unveiling will take place on what would have been his 100th birthday,” she said.

“It is also meaningful that the plaque will be located at the rugby ground where dad had so many happy memories.”

Hugh McCaughey, chief executive of Ulster Rugby, said: “Jack Kyle is one of the true giants of Irish and world rugby, and his legacy continues to inspire everyone connected with Ulster Rugby.

“His skill, humility and sportsmanship set standards that still define the game today.

“It is entirely fitting that this plaque stands here to recognise not only Jack’s extraordinary achievements on the field, but also his lasting impact on rugby in Ulster and far beyond.”

Jack Kyle is to be commemorated with an Ulster History Circle Blue Plaque at Ravenhill in Belfast. PICTURE: PA