Hail the old boys of rugby’s exotic history

Source: The Telegraph article by Daniel Schofield, 26 January 2021

For those of you still trapped in the weekly cycle of Zoom quizzes desperately seeking new material, here is a question you can pass off as your own: what role did Flamingoes, Gipsies and Mohicans play in the establishment of rugby?

Answer: they were among the 21 founding clubs of the Rugby Football Union, which was formed 150 years ago today in Regent Street’s Pall Mall Restaurant. While some founder clubs, such as Harlequins and Blackheath, remain, many of the more exotically titled teams disbanded. The minutes of that meeting survive, however, and will be on display at an exhibition around the 150th anniversary of the RFU once the World Rugby Museum is reopened to the public.

If the mind paints a sepia-tinged image of the meeting being composed of men with long grey beards and top hats, the average age of the participants was, in fact, 23. At the time, rugby was still largely confined to schools, with clubs being formed by leavers who wanted to carry on playing. The youngest representative, Wynnard Hooper, for St Paul’s School, was 16.

The reason the meeting was called was connected to an unofficial football match played between England and Scotland in 1870. The Scottish authorities did not grant the match recognition because they preferred rugby football to association football. So, a challenge was laid down by captains of five Scottish clubs for England to play a rugby football match at Raeburn Place in Edinburgh the following year.

The main fault line in the laws debate centred around the practice of ‘hacking’ – kicking someone in the shin.

A letter was subsequently published in The Times inviting the rugby footballers of England to get together to select a team and produced a codified set of rules. The teams were selected, but it took five more meetings for a codified set of laws to be agreed – plus ca change – by which time England had already lost the first international 1-0 to Scotland.

According to Phil McGowan, the curator of the World Rugby Museum, the main fault line in the laws debate centred around the practice of “hacking”.

“Hacking is when you kick someone in the shins when they try to run past you, which was a real feature of the game at Rugby School. Children used to put nails in the end of their boots to assist in their hacking. Rugby clubs left the FA’s meeting in 1863 not because they objected to not being able to handle the ball, but because they objected to not being able to hack.”

Eventually, it was agreed that hacking would not be permitted, which shows there have been some advances in player welfare. And if you wanted to know why rugby insists on referring to laws rather than rules, it was because that meeting largely comprised solicitors.

The teams were less clubs in the modern sense of the word, but groups of school friends who wanted to continue playing rugby. Gipsies were founded by former Tonbridge school pupils and owe their etymology to their wandering nature, moving from Peckham Rye to Putney and Wormwood Scrubs.

Similarly, Marlborough Nomads bounced between Blackheath, Richmond, Surbiton and Thames Ditton. The old boys’ teams struggled to remain competitive as the game rose in popularity, due to their limited playing pool.

In 1911, the Nomads merged with Rosslyn Park. Having once been the biggest club in London, Gipsies also disbanded in 1883.

Despite their short lives, these clubs and their members had a profound influence across many sports. Nomads’ meeting representative, Frederick Currey, played for England and would become an important administrator for the RFU and International Rugby Football Board. Montague Shearman, of the Nomads, became the first secretary of the Amateur Athletics Association and represented Wanderers in an FA Cup final.

Read more: here

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) is gearing up to mark the 150th year of English rugby throughout 2021.

On 26 January 1871 at the Pall Mall Restaurant on London’s Regent Street, a meeting took place between representatives from 21 clubs, many of which are still in existence today. The representatives were young men, the average age being 23, many were club captains and together they created the world’s first governing body for rugby football.

At the meeting 20 players were also selected to represent England in the first ever international contest on 27 March 1871 following a challenge of an international fixture issued by Scotland.

The RFU plan to mark the anniversary with various activities, to find out more visit their 150th RFU webpage: here