Southern Comfort

THE BIRTH OF BORDERS
RUGBY

THERE WAS NO ‘eureka’ moment about the fashion in which rugby union became as inextricably linked with the Borders as Sir Walter Scott. Instead, as the Victorians assiduously developed the basics of many athletic pursuits, fuelled by their desire for self-improvement and nurturing a healthy workforce, the sport arrived in Scotland, initially in the public schools of the country’s two major cities. Edinburgh Academy adopted the ‘Rules of Play’ formulated at Rugby in 1851, before Merchiston followed suit seven years later, and these establishments came together in December 1858 to lock horns in what is now accepted as the oldest regular fixture in the global game.

Yet, if this was the beginning of an organised pastime, there had already been signs that rugby would capture the imagination of those who dwelled in the Borders. For hundreds of years previously, the community of Duns had staged the Fastern’s E’en Ba Festival, and such was the popularity of this extravaganza – which is coming soon, in a revised format, to Sky One or Channel 5, if they ever get to hear about it! – that scores of Borderers flocked to Duns whenever it was staged. Essentially, three young males – called ‘Ba-Men’ – were chosen by their townspeople to make the arrangements on the Wednesday evening, prior to the festival, whereupon they would convene for the ‘Shaping of the Ba’, accompanied by a drummer and fiddler, while they sang: ‘Never let the gree gang doon, For the good o’oor toon.’ Thereafter, they prepared four balls: the first was gilt and called ‘the golden ball’; the second was the ‘silver ball’; and the third was spotted. The fourth was presented to the most important member of the community and either he, or a member of his family, or his baron Baillie, threw the first ball to commence the action in what quickly developed into a giant scrum. All the shops were shut, their windows and doors firmly shuttered up, and the proceedings started with the ball being thrown up in the Mercat Square. The objective for the married men was to ‘Kirk the ba’ by putting it into the pulpit of the parish church, which was situated in a lane off the Square, and to proclaim their triumph by giving the church bells an almighty ring. In contrast, their rivals, the bachelors, had the thornier task of placing the ball in the hopper of any of the grinding mills in the district, the nearest of which was over a mile away. If an unmarried man succeeded in this ambition, the miller would dust his cap and coat, before offering him a meal of pork and dumplings, which was the standard fare of the day. If this all sounds arcane, or more suitable for the cloisters of Hogwarts than a forerunner to the Five or Six Nations Championship, it was taken very seriously by those who strained their sinews throughout the event, and the individual who ‘kirked’ or ‘milled’ that first ball would receive a prize of one shilling and sixpence, which was a small fortune in the 19th century, while those coming in second and third would gain a shilling and sixpence respectively. Once they had finished their labours, the ‘Ba-Men’ retired to one of the taverns in Duns and slaked their thirsts on the balance of the subscribed money.

‘I just had an interest in these early games and started to visit one or two of them,’ declared Hornby, who was impressed by the clamorous scenes in Jedburgh. ‘Most of the games that died out were very popular and actually had no problem with people turning out to take part in them. In fact, that was the very problem, the damage done to property and disruption to traffic were the main factors in authorities and magistrates and do-gooders – you might say – stamping them out. Of course, one or two of the games in this area were victims of that, but others have survived and are still keenly followed.’

One of the first historians of the sport in Scotland, Sandy Thorburn, even speculated on whether rugby owed its origins in the Borders to the game of ‘harpastum’, which had been played by Roman legionaries. And although that notion might be fanciful, there were myriad indications that the farming communities in the South relished their involvement in mass participation pursuits, with similarities to what would subsequently develop into the 15-a-side pastime. For instance, in 1815, Sir Walter Scott, the author of Ivanhoe, The Heart of Midlothian and other famous novels, was the guiding light for a match between the men of Selkirk, with some assistance from their peers in Gala and Hawick, and the men of the Valleys. The contest, in the meadow lying between the Yarrow and Ettrick Waters, was staged in front of the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, and featured up to 750 players on a field which was one mile long by three-quarters wide, making it appear less like a sporting tussle and more akin to a battle royal. The first score was made by one of the Selkirk representatives, Rab Hall, who, according to the contemporaneous reports, ‘seized hold of the ball, succeeded in eluding the clutches of his desperate opponents, and, rushing into the stream, held the ball aloft in a token of victory.’ This was no-holds-barred confrontation, scarcely for the faint-hearted, as was illustrated when William Riddell, who was apparently a Scottish antecedent of Usain Bolt, broke away from the scrum and would have scored, but for the slight problem that he was impeded by a mounted spectator when striving to finish off his attack!

These activities may have been harum-scarum in nature, but there again, rugby, as it was conducted in the early years, would scarcely be understood by a modern-day viewer if he or she was transported back to the 1850s and 1860s. At the outset, it featured 20 players (or more) on both sides and the majority of these participants were concentrated in and around the scrum, with many contests being dominated by ferocious and often indiscriminate mauling. Fisticuffs often broke out – and private feuds would occasionally be settled behind the clubhouse later on – while ‘hacking’, the deliberate tripping of an opponent who did not have the ball, was permitted until the 1870s. By then, Scotland and England had met in the first ever rugby international, at Raeburn Place, in 1871, with the hosts winning by a goal and a try to a try. And, more pertinently to the Borders, clubs began springing up all through the region as the sport gained in popularity.

Rugby was not the first recreation to arrive in the Borders. Kelso Cricket Club was founded in 1820 and the likes of Hawick and Selkirk soon followed them, without the union code dominating matters, as eventually proved the case. Football did not hog the limelight either, as it did throughout the rest of Scotland from the 1870s onwards, possibly because none of the small communities in the South was large enough to accommodate a senior club, while the mill owners, who held sway over their employees, were often former public schoolboys who preferred cricket and rugby to the association version, which they brusquely branded ‘soccer’. At any rate, Langholm sprung into existence in 1871, Hawick were born in 1873, with Gala, Kelso, Melrose and Duns arriving in 1875, 1876, 1877 and 1878 respectively, as the prelude to Peebles and Jed-Forest joining them in 1881 and 1885. (Selkirk were not founded until 1907).

Soon enough, these organisations were involved in regular fixtures against one another, and although the early (anonymous) newspaper reports are frustratingly short of detail, the nascent rivalry between the competing clubs was fuelled by such incidents as the famous row which erupted between Gala and Melrose, when the former turned up at their ground one morning only to discover that the goalposts had been moved to Melrose, sparking a rivalry which still burns brightly. As Laing Speirs, the renowned Scottish journalist and historian, recounted in his Border League Story, what their initial tussles lacked in sophistication, they more than made up for in aggression and local pride.

Nothing could have summed up the approach that was to mark out the character of the Border League better than the first match between Langholm and Hawick in 1873. There was a lengthy discussion before the match about the laws, most of the argument being over whether a goal should be kicked over the bar, which was Hawick’s favoured option, or under it, which Langholm preferred. They won that argument, but the game ended in a draw, with the ironic point being that they had forced a touchdown, but [their kicker] sent the conversion over the bar. It was, of course, a classic example of the sort of on-field incident that was going to liven up Border games for the next century and more.

Langholm, Hawick and Gala were in action against the others 25 years before the [20th] century dawned and Melrose and Jed-Forest, or Jedburgh, as they were known in the early days, were soon regular opponents. [Eventually] representatives from the South clubs convened in 1890 to pick a side to play Edinburgh. There must have been some teething problems, because another meeting was called, at St Boswells, to discuss some contentious issues towards the close of the following season. One of them was ‘the great dissatisfaction, which exists in the South with the present state of affairs, and the best way to secure redress of grievances and the furtherance [sic] of rugby would be easier promoted through the formation of a South of Scotland Rugby Union’.

Basically, this statement encapsulated the simmering resentment which festered between the private schools in the major cities and their counterparts in the Borders. Much of it revolved around class, with the likes of Edinburgh and Glasgow Accies restricting their membership to former pupils and making no effort to spread the rugby gospel beyond those (narrow) confines, whereas Langholm, Hawick and the rest were simply interested in promoting the sport, without worrying unduly about old school ties and other pieces of flummery. This is not the place for a diatribe on the impact which the latter have played in cementing the perception of rugby as a purely middle-and upper-class pursuit. Suffice to say that the Borders were prepared to embrace radical new ideas and, akin to what was happening in the Welsh valleys during the same period, operated on the basis that the best means of pursuing success lay in encouraging everybody in their area to pick up a rugby ball and gain the opportunity to play with it as soon as possible. The former pupils’ (FP) clubs did the opposite, and sparked a situation where the majority of people in their communities were specifically excluded.

The consequence was that the SRU was branded an elitist body by many people in the South, sparking a division which intensified as the years rolled by. Yet the Borders clubs were blessed with sufficient ambition and prescience to flourish on their own terms, as was obvious when a young Borders butcher, called Ned Haig, introduced Sevens to the world in 1883. At this distance, it is easy to forget how often the best ideas spring from necessity, but the reality was that Melrose RFC were suffering serious financial problems and needed something which would assist them in raising funds. Enter Haig, who was born in Jedburgh in 1858, and was clearly an ingenious fellow, whose appetite for rugby had been whetted by his early involvement with the Fastern’s E’en Ba festival.

Consequently, with his brethren and their organisation in the toils, Haig devised the basic template for a game which has now become a global phenomenon. ‘Want of money made us rack our brains as to what was to be done to keep the club from going to the wall,’ he later wrote in An Old Melrose Player’s Recollections. ‘The idea struck me that a [rugby] football tournament might prove attractive, but, as it was hopeless to think of having several games in one afternoon, with 15 players on each side, the teams were reduced to seven men.’ At a stroke, Haig had hit upon a successful formula, and all that remained was for the structure and regulations to be thrashed out by the committee at Melrose, who have always been one of the most progressive clubs in their homeland.

Since when, their members have taken pains to enshrine Haig’s name for posterity and the Border Advertiser related how the Sevens concept was an instant hit:

Haig’s contribution, according to that statement by himself, was the idea of a football tournament. The wording suggests that the reduction to seven players per side was the outcome of discussion between some or probably all of the club’s officials of the mechanics of running such a tournament. It is not now possible to say whether a football tournament with athletics events, or vice versa, was the original idea. Whatever the truth of the matter might be, generations of spectators and players have been grateful that the Melrose Sports started and included a football tournament. Originally, the ‘seven men’ comprised a full back, two quarter-backs and four forwards, but, with the introduction of the passing game, the forwards were reduced to three and an extra half-back played.

Initially, the programme [of events] included foot races, drop kicks, dribbling races and place kicking. However, the ‘Football Competition’ was the main attraction and a cup was presented for it by the ladies of Melrose. On 29th April, 1883, the first Melrose Sports were held at the Greenyards, beginning at 12.30 and concluding at 7.30. The day was not very favourable, being cold in the morning and wet long before the close.

But by the time this event [the Sevens] commenced, an enormous crowd of spectators had assembled, special trains having been run from Galashiels and Hawick and about 1,600 tickets had been taken at Melrose during the day. From the former place alone, there were 862 tickets booked, of whom 509 came by special train, and the other 353 by ordinary train. Among these was a number of manufacturers and Melrose itself was represented by many of the gentry of the district. As [rugby] football has been the popular game of the season in the district, perhaps because its nature corresponds with the spirit of the hardy Borderer, the competition had been looked forward to with great interest, as most of the clubs of the district were expected to compete for the prize. The excitement during the games was thus great and that portion of the spectators, belonging to the various townships, did all they could to encourage their clubs and players. This was especially the case with the Galashiels people, who leaped the barrier at critical points of play on several occasions and mixed among the players. To their credit, let it be said that no portion of spectators, however warm their feelings, interfered with any of the clubs. The competition was played under rugby rules, fifteen minutes of play being allowed in each heat, and seven members of every club competing. The regulations were that, in the first heat, if two clubs tied, they would both be allowed to play in the second; if two clubs tied in the second round, they would play on until one scored, when that one was declared the winner. [Gala Forest, a junior team, had a bye, because Kelso didn’t turn up].

Melrose and Gala were left to decide the result of the final. The ground by this time was soft and slippery, owing to the rain, and the Gala team were pretty well knocked up [exhausted] after a tough contest with St Cuthbert’s. After a short interval, however, they were forced to begin again, or run the risk of being disqualified. The Melrose team had had a long rest and the two clubs they had played previously were both light and they were therefore much fresher than their opponents. They played for fifteen minutes, a fast and rough game, but as nothing was scored, it was agreed by the captains to play another quarter of an hour. After ten minutes, Melrose obtained a try and left the field without either trying to kick their goal [conversion] or finish the game, claiming the cup. But they were challenged by Gala on the ground that the game had not been finished. The proceedings were then brought to an abrupt conclusion, and the spectators left the ground, amid much confusion. It is said the referee decided the tie in favour of Melrose, but they should have played the quarter of an hour before they claimed the cup.

That version of events seems to have been written, through clenched teeth, by a non-Melrose reporter, but the success of the whole festival spoke for itself and Haig, as one of the participants, was delighted at the sizeable crowd’s response. In later seasons the format was tinkered with and guest sides were gradually invited from all over the globe, bringing some wonderfully gifted performers from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to the Borders. Yet the beautiful simplicity of Haig’s original vision has not been diminished in the process of transforming Sevens into an Olympic sport. Some rugby aficionados have mixed feelings about the abbreviated version of the sport – just as many cricket enthusiasts shudder at the recent invention of the Twenty20 game – but Melrose pioneered something special, something which both thrilled most of the cognoscenti and appealed to the unconverted, and rugby owed a significant debt to Ned Haig.

Perhaps, predictably, there was not any overwhelming enthusiasm for Sevens from the school-based entities in the Central Belt. (Plus ca change!) But, in all these dealings, it should be borne in mind that the Scottish Rugby Union was resolutely committed to amateurism and preserving what it viewed as the essential ethos of rugby. There is scant value in bemoaning this attitude with the benefit of hindsight; it was simply a reflection of the times and the conservative conviction of most SRU officials, whose autocratic secretary, J Aikman Smith, a chap whose default setting was ‘No’ to any suggestion which might tamper with the sanctity of the existing laws or, heaven forbid, persuade more supporters to attend matches. In his opinion – and it was an attitude shared by many of his contemporaries and those who followed – rugby existed as a game for players, not spectators, and he was aghast at the notion that the former should have their jerseys numbered to improve recognition. ‘It is a rugby match, not a cattle show,’ he is reported to have said to King George V on one occasion, and he meant it. But there again, he was merely sticking to his principles. What stuck in the craws of so many Borderers was that these tenets seemed to imply the South was wrong for encouraging competition.

All of this ensured that an atmosphere of mutual suspicion consistently existed between the Edinburgh elite and their counterparts to the South. Yet, amid the tensions, the establishment of a string of clubs in the Borders swiftly led to their derby matches developing a genuine edge, with the crowds at these fixtures adding a raucous amount of partisan bias to the proceedings. These matters can sometimes be overstated, but if there is a prevailing theme from the accounts of the Borderers’ early tussles, it lies in the uncompromising hardness of those involved, both on and off the field. There were numerous instances of supporters spilling on to the pitch, while disagreements between players were often the prelude to impromptu boxing matches, sparking a situation where, in the words of Borders historian Laing Speirs: ‘The simple rule was that if one player annoyed another – and the players made a habit of annoying one another – they retired behind the pavilion to settle their differences with fists. Sometimes as many as four or five fights were in progress at the same time. But the game carried on regardless.’

It may be asked why the sport immediately gained a widespread audience while other games, such as cricket, continued to dwell in sedate anonymity in the South from decade to decade, even though they had laid down roots before rugby was even invented. But the historians of the time seemed in agreement that the physicality of the oval-ball pursuit tapped into the Borderers’ consciousness. One of their number, R J Phillips, summed up this argument with the words: ‘It wasn’t that the Scot was rougher than the Saxon, but he was hardier, partly by racial inheritance and partly by his football upbringing.’

There may be a sprinkling of merit in this assertion, but I sought out Jim Telfer for his perspective and the former Scotland centre and national coach, who masterminded the British and Irish Lions’ successful tour of South Africa in 1997, was typically prescient. That came as no surprise because, in many respects, Telfer is the living, breathing embodiment of rugby in the raw, as practised in his backyard. During the past 25 years, I have witnessed some of the most redoubtable customers in the Caledonian game almost visibly shrink with apprehension at the prospect of crossing swords with Telfer – and there have been instances where he has made Sir Alex Ferguson seem like an oasis of calm by comparison – but though he can be combative, curmudgeonly, cantankerous and cussed to the point of blind obstinacy, the bottom line is that this fellow has forgotten more about the game he loves than the majority of us will ever know. Hence, his characteristically forthright answer to my original question.

There have always been a lot of people who work outdoors in the Borders, with their hands, men who have to be big and strong, and whether they are working on farms or in other aspects of the agricultural business, or they are labouring or involved in stonemasonry, they have wanted a game which would play to their strengths and where they could go out and use that power to their best advantage. Soccer wasn’t for most of them, but rugby suited them down to the ground. And once you had the formation of so many clubs in such a short time frame, it created a climate where every town wanted to get the better of their nearest rivals, a few miles away. It also suited the way people worked in the 19th century, where they didn’t have whole days they could devote to sport. With rugby, right from the outset, they could use a horse and cart and get from Gala to Melrose quickly. And of course, once Langholm were up and running, that guaranteed that the other communities in the region would knuckle down and get their act together.

Of course, there is local rivalry and passions occasionally run high in the heat of battle. I know from my time with Melrose that there is a real hunger and burning desire amongst the others to beat us. And it was the same whenever we took on Hawick in my playing days. But that is healthy competition and there is no malice attached to it, or not from my experience. Sometimes, the rivalry becomes very parochial, narrow-minded and introverted, and you will find clubs judging whether a season has been a success or not by whether they won their derby fixtures, not where they finished in the league.

But, for me, the success of the Borders has actually been a very positive development and it is something that we should be proud about in Scottish sport. There is no religious aspect, we have established a pastime where the minister’s son is playing alongside the plumber’s son, and the doctor’s boy is in the same team as the joiner’s lad. So it is all very democratic and egalitarian and I honestly believe that if you travel to Gala or Hawick, or Melrose or Kelso, you will be given a warm welcome by their members and, if you want to play rugby or watch rugby, you will be made to feel very welcome.

Rugby is still a snobby sport in some areas, but certainly not down here. When I was growing up [in the 1950s], you never questioned whether or not you should be playing rugby, you just went out and did it. (And the only alternative was crosscountry running.) Every club did its best to set up development programmes to search for talent and I think we have made a virtue of necessity, because we have such a small population down here, compared to the rest of the country, that we can never afford to be complacent.

Some of our most talented guys have gone to the feepaying schools in the cities, but most of them return to their roots after they have finished their education. John Jeffrey, for instance [the Scotland and Lions flanker], went to Merchiston [in Edinburgh], but you wouldn’t associate JJ with anywhere other than Kelso. And that is one of the strengths of the sport in these parts. There is a continuity, a sense that we are carrying on a tradition, and while more youngsters are playing soccer these days, the link between the [nine] secondary schools in the region and the rugby clubs is still strong and we still have lots of promising kids who are as dedicated to their rugby as anybody could be. We need that attitude and that determination from the young generation if we are to build on the successes of the past. And nobody can afford to rest on their laurels.

Jeffrey’s progress was in the opposite direction, to some extent, from one of the first superstars of Scottish rugby. Back in the 1880s, Charles Reid, the towering Edinburgh Academical forward with the nickname ‘Hippo’, was first capped for his country when he was only 17 years and 36 days old and still at school. In those days there were no Jonah Lomus or Va’aiga Tuigamalas – or not in the British game at any rate – but Reid, who weighed in at over 15 stone and stood 6ft 3in tall, was as close to a man-mountain as his contemporaries had ever witnessed. He was a formidable presence for Scotland in the second row in many of the early international tussles with the Home Nations – he made 20 appearances against England, Wales and Ireland between 1881 and 1888 – and although it may be a fruitless exercise trying to compare the talents of luminaries from different generations, the universal praise which has been accorded to this fellow indicates that he possessed prodigious gifts. Certainly R J Phillips considered him ‘Scotland’s greatest forward’, yet all the recognition meant little to Reid, who moved to the Borders after graduating as a doctor, and subsequently turned out for the junior club, Selkirk Union, where he must have looked like an avenging angel to those unfortunate opponents, who were tasked with attempting to halt his progress.

Indeed, although he was not a Borderer, he thrived after making the journey to the South of Scotland. And as Walter Thomson, one of, if not the greatest, of the Scottish rugby historian fraternity (and the famous ‘Fly-Half’ of the Sunday Post) – later wrote: ‘If Selkirk had been as deft as some of their neighbours in claiming caps on somewhat tenuous grounds, they might have bragged, right till the time of Hawick’s Jock Beattie in the 1930s, that they held the Border record in international appearances.’

By the end of the 19th century, the efforts of characters such as Reid had yielded some significant success for Scotland. He led them to their maiden Home Championship triumph in 1887, following victories over Wales (by a substantial margin of four goals and eight tries to nil) and Ireland (by one goal, one goal from a mark and two tries to nil) with a draw (one try apiece) against England at Whalley Range in Manchester. The fact that his Test career finished at the age of 24 only seems extraordinary if we overlook the fact that individuals in his mould viewed sport as play; his vocation was medicine. And, according to the testimony of those who covered rugby at the time, Reid derived an equal amount of pleasure from marauding round the paddock in Selkirk as he did anywhere else.

By this stage, the Borders had established the Sevens version of rugby, most of their clubs were thriving, and they were blazing their own trail, on their own terms, often without the approval of the governing body. But there was to be no immediate cessation of hostilities between the two parties as the South embarked on an ambitious plan.