150 YEARS OF RFU
Brendan Gallagher looks at how player welfare led to RFU creation
This Tuesday night – January 26 – is the 150th anniversary of the founding of the RFU at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London, an event of some importance at the time and even greater significance in retrospect.
And in many ways it remains a very modern tale. It was all about stopping the bickering and agreeing a universal set of laws that were not open to interpretation. It was about outlawing dangerous foul play and minimising life-threatening injuries and it was about forming one unified body to govern the game. Conferences are still regularly held to discuss the exact same issues.
The result in 1871 was the formation of the RFU after which the other Home Unions took their cue. Scotland followed suit in March 1873, Ireland in 1874 and Wales in 1881. From this point onwards organised Rugby Union in Britain and Ireland began to flourish. Indeed, within just weeks England were travelling to Scotland for rugby’s first international game. Everything happened in a hurry 150 years ago, something rugby has never been noted for subsequently.
Being rugby, the meeting naturally involved licenced premises which means there was some shenanigans to report. Famously the Wasps delegate – whose name has never been uncovered – went to the wrong watering hole, on the wrong night. Less well known is that Ealing Rugby Club – the forefathers of the present Ealing Trailfinders side – also sent a delegate. He travelled into central London on the correct night but also went to the wrong establishment. Finding the company eminently agreeable he settled in for the evening there and thus Ealing were deprived of their ringside view of history being made.
Frankly I’m inclined to sympathise with these two gents wending their way through the murky streets of a Dickensian London. I have seen at least five addresses listed over the years for the Pall Mall Restaurant ranging from the Strand, Charing Cross, Regent Street, Covent Garden and Coskspur Street.
This has all the hallmarks of those wild goose chases – pre satnav – when we set off with vague instructions for a match against new opponents at a distant ground none of us had ever heard of before. The late Michael Green would have loved it, indeed he was a member of Ealing and rather proud of their conspicuous no-show on the big night.
The RFU plaque to mark the event has been erected at a nondescript building – empty when last I passed it but previously a Tex Mex eaterie – on the corner of Cockspur Street and Regent Street. However rugby historian O L Owen in his authoritative history of the game in 1955 insisted that even 65 years ago the restaurant building had long been demolished.
On a more serious note the meeting was in fact the culmination of a couple of hugely important developments in the game. Rugby was still searching for its final identity and laws – how many could play in each side? And most importantly should the practice of hacking be allowed to continue? Hacking was the deliberate kicking or tripping of opponents. Think back to the late Christophe Dominici’s ‘tackle’ on Jason Robinson in the 2003 World Cup semi-final. That was hacking.
It was getting out of control and dangerous and the rugby version of football was attracting some bad publicity.
In the autumn of 1870 a Richmond player was killed while practising with the club and shortly after the Times printed an anonymous letter signed by “A Surgeon” who had been on duty at Rugby School the previous Saturday. “I attended one boy with his collar bone broken, another with a severe injury to his ankle, a third with a severe injury to his knee and two others sent home on crutches.”
All the newspapers of the day piled in and The Lancet – the leading medical journey – also attributed the injuries to hacking regardless of whether that was the case. Rugby was in the dock and so it was that Edwin Ash, the Richmond secretary, and Blackheath secretary Benjamin Burns, sent an agreed letter to all the newspapers with the Times giving it most prominence.
The letter stated: “An opinion has for some time prevailed among the supporters of Rugby Football that some code of rules should be adopted by all clubs who profess to play the rugby game as at present the majority have altered in some slight manner the game as played at Rugby School by introducing new rules of their own.
“Each club plays to its own rules on its own ground; so the strangers in each match finding themselves at once at a disadvantage in not knowing the rules of the ground, confusion, and disputes are generally the results. We therefore hope that all clubs playing the rugby game will join with us informing a code to be generally adopted. Secretaries of clubs approving of this will greatly oblige by forwarding their names to us.”
As a result of this letter – and the response to it – invitations were then sent out for the meeting of January 26 which turned out to be a very London-centric affair. That’s probably not surprising on a wintry Thursday night in January, nobody would willingly travel from much further afield. But it’s still a bit odd that Rugby School themselves weren’t represented – though plenty of former pupils were in attendance – and nor was anybody from Oxford University present. They had formed a club the previous year and Cambridge were on the verge of doing likewise.
So the basic agenda was the codification of agreed laws and playing conditions with a view to making the game safer but subsequent to their letter there had been another development. The five main clubs north of the border in Scotland had challenged England to an international rugby match and to respond to
that challenge – and to govern the new laws that they intended to be put in place – would surely require the establishment of a Union or Federation of Clubs.
And so it came to pass that delegates of the 21 clubs attended the meeting chaired by Edward Holmes, the Richmond captain and an eminent lawyer. Some clubs were represented by two or, in the case of Richmond, three delegates – 32 attended in total – thus establishing a tradition continued by World Rugby to this day. Democracy has never been rugby’s strong point. Elsewhere I list the 21 clubs, the majority of whom are now disbanded.
It was, however, an excellently brisk meeting with all the business completed in well under two hours. The Rugby Football Union was founded, a constitution agreed, officers elected, subscription fees set at 5/- on joining and 5/- per annum – some even paid them – and a working party delegated to produce a definitive set of laws. Oh and in future each club was to bring a maximum of two delegates.
The task of law making was delegated to three men – all former Rugby School pupils and all three lawyers: Holmes, Algernon E Rutter and Leonard J Maton of Wimbledon Hornets who effectively did all the work. Is it too late for the Rugby Writers to award him one of their splendid unsung hero tankards posthumously?
The original idea was that it be a three-man work party but within days Maton had broken a leg playing rugby for the Hornets. He suddenly had unlimited time on his hands and armed with fine parchment paper and a comfortable room in Holmes’ chambers – not to mention an unlimited supply of tobacco and cigars – he sat down and wrote out the laws of rugby as he and other former pupils of Rugby School remembered them while also inserting the agreed prohibition of hacking. When he was finished the 1871 laws numbered 59 with number 57 explicitly outlawing hacking ‘in any circumstances’.
The trio met a couple of times to go through and fine tune the 59 laws with their acute legal minds and on June 22, 1871 a meeting of the newly constituted RFU voted their approval.