Brighton lay claim to being rugby’s oldest

BRIGHTON, riding high in London One South, are celebrating their 150th season but they could be even older – arguably the oldest rugby club in the world.

The revelation comes in a book The History of Brighton Football Club (Rugby Football Union), with the FC designation as the club were officially founded in 1868, before the RFU formed in 1871.

Rugby has never settled ‘the oldest club’ argument and now book author and Brighton vice-president John Honeysett has set the cat among the seagulls.

Honeysett’s research unearthed the Brighton Club formed in 1791 and by 1796 the game of ‘foot-ball’, a hybrid including elements of rugby, was being played in the town.

“This might have been the prelude to the formal foundation of Brighton Football Club – originally called the Shoo-Flies – in 1868, with the club joining the RFU in 1873,” said Honeysett.

Honeysett also discovered a county game played in Brighton between Sussex and Kent in 1866, when the Lancashire-Yorkshire match of 1870 has always been considered the first-ever county game.

“This book documents the febrile swirl of mid-Victorian sports clubs that came in and went out of existence,” said Phil McGowan, curator of the World Rugby Museum.

“John’s perseverance has been rewarded with a clutch of important historical discoveries, some of which fundamentally challenge existing orthodoxies about how the game developed.”

McGowan added that Brighton can claim to be one of the ten oldest ‘open’ clubs in the world, while Guy’s Hospital, founded in 1843 as a ‘closed’ club, calls itself the world’s oldest.

Brighton has bred its share of England internationals, including John Birkett, whose father Reginald scored England’s first ever try in the 1871 international against Scotland, while Jock Hartley went on to manage the 1938 British Isles tour to South Africa.

Current Harlequins flyhalf Marcus Smith played junior rugby at Brighton, where his father Jeremy was club captain.