You have come to find a rugby legend, once a prince among fly-halves, then a princely broadcaster, but now a 79-year-old man living with his wife Pat in the small town of Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. There haven’t been any interviews since cancer of the larynx necessitated the removal of his voice box five years ago and he speaks now with difficulty, which was once the last thing you would have said of the Wales fly-half Cliff Morgan.

Concern for his health melts under the warmth of the greeting. He and Pat come in their jeep to the harbour in Ryde and he is behind the wheel, cutting through the traffic as he once did with the No 10 on his red jersey. He doesn’t get out of the jeep, rather springs from the front seat, takes your bag, wrestles it into the cluttered boot and welcomes you to what is now his part of the world.

We went for dinner that evening and before there was any talk of the bill, he had paid it. Back at his home, we watched the wonderful film of the 1955 Lions in South Africa where he had been such a star. He, Jeff Butterfield and Tony O’Reilly all did things on that tour that give meaning to the cliché about great players who have worn the Lions jersey.

Morgan speaks now with the help of an artificial voice box. Using it tires him, saps his strength but not his resilience. “I had the operation in my first winter on the Isle of Wight, five years ago. First the surgery, then the radiotherapy. But I am lucky. I can walk around, I drive, I can’t speak very much but I don’t do badly. I can still smile.” He can and does. Adversity cannot steal his dignity, nor take away his humanity.

“What makes me miserable sometimes is that I can’t do my job any more because what I had done all of my life was talk. Now I’m in a big room with lots of people, and I can’t converse. They can’t hear me above the din. Then I go for treatment and I see all the people who are so terribly worse off than me and I remember I am lucky.

“I couldn’t have got through the past five years without Pat. Every day she has to sort out this voice thing for me. She looks after me; she spoils me, as my mother did. You can’t think of things good enough to say about people like that. The sacrifices they make for other people. It makes me think about my great friend Jack Kyle.” Another great No 10, Kyle wore Ireland’s green to Morgan’s Welsh red.

He tells a story about watching Wales play Ireland in this season’s Grand Slam decider at the Millennium stadium, and you wonder if some little corner in paradise has not been lost. He wanted Wales to win, of course he did. But through the match he felt Ireland were the better side and as they hadn’t won a Grand Slam for 61 years, he was in two minds. Then the television panned to Kyle, seated in the crowd; alert, concentrated, willing his countrymen to supplant the team of 1948, his team, and it all came back to Morgan.

How a few weeks short of his 21st birthday he was named in the Wales team to play Ireland at the Arms Park in 1951. Coming into Trebanog, his village in the Rhondda Valley, on the bus from Cardiff, bunting everywhere, all his neighbours in the street, his mother and father, all present to celebrate his selection. In this village, this coalminer’s son had learnt to love literature, to play the piano, to sing in a great choir, soprano, contralto, tenor, bass; he knew them all before he was 12.

His father put him on his shoulders and, as one, they went to choir practice twice a week. Later music would have to share his week with rugby and for the boy from the small village to be picked for Wales . . . well, as another Welshman Richard Burton once put it, ‘I would rather play one match for Wales than ever to play Hamlet‘. Then, in the minutes before the start of that first match, Morgan met Kyle for the first time.

“We had to walk around the perimeter of the pitch to get on the field at the Arms Park and I felt an arm on my shoulder, Jack’s arm. ‘I hope you have a great game today, Cliffie,’ he said. I took that with me all of my life. Then, when I saw him at the Millennium stadium, looking so well, I wanted him to have a good day and that last kick, from Stephen Jones, I wasn’t sad when it didn’t go over.”

If there is much for the current Lions to learn from the formidable team of 1974 and from the wonderfully unexpected treat of 1997, the story of the 1955 team also has its place. They played some outstanding rugby, won two Tests at altitude, lost two at sea level, and shared the series 2-2. But it wasn’t just about results on the field, as it should never be with the Lions. Morgan still exchanges Christmas cards with Basie Van Wyk, the great Springbok flanker whose job it was to cut him down to size through that summer of 1955.

What that team had was a sense of adventure which might have something to do with the duration of the tour; the squad departed London on a Constellation aircraft on June 10 and did not arrive back at Heathrow until September 30. The key to the squad’s harmony lay, to a great degree, in harmonies.