Southern Comfort

A LEAGUE APART IN THE
BORDERS

WHENEVER SPORTING teams spring into existence in any region or country, the next logical development is for them to forge an alliance and arrange to meet each other in a formalised league structure. It happened in football, in cricket, in most pursuits where there was any element of rivalry and genuine competition and, therefore, it must have seemed a natural progression for the likes of Hawick, Gala and Melrose to advance from locking horns on a sporadic basis to devising a tournament which would benefit them all. Yet, when these Borders organisations duly took that action at the start of the 20th century, implementing radical proposals for a structured new event, the response to their endeavours in some quarters suggested they were committing a treasonable act.

However, perhaps it was not surprising that the SRU and their colleagues who presided over rugby in Scotland looked askance at the news from the South of the country, when it was revealed that their near neighbours were engaged in establishing a Border League, at a time when such innovation ran contrary to the normal practice of clubs meeting in the equivalent of friendly contests. Such tournaments may be commonplace across the rugby spectrum today, but they were unheard of in the union code back in 1902, which helped explain the suspicion with which the Edinburgh administrators regarded the notion. So too, there had already been a schism in England, where the Northern Union clubs had split from the RFU over the issue of paying players for what was called ‘broken time’, in what, inevitably, led to the creation of rugby league. In which light, it was maybe understandable that talk of a Border League carried the whiff of professionalism, which was, of course, a dirty word in the 15-a-side game for nearly another 100 years.

Nonetheless, for all their frosty glances, there was little, if anything, that the SRU could do to prevent the idea coming to fruition. At the outset, the event featured just five clubs – Langholm, Hawick, Melrose, Gala and Jed-Forest – but these organisations had both strong local roots and a keen rivalry between their respective communities which made their association appear an eminently practical solution. In any case, Murrayfield could ill afford to be overly heavy-handed with the Borders, lest these clubs decamped to the rival code, so the tutting and tsking ultimately added up to a lot of sound and fury signifying precious little. Indeed, in the long run, the officials responsible for orchestrating the Border League were sporting revolutionaries, whose brainchild led to the creation of a tournament which was not merely the first of its kind in the rugby world, but the third-oldest union competition – following on from the Varsity match (which was launched in 1872) and the Calcutta Cup (which commenced seven years later) – of any variety.

All of which makes it doubly frustrating that there should be such limited documentation, explaining the mechanics of how exactly the Border League came into existence. As it is, the original minute books have vanished forever, while the first official records of league fixtures do not start until a decade after the initial competition. Even the beetle-browed historians, who have delved into these matters with the diligence of a Holmes or a Poirot, have invariably been forced to conclude that these early years are something of a mystery. Perhaps, as some people claimed, the clubs involved did not wish to antagonise those who ran the sport any further than they could – and certainly not before the SRU had granted their blessing to the Border structure – but it seems peculiar that the details of one of Scottish sport’s more treasured concepts should be shrouded in fog. Yet that is undoubtedly the case, as explained by Border chronicler, Laing Speirs:

The first years of the twentieth century saw the Border championship emerging from the mists in a shape that is still recognisable today, but one which was totally lacking in the organisational strength, which was introduced by the League’s secretaries and committees over the years. The results of the early games were listed in league form under the heading of the Border Competition, presumably to avoid confusion with the association football structure of these days which called itself the Border League. Club records of the first decade of the century are mostly silent on the progress of Border rugby matches, and often, even the speakers at the [clubs’] annual general meetings totally ignored their team’s success in winning the league over the winter months.

Suggestions that the Scottish Football Union [what was, in effect, the SRU], as it was then known, had frowned on the Border clubs organising competitive rugby have been exaggerated. But there was probably a reluctance, at least in the very earliest years, to upset anybody at headquarters with too dramatic a celebration of local success in a domestic competition which sometimes reached fairly lively conclusions.

Not everybody agrees with this interpretation of events and, from a distance, it appears too much of a coincidence that Borderers, en masse, effectively imposed a news blackout on their activities, following the foundation of the league. What on earth had they reason to be ashamed about? Yet, it can hardly have assisted the South’s cause that, for a short period, their fledgling competition included Carlisle, who joined the original five participants in the 1904–05 campaign. At best, one imagines this would have sparked consternation among Scottish officials, considering that, irrespective of the close ties between the Cumberland club and their counterparts in Langholm, there was no rationale by which anybody could argue Carlisle was in any sense ‘Scottish’. At worst, their bond with the Borders heightened fears that the leading organisations in the South of Scotland and North of England were considering a breakaway from the SRU and RFU.

This apprehension had little genuine substance, although the manner in which Carlisle suddenly exited the tournament hinted at some cloak-and-dagger intrigue behind the scenes. On the pitch, the Englishmen acquitted themselves well, with two victories out of three at the end of December 1905, whereupon they vanished! As Speirs explains:

The most likely reason for Carlisle’s departure, midway through the season, was that the Border clubs were already laying plans to have their championship fully recognised [by the SRU]. It seems likely that, as they prepared for their formal approach to Edinburgh, they realised that their chances of success would be greater if they confined the new structure to the five active senior Borders clubs. Certainly, the timing suggests this may have been the reason, but, whatever it was, Carlisle’s disappearance was abrupt and uncharted.

The first table of 1906 makes no mention at all of them, while there was no reference to the affair in the Carlisle minutes and, coupled with the suggestion that extensive travelling was presenting problems, the conclusion has to be reached that there were no great regrets about the parting of the ways. Whatever the truth, Carlisle faded from the Border League scene, leaving behind memories of a short spell in the spotlight.

Notwithstanding the suspicion of sports politics burbling beneath the surface, the birth of the Border League soon yielded positive ramifications, both for the clubs in the South and the wider good health of the Scottish game. The original five members were soon joined by Selkirk in 1908 and Kelso in 1912 – although Earlston’s application was subsequently rejected in 1923 – and the competition quickly caught fire among the locals, who were understandably excited by the notion of winter derbies between community clubs who were separated by only a few miles, yet remained inherently proud of their own separate identities. From the outset the matches were passionate affairs, and anybody who has ever witnessed a full-blooded tussle between the likes of Hawick and Gala will appreciate the sheer visceral intensity of the combat between the 30 men on the pitch. This was often bone-juddering fare, not least because the hapless individual who missed a tackle or spilled a pass would be reminded of that fact by his townsfolk for the rest of the week – or the season – or, if the offence was especially glaring, the rest of his days! Players might be forgiven for lacking any special rugby talent – such as the redoubtable warrior who once piped up: ‘We couldna play fitba’, but Jings, we could hammer them’ – but no excuses would suffice for those who seemed to be offering less than wholehearted effort or shirking a challenge when it mattered.

Referees, for their part, had to learn to be thick-skinned and ignore the taunts from the sidelines, because if any official tried to mess with the crowd, he soon discovered that he had chosen the wrong place to parade his pedantry. Supporters – and thousands of them were soon turning up for their regular dose of Border League thrills – included significant numbers of men and women, with the latter often providing stalwart support behind the scenes, as well as exhibiting their detailed rugby knowledge when it was required.

In the 1908–09 match between Selkirk and Jed-Forest, for instance, there was a telling interruption from one of the Philiphaugh club’s redoubtable aficionados, Belle Murray, whose piercing cry of ‘Coont the players, ref!’ managed to filter through to the whistler, who, perhaps wisely in the circumstances, abruptly halted the game and discovered that Jed-Forest had 16 players in their ranks. The action was suspended for a few moments, but eventually, as Walter Thomson reported: ‘The mystery was solved. It was found that Jed had arrived a man short. So their coachman, Bill Coltherd, offered to make up the team and, with a spare strip aboard, he took the field. Meantime, the absentee dashed into the pavilion just as the game began, and joined his team-mates in a scrimmage [sic] unnoticed by the referee or, for that matter, his own captain. And, but for the keen eye of Belle, Jed might have finished the game with one over the fifteen.’

On another occasion, the Border Advertiser related how a particularly feisty clash between Hawick and Gala had climaxed in a riot, with substantial numbers of the crowd invading the field to vent their anger at the referee. ‘A scene of great disorder prevailed, with missiles being thrown at the official, and the county police had to intervene, as did some of the home players and officials.’ Thereafter, a short ban was imposed on Hawick, which prevented them from playing within ten miles of their home ground for the rest of the month, and these types of incidents demonstrated how much these matches mattered to the crowd and those who were participating on behalf of their towns. In which light, it was hardly surprising that heroes from within the different organisations began to emerge; men whose names still evoke appreciative nods when they are mentioned around Netherdale or Mansfield Park, or the other clubhouses which hosted the fixtures.

Hawick, so often the trailblazers against the blazerati, won the first Border League title, a triumph which should have surprised nobody considering the stranglehold which they exerted on the competition, and the wider world of Scottish rugby, for much of the next 100 years. The now-legendary ‘Green Machine’, so beloved of Bill McLaren, had yet to crank into full gear, and the Teris [as the locals were known] were forced to cope with a variety of problems, whether in the decline of the hosiery industry in the 1890s, which led to many families leaving the town, or the unwanted (but constant) attention of rugby league scouts, on the prowl, from the North of England. But gradually, they turned the union pursuit into a religion, and produced men who were close to being supermen. There was Bill Kyle, who went on to represent Scotland, and who captained the original league champions, regularly inspiring his colleagues with his industrious energy and unerring catching and dribbling; Sandy Burns, who was the epitome of an immovable object, and whose Herculean labours for his club rightly earned him folk-hero status; and a clutch of players who gained international calls, such as Walter Sutherland, Robert Lindsay-Watson, Billy Burnet and Carl Ogilvy, whose joint endeavours gradually, inexorably, ensured that Hawick had become the team that everybody else feared by the outbreak of the First World War.

Yet they had to work incredibly hard to wrest the initiative away from Jed-Forest, who won the league no fewer than five times in the first seven years of the competition. This was a testimony, both to the power of their forwards, and also the tireless endeavour of their committee officials, who toiled out of the spotlight, but to significant effect, as the ‘Royal Blues’ enjoyed a spell in the ascendancy which made them the best team in the South. They collected the first ever Border League cup – that prize had eventually been authorised by the Scottish governing body – in the 1906–07 season, and also prevailed in the unofficial championship of that campaign, as the prelude to their personnel being presented with gold badges for repeating their exploits in the following year.

As with all the best sides, Jed had gifted performers spread throughout their ranks. Even today, more than 100 years later, any of the worthies at Riverside Park will be able to regale visitors with tales of the derring-do of such characters as Michael Drummond, Adam Renilson, James Henderson and a veritable plethora of Williams with the surnames Hall, Jardine, Balfour, Watson, Purdie and Laidlaw. The latter has been one of the most famous names to emerge from Jedburgh, with generations of Laidlaws doing their birthplace proud. It must be said about these players that they dominated matters at the start of the 20th century as much as Melrose did at the end of it.

In the bigger picture, meanwhile, this was a period of regular success for Scotland on the international stage as the sport moved closer towards how it is recognised today. The Triple Crown, which required victories over the other home countries, was secured in 1901, 1905 and 1907, and the SRU, whose governors had often been criticised for their conservatism, were refreshingly forward-thinking in creating a purpose-built national stadium, with the opening of Inverleith in 1899. This was no mean feat and guaranteed that, for the first 50 years of its existence, the Edinburgh ground could accommodate a larger crowd than any other rugby venue in the northern hemisphere. The spectators flocked to these Test matches and, whether in the thousands of rugby followers who travelled to and from the Borders on the railway services, which would subsequently fall victim to the notorious Beeching axe, or in the manner that other countries copied the Border League format and launched competitions of their own, there was ample evidence of Scotland punching above its weight in the 15-a-side domain.

One could also marvel at the emergence of so many allround individuals, who glittered like shooting stars before moving on to other pursuits or sacrificing their lives in the 1914–18 conflict. Some were reticent individuals who let their actions speak louder than any words could possibly have done and many in the Jed ranks excelled in that fashion. Others, such as Kenneth Macleod, who was only 17 and still at Fettes when he was selected for his country against New Zealand in 1905, possessed a range of gifts which seemed hardly fair to ordinary mortals, as Allan Massie wrote in The Scotsman.

He won 10 caps, all at centre-threequarter while at Cambridge University and retired, before he was 21, at the urging of his father, because two elder brothers had been seriously injured playing rugby. Macleod was famed, both for his running and his drop-kicking, and scored a memorable try in the 1906 victory over South Africa. He retired before reaching his full powers and, having already been Scottish long jump champion, went on to captain Lancashire at cricket, play football for Manchester City and, in middle age, win the Amateur Golf Championship of Natal [in South Africa].

Macleod was, by anybody’s standards, a remarkable athlete. He was also undeniably a fellow from a privileged background, who could afford to heed his father’s advice and seek sporting plaudits in other, less hazardous pursuits (although, in those days, there were probably more people killed playing cricket than on a rugby pitch). Most of the Borders participants, by comparison, hailed from a working-class background and yet there never seemed to be any problems when these men from starkly different vocations convened in the union code. I once asked Jim Telfer about this issue and his response was straightforward. ‘If you love rugby, you love rugby. You don’t care where a man has come from. If he’s in your team, you all pull together. If he’s in the opposition team, you go flat out to beat him and then shake his hand and have a beer with him later.’

Yet, despite the blunt common sense of Telfer’s words, there was often a queasy feeling of different worlds colliding in the early days of Scottish rugby. In 1920, the Border League committee asked the SRU to consider reinstating disabled professionals, while offering their opinion that these people ‘could be of use to clubs or committees’. Two years after the Great War, when millions had died or suffered serious injury or permanent disfigurement, this appeared an eminently practical idea. But it was rejected out of hand by the governing body, who ‘regretted that the Border League should have made such a proposal’ in the first place. In the same year, Jock Wemyss, the Gala prop, who had turned out for his homeland against Wales and Ireland in 1914, asked for a new Scotland jersey and was promptly grilled as to what had happened to the old one. The fact he had fought with distinction in the war, had been injured, and lost an eye, were trivial affairs by comparison. These were the times when, along with the shunning of those from the Borders who went to rugby league in order to make an honest living in sport, union was left looking as if it inhabited a nonsensical ivory tower. Yet, if Wemyss was in any way annoyed by his treatment, he did not show it. Instead, he gained five more caps for Scotland and demonstrated that, whether with one eye or two, he could still do his job.

As for the Border League, it thrived because of the keen-as-mustard dedication of an army of volunteers in the committee rooms, the ferocious commitment of those who participated in the fixtures and the bristling and unrelenting rivalry between the seven clubs, on and off the pitch. Hawick and Jed-Forest were obviously to the fore in the early years, but what of the other teams in the competition? One might have imagined that Gala would be in the hunt for honours from the outset, but despite their victory in the 1905–06 campaign, any sustained success proved elusive at Netherdale, and some observers put that down to a mixture of their inconsistency and either their inability or reluctance to ram home their superiority when they held the upper hand. They produced a number of splendid performers in the early days – and have continued that pattern all through their history – but too often, circumstances or their own frailty let them down. There were no problems on that score with their victorious side of 1905–06, who defended as if their lives depended on it, and conceded only five points in the whole Border League season, and, bolstered by the sterling efforts of such players as their captain, G S Scott, and their wonderfully dextrous scrum-half, Willie McCrirrick, these Gala warriors were deserving of their prize. But too often, in other years, promising positions were squandered.

Langholm, for their part, were traditionally as tough as old boots, and unearthed a number of individuals who looked as if they had just engineered a break-out from a ‘Scotland’s Most Wanted’ poster. But, despite their status as the original Borders club, and the manner in which they spread the union gospel all over Dumfriesshire, they were invariably more competitive than all-conquering in their Border League forays, which possibly helps explain why they have won the competition just once in their history – in 1958–59. That is not meant to denigrate the enterprise of the coruscating players they produced in the early years, including some uncompromising citizens in the mould of Tom Scott and Jim Elliot, both of whom were instrumental in their club vying with Hawick and Jed-Forest for the Border title. But, as historian Laing Speirs explained:

When Langholm’s own standards began to decline, just before the First World War, their hopes of League success faded too. And, by the time of the 1920s, the economic prosperity of the town had declined and with it the quality of the local rugby. Players were often in short supply and desperate measures were needed to keep the team at full strength. At one time, these included drafting in some servicemen from the barracks in Carlisle to make up a team to meet Hawick. Sadly, nobody asked them their names and they go down in the Langholm records as ‘three unknown soldiers’.

Selkirk and Kelso, of course, were latecomers to the party and therefore could hardly expect to march into the winners’ enclosure immediately. Yet, such was the enthusiasm and efficacy with which both clubs embraced the Border League that they soon made their impact on the tournament and developed some of the best players ever to pull on a Scotland jersey in the process. Selkirk suffered a variety of problems in the early stages, and were forced to revert to junior status, which allowed their rival clubs in the South to generate greater early momentum, but one of the constant features of the Philiphaugh side was their capacity for engendering quality backs, and long before John Rutherford emerged to grace the game throughout the globe, Selkirk’s sparkling passing and running had elicited the couthy approval of one Borders worthy, who exclaimed: ‘If we had yon Selkirk backs and they Hawick forrits [forwards], we’d lick a’ creation.’ The remark had a touch of hyperbole about it, but the man’s admiration was genuine and although the Souters had to be patient before finally winning their first Border League title in 1934–35, their achievement owed much to the energy and inspiration of Bob Mitchell, their indefatigable secretary, treasurer and president between 1907 and 1933: one of the myriad fellows in the Borders who devoted his life to rugby union and who was so devoted to Selkirk in particular that the club would have been a far less prosperous organisation without him.

Kelso, the last to arrive in the competition – or at least until Peebles were inducted in 1996 and Duns subsequently gained admission – were blessed with people as ambitious and single-minded as Mitchell and, although it was not until February 1912, when the townspeople turned out in significant numbers to debate the question of whether their club should join the Border League – this was a pressing matter in the South – they marched forward, sidestepped reservations about finance, and embarked on a path which yielded glory as early as 1930–31.

In fact, they could have tasted success even quicker, considering the impressive fashion in which the Poynder Park team stormed out of the blocks. From the outset, they were cheered along by one of the most vociferous groups of fans in the region, and the North British Railways Company soon grew accustomed to laying on special trains to carry those supporters on their magical derby journeys. During that maiden campaign Kelso defeated the mighty Hawick, and, as the years rolled by, vied with the Teris on a number of occasions, and were assisted in their endeavours by luminaries of the quality of Jock Hume and Jimmy Graham. In January 1926, oblivious to a severe snowfall the night before the game, Kelso’s warriors were involved in a bone-crunching contest with Hawick, watched by a crowd of between 3,500 and 4,000, and it was agonisingly close all the way to the death, only for the favourites to show their battling qualities to withstand some concerted pressure from their opponents and gain a nerve-shredding 3–0 win.

That sparked a play-off with the ‘Green Machine’ at the Greenyards, and again, Kelso fell tantalisingly short of their objective. But they were a persistent bunch, who simply refused to bow to adversity, and finally, four seasons later, they launched what proved a barnstorming charge to the main prize. In anybody’s terms, this was a tenacious group of fiercely determined players, captained by the fearless ‘Flood’ Rogers and, with dervishes such as Jimmy Graham and Gordon Cottington among their number, they roared into their opponents’ faces and rarely surrendered the initiative. They swept past Hawick, Melrose and Langholm, and recovered from a loss at Netherdale and the ravages of a chitteringly frozen winter to climb to the top of the league and set up a title decider against Gala. It was rough, it was tough and the language among the forwards was not for maiden aunts, but Kelso were not to be denied again and collected the spoils with an 8–3 win. For the victors there was unbridled joy, a night of carousing and the realisation that their names would be enshrined for posterity. As for Gala, they were angered at what they perceived to be the dirty tactics of their opponents and some unpleasantries were exchanged in correspondence, none of which mattered in the long run. This was the Border League and, almost from the first collision in the opening match, it was no place for softies – you had to be able to take it to dish it out and, by the 1930s, the clubs knew one another well enough to recognise that there was no point in whingeing about alleged injustices to higher authorities, be it in Edinburgh or anywhere else.

In the grand scheme, the competition may have had its detractors, but they could not argue with the innovation, organisation and dedication of the Border clubs, who had responded to the challenge of transforming a close-knit local circuit into a breeding ground for international talent and had done so, almost entirely by their own enterprise. Elsewhere in Scotland, significant areas of the country – such as West Lothian, Lanarkshire and the North-West – remained almost oblivious to rugby and the big-city schools continued to operate on the basis that they would nurture their own shoots of talent and leave soccer to the proles. All of which makes it undeniable – or so I would assert – that a glorious opportunity was missed by the failure of the rest of Scotland to wake up to what the Borders had achieved with a small population, but with a huge amount of foresight.

As for those who had paved the way at Langholm, Hawick and Gala, the fruits of their labours were evident by the middle of the 1920s. Crowds in excess of 5,000 were commonplace in the bigger towns, while even the likes of Melrose and Jed-Forest would often draw audiences which amounted to a staggering 20–30 per cent of their population. The local businesses noticed the increased trade which surrounded their communities’ Sevens tournaments – and while Melrose had patented the concept, their rivals had been swift in picking up the ball and running with it – and the train services in the Borders were assured of extra revenue whenever there was a big derby tie on the Saturday.

It was as close to an ideal set-up as one could imagine and, considering the strength of the ties which bonded the organisations in the South, there was no reason to suspect that the structure might break down in the future. Yes, the participating organisations might have had their differences of opinion, and there were instances where the rivalry was stretched close to breaking point, but as Jim Telfer told me, the prevailing ethos of the competition revolved around hard, no-quarter-asked-or-given 80-minute battles, which remained mercifully free of any premeditated malice or the more cynical acts of foul play, such as eye-gouging and stamping, which occurred in other parts of the world.

In contrast, rugby officials elsewhere in Scotland were almost painfully slow in waking up to the possibilities of launching their own regional tournaments, possibly revolving around the East, the West and the North of the country, and organised on similar lines to the Border League. Instead, clubs outwith the South persisted with the unofficial championship, which was the only means by which the power of the various clubs in different areas could be measured, all the way through to the 1970s. And yet, this was never a satisfactory compromise when one learned that the various participants played a different number of matches, armed with separate fixture lists, which meant it was nigh impossible to judge which club was truly the cream of the crop in any one season.

The Borders, on the other hand, could proclaim their annual champions on merit and that invariably carried greater kudos among their peers. Hawick, for instance, won the unofficial title in 1896, but the celebrations were as nothing compared to the ecstasy which greeted their victory in the inaugural Border tournament. Occasionally, there might have been an element of parochialism in all this, but usually, the lashings of bish and bosh, and rambunctious endeavour, allied to silky skill and shards of opportunism which were required to gain the upper hand over the rest, produced worthy winners, whatever the severity of the winters or the vagaries of the fixture list. And it was surely a telling yardstick of the competitive nature of the league that, within 35 years of it springing into existence, six of the seven participating clubs had tasted championship glory, with only Langholm missing out. That epitomised how difficult it was for any single organisation to dominate their rivals, and although Hawick eventually developed the momentum of an unstoppable juggernaut, consuming everything in their wake, even the Mansfield Park men has to wait until after the Second World War for that to happen.

Ultimately, therefore, the league was an unalloyed success. It was a tough breeding ground for youngsters, a seedbed of talent for future Scotland stars, and the Borders had an increasing part to play in some of the international success stories. Irrespective of any reservations at the outset, it has created characters, myriad tales of triumph and tristesse, and raised the profile of the sport to the stage where the words ‘Borders’ and ‘rugby’ went as naturally together as Rodgers and Hammerstein or ‘argy’ and ‘bargy’. The rest of Scotland might have been only vaguely aware of the tournament in its formative years. But, in the final analysis, it was the rest of Scotland that missed out as rugby expanded its horizons.