Ivybridge

In the South Hams, the prettiest of places you’ve probably never visited, the women of Ivybridge RFC are challenging for honours. At the helm? Possibly rugby’s only husband and wife team, Georgie and Ben Gulliver. 

Ivybridge isn’t famous for many things. It’s rather quaintly named after a 13th-century hump back bridge, and its location is one that would no doubt have appealed greatly to the mass post-lockdown city exodus. On the edge of the beautiful wilderness of Dartmoor, and with Devon’s south coast washing up along its coat-tails, the unassuming town is a blink-and-you-miss-it sort of place for people en route to Plymouth or Cornwall. 

The rugby club, dating back to just 1975, similarly isn’t on the radar of many beyond the county boundaries, although it counts Henry Slade among its former players, and the Cornish comedian Jethro once visited and proclaimed, ‘You got a fucking lovely shed eer’. 

However, things are certainly happening here in this former mill town in the South Hams of west Devon. 

The men’s side are holding their own in South West Premier, sitting seventh, yet it’s the women who are catching the eye, not only after marching to third in the Championship South West 2 (the third tier of women’s rugby), but also after the canny recruitment of a wife and husband coaching team. Almost definitely the only one in rugby, and maybe the only one in competitive-level sport too.

It’s not shy of rugby experience either. In Georgie Gulliver, the head coach, they’ve got a 37-cap former England scrum-half, with four Premiership titles and four cup wins, and a Barbarians appearance to her name. And in Ben Gulliver, appointed by Georgie, they’ve got a forwards coach with a professional career spanning almost two decades and 350-plus appearances for the likes of Coventry, Worcester, Cornish Pirates, Leicester Tigers and, most recently, Ampthill, where he was player-coach. Even more recently, he was also head coach of Plymouth Albion, the big brother side in this part of Devon, twenty or so miles west. 

For Ben, the head coach role was a return to a club he’d spent three years at early in his career, which proved to be significant for many reasons, even beyond the lessons learnt under the tutelage of Graham Dawe. “I was playing for Plymouth Albion when I was at uni down here,” explains Georgie, when we meet the couple at Ivybridge RFC. “That’s where me and Ben met as he was playing for them too. In fact, it’s where I know a lot of the Ivybridge girls from as the whole team moved from Plymouth.”

Ben had arrived from his home-town club of Coventry. “I grew up at that rugby club, from a very early age,” explains Ben, whose father Tony, made 384 appearances for Coventry and is still their team manager today. “But, he wanted to get a contract off his own back,” adds Georgie.

“Yeah,” agrees Ben, “so I went to Bedford, but they ended up going for another guy, can’t remember his name, but a big old unit. And I went back to Cov that season, I was about 21 then, and I think I got £400 a month and a car and I got beaten up for the first three months because of who I was the son of.

“But I got into the first team and in my first game of men’s rugby I punched Darren Garforth with a shit punch with my left hand, and I woke up on the sideline, [having been] completely out.

“I’d come out of 21s league rugby thinking I was hard and that happened in the first game with the men.

“Then against Plymouth one year, I flew into a ruck and gave Dawesy a cheap shot and I came out of the next ruck with hands like that [gestures to, ahem, stretched facial features due to fingers pulling at his mouth] and then we had a pint in the clubhouse after and he said ‘do you fancy coming down?’.

“At the time, Cov were three-quarters professional, so it was an opportunity to come down here [the couple live in Plymouth now] when Plymouth were doing well and had aspirations to reach the Premiership.

“We won the first five games [Exeter broke their run, 18-14], the money was good, it was the first time I had proper match fees as well. We were on around mid-£20,000s, and we were on £400 home win, and £600 away, so after five wins, I was like ‘oh my god, how good is this?’.

“If you look at it now, those sort of contracts don’t happen [in the Championship] anymore, as we also had a house and car as add-ons.

“And of course, Georgie used to follow me around,” he laughs.

“You know that’s not true,” cuts in Georgie. “The women used to train on the rubber crumb after the men had finished, and Ben, being a second row, would stick around to do kicking practice. I’m not sure why...”

“I’m a very good kicker,” responds Ben. “Well, regardless,” continues Georgie, “I’ve never seen you kick in a game. Ah, actually, that’s not true.”

“Yes, I’ve kicked quite a few times in a game actually, at least three every season.”

Kicking credentials covered, the pair got together and have been inseparable ever since. From Plymouth, Ben went down the road to Cornish Pirates, who were then playing in Truro, while Georgie – who had made her England debut while at Plymouth – headed to Bristol, to further her international prospects. 

As with every stage of their careers, which have taken Ben to Leicester (on loan), Worcester, Bedford (again) and Ampthill, and Georgie to Lichfield and Saracens, the pair have always managed to live under the same roof. Although, certain times have been harder than others. “It’s a bit mental,” admits Georgie, “but because I’d been capped I was told I needed to play at a Premiership club, so I was travelling up to Bristol [from Truro] every week for training and games.”

Georgie also managed to balance a full-time career with the NHS as a lead anaesthetic theatre practitioner with competing at the highest level of the game, a juggling act that proved its most challenging at her final club, Saracens. 

“It was really, really tough at times, it was brutal,” she admits. “But weirdly your body gets used to it, it gets into this routine of doing it. 

“I’d say the toughest bit for me was my last five years at Saracens [2013-19] because the game had already gone so professional that I felt like I was full-time working in the NHS and a full-time rugby player. And that was it, on cycle.

“I’d be up at six training in the mornings, Tuesdays I’d do a full ten-hour day in the hospital and then I’d get in the car and drive from Bedford [where they lived and Ben played at the time] to Sarries for team meetings, training, physio. I’d leave there at half nine, back home at eleven.”

“Savage,” chips in Ben. “And then we’d get up and do it all again on a Wednesday,” continues Georgie, “and it was that on repeat for five years.”

The professionalism of Georgie – not actually paid to be a rugby player – even rubbed off on Ben. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I was actually playing full-time rugby while all this was going on and Georgie was dovetailing all these things and, I’m not trying to be corny here, but she had a big impact on my outlook on how to be a professional.”

While there was funding for Georgie, it was never enough to pay the bills, meaning the balancing act had to continue. And that went for the couple as well. “Because I always had the ambition to play in the Premiership,” says Ben, “I had to go where the contracts landed, so trying to balance that with Georgie’s career and rugby, was really tough, so we always went with what we thought was the best offer for us.”

“And none of the moves were to the detriment of my career,” adds Georgie, “I’d always boosted my career.”

Moving from Bristol, to the then star-filled ranks of Lichfield, then to double champions Saracens proves the point, although the latter move was on the back of her biggest disappointment.

“After I didn’t make the 2014 Rugby World Cup squad, I was kind of like, ‘wow, I’m probably over it now, I’m ready to stop playing.’ 

“I was done,” she emphasises the point. “I didn’t think I had anything else to offer, I was really disappointed not to be involved in that World Cup squad, having done all the summer training for it and getting in really good shape, probably playing my best rugby. 

“I thought, ‘well, if I’m not good enough now then I’m never going to be good enough, really, so that’s it, I don’t need to keep doing all this, putting in all this effort.’”

How she was told of her omission still rankles too, certainly with Ben. “The way you were told though,” he begins, before Georgie cuts him off. “It wasn’t ideal,” she diplomatically points out, before adding, “Graham Smith was really supportive though.”

She’d been dropped the week before the squad set off for the tournament in France, having felt certain – as one of only two fit scrum-halves training – she’d be part of the group. She ended up going to support England in Paris when they reached the final, after a random meeting with an easyJet pilot while watching Ben play for Bedford, the Friday night before. “Me and Fran [Matthews] who’d been around the squad, decided to go to the game and get on it,” explains Georgie. “We’d both had a few drinks and been talking about going [to the final], and that we should go, Fran certainly should have, as her sister [Alex] was involved. And this guy wanders up to us and says, ‘oh, you Gully’s wife? I’m gutted you didn’t get on that plane, you should’ve been on it. Gully tells me you want to go to the final?’”

After revealing he was a pilot, he used his contacts to get Georgie and Fran on the next flight to Paris. “We ended up drinking with him until three in the morning, then frantically going home to pack a bag and catch a 6am flight the next day,” explains Georgie. “My parents were already out there as they’d booked thinking I was going to be there, so when we landed I rang up my dad and asked him for a lift.”

Joining in the celebrations when England became world champions [defeating Canada 21-9 in the final], Georgie says she’d have regretted not being there, even as a supporter. Has she got over not being in the squad? “I’m not sure I have, to be honest, or I ever will,” she admits.  “Because you know, I was so happy for the team, they played amazing, we won the World Cup, it was crazy. 

“But, yeah, I’m always going to think that little piece [of my career] will always be missing I guess.

“I’m in awe of that team that won that World Cup, it was incredible,” she continues. “It was a really massive turning point for England rugby, for women’s rugby, but yeah, just to not get that final little hat tip at the end ... that would have been good.”

After the Rugby World Cup, Georgie’s friend and Lichfield team-mate Vicky Fleetwood persuaded her to join her for a training session at Saracens, the dominant side in English club rugby. “I said to Rob Cane – the coach there, who’s now with USA – ‘Hi, I’m George Gulliver, I don’t know why I’m here, I’m really sorry, this is nothing to do with you, but I don’t think I want to play rugby anymore.’”

Cane, naturally, gave a ‘well, see what you think’ response, and duly put Georgie on the bench for the first game of the season against Wasps away. “And that was it really, I just thought, ‘I love this team, I love this environment.’ 

“And it was him, he’s responsible – and he knows that, I’ve told him before – for me falling in love with rugby the game. Saracens was just such a great club to play for.”

Winning two Premiership titles and two cups in her time there, Georgie called time in 2019. Her finale couldn’t have gone better. 

“I got called up by the Barbarians to play England,” she says. “So I had the dream ending to a rugby career really. In my last month, we won the Premier final for back-to-back titles, and then I went off and played against England at Twickenham one last time.”

“I was so jealous,” says Ben. “For the Barbarians game, I dropped her at that big service station on the M40 with Rocky [Clark] and Ceri [Large], there’s a Wetherspoons there, and they were all straight on the beers.”

Ben’s career highlights, aside from the kicked goals, are varied, from cup runs – Cornish Pirates’ British & Irish Cup win – to specific games to specific people, including those that made a big impact. Back to Dawes. “I love the man,” he says. “Yeah, I’ve got a really good relationship with Graham. 

“He used to say, ‘Gully, what the fuck are you smiling at?’ And I used to say ‘Dawesy, you are hilarious’. And he never used to mind me saying that, whereas everyone else was shit scared of him. I find him really funny. But he was brutal. 

“The mauling sessions, I’d never want to do those again.”

“Wasn’t it topless mauling?” asks Georgie. 

“Yeah, we did a bit of topless mauling, topless scrummaging,” confirms Ben. “Every Tuesday we would maul for probably 45 minutes, mauling against each other, full on, he’d join in as well. 

“And then he’d get the backs in, and it would be the starting team, so eight of us, mauling against thirteen or fourteen people.

“Our maul was amazing, don’t get me wrong, we’d maul from the 22 or wherever. It was brilliant. 

“I used to catch the lineout and think, ‘we’re scoring here’, it was a great feeling. Yeah, he’s a great bloke, but he did break some people I know, there’s no doubt about it. I enjoyed him, but didn’t necessarily enjoy training.”

And he has met few tougher than the former Bath and England hooker. “Every now and then Dawesy would go in at tight head on the scrum machine, he was tough. He wasn’t handy, but he was a hard, hard man.

“I mean, Colin Stewart [the lock] didn’t like Dawesy and he was about nineteen stone and would be like ‘right, I’m going to fucking break him’ and would slam him into the scrum machine. But Dawesy would just lock it out. Colin would be like, ‘I can’t break him’.”

Ben’s sliding doors moment would come via another England hooker, Richard Cockerill. When a three-month loan at Leicester from Cornish Pirates to cover for Geoff Parling and Louis Deacon came to an end, Cockerill picked up the phone. “They had a shortage of second rows, and after the loan, I was going back but Parling got injured again and Cockers – who’d played for my dad, that was the link – rang me to ask me to stay for a year, if I could make it happen. 

“But there was quite a big payout on my contract so it didn’t happen. That was the one, where it [my career] could’ve gone either way...”

Injuries also played their part in stopping him from playing more Premiership games. “Seeing Ben go through so many injuries, and the rehab, was hard,” says Georgie. “Especially that second bicep injury.”

“I had 21 operations in my rugby playing career,” says Ben, picking up the story. “And I remember I went to Bedford, I had a really good first year – got players’ player, never had that before – and ruptured my bicep, look I’ve got no biceps...”

He lifts his sleeves to reveal arms that look like a tube of squeezed toothpaste. “Noodle arms,” laughs Georgie. “It just pinged,” says Ben, bringing us back to the injury. “I recovered in time to play in the Champ final, and then something else happened just before and I hyper-extended my elbow.”

“That was awful,” explains Georgie. “I remember being sat with him in A&E and he was saying, ‘I’m done, I can’t do this anymore, I’m done.’”

“I remember walking off the training field at Bedford, I’d had a shitload of injuries and I was gone,” says Ben. “I was crying almost, I was just emotionally done with it all, and you [to Georgie] picked me up to take me to A&E and I couldn’t speak, I was broken, done with my body, fed up of it all...”

“Yeah,” says Georgie. “and then for Ben, because he wasn’t kept on at Bedford, but he wasn’t ready to stop playing, it was a realisation about what you do after rugby...”

Then came Ampthill, an opportunity to work in car sales as well as play in Paul Turner’s ambitious team. “That was my Sarries,” he says. “My first game was for the second team and I was just driving over and thinking ‘please just be roadworks or something that stops me going to this bloody game that I don’t want to play in’.

“But when I played, on the sideline were a load of Tongans – Aleki Lutui, Maama Molitika, Vili Ma’asi – and I just looked at them and thought to myself, ‘drop the ego’. And I went on, smashed a few people, and realised it was fun again.

“I was the youngest in the pack at 35, I felt a kid again, but being surrounded by those Tongan boys in their forties, they looked after me. And it was just a lot of fun, we got proper boozy on the bus all the time – although I had to dip out of that sometimes as it got too much.”

“There was the magic bus or the fun bus,” recalls Georgie. “One got you home really quickly, the other stopped every ten minutes.”

Three years at Ampthill, a side where he felt the coaches Turner and Mark Lavery, got the best out of him, came to an end when he accepted a job back at Coventry, as community manager. Although not joining in a playing capacity, he still turned out for the second team as a replacement and would make one final appearance in a friendly against Canada. “It ended quite nicely for me there,” says Ben. “It was the year before the World Cup and most of that team we played went to the World Cup.”

A job offer from Plymouth Albion, as head coach, brought the couple back to Devon, although Ben’s stint at his former club lasted just six months. “It was a tough period which didn’t quite work out,” says Ben. “I took the job with my heart rather than my head and it all happened a bit too quickly. I arrived on my own, I didn’t have any of my staff around me and, six months down the line, I wanted the squad to go one way and the squad kind of got wind I wanted to trim a few bits off...”

“It was difficult wasn’t it?” says Georgie. “Because you didn’t come in at the start of the season, you didn’t hire your own players, you didn’t build your own squad. That’s always difficult, as a head coach you want to pick your own players.”

“Looking at it now,” says Ben. “I think I’m a bloody good number two.”

“I think you’re putting yourself down there,” interjects Georgie. “You could’ve been a good head coach in a different environment, but it wasn’t right at Albion. We can’t talk too much about what went on, but it wasn’t right for Ben, it wasn’t right for them.”

“But I look back and I’m pretty pleased with how I conducted myself and it’s definitely helped my growth,” concludes Ben. “I think I’ve learned an awful lot about myself.”

The couple had always intended to return to the west country, and the Plymouth Albion role had at least hastened that decision. Georgie switched her job to a private hospital, but the onset of covid saw her transferred to the NHS. “I was seconded back to the NHS, and a big trauma hospital,” she says. “So I was taken out of my nice private hospital and I actually had to go and work in ITU [intensive therapy unit] looking after ventilated covid patients. 

“It was so new then,” she recalls. “And people were dying and healthcare workers were getting ill and healthcare workers were dying. 

“It was just a crazy time, let alone to have just gone through that [Ben’s brief stint at Plymouth Albion], but to be honest, what happened to Ben was not a thing we could dwell on because these other crazy things were happening in our lives.”

For Ben, he was able to take a break from rugby. “I jumped in an Argos delivery van, and I was one of the lucky ones because I got to work through the pandemic,” says Ben “I was really grateful to get a job in that time and people talk about reflecting but often they don’t mean it, whereas I was sat in a van on my own all the time.

“So I did get to think, ‘where are my skill sets, what do I want to do?’ And, it’s not the best job in the world, but at the same time, I was grateful for it, but I used it positively.”

Around the same time, Ben started the Championship Clubs podcast which soon filled a much-needed void, sharing the tales of rugby’s second tier and the people in and around it. Then, Georgie picked up a new coaching role with Ivybridge RFC, initially as assistant coach, then becoming head coach, earlier this year. “I spent quite a while trying to find a forwards coach,” says Georgie. 

“I asked a few people and no one was around, nobody was available.”

“I was like fourth choice,” laughs Ben. “No, that’s not true,” retaliates Georgie. “I asked you quite early, but your head wasn’t in it. And I was only going to ask him once. I’m not sure what changed really...”

“Well, I looked at your fixture list, and saw you were going to be out Tuesday and Thursday, so it made sense for me to come on board with you. It was a good opportunity to work together, but I’d have been at the games anyway, so I might as well do it in a coaching capacity.”

With both always being involved in rugby, the couple – who have been married for nine years – have invariably found their rugby lives worked well in tandem, often with Ben playing on a Saturday, then Georgie on a Sunday. “I’d always go to watch Ben and he’d always watch me,” says Georgie. “I think both of us playing made it easier because you weren’t constantly putting pressure on the other one to spend time with the other. 

“It was just like, we were both doing something that we love doing and supporting each other throughout that. 

“Now the commitment of coaching Ivybridge is easier because we’re doing it together.”

And how is it going? “It works well, I’m bad cop, he’s good cop,” says Georgie. “Sometimes,” adds Ben. “But you’d have to ask the ladies, but I think they enjoy the dynamic we’ve got,” explains Georgie. 

And no sooner had Georgie taken over, than Susie Appleby, her mentor – “since I was little, to be honest,” admits Georgie – invited her up to Exeter Chiefs with a view to making Ivybridge a feeder club. Already players are being loaned to the South Hams side. 

“The reward for us is the growth of the club,” says Ben. “If we can grow it and then have players that come to us and kick on and maybe go to Chiefs or go to Bristol, and get someone that gets capped for England or whatever, that’s so rewarding.”

“I was lucky to have really good coaches,” says Georgie. “Tristan Forster at Plymouth, Richard Bennett, Rob Cane, they had a real impact on me at different stages of my rugby career and I’d like to think I’m having that impact on someone else going forward.”

“I’ve got a lot of good friends that are full-time coaches,” chips in Ben. “And I look at them, and just think ‘shit, I wouldn’t want to be in that situation with that amount of stress and being one opinion away from losing your job. At the moment, I don’t think that’s for me.”

“Although that might change in the future,” cautiously adds Georgie. 

“Yeah, it might,” agrees Ben.  

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Karen Yeomans

This extract was taken from issue 16 of Rugby.
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