The seven questions you were too embarrassed to ask
Rugby is a huge part of the School’s heritage but not all of us are conversant with the game. So we’ve prepared this short primer, just for you, answering the seven questions you were too embarrassed to ask.
We are starting off by calling on the BBC, who say,
The Rugby Football Union (RFU) rules, written in 1871, forbade rugby being a professional game, but by the 1890s some players in Yorkshire were being paid to appear at matches to compensate for missing a day’s wage.
This led to a split between the RFU and clubs in Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Northern Rugby Football Union was formed to incorporate these breakaway clubs and over time they developed their own style of play – which became known as rugby league.
This debate is academic now, because since 1995 rugby union has been professionalised too.
The differences between the two games are now in how they’re played, from how they’re scored to the number of players on the pitch. But the games’ history has also meant that in England they’ve divided roughly along class lines – rugby union a more middle-class pursuit and rugby league a more working-class pursuit. Rugby league’s heartland remains the North West of England – iconic rugby league teams are St Helens, Wigan Warriors, Warrington Wolves, and Bradford Bulls.
This class split doesn’t really apply to Wales, though. The hotbed of Welsh rugby was South Wales – geographically removed from the North West of England – and the schism in English rugby didn’t cross the border. Rugby union is the dominant strand of Welsh rugby, although rugby league does have a presence, Wales being one of only seven countries in the world to have a professional rugby league team.
RGC 1404 are our local rugby union team, based in the Eirias Stadium at Eirias Park and affectionately known as the Gogs.
Many Rydal Penrhos alumni have played for the Gogs, and current players include Dan Owen, Danny Cross, and Joe Simpson.
Danny Cross in school colours
Established in 2007 as Gogledd Cymru, the team was renamed in 2010. RGC is an acronym for Rygbi Gogledd Cymru, while 1404 is the year Owain Glyndŵr became Prince of Wales.
RGC is the sole North Wales team to compete in the Welsh Premier Division
RGC is the sole North Wales team to compete in the Welsh Premier Division, the top flight – or highest level – of Welsh domestic rugby. The team reached the division in the 2015–2016.
In 2017 RGC won the WRU Challenge Cup, the highest level knockout competition in Welsh rugby.
The North Wales Crusaders are now our local rugby league team. Formally based in Wrexham, since July this year they have played in Eirias Stadium. Rugby league is played spring to summer, while rugby union is played autumn to spring, so the two teams don’t tread on each other’s toes. In September, the Crusaders held their annual Awards Evening here in school.
‘XV’ is Roman numerals for fifteen. There are fifteen players in a rugby team (in rugby union, at least – in rugby league there are thirteen). So a ‘Rugby XV’ just means a fifteen-man team. The First XV is the first-choice team.
You earn a cap, or get capped, each time you play for your country’s national team. Originally caps were worn by members of a team to distinguish themselves from their opposition. Later the cap became a ceremonial item awarded to a member of a first team – like this Rydal cricket cap from 1935/36, stored in the archives.
Rydal cricket cap from 1935/36
Yes, and yes.
Before the 1800s there wasn’t rugby and football, there was just football, and the rules of football weren’t codified. Football was just ‘two teams each trying to force a roughly spherical object to a target at opposite ends of a notional pitch’, as sports writer Jonathan Wilson writes. It was the continuation of a mob game played on the streets of medieval Britain, a game that was ‘violent, unruly and anarchic’ and that was repeatedly outlawed.
In King Lear, Shakepeare has one of his noblemen insult a steward by calling him a 'base foot-ball player'.
But by the early 1800s, English public schools – notably Rugby School – were playing football, and had devised their more formal sets of rules for how the game should be played.
Historical myth has it that a pupil at Rugby, William Webb Ellis, was the first ever player to pick up the ball and run with it, breaking school rules and instituting a whole new game in the same act. The story probably isn’t true, but what is true is that by 1823 Rugby School had a form of football in which it was legitimate to handle, carry, and run with the ball.
Contrary to this version of the anecdote, this form of football didn’t really constitute a break with the past. Medieval football was rather lax about how one was allowed to propel the ball forward, possibly allowing any means short of murder. One form of football called camping, played in East Anglia up until the early 1800s, seems to have expressly forbidden kicking the ball.
So rugby did begin as a form of football, albeit before football was the game it is today. That’s why many rugby teams have ‘F.C.’ (Football Club) at the end of their names. And it does take its name from Rugby School, and so from Rugby, Warwickshire, even if it didn’t exactly begin there. Rugby School’s influence in the emerging world of football led to the form of the game played there being called rugby football – later shortened to rugby.
The Webb Ellis Cup, the Rugby World Cup trophy
Wales has won the Six Nations Championship more times than any other country – as long as you include shared wins. If you only count outright wins, that honour goes to England, with 29 outright wins to Wales’ 28.
Wales’ record in the Rugby World Cup has been a bit less impressive.
The national team has always qualified but has never won – our best performance was in 1987, when we came third. But in fairness, the Rugby World Cup has only existed since 1987. If it had existed earlier, we might have a better record. Between 1900 – the beginning of the first so-called Golden Era of Welsh rugby – and 1987, the Six Nations Championship or one of its forerunners was played 76 times and Wales garnered 20 outright wins and 10 shared wins.
The Welsh national team has a permanent place in rugby’s history.
Wales has also performed well more recently. We won the last Six Nations, in March, and finished fourth in the last Rugby World Cup, in 2019.
It must also be said that there is a longstanding and bitter rivalry on the rugby pitch between England and Wales. The Welsh national team’s first ever match was against an English club, while in 1977 Phil Bennett gave a particularly rousing pre-game pep talk to his Welsh side.
Rydal Penrhos might be said to bridge this this rivalry, our own John Waszek having played for the English Universities rugby squad. John's connection with the sport goes even further, having previously been a Head of Department and housemaster at Rugby School itself. •
Rydal Penrhos at the Rosslyn Park Sevens
