Brian Lockwood, who has died aged 78, was a rugby league forward who won the World Cup with Great Britain and the Challenge Cup four times with three different clubs; rock-hard and abundantly talented, he also had a successful stint in Australia, reaching the Grand Final.

Brian Lockwood was born on October 8 1946 in Castleford, a cousin of another towering figure of the game, Roger Millward. He signed for Cas and made his first-team debut in 1965.

He was in the second row as Castleford beat Salford 11-6 in the 1968-69 Challenge Cup final, and the following year they were back at Wembley to retain the trophy with a 7-2 win against Wigan in front of more than 95,000 fans.

He won the first of his three England caps in 1970, and was called up to the Great Britain squad for the 1972 World Cup in France, but there was a spot of bother in the run-up to the tournament. He was in a shop buying perfume for his wife when he accidentally bumped into another customer.

“He just turned around and called me ‘Pommie this’ and ‘Pommie that’ with a few swear words thrown in,” Lockwood recalled. “I apologised but he carried on. I ended up knocking seven bells out of him. My team-mates Paul Charlton and Chris Hesketh dragged me off him and asked me if I knew who it was. He’d got this Australian tracksuit on but I didn’t have a clue.”