For decades, Moseley have been the pride of second city
This series will delve into every nook and cranny of club rugby in Britain and Ireland – small and large, old and new, wealthy and potless – and inevitably there are going to be a few once great clubs who now operate at a slightly lower level although hopefully they still enjoy their rugby.
One such club is Moseley, now Birmingham Moseley who, when I grew up, were dripping with England internationals and perennial contenders in the old RFU Cup or John Player Cup as it was quickly retitled. Three appearances in the final yielded two defeats and one shared title, in 1981, with Gloucester
A trip to the Reddings was normally rewarded with a feast of good rugby but come the revolution they went into decline. Which was all rather strange as they were the pre-eminent club in England’s second city and always seemed rather well heeled. Not so, clearly.
Initially, they kept their heads afloat in Division One for the first four years of the Courage League but were then relegated and then later in the 1990s with the advent of professionalism they overspent trying to fly the flag and keep pace with others and paid dire consequences. No sugar daddy appeared and they were sadly forced to sell the Reddings for development – their home for 125 years.
They relocated to the University of Birmingham and then in 2005 moved again, this time to Billesley Common, once the home of Birmingham Medics RFC. These days they are solid citizens of National One and although they have never threatened to go into freefall like some formerly illustrious clubs, there also seems little likelihood of ever regaining their old status.
Moseley’s origins lie with Havelock Cricket Club whose members decided in 1873 that the needed to keep fit in the winter and formed a football club. Both football and rugby were played initially
until the rugby football code prevailed. They quickly built a strong fixture list and enjoyed period of dominance between 1879 and 1882 when they were unbeaten over three seasons and 54 games. During that time, they marked their debut at the Reddings with a win over Leicester Tigers and for the rest of the century they flexed their muscles, beating Cardiff in 1886, the touring New Zealand Natives two years later and dominating the Midlands Counties Challenge Cup.
An early star was Fred Byrne, a powerful man at fullback with a prodigious punt and won 13 caps for England between 1894 and 1899. He also toured with the successful 1896 Lions in South Africa where he played all 21 games on tour. Something of an allrounder he was a talented amateur cricketer
who captained Warwickshire on occasions and was noted as the man who got WG Grace out twice in a match when Warwickshire played London County at Crystal Palace.
Byrne however was not one of the four Moseley players who took up a last minute invitation to represent Great Britain at the 1900 Olympics against France. That quartet was J H Birtles, C P Deykin, M W Talbot and FC Bayliss who together with a group of Birmingham-based players formed the Moseley Wanderers for the occasion and reportdly travelled to Paris and back in a day for the game. By all accounts Deykins had played a County Championship match the day before.
As we rattle through the decades, England centre Peter Cranmer was possibly Moseley’s most illustrious player, the winner of 16 England caps at centre with many more to come before World War 2 intervened. As with Byrne, he was a more than useful cricketer and had to miss out on the 1938 Lions trip to South Africa because he was captaning Warwickshire that season. After the war he would continue playing club cricket and captain Warwickshire seconds until his mid 50s.
Flanker Nick Jeavons, who won 14 caps for England, toured with the Lions in 1983, but Moseley’s most iconic player probably remains Sam Doble, a goal kicker whose career was cut short in his pomp by cancer, which eventually took him at the age of 33 in 1977.
Doble scored a world record 581 points in the 1971-72 season but actually it was an even more jaw dropping 628. During his annus mirablis, Doble scored 486 points for Moseley including 12 tries – many forget he was a powerful long
striding runner – and 63 for Staffordshire in the County Championships with the rest coming in England trial games.
But what seems bizarre is that his 47-point haul on England’s tour of South Africa that May is not included in the total. That, of course, however, takes in the 14 points he stroked over at Ellis Park on his England debut when he helped his side to a famous win over the Boks. Those points most certainly don’t belong to the 1972-73 season which didn’t start until September, so I am unilaterally increasing the official points tally to 628.
Doble was a extraordianry accumulator of points and although it was his prodigious goal kicking people remember first – 3,651 points in all senior games before illness struck – there were 85 tries as well as befits an all-round sportsman. Doble made a more than decent stab at just about every sport he tried while at St Paul’s College Cheltenham and at one stage there was a serious possibility of him turning to athletics and the decathlon.
His kicking wasn’t a thing of natural beauty, he attacked every ball no matter what the distance and gave it a hefty thump rather in the fashion of Jimmy Gopperth these days.
For five consecutive seasons, from 1967-68 to 1971-72, he was the leading points scorer in British rugby with tallies of 311, 379, 381, 389 and the record breaking 581 which we have upgraded to 628.
Success in recent years has been hard to come by but the competitive spirit remains. Moseley won the National Division Two title in 2006 and the National Trophy in 2009, defeating Lees 23-18 the final at Twickenham.