White Gold - Swansea RFC 1872-1887

By David Dow

A founder member of the Welsh Rugby Union, Swansea RFC is one of Wales’ oldest and most illustrious rugby clubs. It was the first to beat the ‘big three’ touring teams of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, and enjoyed multiple Welsh Cup and Merit Table successes, over its first 150 years.

Formed in 1872 as an association football team before converting to rugby football in 1874, White Gold tells the fascinating story of the club’s first 15 years, when a group of Swansea cricketers established a football club for winter recreation, found a home at St. Helen’s and how they created an open, running playing style that quickly became known and revered around the rugby world.
 
Lavishly illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, White Gold has been meticulously researched by club historian David Dow and is the most comprehensive study of the early days of rugby in Swansea ever published. White Gold also vividly describes rugby politics both inside and outside of Wales, the social attitudes of the day and how they influenced Welsh rugby and society.

David Dow’s comprehensive and definitive study also contains extensive appendices covering all the players, the club’s first internationals, complete fixture lists, club captains and point-scorers of the period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: St David's Press
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781904609094

David Dow

David Dow is the Archivist at Swansea RFC. A former Official Photographer to Ospreys Rugby, he spearheaded the creation of a digital archive at Swansea RFC, in partnership with Swansea University, to protect and promote the unique cricket and rugby collection at St. Helen's.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The origins of this book lie in the bombing by the Luftwaffe of Bert Palmer’s house in February 1941. Palmer was Hon. Secretary of Swansea Rugby Club from 1926 until 1939, and the loss of the majority of the club’s pre-war records at his residence was an almost insignificant side story to the over 200 lives lost and vast amount of damage caused over those three nights when the full force of the Blitz hit the town. However, the result for the All Whites was that nearly all the early fixture lists and other records were lost and the club’s beginnings were represented only by scattered clues here and there; tantalising fragments of a past now buried under rubble as the old town centre was in 1941.

My own involvement with the club began much later. I first began watching Swansea play in 1998 and within a few years, almost without realising it, I became the club photographer. A redecoration of the club’s interior in 2006 made all the framed photographs hanging from the walls suddenly available to be copied, and an infant digital archive began which has now grown into a rather large and hungry child, consuming the energies of an ever increasing group of ‘parents’. My increasing involvement among the club archives and memorabilia soon had me interested in this little known and earliest era of a club that has held such a prominent place in the history of Welsh rugby since the game was introduced to the country. The dimly lit period from which the club first emerged called out for a new appraisal. Existing books on the club by Brinley Matthews (1968), David Farmer (1995) and Bleddyn Hopkins (2002) had only limited information available to them in reference to the formation and early days of Swansea RFC. Besides, this crucial but little known period formed only a part of the remit of their books.

In this volume, my objective has been to shine a new light on the beginnings of a club known and respected the world over as the All Whites. The story of Swansea Football Club – for that was how it was first known and is still described on the pavilion wall at the St. Helen’s ground – is inseparable from the history of the game in Wales. Its founders were leading architects in the introduction of the earliest inter-club organisations and administrative bodies in Wales, including and beyond the formation of the Welsh Football Union in 1881. Many of these personalities have faded from our recorded memory and their stories and achievements reduced to a name on a captain’s board or brief description in a list of capped players, but the men who started a rugby football club from the membership of the Swansea Cricket Club were true pioneers. The successes achieved with the oval ball by the All Whites toward the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th, were built on the foundations laid down by these footballers who began playing for pure camaraderie but soon found themselves embraced by the town and representing the hopes and aspirations of its people.

In the following pages the story of Swansea Football Club from its birth in 1872 is described, alongside the beginnings of the other early Welsh clubs and the style of play as it developed inside and outside of Wales. In unravelling the threads of the club’s early days it soon becomes evident that Swansea was among the first to adopt and experiment with these advances in the game. The club rapidly developed from a group of cricketers who wanted a game for the winter months, to a leading club that challenged for silverware, and included the best English clubs on their fixture list. The club’s debt to Llandovery College and connections with Cheltenham College are explored, while rivalries can be seen developing with other Welsh clubs like Cardiff, Llanelli, Neath and Newport. Fixtures that first began near the Uplands Hotel, moved to a steep hillside off Constitution Hill and finally to St. Helen’s, the ‘Circus Maximus of the West’. Away games were played on new grounds, some long forgotten and some still with us, but these venues became cauldrons of fanatically opposed townsfolk who thought little of pushing over goal posts, invading pitches or pelting players and referees with clods of earth. The book describes the introduction of the South Wales Challenge Cup, afterwhich football in Wales flourished as never before and became the all-consuming passion that thrust Welsh teams into the international arena. The Swansea story is inextricably tied to the national tale as is its famous ground of St. Helen’s.

I have chosen 1887 as an end point to the narrative for two reasons; firstly, and without giving too much away, the end of 1886-87 was a significant milestone in the club’s upward trajectory. Secondly, the players who came along afterwards represent a different strand of the story and an era of their own. Their story picks up where this leaves off.

Alongside the many players and their deeds described here lies the ‘campaign for open spaces’, led by William Thomas of Lan; philanthropist, Mayor of Swansea, tireless champion of the poor and incidental benefactor of the All Whites and the world renowned St. Helen’s ground. How the cricketers and footballers secured and improved St. Helen’s is described, as is its development from an unpromising collection of ‘heaps and pools’ to a ground the town could be proud of: ‘turfed so perfectly as to resemble a huge billiard table.’ As the club developed so did St. Helen’s until it became the best football ground in Wales and hosted Wales’ first international to be played on home soil.

The book traces the club’s rapid development into a socially inclusive body that fielded Welsh capped players, from manufacturer and future Baronet George Morris to plasterer Billy Bowen; and all this in just a few years. In researching this story, primary sources have been used wherever possible and every effort has been made to confirm and cross-reference the facts and statistics. Where references to other works are made, the validity of those sources has been substantiated as far as is possible or otherwise expressed as an alternative view.

The publication of this book comes as we mark the sesquicentennial season, the 150th anniversary of the ‘All Whites’ and is a part of the club’s celebration of this significant milestone in its history.

The journey into the beginnings and early history of Swansea Football Club has been a fascinating and rewarding one, begun seriously around 2012. If the events, places and names in these pages appear clearer in the mind and imagination of the reader, and help provide colour to a distant monochrome era then the book will have achieved what the work researching it has done for myself.

David Dow

Swansea

March 2023

1

Football: A Friendly Kind of Fight

‘… for as concerning football playing, I protest unto you it may rather be called a friendly kinde of fight, then a play or recreation; A bloody murthering practice, then a felowly sporte or pastime…’1

Although our story is firmly set in south Wales, it is not possible to leap into the sporting world of late Victorian Swansea without first describing how that landscape came to be and why the game of rugby football was ever taken up at all in Wales. We need to look back, albeit briefly, to the origins of the sport, its birth and the influences that turned it into a game we can recognise as rugby football. The path of this book follows the introduction and development of the game at the Swansea Club but it adds to our understanding of the early game in Wales to take a look over the shoulders of those Welsh pioneers to the influences that induced them to promote the game in Wales.

It is evident that by the mid-1860s the game of rugby football was advancing through England, Scotland and Ireland, initially through its uptake in the public schools, and encouraged by the schoolmasters who were ‘Old Boys’ of Rugby School and other schools were variations of rugby had been played. As the mid-Victorian values of ‘Muscular Christianity’ (a combination of devoutness, combined with healthy physical exercise reflecting religious and physical piety) sat well with the school ethos of Mens sana in corpore sano,* these schools became sympathetic environments for the game to prosper. But what game was it?

Encouraged in the placing of games at the centre of Rugby School’s curriculum by headmaster Thomas Arnold in the 1830s, the school played a game descended from the folk football that had existed for hundreds of years whereby whole villages would turn out in what is best described as open warfare with a goal at each end. Rowdy games where whole communities joined in were a familiar feature of life for working people through the Middle Ages and into the 16th and 17th centuries.

Folk Football, a proper exercise for the Sabbath day?

The disapproving 16th century Puritan Phillip Stubbes called football ‘a friendly kind of fight’. He went on to declare ‘For dooth not every one lye in waight for his adversarie, seeking to overthrowe him, and to picke [pitch] him on his nose, though it be upon hard stones? In ditch or dale, in valley or hil, or what place soever it be, hee careth not, so he can have him down’.2 Stubbes’ outrage at the violence he witnessed in these games was expressed in such depth that it begs the question as to how often he forced himself to watch in horror at the wanton harm done to all and sundry. As Joseph Strutt, writing in 1801, tells us:

‘When a match at football is made, two parties, each containing an equal number of competitors, take the field, and stand between two goals, placed at the distance of eighty or an hundred yards the one from the other. The goal is usually made with two sticks driven into the ground, about two or three feet apart. The ball, which is commonly made of a blown bladder, and cased with leather, is delivered in the midst of the ground, and the object of each party is to drive it through the goal of their antagonists, which being achieved the game is won. The abilities of the performers are best displayed in attacking and defending the goals; and hence the pastime was more frequently called a goal at football than a game at football. When the exercise becomes exceeding violent, the players kick each other’s shins without the least ceremony, and some of them are overthrown at the hazard of their limbs.’3

The gathering of communities on Shrove Tuesdays, to play a largely unregulated, violent sport, led inevitably to cases of rioting, either through exuberance and inebriation, turning to lawlessness, or sometimes as Tony Collins points out, to the outbreak of predetermined protest such as that against land enclosure* at White Roding, Essex in 1724. The rise of the Chartist movement in the 1830s and 1840s also minded the authorities to try to curtail large holiday gatherings. Such attempts to ban holiday football games led to the reading of the Riot Act and calling out of troops in Derby in 1846.4 Yet the folk football games remained popular. That the football gatherings were slow to disappear is evidenced by a match reported as late as 1876 where, at Sheffield, a crowd of 1,500 were present for such a match played across country with the goals four or five miles apart. Again, in 1880, a report of a traditional Shrove Tuesday match in Dorking noted: ‘one of the few towns in England which still keep up the old wild game of football on Shrove Tuesday, played in the streets by all the populace who care to join, is the town of Dorking, in Surrey.’5

The severe censure of folk football backed by the force of law must be viewed against the background of mainland Europe which was, in 1830 and more violently again in 1848, in the throes of revolution against the established monarchies. The establishment in Britain was as anxious to avoid the perception of losing the reins of control, as it had been with the overthrow of the earlier French monarchy and advent of Revolutionary France in 1789.

Football at Rugby School – a template for the game

Authorities, concerned to avoid civil unrest every time a public holiday loomed, increasingly curtailed the sport in the countryside and burgeoning towns, yet it became, in different guises, popular in British public schools. However objectionable the stern Messrs Stubbes or Strutt viewed the violence of the untamed game; it reappeared in another incarnation at Rugby School, eventually to be codified under a set of rules devised by the pupils there. Aside from a goal at either end of the playing area, only the freedom to maim and injure seem to have been translated into the school game.

The image of William Webb Ellis in 1823, picking up the ball in one of these games ‘with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time’6 has been a subject for dispute ever since it first appeared in ‘Bloxam’s letter’ of 22 December 1876 (to the Meteor newspaper). Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, a pupil at Rugby School (1813-21), had a letter published, describing the game played there in his day. In a second letter to the newspaper (1880), he alludes to a William Webb Ellis7 running with the ball in hand in 1823, against the accepted rules of the day. Although this would have been after Bloxam had left, his brother John Rouse Bloxam8, who entered Rugby School after him, was a contemporary of Webb Ellis and may have influenced the alteration in the second account. Bloxam’s initial assertion that running with the ball was introduced to Rugby School around 1828 was amended in this second letter. It is possible, as Jennifer Macrory suggests,9 that Bloxam’s brother was able to correct the initial description from first-hand knowledge. The letter forms part of the school’s case for the veracity of the Webb Ellis story. An enquiry by Rugby School into the origins of the rugby game between 1895 and 1897 credits William Webb Ellis with the innovation of running with the ball. This does contradict an assertion by Montague Sherman,10 writing in 1887, that, from an earlier time at Rugby School, ‘every player was allowed to pick up the ball and run with it.’ The Bloxams were, however, both pupils at the school and Sherman made his assertion in a general narrative on football’s development over five centuries. Tony Collins, asserts that the Rugby School enquiry hijacked the Webb Ellis ‘myth’ in order to hold the origins of the game to themselves, having fallen behind other schools and clubs in its practice and advancement.11

Rugby School and the famous ‘close’ where the boys played football. (Courtesy: author)

There may be truth in that assertion, but Bloxam did not gain from his written contribution and it is generally accepted that running with the ball still took another decade to become an accepted norm at Rugby School. Perhaps, as Professor H.A. Harris observed, the mistake of the rugby world’s reaction to the enquiry was to conclude that the Webb Ellis incident was a pivotal moment that, in their keenness to establish the mainstay of a narrative, they (the rugby establishment) very much desired to unearth. Professor Harris points to another letter submitted to the school enquiry from a junior contemporary of Webb Ellis. Thomas Harris12 (no relation to the professor) confirmed that in his day ‘picking up and running with the ball was distinctly forbidden’.13 He accepted that it did sometimes occur and that the cry of ‘hack him over’ always resulted from an attempt to do so, thus illustrating the continued contempt for the action.

Rugby School’s archivist Jennifer Macrory, in her study of the early game, is generally in accord with the view that whatever Webb Ellis did, it was not to change the course of the game in his own day. The Rugby School report on the origins of the game made one thing abundantly clear. From its gathered testimonies, it was evident that running with the ball at the school was not common until the 1830s and not regularly practiced until after 1841. But perhaps by fastening the Webb Ellis narrative to the school with the enduring knot of tradition, they had achieved their aim.

It must be taken into account that the Rugby School enquiries were made against the backdrop of the recent secession of the northern clubs from the English union in order to form the Northern Union. This turmoil prompted the rugby establishment to further entrench their views on the ethos of the game, and perhaps attempt to hoist the flag of middle class values they perceived to be on the wane in the north. Yet, ultimately, Rugby School’s influence on the advancement of the game across the land through its former pupils was to be of far more consequence than the fixing of a commemorative plaque to a wall.14

None of this early narrative would have been of much consequence had the game remained with the grand and influential public schools of the day. The later spread of the game and its enthusiastic uptake by the working class was to lead to a clash of ideals and a defensive backlash from the game’s custodians in the south that would split the game in England. The boys of Rugby School, of course, were not the only exponents of the early game.

Public schools such as Marlborough, Wellington and Cheltenham Colleges, Clifton, Eton, Winchester, Harrow and others all played a variant of the game with their own specific rules. In counterpoint to the handling game played at schools like Cheltenham, Rugby, Haileybury, Clifton, Marlborough, Wellington, Tonbridge and others, the dribbling game, more akin to the association game of the future* was taken up by the likes of Charterhouse, Westminster, Repton and Shrewsbury. Others had their own version of the sport, developed to suit the location and playing conditions each school faced, meaning that opposing schools would have to agree what rules to play under before an inter-school match could be played.

The earliest Rugby School rule booklet. (Courtesy: Rugby School Museum)

Jennifer Macrory suggests that in 1839, the old Rugbeian, Cambridge undergraduate and future MP, Albert Pell got together a team of Old Rugbeians to play one of Old Etonians at Cambridge. The consequent match was only remembered for the controversy caused by the Old Rugbeians’ use of the hands, contrary to how the Old Etonians had learned to play. A match today under such circumstances would prompt a forum on re-drafting the rules. This was the exact response in 1839 to the misconceived fixture. As a result of the confusion, representatives of the major public schools met at Cambridge that year to draw up the ‘Cambridge Rules’. This represented an early attempt to codify the game, though the ‘Cambridge Rules’ were not finally published till 1863.15

By 1845, boys at Rugby School had drawn together the threads of their own game into a formal set of rules. This was to be the first acknowledged written template for football and provided the school with great prominence, as former pupils could now export their style of football as they came into contact with colleges and schools around the country. Also, in future years as masters at other institutions, they could introduce the game they had played themselves at Rugby School.

1851 – The earliest photograph of football at Rugby School. A huddle of players organise the match while one boy on the far left arrives carrying two footballs by their laces and others lounge around awaiting kick-off. (Courtesy: Rugby School Museum)

With the game spreading through the public school network, it was inevitable that former pupils and masters would wish to form clubs in the towns and districts where they lived or within their places of work. The formation, in 1839, of the Cambridge ‘club’ at the time of Albert Pell may not have been a permanent one, for they were reborn in 1872 as the Cambridge University Football Club. Other clubs such as Guy’s Hospital (1866-67), Liverpool (1857), Blackheath (1858), Edinburgh Academicals (1857-8) and Trinity College Dublin (1854) vie with them as early clubs, Trinity claiming a seniority that is generally accepted, though the game played would have been under their own ‘football’ rules.16

The game then played was violent in the extreme with 20 or more ‘combatants’ on each side. An observer of early matches could be forgiven for thinking that maiming an opponent was of greater importance than scoring a point, one of rugby’s early characteristics still kept alive today in some quarters. The act of ‘hacking’, or kicking an opponent in the shins, was a skill valued highly by early players, especially at Rugby School (the Eton and Harrow games instead, emphasised the ‘dribbling’ game) and the opponent did not have to be in possession of the ball to incur or indulge in ‘hacking’. The severity of the injuries meted out and received was part of the attraction as ‘Two boys would often be seen steadily hacking each other long after the ball and the forwards had passed to the other side of the ground’.17 It was also probably one of the only ways to get a ball released from a large mêlée of players and was only banned after the formation of the Rugby Football Union (RFU), though some clubs had already done away with it by then. Obtaining possession of the ball was not always the aim of the participants however, and it can be said that, especially at Rugby School, the enthusiasm for hacking or ‘shinning’ as it was known there, was taken to a ludicrous degree.

As Tony Collins points out, the former RFU President and Blackheath rugby player Harry Garnett fondly reminisced, ‘Boots were made specially with an extra sole piece at the toe, pointed like a ship’s ram, and hardened against the bars of the fire, or with a hot poker,’ and opponents were hacked ‘with the utmost violence’.18 The opposing views on the eligibility of ‘hacking’ and ‘tripping’ were to lead to the division of the game into those who preferred the ‘dribbling’ game and those the handling game. Following appeals in newspapers for a common set of football rules, association football founded its governing body in 1863 in London. Both the Blackheath School and Blackheath Football Club were represented at the original meeting where the Football Association (FA) was founded (26 October 1863) but, along with other London clubs who leaned toward a handling game, they withdrew at a further meeting when their own stipulations on rules were not carried. The public schools, having been instrumental in calling for a common set of rules, now saw that the laws of association football set them apart from the FA’s other member clubs, and the dribbling game went its own way.

The notorious ‘Death Cart’, so named by the boys at Rugby School. It was used to remove incapacitated players from the field of play. (Courtesy: Rugby School Museum)

A football game between Rugby and Marlborough schools played at Christ Church Cricket Ground, Oxford, on 30 November 1861. (Penny Illustrated Paper, 14 December, 1861)

Formation of the RFU and the export of the game

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) was formed on 26 January 1871 in the Pall Mall Restaurant in Regent Street, London, under its first President, Algernon Rutter of the Richmond Football Club. Representatives of the influential London clubs filled other committee positions (the Hon. Secretary was Edwin H. Ash of the Richmond Football Club). In fact, virtually all the clubs attending the formation of the RFU that day were from the London area. During the 1860s the London clubs were numerically dominant in England, while outside the capital, the school sides in Rugby, Marlborough, Tonbridge, Haileybury, Wellington and Clifton were sound bases from which local clubs could emerge. In the north of England, there were strong clubs in Liverpool (1857) and Manchester (1860), both of which were well represented in England’s first international, against Scotland in 1871. Again, Old Rugbeians were the moving forces in starting these clubs, from among the middle class mercantile families. Nearby, other clubs were springing up, for example, in Sale (1861), Bradford (1865), Hull (1865) and Swinton (1866).

The RFU’s initial regulations, agreed in 1871, were based upon those of Rugby School – a very idiosyncratic set of 39 rules, in addition to their definitions of the game – and extended to 59 laws: the main difference to Rugby School being the abolition of hacking, hacking over, and tripping opponents. It did, however, mean that Old Rugbeians – as masters in public schools in England, Scotland and Ireland – could introduce the football game to their pupils, as played, essentially, under Rugby School rules. As Fletcher Robinson points out in his 1896 book, Rugby and Marlborough schools supplied the overwhelming majority of better-known players in England in the 1860s and the entire Richmond team in its 1865 ‘invincible’ season.19

The coming of the new RFU laws of 1871 was also announced in Welsh newspapers of the day. (Cardiff Times, 19 August 1871, p.3)

Football in Wales – Cnapan and cudgels in the west

Just as the English had their Shrove Tuesday warfare, with a ball at the centre of the mêlée, so did the people of west Wales in the game of Cnapan, described in the early 1600s by George Owen of Henllys. One of the minor gentry of north Pembrokeshire, he wrote about the game in his Description of Pembrokeshire in 1603, although cnapan was already well established by then. Where some variants of folk football allowed kicking or the use of bats, sticks or ‘clackens’ as it was in Scotland, the game that appeared in Wales was predominantly, though certainly not exclusively, a ‘carrying’ game. If not an ancestor of rugby football, cnapan was a little more akin to its precepts than some folk games of the past.

Using a cnapan (a solid wooden ball) a little larger than a cricket ball, the game was ‘rare to hear, troublesome to describe and painful to practice’ according to Owen, and played ‘not for any wager or valuable thing, but for glory and renown.’20 Neighbouring parishes competed, with teams of an unlimited number including horsemen, which added another dimension of danger to the spectacle. To add to the disorder of 1,000 or more participants, the ball – usually of a hard wood such as yew, box, crab apple or holly – was boiled in tallow the day before a game to make it slippery and hard to handle. The games were played on Shrove Tuesdays or at Easter, Ascension Day or Corpus Christi Day and drew large crowds from the locality, along with victuallers with stalls or booths of meats, wine, beer and other refreshments. The object was to carry the ball, along with your teammates, so far into your own parish that its recovery was not possible for your opponents. The ball was thrown between players to keep it from their opponents’ grasp and players could break away with the ball or throw it in the direction of their home ground.

Horsemen were armed with ‘monstrous cudgels three foot and a half long’ and not averse to swinging them. If a horseman got hold of the cnapan, he would steal off with it, chased by other horsemen and the other players on foot. If he did not release the ball on being caught he was fair game for the cudgel of his mounted captor until he did so. Not to be cowed by the mounted men, players on foot were allowed to pelt them with stones as a deterrent to being trampled under the hooves.

Taken as a whole, it was a ready excuse for intoxication, violence and the settling of old scores – a happy breeding ground, then, for the more formalised game to come. The practice of two players holding the ball between their facing bellies, and more and more players holding fast onto them, making the whole group one big ‘cnapan’, had a flavour of the more orthodox forwards of the early rugby game which came to Wales as cnapan declined. As in England, attempts were made by the authorities to control and subdue the wild games but, probably, the increasing enclosure of land and the opposition of the gentry farmers did more to hasten the decline of the game, particularly as many of the participants were employed by the landowners. Thus cnapan, played in Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire, faded into history.

As late as 1719 the spirited Miss Anne Beynon would write to her emigrated sister in Delaware, of her brother who would not play football for the honour of Llandysul against Llanwenog, saying: ‘I wish I were a boy instead of him to fight for the parish.’ She stole away to watch the match and, thrilled by the heady violence, wrote:

‘It was said that one youth of Llanwenog had been killed. He was insensible for a time but he came to and is now well. Twm Penddol was kicked rather badly because he was too drunk to take care of himself. There is much talk of the battle everywhere, and the two parishes threaten to go at it again with cudgels sometime in the summer’21

It is uncertain what form of village sport Anne Beynon was describing but, if not cnapan, it conforms to the early folk football seen elsewhere in Britain which was starting to recede, with the needs of agriculture and pressure from the law combining to oppose it. An example, from 1835, of a folk football practised by many rural communities in Wales, is recorded in Haverfordwest where the annual Shrove Tuesday game proceeded from noon till dusk as the inhabitants were seen ‘shutting up their shops, suspending their business, and barricading their windows, to give boys & c., an opportunity of shewing [sic] their dexterity in kicking and catching the football to the greatest advantage.’22 The ‘extreme good nature’ exhibited by the populace in preparation for the onslaught no doubt came from hard experience of previously failing to take such precaution. The unruliness of the old games, however, brought them increasingly under pressure from the authorities, such as when James Owen, Mayor of Haverfordwest, had to personally intervene to curtail such activities:

Bando was another of the popular early games in Wales and its most ardent exponents were as careless of life and limb as were the cnapan players. Appearing in the 18th century as a variant of hockey, and with some similarity to hurley, bando was immensely popular in Glamorgan. Goals were made by striking a ball with a bandy (stout stick) between two markers. A match between Llantwit Major and another parish in the Vale of Glamorgan is described by Charles Redwood in 1839. They played on the seashore, with sides of 30 or more, though the huge crowd seem to have played their part also, with partisan women hiding the ball under their petticoats when it strayed into their midst. The players of St. Athan were particularly renowned for their prowess at the game, and a retrospective article in the Glamorgan Gazette in 1909 tells us that the contests between players from St. Athan and Llantwit Major were not always bloodless in ‘The good old days, when men preferred acting ‘fair and square’ with their fists.’23 The ‘Bandy Boys of Margam’ were well known for their skill at bando in the late 1800s, but the building of the Mansel tinplate works and loss of Margam Sands as a venue as well as to the forming of a football club at Aberavon, led to their eventual demise in the 1870s.24 As older forms of football receded, the newer games arrived via the rural public schools in Wales where masters would sow the seeds of the Rugby School game and nurture their growth.

(Pembrokeshire Herald & General Advertiser, 16 November 1849, p.2)

Rugby football - The crucible of the Welsh colleges4

As the new football game spread, via the public schools and colleges, so it was to arrive in Wales. With no university as yet*, or public schools of comparable size to the English establishments, however, it was to smaller institutions that the seeds of modern rugby football would be blown. Rev. Rowland Williams arrived at St. David’s College Lampeter in 1850 as Vice-Principal and Professor of Hebrew. He had been a Fellow and tutor at King’s College Cambridge for 14 years and was a near contemporary there of Albert Pell (Williams arrived from Eton in 1836, Pell arrived in 1839). It was Pell we are told, who had got former Rugbeians and Etonians together at Cambridge to play football. Rev. Rowland Williams attended King’s College but Pell was at Trinity College, so whether they met or were familiar with each other is not known, but as D.T.W. Price, in his history of St. David’s College Lampeter, tells us, Williams would bring the game to west Wales.25

Williams’ introduction of a form of football to the college stemmed from the same motives that prompted Thomas Arnold at Rugby School and others, to advocate sporting activities; namely to promote the moral well-being of their charges or in Lampeter’s case, to ensure the students would spend their spare time in ‘healthful exercise, rather than in clownish lounging about the shops or market places.’26 St. David’s had been established in 1822 and its focus was on the training of clergymen for the Anglican Church in Wales. So the Rev. Rowland Williams’ energy in this regard was well supported by the Principal and masters at the college. There is no evidence to suggest that Lampeter played the Rugby School version of football at this time but, whatever the form of the game, early opponents were the grammar schools at Llandeilo, Ystrad Meurig, Cardigan and, above all, Llandovery College.

Rev. Rowland Williams, Vice-Principal of St. David’s College Lampeter 1850-60. His portrait still looks sternly down from the walls of the college. (Courtesy: St. David’s College, Lampeter, photo by author)

Established in 1848, Llandovery College is said to have participated in the first football match between established sides in Wales, in 1856, when they played against St. David’s College, Lampeter. Professor H.A. Harris recalled that when he joined the staff at St. David’s in 1926, he was told of the first match by William Davies who had been College Manciple for over 40 years.27 David Gealy, in the official Llandovery College history, points to a 1939 radio broadcast by Rev. Walker Thomas who had recalled that:

‘It was played at Caio, mid-way between the two towns. On the day of the game there happened to be a hiring fair in a neighbouring field where the young men of the district assembled to hire out their services to the farmers for the coming year. For the first ten minutes they were merely interested; then they came to the conclusion that this was a rough and tumble for all comers and joined in the fray. With much difficulty they were cleared off the ground and the match proceeded.’28

Whether truly accurate or not, it gives a good idea of the impression an early hybrid game would have had on an onlooker, for a hybrid game it would surely have been: it is believed they played 12-a-side on that day. At that time Llandovery College were certainly playing a variant of football, something between association and rugby. It was into this environment that Rev. Walter Price Whittington arrived in 1868 from Edinburgh. Educated at Cowbridge Grammar School and then Oxford, he had gone on to become a master at Merchiston Castle School, Edinburgh, where football under the code of the Scottish clubs’ ‘Green Book’ flourished. D.I. Gealy in Floreat Landubriense credits Whittington with introducing rugby and athletics to Llandovery College, and Whittington himself, in his reminiscences, says: ‘Coming from Merchiston Castle School, Edinburgh, the best school in Scotland for Rugby Football, once finding that the boys at Llandovery played a sort of Association without definite rule – I introduced Rugby, and it throve wonderfully. The boys took to it, and rejoiced in it, and will never look at Association again.’ Early games were internal affairs between house teams with names such as Sharks, Penguins, Puffins, Slashers, Druids and Socii. As the game became established, external matches took off and Lampeter and later Brecon College were early opponents. Football in Swansea, as we shall see, was to benefit greatly from sporting connections with Llandovery College.29

Founded in 1822, St. David’s College, Lampeter, was the nursery for a form of football from the arrival of Rev. Rowland Williams in 1850. (Courtesy: author)

One of W.P. Whittington’s younger brothers, Thomas Price Whittington, a forward for the Merchistonians club, would go on to be capped by Scotland against England in 1873 and would be instrumental in the formation of the Neath Football Club. An attempt at Neath to form a rugby football club was actually made as early as 1864, when it was announced in the Cambrian that a club was to be formed with a view to playing under the laws as played at Rugby School. The club’s new President was none other than J.T.D. Llewelyn of the Swansea Cricket Club, ‘a gentleman well known in the neighbourhood for the interest he takes in all athletic games. Under his auspices we think the club cannot but succeed’ and they were to play at ‘a field near Court-Herbert.’30 J.T.D. Llewelyn owned Ynysgerwyn House in Neath, as well as Penllergaer House, his residence north of Swansea. He also started up the cricket club in Ynysgerwyn, so had strong sporting links to both the Neath and Swansea areas. Unfortunately for the enthusiasts in Neath, no more was heard so we may assume they found no opponents and did not succeed, although they may possibly have played matches amongst themselves, the starting point for many clubs. However, with the name of J.T.D. Llewelyn attached to their enterprise, it would be likely that any external fixture played would have made the newspapers as a follow up to the announcement of their intent to form a club. Of greater interest is the specific reference to the intention to play under rugby laws: ‘The rules of the game, as played at Rugby, are being attended to, and would some other club in the locality adopt the same, a spirited match might soon be looked for’. This is very likely to be the earliest reference to football of the Rugby School code in Wales. At this time modern rugby laws had yet to be introduced in the football nurseries of Llandovery and Lampeter colleges. It is possible, then, that former public school pupils were trying to introduce it into the sporting arena of southern Wales much earlier than we have hitherto thought. It seems, though, that the seed failed to germinate as, frustratingly, no further activity of the venture is recorded. The Neath story is not picked up again until 1872.

Another early example of football of a kind in Wales was when Kilvey School and Swansea Grammar School* played a match in November 1865 at:

‘the good old English game of football on the Maesteg Grounds. The game was kept up with much spirit for several hours, and became very lively and interesting. As the shade of evening drew nigh both parties withdrew from the contest, neither side being victorious.’31

Swansea Grammar School also played away to Cowbridge Grammar School in 1868, and were recorded as fielding 16 players, though their opponents’ number is not mentioned. The Swansea boys scored an early goal and, following a ‘difference of opinion … as will often be the case in a contest of this kind’, Cowbridge re-took a ‘free kick’ and equalised, thus drawing the game, which was watched by several bystanders. What style of football they played is not clear. Reports of kicks at goals and ‘free kicks’ leading to ‘goals’ are inconclusive evidence of rugby football. Similarly, 15 boys from Cowbridge Grammar School played and beat twelve gentlemen from the town in October 1871, with no scores specified.32 Prior to the formation of the Football Association in 1863, the distinction between differing styles of football was obscure and all types of the game, whether purely dribbling, handling or hybrid, were ‘football’ in the parlance of the day. Despite the appearance of a set of association rules to mark the difference between the diverging codes, the game in Wales was as much exposed to the Rugby School-oriented games of the colleges as to a non-handling variety.

Further north there was footballing activity at Brecon, where Christ College took on a side from the town in November 1867 – played on the town team’s ground – in what was reported as a second win for the college. There are records of the town side’s existence from an advert the following year, which noted that ‘A football club has recently been established in the town and the inaugural match took place on Wednesday last [21 October 1868] in the cricket field, between the captain’s and the secretary’s sides.’33 The town team intended to offer matches to ‘several local clubs’ which may have included Llandeilo Grammar School and Llandovery College.

(Brecon County Times, Neath Gazette & General Advertiser 16 November 1869, p.1)

This was, possibly, not the first attempt to form a town club in Brecon. They soon found opponents in the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers who they played on the cricket field on 11 November 1868 in a drawn game. In this match, as with other Brecon Town FC matches, it is not possible to say what sort of football they played, as the scant details tell us nothing of the style of play. The town side would, though, be first to embrace the rugby laws, with Christ College Brecon doing so in 1874, their first opponents being Brecon FC. The town side also played Crickhowell in 1869, though again, under what rules is not clear.34

Llanelli was a little later in taking up the game than some of its neighbouring towns but, when it was established there in the mid-1870s, it would be from Rugby School connections. Further east, as Gwyn Prescott notes, a Bridgend School XIV played a football game against a R. Randall’s VIII-man team in 1866. It is likely that this was in fact William Richard Randall, later captain of Swansea’s first ever side, who was living in the Bridgend area at that time. This was possibly a rugby style match with ‘charging’ and ‘squashes’ as the Bridgend Chronicle described it. The Bridgend School’s remit of preparing boys for the public schools may have influenced the choice of what game they taught the boys.35 A Tredegarville (Cardiff) club appeared in the Cardiff & Merthyr Guardian of 24 December 1870 having played a game against a ‘Cardiff club’ on Wednesday 21 December, beating them by two goals and four ‘rouges’ (minors) being registered, which certainly indicates a football game of the rugby code, particularly when considering that the Tredegarville club was listed in the Football Annual of 1871 as an association and rugby laws club.36 A week later the Cardiff Times recorded the return match between these two teams, which Tredegarville won by a single goal and ‘thirteen points’. Which report was the more accurate in describing the points system is not certain, but again, points as well as goals were noted, supporting the likelihood that these were rugby football matches.

References to football at Pontypool appear as early as February 1870, with a match between the ‘football clubs’ of Pontypool and Aberdare, the latter winning by ‘one goal and one touch down in self defence’.37 Unusually for such an early game, both teams are listed so we know they played 16 a-side: Aberdare fielding two half-backs, three backs and 11 forwards. The Pontypool team list described one or two half-backs and 14 forwards. Despite this match occurring prior to the RFU releasing its new set of rugby laws, a form of rugby is suggested by this description, even if all the player positions are not correct. Again, the Football Annual of 1871 lists Pontypool as a club side – formed from the Pontypool Cricket club in October 1868 – who played a ‘modification of Association’ football. This account, drawing from contemporary news sources credits the brothers Arthur and Herbert James as the driving forces behind its establishment. Certainly, in 1870, there was a ‘James’ in the Pontypool team which played against Aberdare, though whether he is one of the brothers is hard to prove. Neither team can claim, however, to have played a true rugby laws game at that time as Pontypool did not finally plump for rugby laws until 1875. The Pontypool club had a chequered early history, being eclipsed by the local Pontymoile club in the 1890s to re-emerge as Pontypool Football Club in 1901.38

The enthusiasm of sportsmen in Wales for a football game is evident from the examples above and the various attempts to form clubs. The rugby code game would predominate once the settled laws from the RFU were more widely known – the RFU’s publication of the 1871 football laws was noted in both English and Welsh newspapers – and the influence of the colleges and schools in Wales was crucial in the early phase of its introduction. In future years the footballers of Swansea would rely heavily on these institutions in establishing their own club, and the germination of such seeds in other clubs in south Wales is intertwined with the story of the Swansea club’s emergence, where the cricketers of a town often provided the nursery essential for a football club to be established. Now we shall see how the cricketers of Swansea came to fall under the football spell and how the footballers in turn thrived on contact with the early exponents of the game in South Wales.

Notes

1.   Phillip Stubbes: The Anatomie Of The Abuses, 1583 (N. Truber & Co., 1882), p.184.

2.   Ibid., p.184.

3.   Joseph Strutt: Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, 1801 (Ed. J. Charles Cox (LL.D., F.S.A.) London, Methuen & Co., 1903), p.100.

4.   Tony Collins, Rugby’s Great Split – Class, Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football (Routledge, 2006), pps.2-3.

5.   Bristol Mercury, 15 January 1876, p.8. The match in Sheffield lasted three hours and ended in a draw. See also the Aberystwyth Observer 14 February 1880, p.2, for an account of the match at Dorking in 1880. A group of boys went round on the morning of the match, collecting subscriptions to pay for the expected damages that would result from the free for all. Houses and businesses were boarded up as a precaution before the match began. Over 2,000 townsfolk are said to have taken part.

6.   The reference is to the dedication engraved on the marble plaque inserted into the wall outside the Headmaster’s rooms at Rugby School in 1895 following the Old Rugbeian Committee’s investigation into the Webb Ellis story. The complete text reads:

THIS STONE

COMMEMORATES THE EXPLOIT OF

WILIAM WEBB ELLIS

WHO WITH A FINE DISREGARD FOR THE RULES OF FOOTBALL

AS PLAYED IN HIS TIME

FIRST TOOK THE BALL IN HIS ARMS AND RAN WITH IT

THUS ORIGINATING THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE OF

THE RUGBY GAME

A.D.1823

7.   Rev. A.T. Michell, (revised and annotated by), Rugby School Register Volume I, 1675 to 1849 (A.J. Lawrence, Waterloo Place, London, 1881), p.128. William Webb Ellis, son of a Mrs Ellis of Rugby town, entered the School in 1816 as a ‘Town Boy’, aged nine years. He left in 1825.

8.   Ibid., p.116. Matthew Holbeche Bloxam entered Rugby School in 1813, aged eight years. Also, p.120 recorded the entrance of Matthew’s brother, John Rouse Bloxam in 1814, aged seven years.

9.    Jennifer Macrory, Running With The Ball – The Birth of Rugby Football, (Collins-Willow, 1991), pps.23-7.

10. Montague Sherman, Athletics and Football (Longmans, 1887), p.273.

11. Tony Collins, Rugby’s Great Split, op. cit., pps.5-6.

12. Rugby School Register Volume I, 1675 to 1849, op. cit., p.138. Thomas Harris was a pupil at Rugby School from 1819 to 1828.

13. H.A. Harris, Sport In Britain – Its Origins and Development (Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd, London, 1975), pps.122-123.

14. Jennifer Macrory, Running With The Ball, op. cit., pps.26-7.

15. Ibid., p.142.

16. Adrian Harvey, ‘The Oldest Rugby Football Club in The World?’ Article in Sport in History, Vol. 26, No.1 (Routledge, April 2006) pps.150-152. The earlier date claimed as the Guy’s Hospital foundation date is 1843. By this claim, Guy’s was advanced as being the oldest established rugby club. This claim is now regarded as extremely unlikely as no firm evidence exists to support it. The date originates from an 1883 fixture card highlighting the club’s 40th year but no earlier description of football at Guy’s exists, only hearsay evidence from ‘distinguished officials’ in 1863 and 1864. Trinity College Dublin’s foundation date of 1854 is proven and their seniority more generally accepted.

17. Bertram Fletcher-Robinson, Rugby Football During the Nineteenth Century (A.D. Innes & Co, 1896), p.31.

18. Tony Collins, Rugby’s Great Split, op. cit., p.4.

19. The Times, 27 October 1863, p.3; Daily News London, 27 October 1863; and Penny Illustrated Paper, 31 October 1863, p.283. See also: Daily London News, 11 November 1863, p.5 for second meeting which ended in ‘an animated discussion’ on the finer points of the rules to be adopted and was adjourned for a week. A subsequent meeting to this resulted in the split of the London clubs who preferred the rugby style handling game. An example of a letter suggesting a unification of football rules is found in The Times, 5 October 1863, p.8 by ‘Etonensis’, who suggests that the reluctant public schools can continue to play their own idiosyncratic games among themselves but would be able to compete more widely with a united set of rules. This was just three weeks before the meeting on 26 October that gave birth to the Football Association.

20. Fletcher Robinson, Rugby Football, p243.

21. Reprint of the text on Cnapan from George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire (1603), Ed. Dr. Henry Owen, (London, 1892) in: Brian John The Ancient Game of Cnapan and The Beginnings of Rugby Football (Greencroft Books, Newport, Pembrokeshire, 1985), pps.8-12.

22. Derek Birley, Sport and the Making of Britain (Manchester University Press, 1993), pps.113-114 and p.276.

23. Glamorgan, Monmouth & Brecon Gazette & Merthyr Advertiser, 14 March 1835, p.3. Also repeated in The Welshman, 6 March 1835, p.3.

24. Glamorgan Gazette (hereafter GGZ) 6 August 1909, p.8.

25. Charles Redwood, The Vale of Glamorgan – Scenes and Tales Among The Welsh, (Saunders & Otley, London, 1839), pps.173-179. See also David Smith and Gareth Williams, Fields Of Praise – The Official History Of The Welsh Rugby Union 1881-1981’, p.27. See also The Welshman, 24 December 1847, p.3, for an example of a game of bando where the players, having trespassed onto a field to play, were arrested and fined ten shillings each, and two of them being sent to the house of correction for six days. This indicates that the game was under the same pressure from authorities as was cnapan.

26. D.T.W. Price, A History of St. David’s University College Lampeter – Volume One: to 1898, (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1977), p.152. Williams was Vice-Principal of St. David’s College, Lampeter from 1850 to 1862.

27. Ibid., p.152.

28. H.A. Harris, Sport In Britain – Its Origins and Development (Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd. London, 1975), pps.132-133.

29. D.I. Gealy, ‘Sport in Llandovery’, in Floreat Landubriense – Celebrating a Century and a half of education .at Llandovery College, Brinley Jones R (Ed.), (Gomer Press, Llandysul, 1998), p.242.

30. Ibid., p.242. Gealy says it is ‘highly likely’ that Whittington introduced rugby to the college. Whittington himself is more emphatic in his essay: pps.47-48.

31. Cambrian, 4 November 1864, p.4.

32. Ibid., 3 March 1865, p.5.

33. Ibid., 20 November 1868, p.5. Western Mail 28 October 1871, p.3, described the Cowbridge GS match against ‘twelve gentlemen’ from Cowbridge town.

34. Brecon County Times, Neath Guardian & General Advertiser, 24 October 1868, p.4. Also see: 9 November 1867, p.4, for reference to Christ College Brecon v Brecon Town.

35. Ibid., 16 January 1869, p.4.

36. Gwyn Prescott, This Rugby Spellbound people - Rugby Football in Nineteenth Century Cardiff and Wales, (Welsh Academic Press, Cardiff, 2011), p.16.

37. Cardiff & Merthyr Guardian, 24 December 1870, p.5. See also: Cardiff Times 31 December 1870, p.6; Gwyn Prescott, This Rugby Spellbound People, op. cit., p.21, refers to the entry in the 1871 Football Annual to Tredegarville’s playing of both association and Rugby codes.

38. Aberdare Times, 3 February 1870, p.4.

39. Edward Donovan, Arthur Crane, Allan Smith and John Harris, Pontypool’s Pride – The Official History of Pontypool Rugby Football Club 1868-1988 (Old Bakehouse Publications, Abertillery, 1988), pps.28-56. See also Gwyn Prescott, This Rugby Spellbound people, op. cit., p.20, quotes the 1871 Football Annual description of Pontypool playing a ‘modification of Association’.

____________________________________________________________________

*. ‘A healthy mind in a healthy body’

*. Enclosure (or inclosure) was the formal fencing or enclosing off of former common or arable land, thus preventing traditional uses such as grazing, mowing for hay, gathering timber, fishing etc by the poorer, unlanded or subsistence farmers. The enclosed lands were deeded off to one or several landowners, causing much strife and violent reaction. The height of the legislation in Britain was between 1760 and 1850.

*. Soccer was an abbreviation used by the schools for association football.

*. The University College of Wales in Aberystwyth was not founded until 1872.

*. The original Swansea Grammar School (opened 1853) was situated in Mount Pleasant, the site of the present-day University of Wales Trinity St. David.

2

1831-73: A Winter Sport for Swansea’s Cricketers

‘I will first deal with the Swansea Football Club, which was started on the 26th day of September, 1872’1

James Livingston made the above statement in an essay published in 1910. Livingston, a brash and forward thinking character, had every reason to feel comfortable with being asked to write a description of the birth of the Swansea Football Club he had done so much to bring into the world and nurture. In fact, he was a moving force in the formation of the club and helped steer its course through the early years as the game grew and developed in southern Wales to become the national game. We will meet Mr Livingston again in this journey. It is he and men of similar vision who brought into being a rugby football club from the crucible of the town’s cricket club, but who were the founders and early players of the Swansea Football Club and what drove them to form a rugby football team in the busy coastal town of Swansea, to play a game whose origins lay in the public schools of England?

To answer this, we must place ourselves amongst the cricket playing sportsmen of Swansea in the latter half of the 19th century. Their attempts to establish a cricket club and their relocations from one ground to another in search of a permanent home are the prelude to the story of the football club. It was from their members that enterprising men went on to form the backbone of a new club to play the ‘winter game’. The travails of the cricketers and their migration from one green field to another form an essential introduction to the birth of the Swansea Rugby Football Club, and help us to understand the eventual relocation of the footballers, alongside the Swansea Cricket Club, at the now famous St. Helen’s ground. In every sense, they were the senior of the two clubs and the emergence of the latter, while not entirely dependent upon the cricket club, could not have established itself on the Swansea seafront in such an advantageous location without the ambition and hard work of the Swansea cricketers. The connection with the cricket club was to remain a vitally important one in the formative years of the Swansea Football Club.

A cricket club for Swansea

Evidence for Swansea being the venue of some of the earliest known organised cricket games comes from the correspondence column in the General Evening Post (London) in April 1771, in which a local gentleman describes his disapproval of young men gathering together on the Sabbath to indulge in outdoor pursuits. He writes that ‘football, wrestling, cricket, fighting, jumping and an enormous use of oaths is made their exercise and the pastors of these places generally take too little pains for restraining this vice of profaining the Lord’s Day.’2 The mention of ‘football’ in the same sentence is an important early indication that an early form of the ball game existed in the town, though we cannot know what form it took or how popular it was, but evidently sufficient to incur the displeasure of the pious gentleman correspondent.

A formal cricket club was known to be in existence by 17853 when a notice in the Hereford Journal reminded subscribers that the first practices were approaching, and mentions a gathering place near the bathing hut at Crymlyn Burrows. The Swansea Cricket Club, which is the lineal ancestor of today’s cricket and rugby football clubs, was formed in 1829 and had a somewhat stuttering early history. By July 1831, according to an article in the Cambrian advertising a match between married and single members, it had 70 members. The writer enthused that cricket: ‘is likely to become the national game with the Welsh as well as the English and the Swansea Club will yield to few in the number and respectability of its members.’4 The town’s gentlemen were clearly being informed of a club to which they should aspire to become members. We are told how:

‘Many of the fair sex, attracted by curiosity, or other benevolent motives, were interested spectators of the match, and as they could not but observe the scarcity of Benedicts,* it is to be hoped their compassionate exertions will not be found wanting, in endeavouring to supply the deficiency, by transforming some of the Bachelors into happy members of the opposite party.’5

At this time, the Bush Inn in High Street would appear to have been the centre of operations of the cricket club. A dinner in a marquee on the ground was provided after the match and, despite its capacity to accommodate 50 persons, our correspondent bemoans the poor arrangements which ‘savoured too much of confusion for comfort.’ He suggested that all