THE OVAL WORLD A Global History of Rugby
Tony Collins
LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY
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CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations Introduction: A Boy and an Oval Ball
vii 1
Part I: Kick-off 1 The Tradition 2 A School Called Rugby 3 What Tom Brown Did Next 4 Rugby’s Great Split
5 7 15 23 34
Part II: Towards Five Nations 5 Scotland: ‘Rugby Football: The Real Game of the Two Countries’ 6 Ireland: A National Identity 7 Wales: The Dragon’s Embrace ´ 8 France: The Baron, The Red Virgin and Rugby’s Belle Epoque
49 51 64 77 92
Part III: Making a Rugby World 9 New Zealand: All Blacks in the Land of the Long White Cloud 10 South Africa: From Gog’s Game to Springboks 11 Australia: Wallaroos and Kangaroos 12 From Rugby to Gridiron: The United States and Canada
109 111 126 146 161
Part IV: Golden Years Amidst the Gathering Storm 13 Harold Wagstaff and the Phantoms of Baskerville 14 British Rugby Before 1914: Stoop to Conquer 15 A Greater Game? Rugby and the First World War
179 181 200 213
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CONTENTS
Part V: Challenge and Change in the Interwar Years 16 All Blacks versus Springboks: Battle for the World 17 Rugby de Muerte, à Treize and à la Vichy 18 Britain’s Rush to Rugby 19 Leagues Apart: 1919–39 20 Rugby in the Second World War
227 229 244 257 273 288
Part VI: Rugby’s New Horizons 21 European Rugby and the Rise of Italy 22 Argentina and South America: Rugby on a Soccer Continent 23 Empire of the Scrum: Japan, Asia and Africa 24 Big Hits from the South Pacific: Fiji, Tonga and Samoa 25 The USA and Canada: Rugby’s North American Dream 26 Women Will Hold Up Half the Game
303 305 316 326 344 358 372
Part VII: Tradition and Transformation 27 Springboks, All Blacks and the Politics of Rugby 28 Gentlemen and Players: Wales and England 1945–1995 29 Bravehearts, Tigers and Lions: Scotland and Ireland in the Post-war Years 30 The France That Wins … 31 Rugby League: A People’s Game in the Television Age 32 Rugby’s Road to 1995
383 385 397
Part VIII: Into the Twenty-first Century 33 Shrinking World, Global Oval
473 475
414 428 444 457
Conclusion: The Soul of the Game
498
Notes Acknowledgements
503 529
Index
000
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AFRF ARL ARU EARFU FFR FIR FIRA GAA IB IFA IFA IFU IGRAB IRFU JRFU LFRT NFUI NIFC NRL NSWRFL NZRFU PIRA RFU
Association Française de Rugby Féminin Australian Rugby League Australian Rugby Union East African Rugby Football Union Fédération Française de Rugby Federazione Italiana Rugby Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur Gaelic Athletic Association International Rugby Football Board Intercollegiate Football Association Irish Football Association Irish Football Union International Gay Rugby Association Board Irish Rugby Football Union Japanese Rugby Football Union Ligue Française de Rugby à Treize Northern Football Union of Ireland North of Ireland Football Club National Rugby League New South Wales Rugby Football League New Zealand Rugby Football Union Pacific Islands Rugby Alliance Rugby Football Union
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
SANZAR SARB SARFU SRU UFRA USFSA WPCRFU WRC WRFU WRU YRF
South African, New Zealand and Australian Rugby South African Rugby Board South African Rugby Football Union Scottish Rugby Union (formerly SFU – Scottish Football Union) Union Française de Rugby Amateur Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques Western Province Coloured Rugby Football League World Rugby Corporation Women’s Rugby Football Union Welsh Rugby Union Yugoslav Rugby Federation
viii
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INTRODUCTION: A BOY AND AN OVAL BALL I can remember the precise moment I realised that I would never achieve my dream. It was late 1973; I was just 12 and a few weeks into my first term at secondary school. The school had a wide catchment area and every year there were about 150 new boys. Rugby was the local game and playing it, knowing it and even being able to talk about it brought varying levels of adolescent prestige. I knew about it – my dad even worked alongside some of the top players – and I spent hours playing the game in the street with my best friend, Steve. Since the age of seven, when Dad took me to watch my first big match, I had set my heart on playing international rugby. So when it came playing to rugby in PE lessons Steve and I thought we could show our new schoolmates what the game was really all about. The boys would defer to us and the girls would bestow their favours on us: it was just a matter of time. We hatched a plan. At the next match, we would display our tactical insight and superior skill with a series of perfectly executed set-plays. The first would be audacious and daring. As scrum-half I would pick the ball up from the base of the scrum, feign to pass it out to the threequarters standing to my right but instead run around to the left and through the narrow gap between the scrum and touchline. Steve, playing out on the left wing, would shout for me to pass him the ball. I would dummy it to him, the opposing defenders would fall for it, 1
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leaving me in the clear to romp through to the try line unopposed. We’d seen it done on television, practised at home, and knew it would work. Ten minutes into the match, a scrum was formed just 25 yards from our opponents’ try line. Our plan kicked in. Everything went like clockwork. The undefended try line beckoned to me. Just 20 yards and I would be over. Glory was within my grasp. But as I tried to accelerate, the try line did not get closer. My feet seemed to be getting heavier and my legs shorter. I sensed movement to my right – and almost immediately the air was knocked out of my lungs as I crumpled under the weight of two of the school’s fattest boys. I fell face first into the mud and the ball squirted out of my hands. ‘Knock-on,’ shouted Mr Miles, the PE teacher. Steve picked up the ball and stared at me, still on the ground trying to catch my breath. ‘I knew you should have bloody passed it to me,’ he said, his voice full of contempt. I could have cried. But although I knew then that playing rugby in front of tens of thousands of people or touring foreign lands was not to be for me, my interest in rugby did not disappear. If anything, freed from the burden of having to play the game successfully, its fascination increased. The geometric perfection of a cut-out pass, the split-second timing of the bone-shuddering tackle and the spectacular artistry of the side-stepping three-quarter still continued to enchant me. What’s more, rugby seemed to be a game of unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries. It was played in exotic places like Fiji and Papua New Guinea, but countries like Germany and Brazil didn’t seem to play it at all. Soccer, for some reason unfathomable to me, was infinitely more fashionable all over the world, but in towns like the one I grew up in, rugby was the most popular sport. More confusingly, I also discovered that there were two types of rugby. Each had a different number of players in a team, separate rules 2
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INTRODUCTION: A BOY AND AN OVAL BALL
and even reverse methods of numbering players’ jerseys. When I watched the other rugby on television, I couldn’t really understand what was going on. Of course, my dad and I would never bother going to watch it. I would later discover that neither type of rugby was very much interested in the other at all. So although my interest in playing rugby evaporated, my curiosity about it expanded. There seemed to be many questions for which no one quite had an answer, and if it was my lack of athletic ability that ruined my dreams of a rugby career, my inquisitiveness about rugby and the wider world was stimulated and developed, and that ultimately led me to become a historian. The Oval World is a book whose genesis lies in the muddy playing fields of early 1970s Britain. The stories it tells, the questions it answers and the mysteries it tries to solve are those that have occurred to most people who have ever watched a game of rugby, whether as fans or as casual observers. As the tiredest of sporting clichés tells us, rugby is much more than a game – so this is a history of the life and times of the game and the world that created it, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to digital television, from Hull’s docklands to Sydney harbour, from Welsh miners to a Russian prince. Rugby is the story of the world we live in and how it was made.
3
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PART I KICK-OFF In almost every part of the world, across centuries and civilisations, humanity’s instinctive joy in catching, throwing and kicking a ball has meant that games which resemble rugby have long been played. For the origins of rugby as we know it today, however, we must look to Britain. The rough and tumble games played in the fields and villages of pre-industrial times were taken up by the boys of Rugby School in the English midlands and transformed into a game of rules, regulations and morality. Soon, the thrill of the try and the crunch of the tackle were gripping the imaginations of great swathes of the population. The game spread beyond its public school founders and became a passion of the industrial workers who were crowded into the great cities of the Victorian age. Rugby was now a game played and watched by all ‌
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1 THE TRADITION It is a cold, sharp, sunny day in February, a sense of anticipation in the air. Small groups of people gather, some laughing and joking, others deep in serious conversation about the the afternoon’s prospects. They break up, moving, meeting and merging with other groups, a tide of multicoloured shirts, freezing breath and boisterous conversation. As the crowd grows and snakes its way closer to the scene of the afternoon’s action, the pace quickens and the chatter becomes louder. The familiarity of the ritual does nothing to diminish the growing sense of excitement. And then, as they reach their destination, the crowd once more becomes individuals, some taking their usual places, others staking a claim for a good vantage point and newcomers wandering in search of somewhere to watch the day’s proceedings. The stage is set. The match begins. The crowd lets out a convulsive roar. The players tear into each other, desperate to get hold of the ball and drive through, around or even over their opponents. The match is locked into a succession of surges, counter-attacks, surges. Eventually, as the game wears on, the two sides begin to tire and taut defences become slack and baggy. Suddenly, the ball squirts free of the pack and is kicked through into open space. It is picked up and moved rapidly and precisely from player to player as they scythe deeper and deeper into enemy territory. The 7
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decisive score seems unstoppable. Supporters bellow encouragement, while their opponents grit their teeth. Then it happens. The ball reaches its destination. Time momentarily stops. Encouragement becomes ecstasy. The thrill of triumph has momentarily abolished the cares of the world. And then the game ends, and the crowd begins to drain away, some to celebrate, others to commiserate. But whether winner or loser, player or spectator, each will be back, week after week, year after year, in search of that sublime everlasting moment that only this game can bring.
Mauls and mardi gras Such a scene is experienced whenever and wherever rugby is played, from Sydney to Swansea, Perpignan to Pretoria, and all points in between. This isn’t a modern rugby match, however: it’s a description of the Shrove Tuesday ‘folk football’ match played annually between the Up’ards and Down’ards of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, the rural heartland of England, one of a handful of such games that survive from the rural past. Like most of these games it is open to all inhabitants of the town, whose allegiances are divided according to whether they were born north (the Up’ards) or south (the Down’ards) of the River Henmore, which not only divides the town but also provides the two goals. These are three miles apart, the southerly goal at Clifton Mill and the northerly at Sturston Mill. Play takes place through streets, fields and the river as hundreds of men, young and old, and occasionally women, seek the honour of scoring the decisive goal – which results in the scorer’s name being inscribed on the ball and it being presented to them. In contrast to the complex rules of today, the Ashbourne game has never had many. The winner is the side that gets the ball to their goal 8
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and taps it three times against the remaining stones of the longdemolished mills. If no goal is scored, play finishes at 10 p.m., although if a goal is scored before 5 p.m. another ball is provided to prolong the game. Beyond that, whatever it takes to score a goal is acceptable. Ashbourne is by no means unique or exceptional. Like a throwback on the evolutionary ladder of rugby, there are more than a dozen similar games still played today, from St Ives on the furthest reaches of Cornwall’s west coast to Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney off the north coast of Scotland. Neither soccer nor rugby, like all pre-20th century team sports involving a ball, goals, hands and feet these games were known simply as ‘football’ and are now referred to as ‘folk football’ by historians. This type of game can also still be found in Europe. In France, the first written reference to a game resembling folk football dates back to 1147. La soule, also known variously as choule or cholle, was played among the villages of Normandy, Picardy and Brittany in northern France up until the first half of the twentieth century. In Italy, versions of football known as calcio emerged during the sixteenth century. Calcio Fiorentino was revived under Mussolini and is still a major tourist attraction in Florence today. Countless similar games were born and died without troubling the historical record. Each one was more than just a game. Each was part of the cycle of festivals and celebrations that punctuated everyday life in pre-industrial, agricultural society. Shrove Tuesday, traditionally the last day before the fasting period of Lent in the Christian calendar, became the most popular day for folk football. Across the Christian world, Shrovetide was a festival of indulgence and licence. Sports and games – ranging from pancake-racing to cockfighting – were an essential part of the festivities. When Shrovetide football games took place, entire villages would close for the day while huge scrums of men and youths struggled to carry the ball to their goal. 9
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Normal customs and rights would be suspended. Occasionally, women would play, as they did in the 1790s in Midlothian in Scotland. And, just as today, alcohol was always an essential lubricant. Today, there are state-of-the-art stadiums, highly paid athletes and complex rules, but despite the distance of time and place, modern rugby stands firmly in the tradition of its medieval forebear.
‘Football’, rugby and soccer The historian Barbara Tuchman once suggested that the invention of the ball was as important to the history of human leisure as the wheel was to the development of technology.1 She was undoubtedly right. Across all continents and cultures, people have played ball games since the dawn of human civilisation. As early as 300 bc the Chinese appear to have played a game called cuju that involved kicking a ball over a silk net suspended between two bamboo poles. The Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis described harpastum, a Roman game in which a ball was seemingly carried and passed by the participants – and which some have speculated as being the forerunner of rugby, despite there being no hard evidence. The first recorded description in Britain of a game called football, by William Fitz Stephen in 1174, chronicles its popularity in London: ‘After dinner all the young men of the city go out into the fields to play at the well-known game of football. The scholars belonging to the several schools have each their ball; and the city tradesmen according to the respective crafts, have theirs.’2 The emergence of folk football games like this may have been linked to the growth of towns, trade and the economy during the later Middle Ages that intensified local rivalries, the crucial competitive impulse for sporting contest. The word ‘goal’ seems to share some common heritage with the word ‘boundary’. It may also be linked to a ritual called ‘beating the bounds’, where local people would walk the boundaries of their 10
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parish to share the knowledge of where they lay and to ensure that they were remembered in the future. Perhaps because of such contests, folk football was often seen as a sport of the common people. Joseph Strutt’s 1801 epic The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period describes the game as ‘formerly much in vogue among the common people of England’. It was also suspected, sometimes with justification, of being a cover for the organisation of protests, or worse. It was banned in Ireland in 1719 by the British as being nothing more than a ‘pretence’ for ‘tumultuous and numerous meetings’.3 The various ways a ball could be handled, kicked and passed were as diverse as the regions in which ball games were played. Some were far more organised and based on clearly defined rules. Teams of 22-a-side representing Cumberland and Westmoreland played each other for 1,000 guineas on Kennington Common in London in 1789. A four-a-side match was played in Ashbourne in 1846. Even one-a-side matches, based on the idea of cricket’s single-wicket contests, were not unknown.4 The game of camp-ball, which was played across Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire from at least the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, had a sophisticated set of rules and specialised playing fields, known as ‘camping closes’. Teams of ten or 15 players would carry the ball upfield supported by ‘sidemen’ who would act as American footballstyle blockers. When a sideman’s progress was halted, the ball had to be thrown to another player.5 Cornwall’s ‘hurling to goals’ game was played between teams of 15 to 30 players and allowed similar forms of blocking. When tackled, the ball-carrier had to pass it backwards to a team-mate. Forward passes were not allowed and when a player was tackled he would shout ‘hold’ and pass the ball back. If any rule was broken, wrote the seventeenthcentury Cornish MP Richard Carew, players would ‘take for a just cause of going together by the ears, but with their fists only, neither doth any of them seek revenge for wrongs or hurts, but at the like play again’.6 11
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No matter how different or diverse these early games of folk football, the descriptions of matches make one thing clear – most resembled modern rugby far more than they did soccer. You don’t have to be a time traveller to see the connection. All you need is a map. Many of these early ‘football ‘games were played in areas that would later become hotbeds of rugby. In the area around Twickenham in south-west London, Shrove Tuesday matches were part of a well-established tradition. As well as Twickenham itself, matches were played in other outlying parts of London, at Teddington, Bushey Park, Richmond, Hampton Wick, East Molesey and Thames Ditton. The annual game at Kingston-upon-Thames did not finally end until 1868, just three years before the Rugby Football Union (RFU), the English game’s governing body, itself was founded.7 In today’s rugby stronghold of Leicestershire, matches were recorded from at least 1790, when the village of Ratby staged a match. On Shrove Tuesday 1852 a 15-a-side match was played between Blaby and Wigston in a field that is today just 15 minutes’ drive from today’s Leicester Tigers’ training ground.8 Enderby, another village in the district of Blaby, gained such a strong reputation that they played a team from Holmfirth, near Huddersfield, on Good Friday 1852 at the neutral ground of Sheffield’s Hyde Park.9 Fifteen miles from Leicester in the village of Hallaton, its traditional Easter Monday ‘Bottle-Kicking’ match (a misnomer: no bottles are used but three small barrels are carried but not kicked) is a remnant of an eighteenth-century mass folk football match that continues today.10 Further north, in today’s bastions of rugby league, the East Yorkshire town of Hornsea could boast of its own ‘football grene’ from the 1680s. In the 1820s Primitive Methodists would gather to try and stop the annual match between the villages of Hedon and Preston. Even as late as the 1890s, one Hull FC rugby player claimed that he learned his rugby skills by playing traditional ‘football’ in the local village of Sutton.11 In Yorkshire’s West Riding, games were played at Keighley, 12
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Pudsey, and most regularly at Holmfirth, the birthplace of Harold Wagstaff, arguably the greatest centre-threequarter to play either code of rugby.12 Across the border in Lancashire, Rochdale in the 1840s hosted a number of matches between short-lived clubs boasting names such as the ‘Body Guards’ and the ‘Fear Noughts’, prefiguring the town’s later rugby club adoption of the moniker of Hornets in 1871.13 In Orrell, a 30-a-side challenge was thrown out to local villages in 1841.14 And in Cumberland, the mass folk football ‘Uppies and Downies’ game survives today in Workington’s Easter game. Its neighbour Whitehaven also staged a match in which shipwrights would do battle with quarrymen.15 In Wales, a game called cnapan was apparently played by thousands in Pembrokeshire in the far south-west, in which men on foot and horseback would struggle for possession of a ball. It appeared to flourish in the sixteenth century and was being played on the River Teifi in West Wales 1740.16 In the Scottish Borders, folk football games flourished, most notably at Jedburgh. This roll call of rugby precedents raises an obvious question. Why were these games given the name ‘football’ if they weren’t played with the feet? The plain truth is, as with the origins of many words, we simply don’t know for certain. Soccer’s omnipresence in today’s world can lead us to assume that football means a sport that is played exclusively with the feet. This was never the case. Even the Football Association in its early years allowed the hands to be used by outfield players to catch a ball. And, of course, the feet are used extensively in rugby. Place kicks, drop kicks, chip kicks, punts, bombs and grubbers are part of the armoury of every rugby team that takes the field. It is a game played with both hands and feet. In fact, soccer’s insistence that only the feet can be used by outfield players makes it the exception to the rule. This was widely recognised by the Victorian apostles of modern football. Writing in 1887, the first serious historian of the game, Montague Sherman, pointed out that 13
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‘there is no trace in the original form of [football] to suggest that nothing but kicking is allowed’.17 Far from being a partisan of rugby, Shearman was a member of Wanderers FC, the first ever winners of the FA Cup. Which game is the true inheritor of the traditions of early football? Indirectly, all of them. Directly, none of them. Viewed in terms of human evolution, folk football is related to modern soccer, rugby and the other types of football in same way that apes are the common ancestor to chimpanzees, bonobos and humans. One simple fact remains, however. The sport most firmly rooted in the tradition of the football games played across Europe for centuries in which the ball is handled and kicked, and in which players are bodily tackled, is not soccer. It is rugby.
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2 A SCHOOL CALLED RUGBY Early in 1856 a former pupil of Rugby School named Thomas Hughes sat down to write a book for his eight-year-old son Maurice. It was to be a story about what the boy could expect when he followed in his father’s footsteps to Rugby. Hughes wanted it to be both entertaining and educational, preparing the boy for daily life at the school and introducing him to its principles. It would teach him the importance of character, how to become a gentlemen and, no less importantly, the valuable lessons to be learned from playing sport. When it was finally published in April 1857, Tom Brown’s Schooldays was an instant bestseller: 11,000 copies were sold in its first year and it went through almost 50 editions by the end of the century. It would become one of the most important novels of the Victorian age, establishing the genre of school stories, providing a model for schools around the world and inspiring countless thousands to play the game of rugby. But perhaps the accolade that the doting father Thomas Hughes valued most was that of the anonymous reviewer in The Times, who pronounced that the book was one that ‘every English father might well wish to see in the hands of his son’.1 Sport, and particularly Rugby School’s own version of ‘football’, was a crucial element of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. As soon as he arrives at the school, Tom is thrust into the midst of a ferocious match. Thanks to a mixture of bravery and a sense of duty, he hurls himself into the fray and emerges a hero when, in the last minute of the game, he throws himself 15
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on a loose ball to save a certain try and ensure victory for his team. In doing so, he became rugby’s first role model. Rugby School itself had been established almost two centuries before in 1567 by a London grocer, Lawrence Sheriff, to ‘teach grammar freely’ to local boys. By 1818 it was the second largest public school in England, boasting almost 400 pupils and ‘football’, as rugby is called even today by its pupils, had become embedded in the daily fabric of school life. The town of Rugby was no stranger to games of football. Nestled on the banks of the River Avon in the region known by the tourist brochures as the ‘Heart of England’, the area had a tradition of ‘football’ games stretching back to at least the mid-eighteenth century. In the 1700s a match was played in Rugby town centre every New Year’s Day. It was so popular – or such a nuisance, depending on your point of view – that on New Year’s Eve in 1743 the town crier, Mr Baxter, was paid twopence by the local constable to cry ‘no football play in ye street’ to discourage potential players.2 As late as 1845, the same year that the school published the first printed rules of the game, ‘six tailors of Rugby’ issued a challenge to any other team of six men within five miles of the town to play them for a prize of five pounds.3 The nearby villages of Flecknoe, Grandborough and Staverton also played regular matches in the 1840s. In 1843 local bookmakers offered odds of 100-1 on Flecknoe beating the undefeated Grandborough team. It was to be a memorable day for the village, and especially its gamblers. ‘After playing eight hours, much to the surprise and mortification of the knowing ones,’ reported the sporting weekly Bell’s Life, ‘Flecknoe succeeded in gaining two games, and therefore came off victorious.’4 None of these games or teams would survive into the 1850s. The growth of industrial manufacturing and the rigid discipline of the factory system left neither the space nor the time for traditional folk football matches. Profit overrode pleasure when it came to traditional 16
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sport. ‘It is not a trifling consideration that a suspension of business for nearly two days should be created to the inhabitants for the mere gratification of a sport at once so useless and barbarous,’ complained one Derby businessman in 1832 about the town’s traditional Shrovetide match. In 1846 Derby’s mayor read the Riot Act and called out troops to make sure that the match was not played. ‘It is all disappointment, no sports and no football. This is the way they always treat poor folks,’ complained one former Derby footballer.5 But if the traditional forms of the game played by ordinary people were withering on the vine, the game survived, and thrived, in elite public schools such as Rugby.
Tom Brown’s world By the time Thomas Hughes began to write Tom Brown’s Schooldays, football at Rugby School had become far more than just another sport: it had become a symbol of the school’s unique style of education. Unlike its more socially prestigious rivals like Eton and Harrow, Rugby emphasised the development of a boy’s character. The leaders of British society, industry and empire had to be educated in the competitive spirit that drove the engine of economic expansion onward. And how better to do that than to play rugby? This explains why the true hero of Tom Brown’s Schooldays was not actually Tom Brown but Thomas Arnold, Rugby School’s headmaster from 1828 to 1841, whose presence towered over the book. He believed that the active struggle for Christian principles was an essential part of everyday life. ‘What we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability’, he taught.6 Although not a phrase used by Arnold, this was the philosophy of Muscular Christianity. Under Arnold, Rugby acquired an overwhelming sense of moral purpose. The school became a vivid reflection of the seemingly 17
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irresistible self-belief of the middle classes in the first half of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1846, one pupil described the school as the image of that most powerful element in modern English society, the Middle Class … In a late stage of civilisation, like the present, the idea of trade comes prominently and almost exclusively into notice, being able at length to connect itself with that from which it has long been kept apart, education and enlightenment. Even so, we feel that our power has of late begun to be acknowledged; and that feeling shall animate us to proceed, holding fast the birthright of moral thoughtfulness which our great teacher {Arnold] bequeathed to us …7
The importance of Rugby School was confirmed in 1864 by the report of the Clarendon Commission, which the government had created to examine education in England’s seven leading public schools. Comparing it favourably to Eton, Harrow and Winchester, the commission declared that Rugby had risen from the position of a provincial school to that of a public school and in efficiency and general reputation is second to none … it has become in fact a national institution, as being a place of education and a source of influence for the whole Kingdom. … It instructs everywhere, is known everywhere, and exercises an influence everywhere.8
The Clarendon Commission’s seal of approval for Rugby School and the huge sales of Tom Brown’s Schooldays brought Thomas Arnold’s principles to a new and wider audience. And, for the first time, it gave sport an importance above and beyond the intrinsic enjoyment of chasing a ball around a field. Rugby football was no longer merely a game. For its disciples, it was a guide to life.
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A SCHOOL CALLED RUGBY
Playing the game What type of a game did Rugby School play? As can be seen in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, it differed little from those games of folk football that had taken place for centuries. The number of players was unlimited but usually numbered around 50- or 60-a-side. There was no time limit to matches, the contest being won by the first side to score two goals, although the first set of written rules from 1845 also stated that ‘all matches are drawn after five days, but after three if no goal has been kicked’. And, like traditional Shrove Tuesday games, play was based on almost continual scrummaging, usually followed by kicking to set up more scrummages.9 Strange as it may seem to us today, a try scored no points at all. It merely provided an opportunity to try to kick a goal, hence the term ‘try’. As in modern soccer, only goals counted in the score. And goals were not easy to score. Firstly, ‘goal-keepers’, usually younger boys in the school, were spread out along the goal-line to prevent the ball going over the line or being touched down. If a player managed to avoid these hordes and touch the ball down, the procedure to kick at goal was elaborate and time-consuming. The player who had made the touchdown punted the ball back from where he had touched down to a waiting player in the field of play. He would catch the ball and make a mark in the ground with his heel. But the moment the ball was kicked to the catcher, the defending side could rush forward to stop him catching the ball. If he caught the ball successfully, the catcher was allowed to place it on the ground for the try scorer to kick over the bar and between the posts of the goal. Not surprisingly, this arcane procedure was not incorporated into the first set of rules drawn up by the Rugby Football Union in 1871, but it did have one piece of historical significance. The fact that the opposing side could charge the kicker meant that goals at Rugby School were scored by kicking the ball over the crossbar rather than under it. 19
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THE OVAL WORLD
As well as the goal-keepers, teams consisted mainly of ‘quarters’, whose job it was to kick the ball back downfield when it came to them, and ‘players up’, the forwards who would take part in the scrum or dribble the ball forward to the opposition goal-line. The scrum itself bore little relation to its modern incarnation. Forwards stood straight up and pushed, kicking the ball or, more usually, their opponents’ shins, a practice known as hacking. Their aim was not to heel the ball backwards out of the scrum but to drive the opposing forwards back and dribble the ball forward towards the goal. Hooking the ball out of the scrum was viewed as a form of cheating. Toughness was everything. A player who put his head down in a scrum would be accused of cowardice, because it indicated that he was concerned for the safety of his shins. For the Victorian public school boy there was no greater test of manliness than the ability to give and to take hacking on his shins. ‘We all wear white trousers, to show ‘em we don’t care for hacks,’ East explains to Tom Brown before his first school match. White trousers showed the blood and confirmed the wearer’s imperviousness to pain. Even the tradition of caps, still awarded today to international players, can be traced back to these adolescent trials of masculinity. Crimson caps were worn by boys of the School House team to distinguish themselves from their opponents. As old boy Sydney Selfe remembered, ‘the mot d’ordre was “whenever you see a [bare] head, hit it”’.10 Boys would even adapt their boots specially for hacking by adding thick soles and filing the toes to a sharpness that could slash the shins of an opponent. Another Rugby old boy described in 1860 how ‘fellows did not care a fig for the ball except inasmuch as it gave them a decent pretext for hacking … My maxim is hack the ball on when you see it near you, and when you don’t, why then, hack the fellow next to you.’11 Even in the 1870s, rugby was a game played predominantly with the feet, literally ‘foot-ball’ as it was often spelt at the time. Handling the ball was severely limited. If the ball was caught from a kick before it hit 20
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A SCHOOL CALLED RUGBY
the ground – a ‘fair catch’ – the catcher was allowed to kick the ball unhindered by the opposing side, known as a free kick. Running with the ball was only permitted if the ball was bouncing when caught – a stationary or even a rolling ball could not be picked up by hand and had to be kicked. No one would have been more surprised than William Webb Ellis himself by the claim that he ‘invented’ rugby by picking up the ball and running with it during a match at the school in 1823. Ellis, who became an Anglican clergyman in later life, died in Menton in France in 1872 oblivious to his apparently historic achievement. Even the inquiry that was set up by the Old Rugbeian Society in 1895 to investigate the origins of Rugby football could not find any evidence – direct, circumstantial or even hearsay – to support the story. This did not deter it from proclaiming Ellis to be the ‘originator’ of the sport. We do know for certain, however, that Jem Mackie, a Rugby pupil in the late 1830s, was renowned for running with the ball, but not long after he was expelled following an unexplained ‘incident’, a general meeting of the school formally legalised running with the ball in 1842. But for his expulsion, Mackie may have gone on to occupy William Webb Ellis’s position in the mythology of rugby.12 Stories about boys like Mackie were passed down the school from one year to another. So, too, were the rules of the game. For decades rugby had no formal rule book. Disputes were resolved by discussion, argument and occasionally by a general meeting of the senior boys. But as the number of pupils increased and the game became more complex, it was decided in 1844 to set up a committee to agree a definitive version of the rules and in August 1845 three pupils were elected to compile the first written version of the rules. They were William Arnold, son of the recently deceased headmaster, W. W. Shirley, a future Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University, and Frederick Hutchins, who would become a London solicitor. A mere three days later they submitted their draft, which was endorsed and printed.13 21
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THE OVAL WORLD
At just 20 pages, including the front and back covers, at only nine by six centimetres in size, Football Rules was a tiny book that could be slipped into the pocket of a player’s white trousers and pulled out whenever a dispute arose. The 37 rules made no attempt to explain how the game was played; they were designed for pupils who already knew how to play. Instead they laid down the decisions and rulings on points of dispute or controversy. The first four introductory pages were taken up with the vexed question of boys who did not want to play – those seeking to be excused had to submit a note signed by a medical officer and countersigned by the recalcitrant boy’s head of house. A revised edition was published in 1862, but by that time the rules were no longer just the concern of boys at the school. Thanks to the unparalleled success of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Rugby football had begun to inspire and excite tens of thousands of boys and young men across Britain. Sadly, the child for whom the book was intended would neither read it nor play the game that the book so lovingly described. Just two years after Tom Brown’s Schooldays was published, Thomas Hughes’ son Maurice died.
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For John Collins, my dad Bloomsbury Sport An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK
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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Š Tony Collins, 2015 Tony Collins has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-4370-3 TPB: 978-1-4088-4371-0 ePub: 978-1-4088-4372-7 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset in 12pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
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The definitive world history of rugby from its earliest beginnings to the present day.
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