How class warfare split rugby in England
And so it is that the England rugby squad for the autumn international series sees men from the north of England grossly under-represented. They amount to a mere six players in an extended panel of 33.
Basically, this amounts to fewer players in the squad who were born in the north of England than the number who were born south of the Equator. The second part of that equation is unsurprising given England’s prolific (shameless) use of players born in Africa, Australia or New Zealand, but the lack of northern-born Englishmen in the squad remains striking.
And, on top of that, only two players in the current squad actually currently play for clubs in the north of England, regardless of where they are born.
The reasons for this are rooted in history and are — in turn — rooted in class and wealth.
It is true that the original rules for rugby football were forged in the elite public schools of the south of England (and, in particular, in Rugby school).
To meet the rapid expansion in the British economy in the 19th century, the number and size of public schools increased — but they were the preserve of the elite of society, the men who were expected to run the country and its expanding empire.
In these schools traditional classical education was redesigned and emphasis was placed on developing a boy’s character, as well as his mind. Sport was seen as a perfect vehicle to do this.
Charles Kingsley, a novelist and Church of England minister, put the new ideology perfectly when he wrote: “Through sport, boys acquire virtues no books can teach them; not merely daring and endurance, but better still (good) temper, self-restraint, fairness, honour.”
Anybody who knows anything about sport understands that this is a load of old guff, but sport became a way to sell the school, to bring in publicity and prestige. And the capacity of the English public school for self-regard and self- promotion seemed inexhaustible. Either ways, a new sporting curriculum was constructed and Rugby football was at the heart of this ideology. When these public schoolboys grew into men they brought their game out of the schools and into the wider world (or at least those who wished to play rather than were made to play brought it with them). This was a complicated process which eventually ended up in the establishment of the Rugby Football Union in London in 1871. This Union was dominated from the beginning by men of a particular sort and they sought to construct a sporting organisation of an equally particular sort.
The thing was, there was also a long tradition of playing football in working class areas all across Britain. This tradition had nothing to do with what was happening in elite public schools, but it meant that there was a ready constituency of interest among men from every background when the rugby rules for playing football began to spread across England through the 1870s and 1880s. And these men remade the game in their own image in the industrial towns and cities of northern England. They loved it and were devoted to it — and they changed it by their involvement.
New clubs appeared. In Yorkshire there came the rugby clubs of Hull, Leeds, Bradford, and Huddersfield. In Lancashire, there were the clubs of Manchester and Liverpool. And so on across other northern counties.
What is fascinating is that up until the early 1890s, rugby was more important than soccer. Indeed, rugby became the major spectator sport in the 1880s, especially in England’s North, as the phenomenon of people paying to attend football matches gathered huge momentum.
As late as 1892, the crowd that attended the Yorkshire Rugby Challenge Cup final between Leeds and Halifax was larger than that which attended that year’s FA Cup (just as had been the case more or less since the 1870s).
But two (related) things were happening which ensured that rugby capitulated in the face of the rise of soccer.
The first was that soccer accepted professionalism and maintained a unified organisation.
And the second (consequential) feature saw rugby split in two (rugby union and rugby league), while soccer — or football as it was and is known in England — remained under the overall control of the Football Association.
Why, precisely, did rugby split in two?
The very spread of rugby created huge tension within its ranks. This tension was manifest in a ‘battle for the soul of the Rugby Football Union’.
At the centre of the battle were the old public schoolboys who sought to control rugby football from their base in London.
These men held the growing power of working class Rugby clubs in the north of England — with their huge crowds — in an ill-disguised disdain.
Indeed, they were often opposed even to the very idea of organised leagues and cups — they clung to the old public school nonsense about the purpose of sport being entirely about forming character and building men, while ‘mere victory on the field’ was to be rendered unimportant.
Accordingly, they refused to sanction a national cup competition and were virulently opposed to the playing of leagues.
Further, the key administrators of RFU were appalled by the prospect of professionalism. They saw what had happened in soccer in the 1880s when it had professionalised and were determined that the same would not happen to their game. They would not be ceding any power to the working class men of northern England.
Indeed, after the Football Association had agreed to professionalism in 1885, the Rugby Football Union introduced rules which committed the association to strict amateurism.
And yet — as the crowds watching rugby matches grew in the north of England — it was clear that players were being given gifts or money to play for clubs.
This, in the view of the administrators, was a working class threat to the control of their sport and one to be resisted at every turn — there would be no truck with pay-for-play.
A Rugby Football Union president said: “If the working man cannot afford to play the game, he should do without it.”
Later, a second president said that the public schools had invented the game and asked why should they hand it over now to the working classes?
The Rugby Football Union began to ban clubs and players suspected of professionalism. Between 1888 and 1895 there were at least 19 trials, with newspapers carrying full transcripts. Players asked why they played for a certain club and how they could afford to play. Meals given to players after games were investigated. One player in Leeds was banned for accepting a wedding present.
Initially, the northern clubs sought a compromise to allow them stay in the Rugby Football Union. In 1893 two Yorkshire officials proposed to allow “broken time” payments: “That players be allowed compensation for bona fide loss of time.”
The secretary of the Rugby Football Union proposed an amendment saying that that was “contrary to the true interest of the game and its spirit”.
The amendment was carried by 282 votes to 136. The Rugby Football Union then passed a motion saying that “only clubs composed entirely of amateurs shall be eligible for membership, and its headquarters shall be in London where all general meetings shall be held”.
It now essentially became the case that any club accused of paying its players now had to prove its innocence — it was a complete inversion of the normal processes of law. A split became inevitable, as Tony Collins has shown in his brilliant book Rugby’s Great Split, when — amid an orgy of accusations — club after club was suspended.
In August 1895, 21 northern rugby clubs met in Huddersfield and formed the Northern Rugby Football Union. It ultimately changed its name to the Rugby Football League in 1922.
Its first decision is to allow six shillings per day as ‘broken time’ payment, where men were paid for such hours as they missed from work. Competition proved the engine of this new organisation. A Challenge Cup was established in 1896, a league was set up, and new rules were introduced to make the game more open (they sought to move their version of rugby away from scrums, rucks and mauls, reduced teams down to 13 and weighted the points so that tries became more important).
Naturally, the Rugby Football Union was extremely hostile to rugby league.
Any player who played rugby league either as an amateur or a professional — or who played against anyone who had played rugby league — was banned from rugby union for life.
Much has changed in the 120 years that have passed since then. But the simple fact remains that rugby union has yet to conquer the northern part of its country that it lost in the 1890s.
The fact that rugby split into “two separate sports, each with its own distinct rules, traditions and communities” has had an enduring impact on the constitution of what is supposed to be an English national team.
But, then, maybe it’s just easier to pay star players from whatever country you wish to sing ‘God Save The Queen’, than it is to undo the legacy of the great split of the 1890s.
