Eddie Butler was a man of many talents and will be remembered by people for different reasons.
He was the player who won 16 caps for Wales and captained his country on six occasions before retiring from international rugby union aged 27.
He became a columnist and journalist who was not afraid to hold people to account; a broadcaster and commentator who soothed and informed with his rich prose and booming voice.
Butler could write and broadcast with gravity and depth but also with lightness and humour; his crafted montages were a genre in themselves, not only on rugby union or even sport.
His final act for the BBC was a piece on the death of Queen Elizabeth II that he scripted and sent over from Peru, where he died in his sleep on a charity trek.
Not many people could have done that, but the extraordinary Eddie Butler could.
A gentle giant, brilliant broadcaster and a wonderful wordsmith.
Butler was born in Newport in 1957 and, when he was three, the family moved to Raglan, as his father was working in a nylon factory in Pontypool.
After attending Monmouth School, Butler had a gap year in Spain in 1975 just as Franco’s dictatorship was coming to an end.
He studied French and Spanish at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge University, where he was a triple Blue after playing three Varsity matches against Oxford University.
That mattered little to the hard school of Pontypool RFC where he came under the tutelage of legendary coach Ray Prosser who nicknamed him ‘Bamber’ after the University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne.
The public schoolboy became accepted in the Pooler set-up that included the famed Pontypool front-row of Charlie Faulkner, Bobby Windsor and Graham Price.
Butler once quipped: “It took me about five years before I was accepted and then they made me captain in the sixth. It takes a bit of time but they are a great bunch of lads.”
