Some good pictures of the great man on the Warrington Guardian website.

Thought you was going to we reincarnating him as a replacement for Lineham....... sorry il leave now

If he had played in these days he would have earned a small fortune.
As it was then (for all players)the money was not great most of it generated was put back in the boardroom coffers.
Sad to say he ended up as a security man on Portsmouth shipyard until he retired.
But he enriched a whole generation with wonderful memories !

Sadly, he wouldn't get a shirt now in the modern game. His ability to win a quick PTB, draw a penalty, or his ability to smash into an oncoming pack fielding a kick return would be questioned.

I'm afraid you're right. The nearest to Bevan in the modern era was the Widnes version of Offiah. Once he moved to Wigan they tried to change him into the all purpose winger and for me some of the magic was lost.

Wigan have always spoilt the game of rugby

Bevan wouldn't have been able to do what he did back then, coming over from Roosters reserve grade to look for clubs in England, as he wouldn't have been able to get a work permit.

He would have had a long and glorious career in Australia. Even if he slipped through the net at one club, the Aussie tiers of rugby league are sufficiently structured that a player scoring multiple tries per game would soon get noticed, whether he was doing that in the NSWRL cup or went to the Queensland Cup or whatever. He would soon find himself in first grade.

Wires71 raises the issue of what would happen if he had flaws in his game that were accepted in the 1950s but would be frowned upon in the modern game. First, given modern conditioning, he would have looked different physically. If he did have flaws technically and they weren't tightened up with coaching then I guess it depends on how far ahead of his peers he was as a finisher. Nathan Blacklock for example was a pure try scorer but didn't get many representative honours as he was deemed to have downsides that his rivals didn't have. But there probably wasn't much difference in the positive things that Blacklock brought, compared to his rivals like Sailor, Tuqiri.

Bevan in his day was streets ahead of even his best peers as a try scorer, and if he was still like that today he would be a Kangaroo and Origin legend. It's one thing having doubts about Kevin Penny but another having doubts about a player who scores hat-tricks, 4 or 5 try hauls on a regular basis, you can tolerate a lot of flaws with that return.

The Offiah comparison is an interesting one. I never saw Bevan but I imagine him to have had the thing Offiah did which was not just being a superb athlete but having a different game sense and awareness of space to every other player, that he would appear anywhere on the pitch at the right time to make the killer break. You don't get that kind of player around today. Even in Aus, I can't remember any other player than Offiah who had that. Despite the clubs he played for, Offiah was the player that made RL more exciting than any other player in my lifetime.

Good post. Just a correction though I don't believe the flaws existed in the 1950s as the game was so different. For one the kick return dominance would not exist before the 4 tackle rule (1966)

Did no Aussie team try and sign him? You would have thought they would have been banging his door down!

My Dad who saw Bevan throughout his pomp always told me he couldn't tackle for toffee, but his team mates did all that for him with pleasure,and then stood back in wonder as he scored try after try after try.

Probably did but couldn't afford him. We had him as a marquee player so only the first two shillings sixpence of his salary counted on the cap.

Aye and he licked road clean with his tongue...

True, and I bet he didn't feel the need to get a load of tacky tattoos and post selfies of himself in the gym on instagram.

Brian Bevan was one of a number of Aussie/Kiwis who came over after the second war, the Aussie game was struggling in the forties/ early fifties and the aussies/ KIwis playing in Britain formed the basis of the Other Nationalities team who had a lot of success in that period, most were on long term contracts, and I am lucky? to be old enough to remember Bev,Harry Bath, Ces Mountford,Brian Nordgren, Arthur Clues,,Lionel Cooper, and the Huddersfield team of many talents.Great days but distance gives enchantment, and I do not know which is better then or now. However both times are better than the Wigan dominated thugby of the eighties,with players being frequently out of the game with serious injuries caused by foul play, often lightlly punished

I started watching rugby league in 1945/46 and watched all of the players you mentioned. Hull signed 3 from Aus in 46/47- Bruce Ryan, Duncan Jackson and George Watt. Watt was a hooker who played for Aus when the GB team toured there in 1946. Ryan was a winger in the Lionel Cooper mould and subsequently left Hull to play for Leeds. I was at the Hull railway station with about another 4-5 thousand people to see Ryan arrive from Aus such was the excitement that we had signed him.

I first saw Bevan play against Hull a couple of years later in a star studded Warrington team that include Bath. Bevan remains my favourite ever rugby league player and Warrington my second favourite team. You gave us a player/coach who too played in that game and took Hull to arguably its greatest decade in history( 50's).

He was a coloured Welsh lad who played centre - Roy Francis. Good enough to have toured with the GB team in 1946 but racial politics at the time prevented that.