Women thrived in wartime
Brendan Gallagher begins a new series charting the history of the women’s game
GIVEN that we don’t really know who invented rugby – and that the Webb Ellis story is essentially an agreed compromise – we have almost no chance of dating the start of women’s rugby.
What we do know, however, is that women enthusiasts, despite active discouragement from their menfolk for decades, have played a form of rugby much longer that you might imagine.
There are some reports of women being involved in – and then being banned from – annual Shrove Tuesday Football matches between villages in the Medieval ages when the rumbustious action was much closer to what we call rugby than what became soccer, and then in the 19th century we have the first confirmed women’s rugby matches or involvement in the game.
The first came in a noted series of eight football games played between Scotland and England women’s teams on a tour around Scotland and northern England in May and June 1881, but only recently has it come to light that the final two games were almost certainly played under Rugby Union laws.
Six matches into the series and the ladies pitched up at the Cattle Market Inn Athletic Grounds at Stanley in Liverpool on Saturday June 25 for the first of two fixtures there. The first was to kick off at 5pm that night and the second at 7.30pm on the Monday. Admission was 1 shilling, unusually expensive for the time, possibly to deter protesters who had caused the abandonment of two of the earlier games off football in Scotland.
The Liverpool Echo reported that the Scotland Women succeeded making ‘several touchdowns and one goal’ in a dominating first half display and several more touchdowns in the second half without scoring a goal which is certainly the language of 19th century rugby when games were decided by goals and you only earned the right to kick at goal by scoring a touchdown, ie a try.
The England women made one goal in the second half but as Scotland won 2-1 I suspect somewhere along the line they also scored a dropped goal, worth one point then. Two days later Scotland won 2-0, also it would seem playing the rugby version of football.
Women’s rugby was still on the radar in 1885 when cigarette manufacturers Ogdens produced their famous image of a woman rugby player running with the ball, or perhaps she was setting up to attempt a dropped goal? The jury is out on that one but it is widely assumed to be based on
an individual from the matches in 1881.
It was in 1887 that a schoolgirl called Emily Valentine came to prominence. Valentine was a student at Royal Portora School in Enniskillen where her father was the assistant headmaster and where two of her brothers formed the first rugby team at the school in 1885. In the best comic book tradition she seized her chance when Portora were one player short and she was stood on the touchline supporting her brother.
As she later recalled in her journal: “I loved rugby football, but seldom got a chance to do more than kick a place-kick or a drop-kick, but I could run in spite of petticoats and thick undergarments. My great ambition was to play in a real rugby game and score a try.
“At last my chance came. I got the ball. I grasped it and ran dodging, darting, but I was so keen to score that try that I did not pass it, perhaps when I should.
“I still raced on, I could see the boy coming towards me; I dodged, with my heart thumping, my knees shaking a bit, I ran. Yes, I had done it; one last spurt and I touched down, right on the line. I had scored my try.”
Meanwhile rugby was taking a grip in New Zealand. In 1891 Nita Webb from Auckland, possibly inspired by the New Zealand Natives’ world tour of 1888-89 which put the Maori culture on the map, wondered if something similar might be organised to promote the cause of women players and womanhood generally.
Such a huge project required somebody with an entrepreneurial streak and Webb tried to embrace that. She advertised for recruits promising a 10/- a week payment while they were on tour and 30 women were gathered in Auckland to start training.
The idea was that initially they would make up two teams and stage exhibition matches domestically in New Zealand and then, when they started spreading their wings in the Colonies, they would organise challenge matches against other women’s teams.
It was an ambitious plan and proved too much even in an enlightened new nation like New Zealand, the first country in the world to allow women the vote two years later in 1893. Webb and her plans unexpectedly ran into a barrage of
press criticism with, seemingly, two main arguments.
First there was the question of whether women should be playing such a violent game at all and the other centred on whether a group of independent young women should be roaming the world on their own. The expected sponsorship and support failed to materialise and Webb reluctantly closed the project and, soon after, emigrated to Australia.
With the benefit of hindsight it feels like a key moment in the early development or ‘non development’ of the women’s game. A high-profile tour taking in Britain and Ireland might have accelerated the process considerably.
Soon World War 1 was upon us with women to the fore on the home front and given more opportunities at both work and play. In soccer the Dick Kerr ladies football team, starting on Christmas Day 1917, famously toured the country attracting huge crowds and raising funds at a series of exhibition matches and although rugby can’t quite match the grandeur and impact of that tour it can boast something similar.
On Saturday December 15, 1917 a women’s team representing Newport – largely based on those working at the Iron mills of John Lysaughts Ltd – played a Cardiff Ladies team which was based on employees of the local Brewery Hancocks. A crowd of 10,000 gathered at the Arms Park with Newport winning 6-0 – two unconverted tries to nil. The ladies were given rooms to change in at the Grand Hotel and had to wear stockings to cover up bear legs. Many also wore what appears to be prototype scrum caps.
Playing full-back for Cardiff that day was Maria Eley who lived to be 106 – when she died in 2007 there had already been five Women’s World Cups: “We loved it,” she recalled. “It was such fun with all of us together on the pitch, but we had to stop when the men came back from the war, which was a shame.”
It was to be 69 years before a Welsh women’s team took the field against England. If the ladies in 1917 were having such a good time and the game was so manifestly good for the camaraderie of the respective workforces why were they not allowed to continue with their rugby adventures after the war?
As the world returned to normal, men returned to the jobs that men ‘always did’ and women largely returned to home-making and child rearing.
It was a curious and confusing time sociologically. Searching through the photographic archives for our History of Rugby series earlier this year it was blindingly clear that while not playing as much during this period, women were nonetheless much more part of the general rugby milieu in the 1920s and 30s than the 50s and early 60s when rugby – post WW2 – became a totally male dominated arena.
Between the wars women were welcomed to all rugby occasions and travelled in quite large numbers to support their teams, but the playing side of the game for women seemed to stagnate.
There were exceptions, most notably in Australia where Tamworth and Armidale were hotspots for the women’s game and where briefly a national league was formed.