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.