The only English rugby union player to win the Victoria Cross played his first game for his country on Valentine's Day 1914 and his valour echoes down the century.

Members of this England team should be conscious that Friday marks the centenary of Arthur Harrison's debut for his country. They will know his name, given that it adorns an award bestowed among themselves for the finest defensive display in each match, but it is his record of valour - worthy of making him the only English rugby player to win the Victoria Cross - that underpins the head coach's desire to fortify a sense of national identity

The back-row forward provided, by all contemporary accounts, a sterling contribution in the scrum to mark his England debut on Feb 14, 1914, helping to ensure a 17-12 victory over Ireland on a Twickenham day free from any shadow of the impending cataclysm. A little over four years later he was dead, killed in the expedition to block the Bruges-Zeebrugge canal to German U-boats in a scene that one senior officer, Engineer Commander William Bury, described as a "bloody massacre". He was 33.

Harrison, a Lieutenant Commander aboard HMS Vindictive, had been taken for dead after the first rounds of merciless German fire, hauled below deck with a shattered jaw. But he was to astonish both his doctors and his men by re-appearing on deck, leading the landing party. In the act of conspicuous gallantry that would earn him the VC, and in spite of his agonies, he mobilised the attack, dying amid the ensuing slaughter along with all but two of his men. Alfred Carpenter, captain of Vindictive, would later recall that "Harrison's charge down that narrow gangway of death was a worthy finale to the large number of charges down many a rugby football ground".

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