The final score in the first ever rugby international was Scotland 1, England 0. That looks a bit odd to fans of the modern game, but in those days a try was just that – it earned you the right to try for a goal, but you didn’t get any points for the try itself. The Scots had two tries, and were successful in one of them, while the English missed their only attempt.
The 20-a-side, 100-minute game was played on the afternoon of Monday, 27th March 1871, at a cricket club in Edinburgh, and the home victory was widely celebrated. The encounter was not without its controversies; the question of “hacking” came up, as it always did in those days: should you be allowed, in the traditional manner, to tackle an opponent by kicking his shins?
One of the umpires (they didn’t have referees yet) later admitted “Let me make a confession: I do not know whether the decision which gave Scotland the try from which the winning goal was kicked was correct. But, when an umpire is in any doubt, I think he is justified in deciding against the side which makes the most noise. They are probably in the wrong.”
It wasn’t billed as a “rugby match,” either, but as “an International Football Match” played under “Rugby rules” – although in fact, the two teams didn’t entirely agree on what the rules actually were. There weren’t yet any governing bodies for rugby, despite it being more popular and widespread than soccer, and a move which was legal in Glasgow might well be banned in Liverpool. All the same, 4,000 people paid a shilling each to watch the struggle, and it’s been a fixture ever since.
We don’t normally think of what later became rugby union as a particularly rebellious game, that place in footballing mythology being reserved for the northern English breakaway which later became rugby league. But when you start looking into the class nature and origins of different sports, the whole business rapidly becomes a lot more complex.
At which point you may well say, “But who cares? Just follow the game you enjoy.” I won’t argue with you – but many would. Disagreements about which sports deserve space in a socialist newspaper are a perennial in the letters columns of left-wing journals, and not only in this country. Unfortunately, no sooner has one writer sanctified a particular game as properly proletarian, than another correspondent will be offended by having their own favourite sport damned as politically unsound by someone who clearly doesn't know their balls from their bails.
Those who insist that Rugby League is working-class while Rugby Union is bourgeois, for instance, would struggle to explain why Union has always been the main form of football through much of the West Country and Wales. Assuming that because something is true where you live it must therefore be true everywhere is a constant danger in such discussions.
In fact, only one of Britain's major sports can be considered unreservedly working-class in its origins. Cricket was the preferred game of agricultural workers in the Home Counties for centuries before being taken up by the newly risen middle-class (mostly for gambling purposes) in the Early Modern period. And of course there are still pockets of the country where cricket remains the chief sport. By contrast, horse and dog racing were for a long time uniquely upper-class pursuits, with laws in place to keep the hoi polloi out.
Almost all modern codes of football - Association, Union, League, American and Aussie Rules - arose as variants of, or schisms from, the assorted games, generically called football, played in British fee-paying boarding schools in the 19th century.
Soccer is essentially the Old Etonian game; most other early forms of football allowed handling of the ball. In some union and league areas, it has always been viewed as a slightly effete game, suitable only for boys whose social-climbing parents wouldn't allow them to get their knees dirty and their noses bloodied playing rougher sports. When football was being codified into soccer and rugby, Eton was considered an upper-class school, and Rugby was more middle-class. So does that make Rugby’s insistence on the older rules over the newer (rugby rather than soccer) a rebellion by the middling sort against their betters, or merely a reactionary spasm of nostalgia?
Football was also the name given to the rough-and-tumble games locally popular in mediaeval Britain on public holidays, but it would be a romantic stretch to see an unbroken line between "mob football" and "soccer" or "rugger."
If we do want to divide games into working-class and not, then which factors should be decisive: the class of people who devised or codified the sport? The class nature of its current followers, or of its current players? Do we measure the ideological purity of rugby league by its insurgent beginnings, or by the millionaires who now own its clubs?
Snooker's image was traditionally of a game too disreputable even for the respectable elements of the proletariat, enjoyed only by idlers and petty criminals, but it was created in the officers' messes of the imperialist British Army stationed in India. Cycling is the sport most historically connected with the British labour movement, but because it involved new technology it was available only to the well-off for its first few decades.
One summer, thirty odd years ago, I spent most Saturdays playing croquet, a game of folk origins, but codified in Victorian times for the benefit of people who owned big lawns. I, though, played the version called association croquet - a marvellously inclusive sport, suitable for most ages and levels of fitness - on a municipal court in south London, at a club run by a retired fire-fighter.
It seems undeniable that there are a few purely bourgeois sports; I've never heard of an engineering works having its own polo team, for instance. However, what are we to make of fives, a kind of squash played against an outdoor wall, using hand or glove instead of racquet? These days it's mainly seen at elite schools and universities, but fives was once a game of the ordinary people in southern England, played originally against church walls and later outside pubs. In the mid-19th century, hundreds would turn out to watch fives matches, and purpose-built walls can still be seen on a handful of Somerset pubs.
The walls are redundant now, of course, architectural ghosts of a working-class sport that's long forgotten. As is pedestrianism - an 18th and 19th century ancestor of Olympic race-walking, but involving big money - which at its peak would attract immense crowds of factory hands.
So, on the basis of the above, should the Morning Star devote most of its sports pages to speed-walking and fives, while largely excluding soccer?
*
Sources:
https://electricscotland.com/history/sport/rugby/rugby5.htm
Floodlights and touchlines by Rob Steen (Bloomsbury, 2015)
British sport a social history by Dennis Brailsford (James Clarke, 1998)
A social history of English cricket by Derek Birley (Aurum Press, 1999)
www.exploringbuildinghistory.co.uk/the-game-of-fives-in-south-somerset/