The story may be apocryphal but it is worth the telling. It's about handling fighting - or at least one way to do so.

What put me in mind of it was the fighting in the first Test between New Zealand and South Africa in Wellington this year. There was a big emotional flare-up when Brad Thorn tipped John Smit and dropped him to ground with a thud. There the players were, mainly forwards, angry with each other, dancing like fighting cocks at close quarters.

While this went on the referee Stu Dickinson stood to one side watching. When it stopped, he got the captains together and said to them: "OK, you've got that out of your system."

Some people wondered at his calm. Some wondered at his detachment, though what a slender man on his own can do, armed only with a whistle, against a rioting mob is uncertain, even if once he was a policeman.

The story I was told goes back some 40 years.

In days before leagues, top Welsh clubs would play each other four times a season. So Newport and Swansea would meet four times. In this particular year, so the story went, Swansea had won three times. It had never happened that one side had lost four times and the fourth match was to be at Rodney Parade, Newport. Newport was not quite sure if it was English or Welsh and the rugby club belonged to both unions.

They discussed the coming match and decided that in the interests of neutrality they would invite Air Commodore Larry Lamb from England to referee the match, after all he was a famous Test referee.

As was the custom in those days, the teams would appear on the pitch and the two captains would meet the referee at the middle of the half-way line to spin up. There was Air Vice Commodore Lamb, dapper in blazer with handkerchief flowing out of his breast pocket, between the two captains.

They spun, chose ends and kicked off - and 30 men on a rugby field fought. They brawled and brawled.

When the brawling petered out, they looked for the referee. Air Commodore Lamb was standing, debonair and ostensibly nonchalant, at the middle of the half-way line watching things - quite calm and detached.

The two captains came mooching over sheepishly.

There was no tirade. Lamb said calmly: "Right, chaps, that's over. Let's start again"

He produced a coin, they tossed again and the match was started and proceeded in orderly fashion. They played five times that year; one match was drawn.

Via Steve Williams, the secretary of the RAF RFU, I tried to verify the story but Air Vice Marshall Lamb said that he had no recollection of what he said would have been "an unlikely sequence of events". If it had happened he felt that it would be firmly etched in his memory banks and those of the national press and the RFU at Twickenham.

But I was told this story more than 30 years ago. It is a delightful story. It would be good to hear from anybody who can verify it.

Perhaps it was not Larry Lamb, not Newport, not Swansea. Age easily distorts the truth.