A Social History of English Rugby Union

Tony Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415476607
• eBook ISBN: 9781134023349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

From the myth of William Webb Ellis to the glory of the 2003 World Cup win, this book explores the social history of rugby union in England.

Ever since Tom Brown's Schooldays the sport has seen itself as the guardian of traditional English middle-class values. In this fascinating new history, leading rugby historian Tony Collins demonstrates how these values have shaped the English game, from the public schools to mass spectator sport, from strict amateurism to global professionalism.

Based on unprecedented access to the official archives of the Rugby Football Union, and drawing on an impressive array of sources from club minutes to personal memoirs and contemporary literature, the book explores in vivid detail the key events, personalities and players that have made English rugby.

From an era of rapid growth at the end of the nineteenth century, through the terrible losses suffered during the First World War and the subsequent 'rush to rugby' in the public and grammar schools, and into the periods of disorientation and commercialisation in the 1960s through to the present day, the story of English rugby union is also the story of the making of modern England.

Like all the very best writers on sport, Tony Collins uses sport as a prism through which to better understand both culture and society. A ground-breaking work of both social history and sport history, A Social History of English Rugby Union tells a fascinating story of sporting endeavour, masculine identity, imperial ideology, social consciousness and the nature of Englishness.

1
THE SCHOOLBOY’S GAME

It is a sunny, brisk afternoon in November, with a slender breeze blowing across the pitch. In a few moments School House will face School in a match that would change the face of British sport.

Thwack! The ball is kicked off, far into the distance but no more than fifteen feet in the air at its highest. It is caught and taken back bravely by a School House player into the oncoming School forwards. As the two packs meet, the ball temporarily disappears. As struggle for possession seems to get increasingly desperate, the ball suddenly appears on the House side of the scrum.

Their forwards hesitate momentarily and in a flash the ball is taken up by the onrushing School breakaways and kicked down field, threatening to breach the House defence. But a covering House three-quarter cleans the ball up, sidesteps a couple of oncoming forwards and drop-kicks the ball deep into School’s half. House forwards flood into School territory and the two packs pile into each other, desperate to regain the ball. House pile on the pressure and seem to have School penned into their own quarter.

The ball squirts free again but as soon as it appears in open play, it is once again entombed by a mass of scrummaging forwards. Two take their life into their hands and fight their way to middle of the scrum, determined to drive the ball through their School pack and out the other side. But the experienced School forwards get the better of them and they lose track of the ball, forcing them to fight their way back out of the wrong side of the scrum before re-entering it back on their own side.

Then Brooke, the House captain, takes charge, crouching low and driving the ball forward through the legs of the opposing school forwards. His skill and strength get it so far but he too is driven back. Slowly School begins to get the upper hand and House are driven back inch by inch, each step contested as if the forwards had the backs towards a precipice. The ball suddenly appears on the wrong side of the House goal line but the danger is averted by a sharp kick into touch.

As the line-out is formed, both sides jostle for position but Brooke takes the ball and throws into the hands of his brother, who scorches through the School line to take it deep into School territory. He beats one tackler, then another, kicks the ball forward and, just as the defenders rush in to kill the threat, throws himself on the ball as it bounces over the goal line and between the posts. Try! Try to House and the Brooke brothers’ combination.

But the try counts for nothing if it is not converted into a goal. Crab Jones, the coolest player on the field, steps forward and amidst a swarming mass of defenders hoping to charge down his kick, calmly steers the ball over the crossbar and between the posts. First blood to House.

The two sides change ends and, following a brief break for refreshments, School kick off high into the air, giving their forwards time to advance deep into House’s half. Their tactics are to keep the ball near the House goal through sheer weight of numbers but the House forwards meet them blow for blow. Each time the ball emerges from the scrum, it is a House player who retrieves it and takes it back up the field. Those loose balls they miss are cleared up by Crab Jones and his fellow backs, who drop-kick the ball out to safety, momentarily relieving the onslaught.

But the pressure refuses to go away and as the end of the match approaches, School forwards get the ball at their feet and drive it forward again towards the House goal. Brooke throws himself into the centre of the rush but fails to get the ball. As it heads towards the posts, Crab Jones manages to get his hands on it but before he can set himself for the relieving kick the School forwards bring him down and the ball slips from his hands and rolls behind the House goal posts.

As the rest of the House team hold their breath and School is about to salute the try that could tie the game, a slight and inexperienced boy playing in his first match rushes headlong towards the ball, a fraction ahead of the incoming School forwards. As the rampaging pack push him over, he manages to fall on the ball a fraction before they collapse in a mass on top of him. As his teammates rush up to congratulate him, the match ends and House celebrate a glorious victory.

The schoolboy was Tom Brown. The game was Rugby football.

And this was the match that would take the game and its values out of the school, across Britain and around the world.

Tom Brown and Rugby School

Of course, the School versus School House match described in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays was entirely fictional.¹ And Tom Brown never existed. But the future popularity of the Rugby School code of football arose in large part to the remarkable impact of this fictional pupil of the school.

In contrast, the fictional exploits of William Webb Ellis, a real pupil at the school, had no bearing on the development of the sport. His tale belonged to a later time, when the story brought comfort to those concerned at the direction rugby had taken in the 1880s and 1890s. Thomas Hughes himself, a pupil at the school in the 1830s, knew nothing of him. ‘“The Webb Ellis tradition” had not survived to my day,’ he told the Old Rugbeian Society.² There can be no doubt that if the Webb Ellis story had contained a shred of truth, Hughes would have woven it into Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a veritable compendium of folklore about Rugby School.

First published by Macmillan in April 1857, Tom Brown’s Schooldays became an instant best seller, almost single-handedly establishing a new literary genre of the ‘school story’, and creating the first schoolboy hero.³ In it, young Tom Brown, the son of a country squire, is sent to Rugby School, where, through a series of moral lessons, including the importance of playing football and cricket, he matures into a model Victorian gentleman. Tom Brown was an attempt to describe public school life for young boys (Hughes originally wrote it for his eight-year-old son Maurice, who died just two years after its publication) and to bring the teachings of Rugby’s most famous headmaster, Thomas Arnold, to a wider audience. Sentimental and sanctimonious in equal doses, it proved popular with boys and men alike, selling 11,000 copies in its first year and being reprinted almost fifty times by the end of the century. It was, said The Times, a book that ‘every English father might well wish to see in the hands of his son’.⁴

In its tone and outlook it epitomised all the self-confidence that the middle classes felt during the decades that followed the 1832 Reform Act, which finally brought them the franchise. The final collapse of the threat of Chartism after 1848 guaranteed an unprecedented period of relative social and industrial peace that lasted for almost thirty years. The Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolised Britain’s triumphant global ascendancy, and the years that followed saw exceptional economic growth both at home and overseas. New markets continued to be opened up to British trade and manufactures, profits and rents carried on rising, and the size of the middle class itself grew rapidly, thanks to the expansion of clerical, administrative and managerial work. The number of people employed in ‘white collar’ occupations grew by 69 per cent in the three decades after 1851 to over 900,000. Clerks, bankers and accountants multiplied fourfold over the period, while those employed in education almost doubled. It was also a period in which the professions began to consolidate organisationally, raising their social status and prestige. For example, the British Medical Association was established in 1856, the 1860 Solicitors’ Act allowed the Law Society to organise entrance examinations, and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors was founded in 1868.⁵

For the more adventurous, the discovery of gold in Australia and California offered opportunities to amass considerable fortunes. Industrial capitalism was now accepted, if not necessarily universally embraced, by the middle classes as an engine of their prosperity now and in the future. This was a world in which all sections of the middle classes – businessmen, churchmen, military men and country gentry – could feel that they, above all other classes, had made the decisive contribution to the success of their nation. Britain’s position at the apex of world power, they confidently believed, was a result of ordinary middle-class families like theirs and, for Thomas Hughes, that of Tom Brown:

much has yet to be written and said before the British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands.… noble families would be somewhat astounded – if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken – to find how small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns.⁶

This sense of Britishness also encompassed an increased awareness of military responsibilities overseas. This was partly because of the growing newspaper coverage of Britain’s frequent wars, most notably in William Russell’s despatches from the Crimean War in The Times, but also because Britain’s increasing international influence necessarily meant increased vigilance as its reach extended across the world.⁷ The frustrations of the inconclusive Crimean adventure were followed in 1857 by the outbreak of rebellion in India, which was not only shocking in its violence but also in the way that it questioned Britain’s right to rule. But such challenges to British authority became occasions not for doubt but for the reassertion of national and racial superiority. It was an age of self-satisfaction and moral certitude. And it was the age that shaped and moulded rugby football, indelibly marking it with features and attitudes that remain with it to this day.

The game’s birthplace, Rugby School, self-consciously expressed and promoted the spirit of mid-Victorian England. It had been founded in 1567 by a London grocer, Laurence Sheriff, to ‘teach grammar freely’ to boys from the midlands town of Rugby and surrounding area. By 1818 the school had become the second largest public school in England, with almost 400 pupils. By this time there was very little that was either free or public about it, although Sheriff’s legacy of land in London’s Gray’s Inn Fields had ensured its prosperity. While it had attracted some boys from aristocratic families in the late eighteenth century, and continued to do so throughout the nineteenth, the majority of its pupils came from the upper middle classes, especially the clergy and the rural gentry. This tendency intensified under the headship of Thomas Arnold, partly because he appears to have discouraged the recruitment of aristocratic boys, but mainly because he himself was the archetype of the social layer from which the school drew most of its boys.⁸

He had been appointed headmaster of the school in 1828 and set about reforming it according to his belief that Christian principles were an inseparable part of everyday living. He changed the school’s prefect system so that much of the responsibility for the social and moral welfare of pupils rested on the shoulders of sixth form prefects, or praeposters as they were know in the school. He also raised the importance of mathematics, science and modern languages in the curriculum, deepening a process that had started before his arrival, moving the school slightly away from the public schools’ traditional exclusive concentration on Greek and Latin. In 1844 a poem entitled The Masters of Science won the school poetry prize, marking the small but significant shift in the curriculum.⁹

But Arnold’s overriding concern was to create boys who had ‘character’, whose education would enable them to provide leadership to British society and the Empire. ‘What we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability’ he explained.¹⁰ Although not a term used by Arnold, this philosophy became known as Muscular Christianity. Under him, Rugby became distinguished by a sense of moral certainty hitherto unknown in public schools. He saw life as a continuous battle between righteousness and evil and the school’s role was to produce young men who would pursue this struggle in every aspect of their lives.¹¹ He argued that the cause of evil was the ‘natural but most deadly error of human indolence and corruption, [and the belief] that our business is to preserve and not to improve. It is the ruin of us all alike, individuals, schools, and nations’.¹² Shaped by his response to the French Revolution, Arnold’s philosophy was a mixture of anti-aristocratic sentiment, Protestant self-help, political reformism and monarchism. In this, they almost perfectly expressed the piecemeal ideology of British capitalist society, combining as it did belief in free trade and opposition to aristocratic excess with a sentimental loyalty to the monarchy and other trappings of traditional authority. Rugby’s view of itself and its place in the world was spelt out by an anonymous contributor to the school magazine in 1846, who described the school as

the image of that most powerful element in modern English society, the Middle Class … [it] may even claim kindred and fellowship of spirit with Railway Kings and Cotton Lords, being equally with them the creation of modern, burning, life-like energy. Her golden age alluded to above, synchronises with the strong convulsions which attended the Reform Bill.… Save in the one article of birth a manufacturer may make himself an equal to a duke. In a late stage of civilisation, like the present, the idea of trade comes prominently and almost exclusively into notice, being able at length to connect itself with that from which it has long been kept apart, education and enlightenment. Even so, we feel that our power has of late begun to be acknowledged; and that feeling shall animate us to proceed, holding fast the birthright of moral thoughtfulness which our great teacher [Arnold] bequeathed to us.¹³

This also explains the importance that began to be placed on competitive sports in the mid-nineteenth century. The economic dominance of British capitalism was based on competition, both in the struggle for new markets and colonies and, more fundamentally, in the very nature of how society functioned. The success of the industrial factory system had been accompanied by the imposition of a new culture of time-work discipline that attempted to inculcate the virtues of hard work and thrift into the working classes. In a similar fashion, the leaders, managers and administrators of the economy and society also had to be educated in the competitive spirit that drove forward the engine of economic expansion.

Another aspect of that competitive outlook was the expression of English nationalism, of which Arnold was also a passionate advocate. He believed in the innate moral superiority of men of his own race and class: ‘a thorough English gentleman – Christian, manly, and enlightened – is … a finer specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could furnish’.

The same sentiments were expressed about the Rugby code of football by the school’s pupils. ‘At football you must possess either muscular strength, or fleetness of foot, or true British pluck (the three points on which a Rugbeian prides himself most) to become even a tolerable player,’ wrote one enthusiast in the school’s New Rugbeian magazine in 1860. Thomas Hughes fully shared the nationalism of his mentor, declaring later in his life that he did not ‘like any foreign nation much from the little I know about them and I am certainly a most thoroughly prejudiced John Bull’.¹⁴

Ultimately, however, the core of Arnold’s beliefs, and of his disciples such as Hughes, consisted of a fervent conviction of the moral correctness of his view of the world. ‘Perhaps ours is the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly, wisely and strongly ruled just now,’ suggests a master with oblivious self-importance to Tom Brown towards the end of Hughes’ book.¹⁵ Many critics have accused Hughes of distorting or even betraying Arnold’s ideals in favour of a cult of athleticism, but Muscular Christianity was literally the embodiment of Arnold’s struggle for righteousness against sin. If one was to ‘fight the good fight with all thy might’, as J. S. B. Monsell’s 1863 hymn had it, it was not enough that it be fought in lectures and sermons. It had to be fought in the industrial cities and throughout the colonies of the empire. Although Arnold had no interest in sport, he shared Hughes’ belief that Christianity was about action, not contemplation. Muscular Christianity gave British middle-class men of action at home and abroad a moral framework in which to justify their work.¹⁶ Such was the intensity of the school’s training and the effect it had on its boys that many former pupils came to see themselves, in the words of The Times, ‘as members of a semi-political, semi-sacerdotal society; [with] an inclination to extend the monitorial system to the world’.¹⁷

Tom Brown’s Schooldays was part of that crusade. The book portrays the social mores and values of Rugby School in ways that would be easily understood by its youthful audience. This leads t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Prologue
• 1 The schoolboy’s game
• 2 The amateur game
• 3 The war game
• 4 The man’s game
• 5 The class game
• 6 The player’s game
• 7 The imperial game
• 8 The money game
• 9 The whole new ball game?
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography