Chapter5

SCOTLAND: ‘RUGBY FOOTBALL: THE REAL GAME OF THE TWO COUNTRIES’

They say Edinburgh is at its most magnificent in the spring. Fine, bright and freshened by a pleasant easterly wind, Monday, 27 March 1871 justified its reputation, as if to welcome the historic event that the city would soon witness.

For it would be here, at around three o’clock that afternoon, that Scotland would play England for the very first time, and international rugby was born.

As with most of the key developments in rugby history, the origins of the match were not straightforward. In fact, the real impetus came not from within rugby circles, but from soccer. In March 1870 England played Scotland for the first time in an unofficial soccer international at the Kennington Oval in London. It resulted in a 1-1 draw but was deemed such a success that another match was played in November of the same year. This time Scotland were beaten 1-0. More importantly, it led to a wave of complaints about the match by Scottish adherents of the rugby code.

It wasn’t difficult for them to find things to criticise. The Scotland soccer team in the first match had fielded only one Scottish-born player. The side in the second had just three. Charles Nepean, who turned out for the Scots in the second match, was deemed eligible for selection on the grounds that his cousin had married a Scot. Not only was the soccer side accused of being unrepresentative by the rugby men, they also denied that soccer was an authentic Scottish sport. H. H. Almond dismissed the 11-a-side game as ‘a modification of the parent code’. Backing him up, Bell’s Life declared, incorrectly as it turned out, that ‘Scotland does not own a single club patronising the dribbling code’.¹ But what really rankled with the Scots was that the soccer team could not defeat the English. As the great Scottish forward R. W. ‘Bulldog’ Irvine would later say, rugby’s supporters felt that it fell to them to ‘defend the honour of Scotland’.²

So, in the second week of December 1870, the captains of the five leading Scottish rugby clubs issued a challenge to ‘any team selected from the whole of England, to play us a match, twenty-a-side, Rugby rules, either in Glasgow or Edinburgh, on any day during the present season’.³ They argued that soccer rules could not be deemed a true test of the footballing prowess of the Scots because so few clubs played the game north of the border. The challenge ended with a promise of a ‘hearty welcome and a first-rate match’.

There was a positive response from Blackheath secretary Ben Burns, who, although living in London, had been born in Perth and educated at Edinburgh Academy, and the date of the match was set for the last Monday in March. England were to be captained by Blackheath’s Frederick Stokes, a young London solicitor who had been educated at Rugby School. Frank Moncreiff, an accountant in Edinburgh who was the son of the Lord Advocate of Scotland, would have the honour of being the Scots’ first ever national captain.

As the big day approached, the England players travelled up from London, Manchester and Liverpool and arrived in Edinburgh on the Sunday morning before the match. They spent the afternoon taking in the air at Arthur’s Seat and Calton Hill, before turning their thoughts to Monday’s challenge. Despite the fact that the England 20 had been selected from ten different clubs, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone that a training session before the match might have been useful. Indeed, the morning of the game was spent having photographs taken at Ross and Pringle’s in Edinburgh’s George Street.

In contrast, the Scots left nothing to chance. They had held two trial matches to decide on their line-up. They also insisted that, unlike the recent England versus Scotland soccer internationals, players had to be born in the country they represented. Even so, England fielded the same Ben Burns from Blackheath – a last-minute replacement for Oxford University’s Frank Isherwood who failed to travel up to Edinburgh – and the Scots selected Northumberland’s Tom Marshall. Yet no one could claim that, even with these anomalies, the teams were not representative.

As with the English side, the Scots players were drawn entirely from the privately educated professional middle classes. Between them, the two sides fielded seven solicitors and half a dozen bankers and stockbrokers. One player, Scotland’s Alfred Clunies-Ross, was the scion of the ruling family of the Cocos Islands.⁴ On the day of the match, the high social tone of the occasion was emphasised by the fact that the man collecting the one shilling admission money from the enthusiastic crowd was John MacDonald, the future Lord Kingsburgh, Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland.

He had his work cut out. Estimates of the crowd in the press ranged from four to eight thousand. Well-dressed spectators from Glasgow poured out of trains and made their way from Princes Street to the ground at Raeburn Place, home of the Edinburgh Academicals rugby and cricket teams. Nor was the crowd restricted to men. ‘Many a fair lassie’s brown eyes sparkled with enthusiasm as she foretold the triumph of the thistle,’ reported Bell’s Life.⁵ The crowd was packed on all sides, while many spectators watched from the hill. A crackle of anticipation was in the air.

At 3.30 p.m. the teams appeared and the honour of kicking off the first ever international fell to the Scottish captain. England, wearing white shirts with a red rose, played with 13 forwards, three half-backs, three full-backs and just one three-quarter. The Scots, starting a tradition of forward play that would last for the next century, dispensed with the three-quarter and played with 14 forwards. As well as an extra man in the pack, the Scottish forwards were also heavier than England’s, with an average weight of 12 stones, three pounds each. They were also much more skilled at dribbling the ball on the ground, something that would be a feature of Scottish play for the next 60 years, but was also, noted Bell’s Life, a ‘feature of the game rarely seen round London’.

This advantage in the forwards paid dividends when, after a scoreless first half, Angus Buchanan, a forward from Edinburgh’s Royal High School Former Pupils, scored a pushover try, much to the chagrin of the English players who felt that the ball had not been grounded. England responded when Clapham Rovers’ Reginald Birkett went over for a try in the corner but almost on full-time the Scots made sure of victory with a try from one of their three half-backs, William Cross, who, had there been a man of the match, would undoubtedly have been named it for his ‘brilliant all-round game’.⁶ After 100 minutes of battle – each half lasted 50 minutes, as it would not be until 1926 that 80 minutes became the standard length of a match – the honours had fallen to the Scots.⁷

As would be the case for the entire subsequent history of Anglo-Scottish internationals, the losers attributed their misfortune to the perfidiousness of the match officials. Future RFU president Arthur Guillemard blamed the narrow pitch – it was only 55 yards wide rather than the standard 70 yards used in England – for England’s defeat. But most importantly, he claimed that both of Scotland’s tries should not have been allowed because of illegal build-up play.⁸ The ubiquitous H. H. Almond, the Scots’ appointed umpire, overruled English protests, despite admitting he was unsighted for the first try. Nor did he take kindly to English players appealing to him to change his mind.⁹ It would not be the last time that a match official ruled against the side making the most noise.

Almond made one other crucial decision in the match. Midway through the game, according to Irvine, some of the players on both sides asked to be allowed to hack. The two captains, Scotland’s Honourable Francis Moncrieff and England’s Frederick Stokes, ‘both looked as if they ought to say no and would rather like to say yes’, but Almond stood firm, telling the players that he would walk off the field if they started to hack.¹⁰ If he had been less decisive and allowed hacking in an international match, the course of rugby history may have been different.

The following day the match ball was decorated with ribbons and displayed in Johnnie Bowton’s confectionary shop in Hamilton Place, just around the corner from Raeburn Place. It symbolised the role that the match had played in propelling rugby into Scottish culture, lifting it ‘from a parochial to a national, or, it might justifiably be claimed, to a universal position’.¹¹

The importance of rugby, and especially international rugby, to the Scottish middle classes symbolised the complex relationship between the Scots and the English in the mid-Victorian era. On one hand, Scotland seemed to be moving towards assimilation with the south. The Scotch [sic] Education Department, established a year after that first rugby international, was based in London. Numerous members of the Scottish ruling elite were educated at English public schools and universities, and many went on to pursue military careers with English regiments. There were even calls for Scotland’s unique legal system to be brought into line with England’s to foster greater economic integration.¹²

Yet on the other hand, the sense of Scottish national identity and distinctiveness did not diminish. Despite the encroachments of Westminster, Scottish politics remained largely in the hands of the Scots. Even the sentimental and clichéd popular art and literature featuring a never-ending stream of highland stags and kilted lairds reflected a Scottishness that may have been nostalgic for a mythical past, but was still fiercely Scottish. Most importantly, despite the apparent integration into English culture and politics, Scottish businessmen, politicians and administrators saw themselves as equal partners of the English in the creation of the British Empire. This alliance was sealed by the extraordinary wealth that accrued to them from Britain’s global dominance. Britain, its culture, its politics and its successes, were as much the creation of the Scots as of the English.

This was precisely how the rugby-loving professional and administrative classes of Glasgow and Edinburgh saw their relationship with English rugby. Looking back on the first rugby internationals from the 1920s, R. J. Phillips described how, ‘fifty years ago racial difference between the countries was more pronounced ... Scottish patriotism was a very real and live thing’.¹³ The Scots believed themselves to be equal partners in the development and protection of the game.

Rugby had a similar lineage on both sides of the border. As in England, the impetus for the development of Scottish rugby had come from elite private schools. Edinburgh Academy (founded in 1824), Loretto (1827), Merchiston Castle (1833) and Glasgow Academy (1845) not only educated young Scots for the challenges of a burgeoning economy and an expanding empire, but were also cradles of rugby. Edinburgh High School had played a type of traditional football as early 1810 and a ‘football’ club had been formed at Edinburgh University in December 1824. The university club’s rules were typically vague, although hacking and tripping were banned.¹⁴ Like other clubs of the time, the university side was short-lived, lasting just eight years. But it was the game played at Edinburgh Academy that provided the groundwork for rugby.

The boys appear to have played some kind of football game since the creation of the school in 1824. By the 1840s its matches bore more than a passing resemblance to those played at Rugby School. One old boy recalled that ‘the most cruel hacking with iron-toed and -heeled boots was allowed and suffered in what was called a “muddle” – the modern maul’.¹⁵ In the mid-1850s, allegedly inspired by Francis Crombie, a pupil who had moved there from Durham School, a version of Rugby School rules was adopted. Francis became school captain and his elder brother Alexander played a central role in establishing Edinburgh Academical Football Club in 1857. Spurred by the evangelical zeal of the ‘Accies’, as they would become known and, as in England, the mania for Muscular Christianity rugby matches began to take place regularly between elite Scottish schools.

In 1858, the first of what would become an annual match between the school and Merchiston took place. By 1870, there were ten senior clubs regularly playing rugby football in Scotland. Foremost among them were the former pupils sides, Edinburgh Academicals, Glasgow Academicals, Merchistonians and Royal High School Former Pupils (FPs), the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, plus Edinburgh Wanderers, Roland’s Rooms (a fencing and gymnasium club in Edinburgh), and West of Scotland, as well as another six clubs that played irregular fixtures. Eight schools had taken up the game as part of their curriculum.¹⁶

As might be expected, Scottish rugby did not lack for confidence. In a number of ways it actually led the English. In 1867, four years before the formation of the RFU and the creation of a common rule book for English rugby clubs, the Accies decided to push for a unified set of rules for all Scottish sides. The aim, as with the Football Association in England, was to overcome difficulties that arose when two clubs with different rules or interpretations faced each other. Promoted by H. H. Almond, the unified rules were agreed and printed in a green-covered booklet, The Laws of Football as Played by the Principal Clubs of Scotland, in the spring of 1868.

Although no copy of the Green Book, as it was known, seems to have survived, it may well be that the first international match was played according to its rules. This would account for the disquiet of the English side about the game. For example, the narrow pitch seems to have been the norm. The ball had to be thrown into the line-out at the point that it crossed the touchline, unlike in England at the time where it was taken from wherever the thrower-in picked the ball up.¹⁷ The Scots also called their half-backs ‘quarter-backs’, a tradition that would be continued in American football.

Some of the Scots’ innovations, such as the position of the line-out throw, were later incorporated into the rules of the RFU. Edinburgh clubs had even discussed counting tries as part of the scoring system in the 1860s, something that was only included in the RFU’s rules in 1875. Most significantly, in December 1871, the Scots were also involved in one of the first senior matches to be played 15-a-side, when the touring West of Scotland defeated the North of Ireland club by a goal to nil in Belfast.¹⁸ This was more than five years before the official end of 20-a-side matches.

Given the dynamism and independent-mindedness of Scottish rugby, it should not be surprising that some of its leaders came to regret that when the Scottish Football Union (as the Scottish Rugby Union was called until 1924) was formed in March 1873 it simply accepted the RFU’s rulebook. As the wily H. H. Almond pointed out, this not only restricted the ability of the Scots to implement their own ideas about the game, but also inadvertently gave the English the sole right to arbitrate on controversies about the rules of rugby. This would become a running sore in subsequent decades.

The next Scotland versus England match was played in London in February 1872 when England regained their honour with a two goals to one victory at the Kennington Oval. It was a match notable for a Scottish player having his kit torn in a tackle and being forced to wear a mackintosh to cover his embarrassment as he ran to the pavilion for a new pair of shorts.¹⁹ When the two sides met again in 1873 it would be in Glasgow, one of only two matches that England would ever play in that city. It was not a pretty sight. Played on a mudheap in heavy rain at Hamilton Crescent cricket ground, it was held by some as being the match responsible for the subsequent popularity of soccer in the city, such was the dire quality of the play.

The match also established the tradition of drunken antics that would become euphemistically known as ‘high jinks’ when an unnamed English forward was found drunkenly driving a mail cart to the railway station in the wee hours of the morning after the match. Fortunately his teammates persuaded him to leave the cart and go back to the hotel before the police arrived.²⁰

With the exception of an 1882 victory in Manchester, the Scots found themselves playing second fiddle to the English throughout the 1880s. But by the end of the decade, there was little fraternal feeling between rugby’s two founding nations. The lightning rod for the tension was the 1884 international at Blackheath’s Rectory Field. It was a dull game in bitterly cold weather that would have been quickly forgotten were it not for a controversial England try scored by Richard Kindersley. The Scots claimed that one of their players had knocked the ball backwards with his hands – which constituted a knock-on according to the rules then in force in Scotland – and therefore a scrum should have been awarded to England. At this time there was no advantage rule in force and after arguing with the two captains for ten minutes the umpires decided that the try should stand. Wilf Bolton duly converted to give England a hollow victory.

Bitter controversy gripped the game for the next year, causing the 1885 Calcutta Cup match to be cancelled amid a mountain of acrimonious correspondence between the English and the Scottish unions. The English claimed, with some justification, that if Kindersley’s try were disallowed Scotland would benefit from the fact that it had broken the rules. The Scots insisted on the letter of the law being enforced and argued that the issue be judged by a neutral nation. They were supported by the Welsh and Irish rugby unions and the three proposed establishing an International Rugby Football Board (IB) to be the ultimate authority on the rules of the game.²¹

The RFU was not prepared to allow such an overt challenge to its authority. It would not agree to equal representation on any international governing body. It pointed out that the English game had three times as many member clubs as Ireland, Scotland and Wales combined. The RFU seemed to exacerbate the situation in 1886 when they unilaterally introduced a points system for deciding matches, with three points for a goal and one for a try. This was not accepted by Ireland, Scotland or Wales, who preferred the old system of deciding matches by goals, or tries if no goals were scored.

Stalemate ensued and England did not play any home internationals in 1888 or 1889. In late 1889, fearing the impact on the standing of the sport of yet another England-less Home International series, the antagonists agreed to appoint arbitrators to reach a binding decision. When they reported back in April 1890, the arbitrators agreed that the IB should be solely responsible for the rules of the game but also found in favour England’s demands for control of the IB. Of its 12 members, six would be from England, with two each from the other nations. Rule changes could only be made with a 75 per cent majority, ensuring that England stayed in control.²²

By the time the settlement had been agreed in 1890, the game in Scotland was no longer played solely by privately educated middle-class young men from Edinburgh and Glasgow. As in the north of England and South Wales, the game had begun to permeate the working class. In Scotland this was not the industrial proletariat of the expanding cities – factory workers, miners and shipyard workers would come to prefer soccer – but workers in the small textile towns and villages around the River Tweed on the western border of Scotland and England.

As in West Yorkshire, woollen cloth was the region’s most important product. Galashiels specialised in tweed, Hawick in hosiery and knitwear, and Melrose in linen, ensuring a local rivalry that would fuel the emergence of rugby clubs in the 1870s and 1880s. Hawick rugby club had been formed in 1873, followed by Gala (1875), Kelso (1876), Melrose (1877) and, lagging somewhat, Jed-Forest (1885). The Waverley railway line between Edinburgh and Hawick had opened in 1849, directly linking Galashiels, Melrose and Hawick. This would be the arterial link that allowed Borders rugby to flourish. Rugby in the Borders was passionate and intense, a game for all the classes that brought together the local businessman and the factory hand. It had a popular culture that was almost a world away from the elite atmosphere of the Edinburgh and Glasgow clubs.

Indeed, these two worlds rarely met. No Borders player was selected for Scotland before Gala’s Adam Dalgleish made his debut in the Scottish pack against Wales in 1890, an achievement that remained rare until after the First World War. Such was the estrangement between the two worlds of Scottish rugby that in 1901 the Borders clubs began their own league in direct violation of the game’s opposition to league competitions. Still in existence today as the world’s oldest league in rugby union, it aroused the suspicious of the Scottish rugby establishment in Edinburgh. ‘Among the mill-hands who play for Hawick, Jed-Forest, Galashiels and Melrose, the evil [of professionalism] might here and there crop up,’ wrote the journalist E. H. D. Sewell, but the league was not seen as a threat and allowed to continue. In deference to the amateur sensibilities of rugby union’s leadership, however, the league champions did not receive a trophy.²³

Perhaps the most marked difference between the clubs in Edinburgh and the Borders was in the region’s love of the ‘short game’, or seven-a-side rugby. Originating in Melrose in Scotland in 1883, the idea appears to have been suggested by local butcher and rugby player Ned Haig as a way of raising money for the club. The competition took place on 28 April 1883 as part of the Melrose Sports carnival. The appeal of seven-a-side was sealed by the home side’s defeat of deadly rivals Gala in the final, after which the tournament became an annual affair. Although many of the Borders clubs started their own sevens’ contests, it wasn’t until the 1920s that ‘limited player’ rugby began to become popular across rugby union, most notably with the start of the Middlesex Sevens in 1926 by the exiled Scotsman Dr J. A. Russell-Cargill.

The cultural similarity between the textile towns of the Borders and the rugby regions of the north of England also led to a steady trickle of Scottish players who ‘went south’ after 1895 to take advantage of the payments available for their skills in the rugby league of the new Northern Union. These ranged from Melrose’s Jim Moffat, who scored a try for Oldham in the 1899 Northern Union Challenge Cup final, to Hawick’s Dave Valentine, who went to Huddersfield in 1948 and became the first man to lift the Rugby League World Cup when he captained Great Britain to unexpected victory over France in the final in Paris in 1954.

But as the 19th century drew to a close the world that Borders rugby and its working-class players occupied rarely concerned the leadership of the Scottish game. Scotland stood alongside England as the upholders of what it saw as the principles of rugby. Men like H. H. Almond and James Aikman Smith, who would be secretary of the Scottish Rugby Union from 1890 to 1931, were even more committed to the amateur values and moral purpose of rugby than their counterparts in the south. Scottish teams played the game in their own unique manner, a style dominated by forwards dribbling the ball ahead of them, challenging opponents to throw themselves down in the face of a forward rush. ‘Feet, Scotland, Feet’ was the cry from the enormous crowds that assembled for internationals in Edinburgh. By the time of the 30th anniversary of the first ever international Scotland stood second to England as the most successful rugby nation. On 9 March 1901, the national side imperiously dismissed England at Blackheath 18-3, scoring four tries and in the process securing the Triple Crown and carrying off the Home Nations Championship for the fifth time. Despite the rise of soccer in the land of the thistle, rugby would still claim to be the real game of the Scottish nation.