NZ rugby’s 150-year-old myth revealed: Wanganui was first
A small advertisement appeared in the Wanganui Herald on 2 June 1869: ‘Foot-Ball Match’, it said. ‘Country v Town. Town accepts the Country’s Challenge, provided the Rugby Rules are attended to. Game to commence at 2 o’clock pm on Saturday, 12th inst. 2 June 1869.’
It’s the first known indication of rugby being played in New Zealand. The game was postponed from 12 June and eventually took place the following week, with both the Herald and its tri-weekly contemporary, the Chronicle, reporting on it (and others later in the year).
The Herald, the paper founded by later Prime Minister John Ballance, reported: ‘a football match was going on between fifteen of the town and same number of the country. The match was very well contested and after two hours hard kicking was withdrawn, rain and darkness coming on. The match will be resumed on Saturday week.’
It was clear rugby rules were ‘attended to’, as the advertisement wanted, by the Chronicle’s report: ‘The foot-ball match on Saturday was not terminated when night-fall brought the game to a termination. The country side, however, seemed to have the best of it, having had the ball in the neighbourhood of their goal for some considerable time, but were unable to kick it over the horizontal bar. The match is thus postponed for a fortnight.’
Other references indicated rugby rather than one of the other football versions common for the time. In one game, the Country boys ‘had the advantage in weight, which was counterbalanced by the pluck and splendid play of the Town boys’.
This undermines the orthodoxy that the first game of rugby in New Zealand was played in Nelson in 1870. Here was clear evidence that Wanganui was there first. Nelson had the advantage of its local paper listing the players involved in its first game in 1870, and these were later reproduced in Arthur Swan’s History of New Zealand Rugby Football. Swan said the first game in Wanganui was in 1872, three years later. But further evidence of Wanganui’s rugby primacy came from Tom Eyton, the partpromoter and advance man for the Natives’ odyssey of 1888–89. He wrote in his account of that tour that he had played in a match, Armed Constabulary against Wanganui, in 1871.
There were also reports of Irish regiments of the British Army stationed in New Zealand during the 1860s playing ‘football’, but there was no indication
of which version. The 18th Regiment of Foot was said to have played a game in Wellington in 1868 but by which rules was not specified; the 18th was also stationed in Wanganui and was the last British regiment in New Zealand.
Monro doctrine
Charles John Monro introduced rugby to Nelson in 1870, no question. But whether his innovative act was the first game in New Zealand, or whether the game spread outwards from Nelson, is open to considerable question.
As we’ve seen, there is evidence of a game in Wanganui in 1869; there is no evidence that what happened in Nelson influenced footballers in places such as Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin to adopt rugby rules.
Towns then were dots on a map not always connected; railways were in their infancy, overland travel otherwise was by foot, horse or horse-drawn coach; the super-highway of the day, the
telegraph, was still developing. Most travel was by ship and letters from, say, Auckland to Christchurch often went via Sydney, Melbourne or Hobart. New Zealand in the 1860s and 70s was a frontier society. While there were newspapers in most places, they were largely confined to their own areas reporting their own news or what they could clip from papers brought by ship.
Monro came back from Christ’s College in North London and told the young men of Nelson about the version of football played according to rules evolved at Rugby School. Hitherto they, like boys elsewhere in New Zealand, played different versions of football – some played Association (soccer), some Australian rules, some the rules of other English public schools. Some games were a mixture of rules; for example, half one version and half another.
The first game of rugby in Nelson was between Nelson College Old Boys and ‘Town’ and was played at the Nelson Botanical Reserve on 14 May 1870. A team of Nelson boys went to Wellington later in the year and played there too.
In 1904, a week after the All Blacks’ first test in New Zealand, Monro recalled the Wellington venture: ‘How we did enjoy ourselves, both victors and vanquished, and how little we thought in those remote times that football would one day become the great national game of the colony or that . . . some of us would form part of that vast multitude who on Saturday last cheered themselves hoarse when a crack team from England was so signally defeated by our successors and fellow countrymen.’