Canterbury Rugby 1929-1979

Steve Uglow

Description

After the desolation of the First World War, the 1920s saw a resurgence of sporting and social activity. Rugby was one of the sports that benefitted from this burst of energy and Canterbury was one of the hundreds of clubs that emerged nationwide. Steve Uglow explores the origins of the city club, the backgrounds of its founding members, its struggle to find a ground but also how it interacted with the social and economic milieu of Canterbury. With Kent on the front line during the Second World War and with Canterbury suffering severe bomb damage, the club only just survives but their matches provide some relief for soldiers and civilians alike.In the 1950s and 1960s, the wholly amateur club fought to establish its sporting credentials in the county but developed through some powerful and charismatic captains, until in the 1970s, it became county champions for the first time. In the modern era it would emerge as one of the top clubs in England and will reach its centenary in 2029.At the same time, the club slowly shed some of rugby's reputation for poor behaviour and as a drinking club for young men, reaching out to the wider community through an enlightened youth policy and the development of women's rugby. This book deals with the first 50 years of the club's history, a period which laid down the roots of the diverse and vibrant club that it is today.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Canterbury

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 02 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800466876
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

RUGBY IN CANTERBURY 1929-1979

Copyright © 2021 Steve Uglow
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks
ISBN 978 1800466 876
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
In memory of Eddie Hardy (1934-2019)
CONTENTS
Foreword and Acknowledgements
One Preamble: On football, rugby and rugby football in 19th century Canterbury
Two Genesis: the first season
Three The 1930s: laying down roots
Four The War Years
Five The Forties: Reconstruction
Six The Fifties: Construction
Seven The Sixties: They Swung
Eight The Seventies: Silverware!
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Canterbury is, at root, a small market town but it has a historical, literary and architectural legacy that transcends that. Its motto is Ave, mater Angliae , Hail, mother of the English. Any sports club might struggle to match such expectations but for the past century, Canterbury rugby club has embedded itself in its city. It is not among the oldest, nor among the most successful, nor (in any way) the wealthiest of the thousand or so rugby clubs in England. But as it approaches its centenary in 2029, it can reflect on success as being in the top fifty clubs in the country, as well as on several occasions as Kent champions. Alongside triumph, there are disasters: a point gained in a 3-3 draw with Erith in the 1990s saved the club from relegation to the very bottom tier of league rugby.
For the young men and women who play the game, it’s just the next game, next week, that matters. But for those long past playing, the club is often a significant social hub that endures. Revisiting Canterbury’s Merton Lane, even after decades, does not just evoke memories but there will always be one or two faces from the past. The ethos of the game opens doors, even abroad. Announcing that you are ‘ un rugbyman ’ in France often makes you friends that you never knew you had.
I set out to write a history of the club to ensure that there was a record of how the club was started, of its development over the decades and of the achievements of previous generations. There is always the danger that we will forget the skills of fly half, Will Simpson, the mercurial running of centre David Parker or the hooking skills of Eddie Hardy. It’s proved possible to write this story because there is a substantial archive of minute books, annual reports and press cuttings. I became custodian of this in the 1980s when I became secretary of the club and, now retired, the opportunity and time was ripe. I have limited this volume to the first fifty years, for two reasons: the first is exhaustion but also the realisation that the second fifty years requires a different approach. Instead of rummaging through dusty archives, most of the club members of these recent years are alive and it is their voices and memories that need capturing. Whatever, this will be done by October 12 th 2029.
Many members have written to me with their recollections of their playing years. I am very grateful to all of them. A special thank you to Peter Henderson, the achivist at King’s who was a tremendous help on the early years and also to Terry Grayson and Jenny Uglow, both of whom read, corrected and commented on the whole manuscript.
ONE
PREAMBLE: ON FOOTBALL, RUGBY AND RUGBY FOOTBALL IN 19 TH CENTURY CANTERBURY
Canterbury RFC celebrated its ninetieth birthday in 2020 but rugby in Canterbury has much older roots, going back to the very origins of the modern game. King’s School, Canterbury 1 was playing rugby in the 1850s and so was the Clergy Orphan School (now St Edmund’s) which had moved from St John’s Wood, London to St Thomas’s Hill, Canterbury in 1855. 2 Alongside these, St Augustine’s College, established in 1848 for training missionary clergy for the colonies, had its own football team in the early 1870s. 3
Football played its part in all these educational establishments. In mid-Victorian England, there had been an expansion of boarding schools, such as Cheltenham College (1841), Radley College (1847) or Wellington College (1853). These schools embraced versions of broader curriculum introduced by Samuel Butler at Shrewsbury (maths, languages, history and not just Greek and Latin) and ‘the re-establishment of social purpose, the education of Christian gentlemen’ (Thomas Arnold’s stated aim at Rugby).
This ethos of social and moral training was sometimes termed a philosophy of “muscular christianity”. 4 A key element was a belief in “ mens sana in corpore sano ’, a healthy mind in a healthy body. Exercise and sport, especially team sport such as cricket and football, 5 not only built muscles but also inculcated moral values. Sport required co-operative teamwork, fair play within the rules, respect for the other side while testing your physical prowess to its limits. There was never a “Muscular Christianity Association” nor any organised movement but these tenets both reflected the culture of these schools while also maintaining and reinforcing it. When the schoolboys left the school gates behind them, they took their sports with them into universities, colleges and professional life, especially the Army.
But what was ‘football’ in the mid-19 th century? One King’s schoolboy, reminiscing about the game as it was played in 1863:
We had originally… practically no rules at all. It was only the necessity of getting rid of one or two practical inconveniences that led us to legislate. One of these …was the prevalence of the habit of running with the ball. I don’t know why we thought this a nuisance, but we did – perhaps it was laziness. At any rate, a rule was made that a player might run with the ball if pursued, but the moment pursuit stopped he must stop too. Moreover, a player was not allowed to pick up the ball from the ground when dead, though he might catch it on the bound and then run with it. I regret to say some mean persons took advantage of this rule and by kicking a dead ball themselves induced it to bound and then ran away with it. Another more serious inconvenience that we found it necessary to guard against was the practice of holding the ball for an indefinitely long time. There was a boy in the school who had a most remarkable skill in retaining his hold of the ball. When he had got it safely tucked under his arm, there it remained; and the game was sometimes suspended for a quarter of an hour or more while he formed the centre of a surging mass of players, from which he generally emerged breathless, but triumphant, and still holding the ball. We eventually made a rule that the ball must be dropped as soon as the player holding it was collared. 6
There were no national sporting organisations, no rules nor codes. It was an unregulated, anarchic, world with schools (and later clubs) playing their own, idiosyncratic, forms of the game. These different rules could lead to schisms – for example, in the 1860s, matches between the Clergy Orphan School and King’s were suspended for a time as neither school were willing to change their own cherished rules. This caused heated disputes every time they met.
The purpose of any form of football, then and now, was to advance the ball down the field to a position where a goal could be scored by kicking it through posts. It was unsophisticated, not least because, until the invention of the india rubber bladder in 1862, the shape of the ball was uneven.
The number of players could vary widely and were presumably decided by negotiation, as would be the rules to be applied on the day. Captains decided on disputes and referees were not introduced until 1875.
Once the ball had been kicked off, ‘ Individual circumstances necessitated local variations. The boys of Charterhouse, Harrow and the other schools were playing on cobbles, heavy mud or in narrow confines. These dictated that their versions of ‘football’ should be played standing up with much of the physical confrontation removed’. 7 Rugby School benefited from large grassy areas and so did the schools in Canterbury.
Schools were also divided on other issues. There were those (such as Eton) that adopted stricter rules that rejected kicking the ball forward so play advanced by dribbling, passing backwards before being in a position to shoot. Others such as Charterhouse favoured a looser approach that allowed the ball to be kicked forward. Even for these ‘soccer schools’, there could be a ‘fair catch’ of the ball from a punt.
It was the running forward with the ball, not its handling, that separated out the ‘rugby schools’. These schools accepted that a player who had caught the ball could run towards his opponents’ line. Where a player was in possession, opponents were free to charge, hold, trip or hack or to wrest the ball from him and often a game would be degenerate into a gigantic scrimmage with the ball somewhere in the middle. Through scrimmaging, kicking, dribbling or running, the ball could be manoeuvred into a position where it could be kicked between the posts for a goal. 8
Rugby-oriented schools and soccer-oriented schools shared a belief on outcome – namely scoring a goal – but not on how that should be achieved. The