The Victorians worried about many things. The Empire. The working classes. Status. Morality. Sex. The French. But as much as anything else they worried about their health.
This was especially true for the young men educated in the spirit of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. After they left school and university, the vast majority entered a world of white-collar work and office life. The new industrial society had created hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the law, medicine, finance and management, all of them desk-bound jobs offering little opportunity for exercise or fresh air.
The dangers of this sedentary lifestyle were widely recognised. Scottish rugby’s most determined advocate, H. H. Almond, the headmaster of the prestigious Loretto School in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, worried about its effects on the health of the nation:
The tendency of the population to congregate in large towns, the multiplication of artificial means of transit, the increased strain and competition of modern life, the calamitousness change by which business hours have begun [earlier] and ended later, till crowds of sallow clerks are now released from offices after the expiry of daylight for many months in the year, are all causes antagonistic to the prime necessity of a nation which is to be long vigorous.1
He was not the only one to feel this way. Concerns about the health and fitness of the professional classes led to the creation of gyms and athletics clubs in numerous industrial cities from the 1850s. ‘Practical philanthropists are organising clubs for working men,’ wrote a Mr Lascelles Carr to the Yorkshire Post. ‘Why, then, should not we, the essentially middle class, possess ourselves of the same advantages?’2
It was another of those great Victorian anxieties, the threat from France, that gave a major boost to this new health and fitness movement. In 1858 Felice Orsini, an Italian political refugee who had spent considerable time in England, tried to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris. Fearful of an invasion by France, in May 1859 the British government created the Rifle Volunteer movement, a forerunner of the Home Guard. Spurred by patriotic duty, young middle-class men flocked to join. Once the threat of invasion had passed, the Volunteers quickly widened their activities to include athletics, gymnastics and other sports.3 Their training grounds and fields would provide the first playing pitches for many early rugby, soccer and athletics clubs.
Enthusiasm for rugby slowly spilled out of the schools and universities and into the adult world. The first rugby clubs began to be formed in the 1850s, most notably at Liverpool in 1857 and at Blackheath in 1858, organised by boys who had learned the game at Rugby School and Blackheath Proprietary School respectively.4 Numerous other clubs were formed at the same time by players keen to continue with the game they had enjoyed so much at school. The evangelical zeal of the young men who had been educated in the spirit of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, whether at Rugby School or elsewhere, would be the catalyst that caused a rugby explosion.
Beyond the school
The burgeoning popularity of rugby could be seen in the way that the game spread to other public schools. Tom Brown’s Schooldays was regarded as almost a handbook for the numerous private schools that were established in the second half of the 19th century and they naturally took up the rugby game. The authority that Rugby School commanded can be seen at Wellington College, Berkshire, which adopted the game in 1860 and where the first rule of football was ‘in case of any dispute arising during a match, the rules are the same as those used at Rugby’.5 But as the sport expanded, its rules began to be amended and altered according to the tastes and needs of schools and the numerous adult clubs that were established to play it.
No one used Rugby School’s convoluted method of converting a try into a goal. The school’s rule forbidding the picking up of the ball unless it was bouncing was ignored by Blackheath, Woolwich and Sandhurst. At Blackheath Proprietary School forwards were allowed to run downfield in front of the ball-carrier, obstructing opponents who attempted to tackle him, something that would soon become a feature of American football.6 Sizes of teams differed, too. Schools tended to play with large numbers – for example, at Clifton 40-a-side was common – but clubs played anything from 20-a-side to 12-a-side, as Hull did against Gainsborough in the early 1870s, although 15-a-side had become the norm for club matches by the mid-1870s.
Unsurprisingly, one of the most common changes that was made to the rules was to ban hacking: bloodied shins acquired on a Saturday afternoon were not ideal preparation for work the following Monday morning. Richmond campaigned against hacking and were credited with persuading the RFU to outlaw it. They were not the only ones. The Hull Football Club, founded in 1865 by local Old Rugbeians, allowed tripping the man running with the ball but not hacking. Rochdale Hornets and Preston Grasshoppers both played Rugby School rules without the hacking.
Not every adult club shied away from hacking. When York played the shinguard-wearing York Training College in the late 1860s they tried to convince their opponents to remove their shinguards, but the College players took to the field wearing them and so York simply proceeded to hack away at their opponents’ shins. By the end of the match, a York player recalled, they had managed ‘to make them look a good deal worse for wear’. The original rules of St Peter’s School in York also allowed hacking, but did specify that ‘no player may stand on the goal bar to prevent [the ball] going over’, one of the game’s more unusual rules.7
Initially, the only matches these new clubs played were between their own members. Members of Liverpool played matches between teams of those who had been to Rugby; Cheltenham schools against those who had not. Bradford saw the Captain’s side take on the Secretary’s side, and many clubs played A–M versus N–Z or some other alphabetical combination. In the early 1870s St Helens even played fair-haired versus dark-haired.
Such contests soon lost their appeal and as the number of clubs grew so too did the desire to play matches against other teams, especially those seen as representatives of rival towns or regions. ‘We saw reports in the papers of football matches being played at Leeds, Bradford and elsewhere, and we thought that Halifax ought to have a club also,’ remembered the founder of the Halifax club, Sam Duckitt.8
The wide variety of rules used by clubs in different towns presented an obvious problem. Which rules to play under? When inter-club matches began, the understanding was that the home team’s rules would be played. In 1864 the rugby-playing Leeds club played against the soccer-inclined Sheffield side, unsurprisingly winning at home and losing at Sheffield. Four years later Manchester brushed aside Sheffield by a goal to nil under rugby rules but lost the return match in South Yorkshire by two goals to nil.
Such an unsatisfactory state of affairs could not continue and talk about developing ‘universal’ rules became widespread. The issue had already arisen at Cambridge University when in 1848 students arriving from Eton, Harrow, Rugby and other public schools had attempted to draw up a common set of rules so matches could be played at the university regardless of schooling. But the Cambridge rules existed only for its students and were not played beyond the university.
By 1863 there were so many adult clubs playing different types of rules across the country that the matter acquired a new urgency. It was this need for an answer to this problem that led to 11 London-based clubs meeting in October 1863 to discuss the formation of a ‘football association’ that would draw up a common set of rules that could be played by all footballers, regardless of schooling.
It was not quite that simple. Pride in the rules that they had played at school caused many of the delegates to reject compromise. Debates dragged on into the small hours, political manoeuvring dominated the proceedings and it took six meetings for the new Football Association (FA) to agree on a set of rules. In fact, at the end of the fourth meeting on 24 November 1863, the meeting voted for a set of rules that included the following:
9. A player shall be entitled to run with the ball towards his adversaries’ goal if he makes a fair catch, or catches the ball on the first bound; but in the case of a fair catch, he makes his mark, he shall not run.
10. If any player shall run with the ball towards his adversaries’ goal, any player in the opposite side shall be at liberty to charge, hold, trip or hack him, or wrest the ball from him; but no player shall be held and hacked at the same time.9
In short, they voted to play football along the lines played at Rugby School.
Ebenezer Morley, the Hull-born solicitor who had just been elected secretary of the FA, then proposed a motion to endorse the most recent version of Cambridge University’s rules, which did not allow carrying the ball or hacking. Eight delegates supported Morley and a committee was set up to discuss this with the Cambridge footballers. The meeting was adjourned amid confusion about what exactly had been agreed.
Morley seems to have been a man who believed that the purpose of democracy was to allow everyone to vote until they agreed with him. At the following week’s meeting, attended by only eight clubs, he omitted from the minutes the previous decision to endorse hacking. C. W. Alcock, who would eventually become the secretary of the FA and of Surrey County Cricket Club, proposed a motion to delete the previously agreed rules that allowed hacking and running with the ball. Like Morley, he favoured the Cambridge rules. Alcock’s motion was carried, meaning that the FA had approved two counterposed sets of rules in consecutive meetings.10
Faced with such blatant manipulation, the clubs favouring rugby rules didn’t bother to show up at the following week’s meeting, which endorsed Morley and Alcock’s non-carrying and non-hacking rules. The newly founded FA claimed 18 clubs as members but it seems that at least six of them, such as Blackheath, played rugby rules.11 What’s more, the FA’s new rules still allowed outfield players to catch the ball before it bounced and take an unimpeded kick. Even the Royal Engineers, who played in four of the first seven FA Cup finals, still played their own code of football that allowed running with the ball.
In truth, the formation of the FA made little immediate difference to rugby or soccer clubs. It did lead to its game being called ‘soccer’, a shortening of ‘association’ in the same way that ‘rugger’ was derived from the word rugby, but by and large its formation was ignored by most clubs. Four years after it had been founded, the FA had just ten member clubs, nine in London plus Sheffield FC, which had its own rules anyway.
Rugby-playing clubs outnumbered their rivals inside and outside the FA. In the first issue of C. W. Alcock’s Football Annual, published in 1868 and the leading annual of the game for the next two decades, 45 of the 88 football clubs listed played according to the Rugby tradition. Thirty others played FA rules and 13 played the Sheffield version. And, of course, some clubs played both or a combination of both. Such was the dominance of the rugby code that in January 1871 Bell’s Life, the premier sporting weekly of the time, pointed out that ‘every year has increased the superiority in point of numbers and popularity of the rugby clubs over those who are subject to the rule of the Association’.12
The birth of the RFU
Why did rugby eclipse soccer and the other types of football? Alone of all the public school games, Rugby’s was the one that flourished among adult clubs. The Eton, Winchester and Harrow football games did not become adult sports. The FA rule book was a compromise of rules and preferences that had no direct link to any public school game. Rugbeians stood firm in their absolute belief in the superiority of their rules.13 They were so self-confident about the merits of their own game that they had no use for the FA – or any other organisation.
This supreme self-reliance only began to be questioned in 1870, and it was sparked by the Victorians’ concern for health. In November 1870 The Times published a letter complaining about the numerous injuries caused by hacking during games of football at Rugby School.14 Current and former pupils rushed to the defence of the school – and of hacking: one Old Rugbeian now at Trinity College, Oxford, called it ‘entirely legitimate’. In early December public disquiet had become so vociferous that Rugby School’s medical officer, Dr Robert Farquharson, admitted in a letter to The Times that a boy had been killed playing football at the school; the cause of death was not hacking but an abdominal injury caused by a collision with another player. Hacking, he claimed, was not responsible for any major injuries.
For the first time, rugby was the focus of public condemnation, and this criticism could not be dismissed as the carping of rival schools. As we have seen, many adult rugby clubs were also critical of hacking and refused to allow it. Clearly rugby had to put its house in order.
At the same time, the game also found itself challenged by an unexpected source: the Football Association. In 1870 the FA had organised two international games between England and Scotland. Outraged that soccer could claim to represent the English and Scottish nations, rugby players in Scotland challenged their English counterparts to a representative match. To organise an international match, however, a governing body was required.
In December 1870 Blackheath secretary Benjamin Burns and his Richmond counterpart Edwin Ash published a letter in Bell’s Life. It read:
An opinion has for some time prevailed among the supporters of Rugby Football that some fixed 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 way the rules as played at Rugby School by introducing fresh rules of their own. Each club plays according to its own rules on its own ground, and consequently the strangers in each match, finding themselves at once at a disadvantage through not knowing the rules of the ground, confusion and disputes are generally the result. We therefore hope that all clubs playing the Rugby game will join with us in framing a code of rules to be generally adopted.
It ended with an appeal for all those in agreement with its contents to contact the authors, who would arrange a meeting to establish such a code of rules.15
The sense of common purpose that existed in the rugby fraternity can be gauged by the fact that, while it took the FA six long meetings to reach a somewhat hollow agreement, the founding meeting of the Rugby Football Union (RFU) on 26 January 1871 lasted a mere two hours. Edwin Ash welcomed the attendees by explaining that their goal was to ‘frame a code of football based upon the Rugby system of play’. The 32 delegates representing 21 clubs agreed a constitution and appointed a sub-committee of three, all former pupils of Rugby School, to draw up the grandiosely titled ‘Laws of the Game’.16
The committee reported back promptly and in June the new code was agreed. To answer rugby’s critics, law 57 of the new rule book outlawed all forms of hacking and law 58 forbade the use of ‘projecting nails, iron plates or gutta percha’ on boots.17
The first committee of the RFU drew its members from a narrow and close-knit stratum of south-east England’s professional upper middle classes. All 14 had attended public school: six had gone to Rugby and the others to Wellington, Tonbridge, Lancing and Marlborough. Seven were solicitors, two were brokers and the others were a doctor, accountant and military instructor. All lived in central or south London, except the Wellington College representative who lived at the school. The eldest was 29 and the youngest 20. In essence, this was a young gentlemen’s club, one of the many that emerged in mid-Victorian Britain.
It proved to be remarkably successful. By 1875, the RFU was staging regular internationals against Scotland and Ireland, held an annual North versus South match and its membership had grown fivefold to 113 clubs, 21 of them in the North of England.18 As with the school from which its sport emerged, the RFU was now exerting an influence throughout the ‘whole Kingdom’.
The birth of a ball
The Victorians’ concern for health had one other notable consequence for rugby. The importance of the game for Rugby School created a minor industry of ball manufacturing in the town. William Gilbert was a local cobbler whose boots and shoes were favourites of the pupils, not least because his shop was just across the road from the school. By the 1820s he was also making balls. The quality of the Gilbert football became so well regarded that in 1851 he exhibited two Rugby School balls, or ‘educational appliances’, as they were catalogued, at the Great Exhibition in London.19
Gilbert’s early balls were not shaped in the way we know them today. Rugby balls tended to be much rounder than modern ones. Neither were soccer balls the perfect spheres of today. Both rugby and soccer balls resembled the shape of a plum more than they did their later distinctive shapes. Indeed, the shape of the rugby ball did not become settled until uniformity was forced on clubs by the emergence of inter-city matches and cup competitions in the 1860s and 1870s, and it was not until 1892 that the RFU’s rules officially specified that an oval ball should be used for matches.
The manufacture of a uniform oval ball only occurred as the result of a major technological breakthrough, not from Gilbert but from his great local rival, Richard Lindon. Lindon may have begun his working life as Gilbert’s apprentice, but in the spirit of competition that rugby itself taught he set up a shop a few doors down from his former employer.20 By 1861 he had become so successful that he was supplying balls to Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin universities.
Lindon’s success came at great personal cost. The first balls were made from a pig’s bladder encased in leather panels. Inflating the ball had to be done by mouth – a dangerous procedure given the risk of infection from the dead animal. The task of blowing up the balls fell to Lindon’s wife, Rebecca, in addition to her duties as the mother of his seventeen children. She eventually contracted a lung disease, fell ill and died.
Perhaps driven by his wife’s tragic death, in 1862 Lindon invented a way to use a bladder made from rubber rather than a pig. His innovation was based on one of the great discoveries of the Victorian industrial age, vulcanisation, which made rubber more pliable and adaptable for a huge range of uses. At the same time, Lindon also developed a brass inflator which made it easier and much less dangerous to inflate balls. It also made it possible to produce standardised shapes for balls. The modern oval ball had been invented.
Richard Lindon’s crucial place in the history of rugby is almost forgotten. He failed to understand the rules of the game of the intensely competitive world of business and did not patent his inventions. He did not become enormously wealthy. His quest to create a modern rugby ball not only lost him his wife, but left him devoid of the riches to which his inventions should have entitled him.
Yet he was the man who quite literally shaped the future of rugby.