In the later part of the nineteenth century, rugby became not just the national game of New Zealand but the national obsession. This new psychological malaise expressed itself in two symptoms: first, the fervour with which men and boys, and sometimes women, supported local, provincial and national teams; second, and perhaps as a consequence of the first, the inability to accept defeat with good grace.
How deeply this extravagant attitude had penetrated the national psyche became obvious with the tour of Great Britain by the legendary 1905 All Black team. Back in New Zealand, colonials followed every step of their team’s triumphal progress intently. But as Sir Terry McLean once reminded us, because in those times no Sunday papers were published in New Zealand, results of games played on the British Saturday were not immediately available to anxious rugby followers in the colony. McLean wrote about the response of rugby enthusiasts who lived in his birthplace, Wanganui. ‘Each Sunday morning half of the males in the town above the age of fifteen went to the Post Office where at about 8.30 or nine o’clock – the news had been coming through by telegraph – the scores of the match were put up.’
These Sunday gatherings outside post offices were repeated in towns and cities throughout the colony. On the fateful Sunday morning of 17 December 1905, groups of rugby supporters waited confidently, as usual, outside their local post offices for the results of the test against Wales, the last international game in Britain of the unbeatable (or so it was imagined) All Blacks. What a shock when the news of the result of the game at Cardiff Arms Park came through. The unthinkable had happened. Wales had beaten New Zealand, 3 to 0. When the crowds read the cable pinned to the post office notice board, their reaction was one of disbelief and dismay.
The All Black team photographed before the game against Wales. The sixteenth player, the man in mufti on the far left of the back row, will act as line umpire. No replacements for any players named in the original XV were allowed in those days. THE TRIUMPHANT TOUR OF THE NEW ZEALAND FOOTBALLERS, WELLINGTON, 1906.
In a day or so, however, this unhappy result became slightly easier to bear. There was an explanation after all. Bob Deans of New Zealand had scored a try which would have enabled the team at least to draw if not win the game, had the slow-footed referee, John Dallas of Scotland, only been on hand to award it. In his report on the tour the All Black manager George H. Dixon explained why the referee had not kept up with the play. ‘As is customary with many referees in the Old Country, he went out on a greasy ground, with ordinary working boots, no buttons [sprigs] or bars, and clad in ordinary clothing, including the ordinary high collar.’ According to Dixon, in the second half the All Black full back Billy Wallace had split open the Welsh defence and right on the line had passed to the three-quarter Bob Deans ‘who dived over and grounded the ball well over the chalk mark. He was at once dragged back, ball and all, into play, and when the referee who was fully thirty yards away, came up, he gave a scrum, five yards out.’
Whether a try should have been awarded will not be debated here. My concern is simply to demonstrate that the fervour and partisanship whipped up by this episode were no more than a continuation of the spirit in which the game had been played in New Zealand since rugby’s earliest days. There is no better illustration of this phenomenon than the bitter quarrel that broke out as a result of a provincial rugby game between Auckland and Wellington in 1886.
‘Horse Tram Broadway, Newmarket, 1887.’ Only a favoured few could use public transport to the Auckland–Wellington game that took place on the Dilworth farm the year before. AUCKLAND CITY LIBRARIES, NEG. 1887.
It has been said that, in New Zealand’s first interprovincial games, Auckland and Otago pioneered clean passing among speedy backs. Dixon wrote in 1906 that Wellington ‘made the greatest improvement of all in the game by the introduction of fast open forward play. The old-timers will still remember with a thrill the impression created in the early eighties with their almost invincible forward rushes.’
Auckland and Wellington soon became keen rugby rivals, with the southerners at first holding the upper hand. In the three games played between the two unions over the 1875 and 1883 period, Auckland had failed to win even once. The northerners became hungry for victory, not least because the last game played in Wellington had ended sourly and in a way that brought little credit to the Auckland team or to its long-serving, bearded captain, Thomas Henderson. The official history of the Auckland Rugby Union states that ‘Webb touched down for Wellington, which was disputed by the Auckland captain who threatened to take his team off the field. The game continued, however, without the point being decided and led to a rather acrimonious correspondence between the two Unions.’ The game has gone down in the official records as a draw, with ‘a try by Webb (disputed)’.
Not surprisingly Aucklanders looked forward with much relish to the return game against a visiting Wellington team to be played on home soil in 1886. Auckland preparations left little to chance; before the local side was finally selected, trial games were played on four successive Saturdays. When the visitors arrived by steamer at the Onehunga wharf a crowd of 200 Aucklanders was waiting to welcome them. The feeling was that at last the northern province had Wellington’s measure in the forwards. Betting in Auckland favoured the home team by odds of two to one.
The Dilworth farm, circa 1880. The field on which the 1886 provincial game was played is in the far right corner of the photograph, and is partly obscured by the upper slope of Mount Hobson. AUCKLAND CITY LIBRARIES, NEG. 804.
On the day of the game, Wednesday 11 August, interest was intense. The afternoon was declared a half-holiday. Eight thousand people, about onefifth of the city’s population, went to the game. The New Zealand Herald was in no doubt that this match had the locals in thrall.
Amongst some there is an impression that football is not a popular game in New Zealand. Yesterday’s attendance is a complete answer to this in the negative, for the business people, their employées, the wives and families of each, and the public generally showed the interest they take in this game by mustering the largest crowd that has ever assembled at any racecourse or place of popular resort in Auckland. From two o’clock the road to Newmarket was a scene of the densest traffic. The [horse-drawn] tramcars, via Kyber Pass, could not accommodate the crowds that wished to utilise them. Omnibuses, breaks, cabs and hansoms, carried their living freights at as much speed as was possible. The sideways were thronged with a dense population, all wending their way in the same direction, and all was eagerness and excitement to be in time and secure a good position to watch the match. The route via Parnell presented a similar scene. There were no tramcars, but there were interlocked lines of omnibuses and vehicles, from the aristocratic carriage and the handsome buggies and waggonettes, to the common express carts with boards laid across for seats, and covered with sacks for cushions. But all were filled to their utmost capacity, and those who had the privilege of riding in them were envied by those who had to trudge along the muddy ways.
By three o’clock this great crowd gathered at the pitch, which was ‘admirably laid out’ and fenced so that the playing area could not be invaded by spectators. The ground chosen was a large paddock of Dilworth’s farm just opposite the Junction Hotel, then located at the point where Great South Road and Manukau Road intersect today.
The Herald declared that once the game had begun the scene was ‘grand and picturesque’.
In the centre were the teams, eagerly contesting with all their might for the victory. The grandstands on either side were thronged to their utmost capacity, the enclosure surrounded by rows of people crowded together from five to ten deep, straining and pushing with the greatest eagerness, caretakers and policemen doing their best to preserve the lines – the fences, trees, and hedges each affording vantage grounds to those who were unable to obtain better positions, and the tops of omnibuses, the roofs of houses, the verandahs, balconies, and windows of the Junction Hotel, all crowded with eager and excited onlookers, formed a scene of animation which will not soon be forgotten.
We need not dwell on the details of what proved to be a keenly contested game, except to note that Auckland’s win by a score of 4 (two tries) to 2 (one try) was thought by many to be a somewhat lucky one. Wellington was clearly the fitter side, and one or two dubious decisions had gone in favour of the home team. But it is not in the course of the game itself, but in its upshot that the real interest of this episode lies.
After the final whistle there were no signs of dissatisfaction with the result. The newspaper accounts simply state that both teams were driven back to town by brake, with the local representatives encountering en route ‘numerous demonstrations of approval’.
The customary banquet for the two teams at the Imperial Hotel appeared to put the seal of satisfaction on what had seemed a happy day. Many toasts were drunk. In proposing the first toasts, the respective captains set the tone by speaking of their opponents in manly and generous fashion. In proposing a toast to the Wellington team, J. A. Warbrick of Auckland spoke of the ‘friendly game’ that had been played, with ‘no disputes. The Wellington forwards had played splendidly, and the work of their backs had surprised the Aucklanders.’ In toasting the Aucklanders, Wellington captain D. G. A. Cooper, after first thanking ‘the people of Auckland for the kind and hearty way in which his team [had been] received and welcomed’, thanked his opponents ‘for the friendly manner in which the match had been played’.
The Auckland representative team of 1883. A. H. Cotter, who was the official line umpire in that year as well as in 1886, is the figure on right in mufti with a natty bowler hat. RUGBY IN AUCKLAND, 1883–1967, AUCKLAND, 1967.
Once the Wellington team sailed to Napier the following day, however, there were signs that all was not well. Wellington newspaper reports suggested that the game had turned on the biased rulings of the Auckland line umpire, Mr A. H. Cotter. Whether this complaint was justified we shall never know, but the following considerations must be borne in mind. Line umpires in that era had more powers than they have today. For instance, they were often called upon to rule on whether a try had been actually scored, more or less as a video referee does today. Nor were they impartial arbiters of the game. To seek an analogy from a court of law, they should be looked on not as judges but as advocates of the teams that had nominated them in the first place. When Auckland had last played Wellington in the infamous ‘disputed try’ game at Wellington in 1883, Cotter had travelled to the game as the umpire representing the Auckland team and, bowler-hatted, was included in that year’s team photograph. Cotter was also a selector of the Auckland team, a longstanding officer of the Auckland union and chairman of its executive committee in the year that this game against Wellington was played on Dilworth’s paddock.
That the Wellington rugby team was upset at the manner of its defeat in Auckland it made clear at the banquet following the next game that it played against Hawke’s Bay. A telegraph message came through to Auckland newspapers that during the Napier banquet the Wellington captain had proposed a toast to every union in New Zealand, and to New South Wales as well, ostentatiously omitting, however, Auckland from his list. After the return of the team to Wellington, recriminations continued to flow from the capital.
But when members of the Poneke club in the capital ceremonially hanged an effigy of Mr Cotter outside their training shed, the Auckland Rugby Union felt obliged to spring onto the counter-attack. The union convened a special meeting in its clubrooms in the Imperial Hotel, the main item of business being a discussion of recent events in Wellington which, in the words of one delegate, were a ‘slur on Auckland’. After a lengthy discussion the meeting unanimously passed a resolution that called for ‘an apology for the reports which appeared in the Wellington newspapers re the late match Auckland v. Wellington, and the umpiring of Mr Cotter; also that an apology be obtained from the Poneke Club by the Wellington Union for their action in hanging the Auckland umpire in effigy’.
This demand must have riled the Wellington union whose executive had earlier indicated that neither it nor its team could be held ‘responsible … for the work of outsiders’. It replied coldly but politely, reiterating that opinion. On this note the matter was closed.
When competition was resumed between the two unions in 1889, the bad blood was no longer there.
