Rugby's Great Split

Class, Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football

Tony Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134221370
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

Since it's first publication, Rugby's Great Split has established itself as a classic in the field of sport history. Drawing on an unprecedented range of sources, this deeply researched and highly readable book traces the social, cultural and economic divisions that led, in 1895, to schism in the game of rugby and the creation of rugby league, the sport of England's northern working class.

Tony Collins' analysis challenges many of the conventional assumptions about this key event in rugby history – about class conflict, amateurism in sport, the North-South divide, violence on the pitch, the development of mass spectator sport and the rise of football. This new edition is expanded to cover parallel events in Australia and New Zealand, and to address the key question of rugby league's failure to establish itself in Wales.

Rugby's Great Split is a benchmark text in the history of rugby, and an absorbing case study of wider issues – issues of class, gender, regional and national identity, and the impact of the commercialization and recent professionalization of rugby league. This insightful text is for anyone interested in Britain's social history or in the emergence of modern sport, it is vital reading.

Chapter1: From folk football to civic pride: Origins to 1879

Rugby league football, like all modern forms of football, has its roots in the folk football of pre-industrial society. Many of the areas that became strongholds of the game had long histories of folk football going back far into the past. Hull, Huddersfield, Manchester, Rochdale, Whitehaven, Workington, York and many other towns in Lancashire, Yorkshire and the North West can all record football games from at least the seventeenth century.¹

These early forms of football were intimately connected with the fairs, festivals and holidays of a predominantly rural nation. Shrove Tuesday, in particular, was the favoured day for many football matches across Britain. Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and the Easter holidays too were popular dates for football.
Other than two sides and the propulsion of a ball to a goal, the playing rules of the game could differ enormously from area to area. In some regions, the ball was driven primarily by foot. In others, the ball was carried or thrown. Quite often a mixture of the two was allowed. But against those who would imagine folk football was a direct precursor to soccer, Montague Shearman’s Athletics and Football, published in 1887, noted that ‘there is no trace in the original form of [football] to suggest that nothing but kicking is allowed’.²

Folk football was primarily a game for large numbers played over wide distances, often involving the majority of the male population. In Derby, the game often involved around a thousand men, while the Sedgefield game involved 400 men per side. The goals were three miles apart for the Ashbourne game, while Whitehaven’s goals were set at the docks and a wall outside of the town. These organised games were also generally occasions for social mixing between the classes. The level of organisation required in many matches was considerable, often involving the closing of roads, prizes, arrangement of fields, suspension of regular business and newspaper advertisements, necessitating the patronage of local squires or landowners. But whatever its rules or wherever it was played, that folk football was extremely violent and disorderly, even in its most organised form, there can be no doubt. Fighting, bloodshed and broken bones are words rarely absent from reports of football matches, and death was not an uncommon occurrence. It is fair to say that Joseph Lawson’s description of the Pudsey street game of the 1820s and 1830s could apply to almost any area in which the game was played:

Down-towners playing up-towners; in wet weather, bad roads and played through the village; breaking windows, striking bystanders, the ball driven into houses; and such ‘shinning’, as they called kicking each other’s legs. It was quite common to see these up and down towners kicking each other’s shins when the ball was a hundred yards away. Of course, many received serious injuries.³

By the early 1800s, the growth of industrial capitalism had begun to undermine the traditional social basis for folk football. The anti-Sabbatarian Horatio Smith, writing in 1831, described the way in which the urbanisation of London had driven out the possibilities for popular recreation:

Every vacant and green spot has been converted into a street; field after field has been absorbed by the builder; all scenes of popular resort have been smothered with piles of brick; football and cricket grounds, bowling greens, and the enclosures or open places set apart for archery and other pastimes have been successfully parcelled out in squares, lanes or alleys.⁴

But it was not simply lack of green spaces that removed opportunities to play. Football had developed in a rural, feudalistic setting. The way in which it was played – the involvement of large numbers of people playing and watching, taking place over large areas and for long hours – ran counter to the discipline, order and organisation necessary for urban capitalism. As a critic of the Derby football game complained in 1832, ‘it is not a trifling consideration that a suspension of business for nearly two days should be created to the inhabitants for the mere gratification of a sport at once so useless and barbarous’.⁵ In 1835 the Highways Act banned the playing of football on public highways, imposing a maximum penalty of forty shillings. Religious objections to the playing of the game grew too, especially from nonconformist denominations who saw in football only licentiousness, debauchery and violence. Just as importantly, the old relationships between the classes no longer existed. The 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of the Chartists, attempts at armed insurrection in England and Wales and widespread fear of revolution crossing the channel, reducing to a negligible level the opportunities for social mixing across class lines. The gathering of large numbers of working-class people, for whatever purpose, was viewed with some suspicion by the authorities. Threats to public order were often cited as the reasons for the banning of football, as, gradually, most of the remaining outposts of the traditional game succumbed to the exigencies of capitalism.⁶

Despite the vast differences in modes of play and methods of organisation between pre-industrial football and its late-Victorian forms, it is important to stress that many continuities and survivals from these earlier times became bound up in the culture of modern football. For example, there is little doubt that it was associated in the public mind with the common people. In 1720, Stow’s Survey spoke of football as something with which ‘the lower classes divert themselves’, along with ‘throwing at cocks and lying at alehouses’, amongst others.⁷ Joseph Strutt’s 1801 survey of British sports describes football as ‘formerly much in vogue among the common people of England’.⁸ Occasionally football was used as a pretext for the gathering of large crowds to protest against a variety of injustices. A protest against enclosure at White Roding, Essex, in 1724 was initiated under the guise of a football match, while at Kettering in 1740 a match was organised as a pretext for the attempted pulling down of a local mill.⁹ The importance of the game to some sections of the nascent working class can be seen in an 1845 comment of a working man in Derby responding to attempts to ban the annual game: ‘It is all disappointment, no sports and no football. This is the way they always treat poor folks.’¹⁰

The decline and suppression of folk football was not without opposition nor was it totally successful. In Derby, for example, a protracted struggle took place in the 1840s against the local authority’s outlawing of the Shrove Tuesday game, including the reading of the Riot Act and the calling out of troops in 1846.¹¹ Indeed, despite Strutt’s belief in 1801 that ‘of late years [football] seems to have fallen into disrepute, and is but little practised’, a number of games survived until well into the mid-nineteenth century.¹² These survivals continued primarily in villages and rural communities where the straightjacket of inflexible working hours was not so tight. This was especially true in areas where pre-industrial forms of capitalism such as outworking predominated, and where, more often than not, the patronage of a local landowner could be relied upon to provide the authority to ensure folk football’s continuation; for example, the Duke of Northumberland rescued the Shrove Tuesday game at Alnwick in Northumberland in 1827 by providing a field for the game to be played upon and presenting the ball before the match.¹³

It is also clear that survivals of unorganised football, in the form of kickabouts in the streets or fields, continued to be played throughout the period of folk football’s decline. Certainly, football was still played in the 1840s in villages near Huddersfield and Leeds.¹⁴ In 1842 the Royal Commission on Children in Mines and Manufactories found that football was played widely, but informally, in the West Riding coal fields. It is also clear that in the mid-nineteenth century knowledge of football survived among the working classes in parallel with the development and growing influence of public school-derived football. For example, in Sutton, a village just to the east of Hull, a form of folk football was played up until at least 1871, and was the introduction to the game for at least one Hull FC player of the 1880s. Such evidence highlights the degree to which continuities and survivals of pre-industrial practices coexisted alongside urban, industrial culture. It may well be that this residual consciousness of older forms of football was one of the reasons for the alacrity with which organised rugby and association football were taken up by the working classes in the latter part of the century.¹⁵

But as organised football faded almost to insignificance in urban society, it was beginning to acquire the utmost significance in the life of British public schools. By the time the Royal Commission on Public Schools had published its report in 1864, muscular Christianity’s cult of games in the public schools had reached full maturity – and football occupied a central position in its pantheon of character-building sports. Nowhere was this more true than at Rugby school. Football had begun to be played by the boys of the school around 1800 and it is probable, although no definite proof exists, that the game they played was inspired by the annual New Year’s Eve game played by the people of the town of Rugby in the 1700s.¹⁶ Initially, the boys played the game with little or no interest from the school authorities but headmaster Thomas Arnold’s reshaping of the school ethos in the 1830s led his successors to ascribe to football a central position in the school curriculum. Organised by the praeposters, the school’s senior boys, football gradually came to occupy a key position not just as a winter recreation but also in the boys’ hierarchical ‘fagging’ system.¹⁷ While its origins at the school may be unclear, there is little doubt as to a key reason for football’s popularity among the boys who played it or the partisans of muscular Christianity who championed it – its violent appeal to masculinity.

As Philip Mason has noted:

the [public school] process aimed above all at hardening. The public schools were meant to produce a ruling class, and there was a wide-spread view that great empires of the past had fallen because the ruling classes had grown luxurious and effeminate.[emphasis in original]¹⁸

As if in practical demonstration of this, the Rugby school game was marked by an almost obsessional belief in players ‘hacking’ at each other’s shins. Known as ‘shinning’ in the more plebeian forms of folk football from which the practice was taken, hacking became one of the issues that divided the rugby-playing schools from the devotees of ‘dribbling’ forms of football, such as Eton or Harrow, at the founding of the Football Association in 1863. The importance of hacking to the Rugby game cannot be underestimated: reminiscing about his school days in the 1860s at rugby-playing Blackheath Proprietary School, Rugby Football Union (RFU) president Harry Garnett recalled how boys practised hacking in their dorms at night. ‘Boots were made specially with an extra sole piece at the toe, pointed like a ship’s ram, and hardened against the bars of the fire, or with a hot poker,’ and opponents were hacked ‘with the utmost violence’. Throughout his playing career, Garnett played in bare legs, deliberately disdaining protection. Once when playing for Otley, Garnett told a team mate who was wearing a shinguard ‘If you don’t take that off, I will see if I cannot hack it off,’ adding that his colleague ‘deemed it

prudent to take the shin guard off at once’.¹⁹ The Reverend E. H. Dykes, an archetypal footballing muscular Christian, went to Durham School during the same period, where:

hacking and tripping were allowed to any extent. ‘Hack him over’ was the cry when anyone was running with the ball, and it was the commonest thing to see fellows hacked off their feet. A scrummage was mainly an opportunity for hard hacking.

He claimed that the hardest hack he ever took was from a future Bishop of Calcutta, although he took the precaution of preparing for school games by ‘solemnly hammering my shins with a poker to make them hard’.²⁰

As these examples from Blackheath and Durham demonstrate, by the 1850s the Rugby school game had quickly acquired adherents in other schools. Spurred by the popularity of Arnold’s teachings (despite the fact that he personally showed no interest in football) and the proselytising zeal of old Rugbeians who became teachers, public schools across the country, especially the newer schools such as Clifton, Haileybury, Wellington, Marlborough and Cheltenham, took up the game. Public consciousness of the Rugby game was raised significantly in 1857 with the publication of old boy Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which sold 11,000 copies in its first year. While the game’s initial popularity may have in part been due to its association with Arnold’s reputation and Hughes’ book, it was the distinctiveness of its rules which cemented its popularity among its players.

In 1845, a levee, or general meeting, of the sixth form published the rules to Rugby school football, highlighting the essential difference between their game and those of the other leading public schools: running with the ball.
Whilst other schools did not totally forbid handling the ball, only Rugby allowed a player to catch the ball and run with it. How this point of difference arose has become possibly the most famous example of myth-making in British sport. Ostensibly, as recorded in a plaque at Rugby school erected in 1900, one William Webb Ellis ‘with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game’ sometime in late 1823. Unfortunately, no facts can be adduced to support this proclamation. The Rugby game had originally not allowed carrying the ball but by the early 1830s it had become an accepted feature of the game. There is no way of knowing who first ran with the ball at Rugby, but whoever did the deed was only continuing the age-old traditions of folk football. If anyone could claim the mantle of originator of the carrying game at the school, it would be Jem Mackie, a pupil who became well known for his exploits as a ball-carrier in the late 1830s. Soon after, in 1842, carrying was formally legalised by a levee.

Ellis’s name was first advanced in 1877, and again in 1880, by Matthew Bloxam, an old boy keen to prove that the Rugby game was unique to itself and was not a variant of older folk football. Other than in Bloxam’s writings, Ellis’s name is not mentioned in connection with the Rugby game in any work on the subject published before 1895. Even the 1895 inquiry of the Old Rugbeian Society into the origins of the game, which endorsed Bloxam’s theory and led to the erection of the commemorative plaque, could not find a single witness who either saw Ellis’s act or could provide even hearsay evidence of it. Although it has been suggested that the Rugbeians had a need for a heroic, Carlylean figure with whom to credit the origins of the game, the acceptance of Bloxam’s myth and the invention of the Webb Ellis tradition served a broader function for both the school and the Rugby Union authorities at that time.²¹ The school itself had ceased to play other schools at the game in 1876 after a series of losses, claimi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: From Folk Football to Civic Pride: Origins to 1879
• Chapter 2: The Coming of the Working Classes: 1879-1886
• Chapter 3: ‘King Football’: 1886-1893
• Chapter 4: Schism: 1893-1895
• Chapter 5: The Rise and Decline of the Northern Union: 1895-1905
• Chapter 6: A Revolution In Rugby: 1905-1910
• Conclusion: The Northern Union and Working-Class Culture
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography