The Rugby Union World Cup has kicked off in France this week, so this episode of 'Rugby Reloaded' goes back in time to look at when France was expelled from the international game in 1931. Not only was France kicked out of the Five Nations but its clubs were banned from playing British teams.
We look at how and why this happened, and explore how deep-rooted British suspicions of the French led to rugby union's greatest crisis since 1895.
The fateful match: France versus Wales 1930 (Credit: WRU)
Rugby Reloaded kicks off a brand new series and we kick-off with a blockbuster interview with Anthony Broxton about his new book Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher’s Britain.
Anthony’s book explores the history of the sport during a pivotal decade for Britain. It was the era of Hanley and Offiah, when the pro game expanded as far as Kent, but it was also the decade of the miner’s great strike and social devastation across the sport’s heartlands. We talk about these topics and much more, and ask what can learn from the 1980s.
You can follow Anthony on the social network formerly named Twitter at @labour_history and his book is available here from Pitch Publishing or from all good bookshops.
The latest episode of Rugby Reloaded talks to Professor Matthew Brown about his new book Sports in South America. A History. It’s a panoramic book that for the first time in English examines the origins of modern sports in South America from the mid-1800s to the first FIFA World Cup in Uruguay in 1930.
Among other things, it explains the continent had a rich history of sports before Europeans arrived there, casts a critical eye over the mythology of the 'fathers of football' who allegedly brought football to South American nations, and places women's sports back in their rightful context.
Drawing on a huge number of sources in Spanish and Portuguese, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of modern sport, and in the ways that sports have become entwined with national identity, culture and politics across South America.
Our interview focused on some of the key themes of football history that the book deals with: why ideas about 'fathers of football' are mistaken, questioning the importance of railways in soccer's development, why rugby never became a mass spectator sport, the problems faced by women athletes, and much more.
IMaurice Oldroyd, one of rugby league’s greatest administrators, died yesterday. In tribute to a man of great principle, unstinting friendship, and boundless love of his sport, I’m posting a slightly edited version of my review of his autobiography which first appeared in Sport in History in 2016.
Maurice Oldroyd is one of the most important figures in the history of amateur sport in Britain in the twentieth century. As a founder and chief executive of the British Amateur Rugby League Association (BARLA) he was both the most articulate exponent of a specifically working-class form of amateurism and a significant figure in the ending of the Rugby Football Union’s ban on league players taking part in union.
His autobiography, Building The Family Game: A Rugby League Memoir, jointly written with pioneering rugby league historian Robert Gate, was published in 2014, and offers a valuable insight into his life, career and sports politics over the past forty years.
Born in 1935, Maurice Oldroyd grew up in a working-class household in Huddersfield where rugby league was part of the warp and weft of daily life. His aptitude for maths allowed him to escape the world of manual labour of his father and, like many talented working-class youths in the 1950s, he progressed through a series of white-collar jobs, all the time playing amateur rugby league, most notably for Holmfirth’s famous Underbank Rangers. When he finished playing at the age of 28, he became a referee.
He was also developing considerable administrative skills and a conviction that amateur rugby league was not fulfilling its full potential. The neglect and ineptitude of the Bill Fallowfield-led Rugby Football League had reduced amateur league to desperate straights by the start of the 1970s. Moreover, the RFU’s ban on players playing both codes of rugby severely hampered amateur rugby league’s ability to attract players. In Maurice’s home town, the local rugby union club even asked new members to affirm that ‘I have not taken part in rugby league football, either as an amateur or a professional’ before they could be accepted into membership.
Alongside Tom Keaveney, another talented local rugby league administrator, Maurice spearheaded the creation of BARLA in 1973. Despite the opposition of RFL boss Bill Fallowfield, BARLA quickly flourished. Within two years it had over 300 clubs playing under its flag and was recognised by the RFL and the Sports Council as amateur rugby league’s governing body. As its first full-time national administrator, much of the credit for this success was due directly to Oldroyd.
As his autobiography makes clear, Maurice was motivated by more than mere love of his sport. He was, and remains, driven by a strong sense of justice. The formation of BARLA was based on a belief that the rank and file amateur rugby league player was not getting a fair deal from the RFL. This dovetailed with his belief that the RFU’s ban on playing rugby league was discrimination, pure and simple. The book proudly quotes a 1975 Manchester Evening News article describing BARLA’s campaign against the RFU ban as ‘fighting the establishment and men of immense power and influence’ (p. 60). Oldroyd himself is quoted as saying that the RFU’s ostracism of league players was ‘against all principles of human dignity’ (p. 61).
He astutely sought to bring public scrutiny to bear not on the RFU but on the Sports Council, the government body which distributed state funds to sport. In the late 1960s and early 1970s rugby union was one of its major beneficiaries, despite its refusal to put into practice the Sport Council’s policy of ‘Sport for All’. Initially, the Sports Council defended the RFU’s policy, and it sent a private letter to Robin Prescott, the RFU secretary, warning him that ‘it seems quite possible that Mr Oldroyd will go to the press’. But Maurice was not so easily brushed off, and enlisted MPs and lawyers to challenge the Sports Council’s policy. Increasingly embarrassed, the Sports Council was forced to exert some pressure on the RFU to rethink its ban. In 1984, BARLA’s campaign was joined by the Freedom in Rugby campaign and four years later by the All-Party Parliamentary Rugby League Group, and the RFU found itself under real pressure for the first time. BARLA’s growth and influence also became a cause of concern at Twickenham. Numerous internal discussions took place in the upper echelons of the RFU and in December 1983 it even convened a special meeting to discuss the success of BARLA and the threat it represented to union.
Maurice was also able to undermine the RFU’s claims to be the moral guardian of amateurism. He highlighted its hypocrisy in banning rugby league players while allowing players from other professional sports such as soccer and American football to play union, exposed its ‘shamateur’ methods of rewarding players, and also argued that BARLA was more genuinely amateur than union itself. In 1978 BARLA undertook its first overseas tour to Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand. Each player had to raise funds to cover the cost of travel and the time they took off from work. Their only reward was an official tie, holdall and tracksuit, allowing Maruice to claim that BARLA was the true upholder of the amateur ethos, not the RFU.
Unlike rugby union, Maurice’s view of amateurism was not based on the belief it was morally superior to professionalism but on the ideals of community solidarity. BARLA believed that there was nothing wrong in paying players to play rugby, but that the vast majority played simply for enjoyment. If they were talented enough to be paid, all well and good, but those not so lucky, the costs of playing had to be shared. For Oldroyd, amateur was an adjective, not a noun as it was for the RFU.
His tenacious campaigning eventually paid off and, fifteen years after he had first written to the Sports Council to protest against the RFU’s ban, the RFU agreed in April 1987 that amateur rugby league players should be free to play rugby union if they chose. Even then, those who had played professional rugby league were still barred from rugby union, despite players of every other sport being allowed to play the fifteen-a-side game. In 1993 Wasps’ full-back Steve Pilgrim was banned for a year by the RFU after playing a trial rugby league match for Leeds for nothing but travelling expenses. It would take the earthquake of rugby union's 1995 switch to professionalism before the fifteen-a-side game would treat all rugby players equally.
Maurice’s struggles did not end there. Rivalry between BARLA and the RFL over the direction of rugby league continued to be fractious and, perhaps as befitted a sport that emerged from a schism, the internal politics of the game often overwhelmed the pleasures of playing it. As the book makes clear, Oldroyd was invariably at the centre of these disputes, none of which had the historical importance of his achievements in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet despite his controversial career, the tone of the autobiography is always honest and never less than gracious and generous to everyone with whom Oldroyd has encountered during his life, friend or temporary foe - an accurate reflection of the man himself. Building The Family Game is an important record of working-class amateur sport and a fitting tribute to one of the past half-century’s most important rugby administrators.
-- Maurice Oldroyd (with Robert Gate), Building The Family Game: A Rugby League Memoir (London: London League Publications, 2014). Pp. 132. £12.95 (pb). ISBN 978-1-909885-05-9.
My latest book Who Framed William Webb Ellis? And Other Puzzles In Rugby History is now out and available to buy from all good bookshops and direct from the publisher.
It’s the director’s cut of thirty episodes of Rugby Reloaded, featuring the extended scripts of episodes about the historical controversies in rugby, discussions about the evolution of various rules, a look at the art and culture of rugby, and much more. If you’ve ever had a question about some aspect of the history of rugby, there’s a good chance that I’ve tried to answer it in this book.
The cover, which you will recognise from the Rugby Reloaded podcast logo. is based on an illustration that appeared on the cover of the weekly Football Favourite on 27 November 1920. It was then used on the cover of the following season’s Northern Union Annual. It’s good to keep him alive a century later!
On this episode I talk to Duncan Stone's about his fascinating new book Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket.
Different Class is both a history of cricket from the grassroots and an analysis of the roots of the sport's attitudes to race and class. Duncan uncovers the reality of cricket behind the myth, and reveals the true story of working-class cricket in the south of England.
It’s a richly detailed book, based on years of unique archival research, which highlights how the history of cricket parallels the many of the key aspects of the conflicted stories of rugby and soccer. Most of all, for anyone wanting to understand English cricket's current crisis 'Different Class' is essential reading.
You can buy the book direct from the publishers, and there’s a pre-Christmas discount if you move quickly, by going to the website of Repeater Books.
This episode of the podcast talks to journalist, author and publisher Geoff Armstrong about his latest book, the second volume of 'Spirit of the Red V', his in-depth history of St George Dragons.
St George are one of the most significant clubs in the history of Australian rugby league. Famous for its unparalleled run of 11 straight premierships in the the 1950s and 1960s, the club's fortunes have risen and fallen as much with off-field trends as they have due to on-field factors.
Geoff's book tells the story of the club, its players, its fans, and how it has survived in a changing sport and society.
For more details about ‘Spirit of the Red V’ and how to order, go to the Stoke Hill Press website.
Sheet music for ‘Hurrah for the Claret and Gold’ written to celebrate the club’s 1890 Yorkshire Cup win (thanks to the Huddersfield Rugby League Heritage Project).
On 5 November I was invited to give a talk about Huddersfield and its role in rugby's split of 1895 by the Huddersfield Local History Society . HLHS is a wonderful organisation which explores the full range of Huddersfield’s social, political and cultural history.
In my talk, I looked at the growth of rugby in the town, the rise of the rugby club, the role of its most infamous administrator Frank Marshall, and how the split played out in the town during the 1890s. It ends with a few thoughts about how sport evolved in Huddersfield following the split.
For more on the history of the club and the town, take a look at the Huddersfield Rugby League Heritage website and James Mason’s 1972 documentary about his home town, Home James.
George Bennett in his Wales shirt.
On Friday, the 21 October 2022, I gave a talk at the Museum of Wigan Life titled 'Roy Francis, George Bennett, race and rugby league' as one of the museum's Black History Month events.
The talk looks at the lives of the two players, examines the impact of the 1919 racist riots on their lives and the sport, and for the first time reveals how Geroge Bennett was excluded from the 1936 Lions tour to Australia because of racism.
The talk also looks at the lives of Alec Givvons, Oldham’s Newport-born Welsh international, the Cumberbatch brothers Val and Jimmy, and the much lesser known Ralph Meheux of Hull.
It also moves beyond sport, and looks at the story of Roy Francis’ father, Lionel Francis who left his job in the Welsh mines in 1920, emigrated to America. and became a leader of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Most importantly, the talk gives uses the history of rugby league and its player to cast new light on black working-class life in the interwar years.
Thanks to the museum’s great Joan Livesey who organised the event and to everyone who turned out on a damp Wigan Friday night.
Roy Francis running out for Hull FC in the early 1950s.
The new Rugby Reloaded talks to Stewart McGill and Vince Raison about their fascinating new book 'The Roaring Red Front: The World's Top Left-Wing Football Clubs' (Pitch Publishing).
They travelled around the world visiting soccer clubs which have a reputation for left-wing politics, sampling the match-day atmosphere, and exploring the histories of a diverse range of clubs, from Dulwich Hamlet to Detroit City, Boca Juniors In Argentina to St Pauli in Germany.
It's a rich and passionate story that tells us a lot about the place - and the future - of football in the modern world.
To find out more about the book and to order your copy, click here to go to the ‘Roaring Red Front’ website.
Next year, 2023, is the 200th anniversary of the date when William Webb Ellis allegedly picked up the ball and ran with it, and so invented the game of rugby.
As is now well-known - and as outlined in the very first episode of ‘Rugby Reloaded’ - this is a myth, part of the long and complex cultural cold war which split rugby in two. But rugby union is not the only sport with an invented origin story. Baseball has its legend of Abner Doubleday single-handed inventing the sport. And Aussie Rules football also promotes a creation myth that it was originally an Aboriginal game.
But. as this 2011 article - The Invention of Sporting Tradition: National Myths, Imperial Pasts and the Origins of Australian Rules Football - explains, the invention of origin stories is common to almost all sports, which create these myths to support the way the want to portray their sport and its role in society. Sometimes, as is the case with Aussie Rules, these stories sometimes change over time, as the sport or society themselves change.
As well as looking at the way in which Aussie Rules rewrote its own history, the article looks at how the process of inventing traditions worked in other sports, and draws some conclusions about why sports need creation myths. Feel free to use this link to download from here!
On 21 June International Rugby League announced that trans women will not be allowed to play in wonen’s international matches or this year’s Women’s Rugby League World Cup. This is a wrong decision that flies in the face of rugby league’s origins as a game founded on the principle of inclusion and equality. I’ll write something in more detail about this later, but to provide some historical context, here is an edited version of a conference paper I wrote in 2013, ‘Governing Bodies: Sport and the Body in History’ which looks at the reasons for the division between men’s and women’s sports, and why Victorian stereotypes of gender still haunt sport today. Some parts of the paper may sound dated, and more up-to-date examples could be found to illustrate the points, but nevertheless the paper offers a framework to understand the historical roots of current discussions about the rights of trans athletes…
Modern sport emerged in the eighteenth century. Sports such as horse-racing, cricket and boxing were codified, became part of the burgeoning world of commercial entertainment, and governing bodies emerged to organise sports. At this time sport was merely a form of entertainment - indeed, the first rules were introduced as a way to facilitate gambling - and the idea that sport had a moral or educative role to play in society was unknown. Today, I want to focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea that sport was a moral force was born and the sporting body became a site of conflict and contestation, especially when it came to gender.
Muscular Christians privileged the body over the mind. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the bestselling book that was effectively the handbook of Victorian sporting morality, strongly reflected the Muscular Christian belief in ‘Mens sana in corpore sana’ - ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. Once again, historians and sociologists have misinterpreted this key axiom of amateurism simply as the creation of intellectual minds in healthy bodies. But as Bruce Haley pointed out in his much neglected 1978 work The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, the healthy mind - in the eyes of the Victorians who embraced the amateur ideal - was not an intellectually curious or critical mind but one that was morally pure and healthy, and especially one that was free of femininity and the twin temptations of adolescent sexuality: masturbation and homosexuality.
This is also a key theme of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In the second half of the book Tom and his best friend East are approached by ‘one of the miserable little pretty white-handed curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next’. Unprovoked, they trip him and kick him. In a footnote, Hughes explained that ‘many boys will know why [this passage] is left in’, implying that physical violence against boys suspected of being ‘spoiled’ - shorthand for homosexuality - was justified.
This should not surprise us. The book was published in the midst of a moral panic about masturbation and homosexuality among public schoolboys. In 1854 the Lancet published a series by John Laws Milton on ‘spermatorrhea’ who recommended the use of strategically-placed spiked rings to cure the problem of boys’ sexual thoughts. In 1857, the same year as Tom Brown was published, William Acton published The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs. Acton recommended lots of physical exercise to discourage the practice - or failing that, tying-up the hands of a boy at night to stop it.
So modern sport was based on a rigid differentiation between the pure masculine and the impure feminine, the sexually normative and the transgressive. This link between modern sport and opposition to transgressive sexual practices was highlighted by the activities of leading sporting figures of the nineteenth century. Lord Kinnaird, president of the FA for thirty-three years, was a prominent supporter of the Pure Literature Society, the Central Vigilance Society for the Suppression of Immorality, and the National Vigilance Society (which in 1889 was behind the jailing of an English publisher for publishing 'obscene' works by Zola and Flaubert).
In 1895, in response to the trial of Oscar Wilde, Kinnaird had called for 'something further in the way of repression'. And of course it was the Marquess of Queensberry, one of the founders of the Amateur Athletic Association, race-horse owner and the man after whom the laws of modern boxing are named, who was fatefully sued by Wilde in 1895 for calling him in ‘Somdomite [sic]’.
Contesting the female body
Whereas sport in the eighteenth century had seen participation, albeit limited, by women in boxing, cricket, foot-racing and football, in the hands of the Victorian amateurs sport was a pastime for men. Indeed, it was by its very definition masculine. Games were used to define who was and who was not a true, heterosexual, man. It was part of the socialisation of boys into men, a central feature of the process of ‘making men’. It separated males from girls and effeminacy. And sport also offered its leaders and rule-makers the opportunity to differentiate between the included and the excluded in the realm of gender, a grotesque power that would not be fully exercised until the advent of widespread ‘sex testing’ in the 1960s.
Thus when middle-class women began to be involved in sport in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, they were met with pathological resistance from sport’s male rulers. 'We have no dealings with women here' declared rugby union's Reverend Frank Marshall in the 1880s. Women’s bodies were deemed to be unsuited for physical exercise. Strenuous exertion would damage their reproductive organs. Loose clothing used for sport was immoral. Mixed sports would lead to sexual temptation. Cycling would make them unable to bear children. Competitive sport would make them masculine.
Woman, declared Pierre de Coubertin, ‘is above all the companion of man, the future mother of a family, and she should be brought up with this fixed destiny in mind’. Any woman who challenged this hierarchy was by definition unfeminine (and suspected of being a lesbian). Much of this debate came to centre on the question of dress and the extent to which the female body should be covered, a debate which in different forms, continues today.
As you may assume from Coubertin’s statement women athletes were originally excluded from the Olympics and only took their place in track and field in 1928 after the IOC felt itself to be threatened by the creation of a rival ‘Women’s Olympics’ and opted to assimilate the movement. But it did not diminish its suspicion of women in sport.
The 1936 Berlin Games saw the emergence of gender paranoia, something that would be constant element of Olympic discourse. For the first time a so-called sex test was carried out. American Helen Stephens was subjected to a genital inspection after defeating the 1932 gold medalist Stella Walsh of Poland in the 100 metres final. Ironically, it was Walsh who was discovered to have ambiguous sex organs and both XX and XY chromosomes after she died in 1980. Doubts were also expressed about Germany’s Dora Ratjen, who came fourth in the Olympic high jump.
Shortly after setting a new world record in 1938 Ratjen was arrested by the Nazi police who accused her of being what we would now call a trans-man, an offence punishable by being sent to a concentration camp. She admitted that she was a man, but had been mistakenly identified as a girl at birth, and was raised as and competed as a female. The first call for regular testing was made by Avery Brundage, the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, arch-reactionary and future IOC president. He cited the examples of Czech runner Zdenka Koubkova and English shot-putter and javelin thrower Mary Weston. Both were raised as girls and competed as women but opted to have sex-change surgery in their twenties. ‘All women athletes entered in the Olympics,’ Brundage argued, ‘should be subjected to a thorough physical examination to make sure they were really 100 per cent female’. The body was now literally a site of contestation.
The body and cold war sport
But gender paranoia really took hold of the IOC with the entry of the Soviet Union and its allies into the Olympic movement at the 1952 Helsinki games. Of the forty Russian women at the Games, eighteen won a total of thirty-seven medals. Similar results followed at subsequent Olympics.
The body was at the heart of the discourse that western nations used to explain how Russian and East European athletes had become so successful. Western beliefs insisted that these were totalitarian societies in which individual talent and initiative was rigorously suppressed. Therefore the only rational explanation could be that Soviet and East European women were cheating. But alongside the usual claims of veiled professionalism and drug-taking, female athletes were also faced with the accusation that their bodies were not those of ‘real’ women.
Soviet women’s success in strength sports such as the shot put or hammer was highlighted as evidence of their underlying masculinity. The muscular physiques of runners were held up as proof of their lack of femininity. As a direct consequence, in the mid-1960s the IOC and International Amateur Athletics Federation introduced compulsory sex-tests for women because, as the Washington Post put it, of ‘some suspicions that in the last one some of the muscular Russian and Polish babes were not quite as feminine as they declared in the Olympic registry’.
The first testing began in 1966 when international athletics introduced compulsory gynaecological inspections for women athletes. Women who refused or avoided the test were assumed to have something to hide, a reversal of the principle of natural justice and a denial of their right not to undergo what 1972 pentathlon gold medalist Mary Peters described as ‘the most crude and degrading experience I have ever known. The doctors proceeded to undertake an examination which, in modern parlance, amounted to a grope’.
In 1968 the IOC introduced a smear test to determine whether a woman had two XX chromosomes. This gave a pseudo-scientific veneer to the process, which was based on the IOC’s belief that ‘hermaphroditism does not exist. One is born a man or a woman and one remains of that sex’. This was scientifically illiterate at best. Like all issues involving human sex and sexuality, reality is both very complicated and infinitely variable.
Women with an unusual genetic or biological make-up who ‘failed’ the test were publicly humiliated and often confronted with evidence of a medical condition of which they were previously unaware. Not a single man posing as a woman was ever unmasked by a sex-test. Nor was any woman discovered who was being transformed into a man through the use of drugs containing testosterone. And, of course, no-one suggested sex tests for male athletes. The male sporting body never had to prove it was male - because playing sport was in itself one of the most important ways in which men demonstrated their masculinity.
The Sporting Body and the New World Order
In the twenty-first century, concerns about the purity of the body were also accompanied by a refreshed concern to police the boundaries between male and female bodies. Although levels of formal gender equality had risen in the latter part of the twentieth century - by 1984 even the IOC had accepted that women’s bodies were perfectly capable of running marathons - the boundaries between masculine and feminine were more strictly policed than ever. In 2004, FIFA barred female Mexico striker Maribel Dominguez from playing for the Mexican men’s second division soccer side Celaya F.C. on the grounds that ‘there must be a clear separation between men’s and women’s football’.
In 2009 the case of Caster Semenya, an eighteen year-old black South African woman middle-distance runner, once more brought the gender-paranoia of sport’s governing bodies to the fore. After she dramatically improved her times, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ordered an investigation, suspecting her of using drugs and/or being a man. She was subsequently forced to undergo an ‘examination’ in which ‘her feet were placed in stirrups, her genitals were photographed and her internal organs were examined’. Her body had become the proving ground for the Manichean world-view of sporting administrators.
The IAAF even granted itself the power to determine the most intimate part of human identity: the sex of an individual. Rule 113 of the IAAF Competition Rules gives any IAAF race-day medical official was given this right: ‘the [race] Medical Delegate shall also have the authority to arrange for the determination of the gender of an athlete should he [sic] judge that to be desirable’. The IOC requires transgender athletes to have had sex reassignment surgery at least two years before they compete as women. And despite the fact that similar medical conditions can be also be found in men as well as women, male athletes are not subject to testing.
The predominant concern of sports administrators is policing their own definitions of the male and female body, just as they did in its formative era of Victorian amateurism. Then as now, modern sport is founded on the affirmation of strict gender division, in which the female body is subordinate to the masculine ideal, and those whose bodies did not neatly fit into one category or the other are condemned.
This rigorous division of the male and female body also explains the continuing deep-seated hostility to gay athletes, both male and female, in almost all sports. Of the thousands of male professional football players of all codes around the world, there is only one soccer player - Sweden’s Anton Hysen - who felt comfortable enough to be openly homosexual. Leeds United’s Robbie Rogers felt that he had no option but to retire from the game when he came out in February. In women’s soccer, the 2011 world cup was marked by what the New York Times called ‘lesbian panic’ as Nigeria and Guinea sought to purge players suspected of not being heterosexual. Such a state of affairs marks football in all its forms as probably the most reactionary institution in the world on sexual matters, outside of organised religion. This is still a world in which the body is defined by the ideas espoused in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Today, the body remains trapped by sport’s binaries of pure and impure, cleanliness versus corruption, and male versus female, just as it was in the mid-nineteenth century when the ideology of modern sport was first established by the Victorian middle-classes Now, as then, sport is not a method of freeing the body, but a means of governing the body.
England v Scotland 1872: rugby or soccer ball?
Rugby History 101: the shape of the ball.
The latest 'Rugby Reloaded' investigates why the rugby ball is oval - and, as usual, the answer is not as obvious as you might think.
It's a long story where technology, traditions and tournaments converged in an evolutionary process to create the oval world.
The new 'Rugby Reloaded' looks at the career of Maurice Lindsay, who died last week. From Wigan to the RFL to Super League, Maurice changed the face of rugby league as radically as he divided opinion about himself.
Part visionary, part inveterate self-publicist, Maurice created the greatest British rugby league team in generations, spearheaded the move to Super League, and became a household name in rugby league in two hemispheres.
Join us to look at the irresistable rise, indelible impact, and final legacy of rugby league's most charismatic administrator.
The beginning of a great adventure: new Wigan directors Tom Rathbone, Jack Robinson, Jack Hilton and Maurice meet in 1982 (Credit: Wigan Observer)
The New York Daily News makes a point.
In the second episode of our two-part special on the history of rugby union and concussion, we take a look how attitudes changed with the coming of professionalism.
For a sport that came into the world with deep links to the medical profession, the 21st century saw it abandon those links in favour of new relationships with sports scientists - and it would be the players who lost out.
Personal Declaration: I have carried out historical research on concussion and rugby for Ryland's Law, the solicitors acting on behalf of the players who are currently taking legal action against the rugby authorities.
Dorothy Gronwall and Philip Wrightson, Mild Head Injury: A Guide to Management (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Ann B. Shuttleworth-Edwards & Sarah E. Radloff, ‘Compromised visuomotor processing speed in players of Rugby Union from school through to the national adult level’ Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 23 (2008).
Vini G. Khurana & Andrew H. Kaye, ‘An overview of concussion in sport’ Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 19 (2012).
Neil Pearce, Valentina Gallo & Damien McElvenny, ’Head trauma in sport and neurodegenerative disease: an issue whose time has come?’ Neurobiology of Aging 36 (2015).
W. Stewart, P.H. McNamara, B. Lawlor, S. Hutchinson & M. Farrell ‘Chronic traumatic encephalopathy: a potential late and under-recognized consequence of rugby union?’ QJM: An International Journal of Medicine (2016).
The ‘Concussion in Sports Group’ conference statements can be found in the relevant issues of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
The controversy about the work of Paul Mcrory can be found in this Guardian article and the Retraction Watch article.
The latest 'Rugby Reloaded' talks with Jonty Winch about his new book World Champions: The Story of South African Rugby.
For the first time, Jonty tells the complete story of South African rugby union from its beginnings to the present day by including all sections of society, black, white, 'coloured', and women.
It's a major publication for the history of rugby, and Jonty takes us through some of the key issues in that story.
You can find more details about the book at the website of its publishers, Bestred Books. It is available from all good booksellers online and offline.
Wavell Wakefield wears an old-school scrum cap
This episode is the first of a two-part special looking at the history of rugby union's changing attitude towards head injuries in the men’s game. The sight of Wales' Tomas Francis staggering around Twickenham during February's England-Wales match after a head clash has reignited the debate about rugby's treatment of concussion.
I also have to declare a personal interest as I've done historical research on concussion and rugby for Ryland's Law, the solicitors acting on behalf of the players who are currently taking legal action against the rugby authorities.
We go back to the 1970s and look at the discussion in international rugby union about concussion and its long-term impacts, examine what was known within rugby, and what neurological experts were telling the leaders of the game. In part two, we’ll discuss how those attitudes and policies changed for the worse.
The new 'Rugby Reloaded' talks to former 'Sydney Morning Herald' rugby league journalist Steve Mascord about his new book Two Tribes: The Untold Story of Rugby League’s Divided Year.
The book chronicles the rollercoaster year of 1997, when rugby league down under split into two competitions, Super League and the Australian Rugby League.
Featuring over 100 interviewees with the key protagonists, Steve's book is an oral history of a tumultuous time which gets under the skin of rugby league's culture and describes a season that was simultaneously a disaster and a triumph.
You can order the book - with a special discount for listeners - by visiting Steve’s website here, and entering the code ‘Rugby Reloaded’.
This week we look at the long and eventful life of Rochdale Hornets. The club may not have been the most successful rugby league team but they are an exemplar of the sport's struggles and culture.
We talk to Jim Stringer and Mark Wynn, the authors of a brand new history of the club - Triumph and Disaster : 150 Years of Rochdale Hornets about the club's origins in Victorian England, how its fate was tied to the fortunes of the cotton industry, why the town became a colony of Fiji in the 1960s, its time as a supporter-run club, and its future in the post-Covid world.
But the book is more than just a history. Jim and Mark are lifelong fans who have been involved in the running of Hornets, so it also offers an insiders' perspective on the last thirty years, especially the period when the club was run as a supporters' co-operative.
You can buy the book direct from the publishers, London League Publications, or from the Rugby League Journal website.
The latest episode of 'Rugby Reloaded' talks to Hugh Godwin about his fascinating new biography of the England winger of the 1930s, Prince Alexander Obolensky.
'The Flying Prince' is a meticulously researched book which examines how a Russian noble came to be the hero of English rugby union by scoring two devastating tries in England's first ever win over the All Blacks in 1936.
Along the way, it paints a detailed picture of the sport in the interwar years, discusses the history of international eligibility, and reveals the truth behind Obolensky's death in World War Two.
The book is available here and you can follow Hugh on Twitter at @hughgodwin_ You can see Obolensky’s two tries agains the All Blacks at Twickenham in the newsreel below.
