Next Tuesday is the 150th anniversary of a major milestone in Irish sporting history.
On 10 December 1874, the first body to control the playing of rugby football in Ireland was established.
The organisation was actually first called the Irish Football Union and it was established in imitation of the Rugby Football Unions, which had been set up earlier in the 1870s in England and Scotland to organise international matches between the two countries.
The desire for such matches had grown from the manner in which a game called “Rugby football” had spread in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Drawing on older traditions of playing football in urban and rural areas, and in public schools, this new football game had a developing set of rules and a growing number of clubs who played by those rules.
The first football club in Ireland had been established at Trinity College, the sole college of Dublin University, the oldest and then the most important university in Ireland. The university had been founded in 1592 and was based on a 24-acre site in the heart of Dublin city.
A striking feature of the campus was College Park, a five-acre grassy area which was laid out in the 18century and became the informal home for a variety of sports. In the 1840s a cricket pitch was laid out and, in the 1850s, the Park became home to the Dublin University Football Club that was founded in 1854.
The first account of club football in Ireland comes from a notice in the Daily Express newspaper: ‘Football: A match will be played in the College Park today (Saturday) between original and new members of the club. Play to commence at two o’clock college time.’ College time was fifteen minutes behind Dublin time to facilitate prompt attendance at lectures.
The club was founded by a mixture of members of the cricket club, boys who had attended public school in England, and boys who had attended the few Irish public schools before coming to Trinity. At several of these Irish schools, versions of football were played. One such school was Clongowes where their own version of football – gravel football – survived long after the spread of rugby across Ireland.
Initially, the club at Trinity College created a stir in the city and on match days the Nassau Street railings of College Park were lined with spectators, although there was a limit to what they could achieve at the time. With no other club to play against they were restricted to playing matches between themselves, coming up with such divisions as Internals versus Externals, Smokers versus Non-Smokers, and Fair Hair versus Dark Hair.
The club also suffered fallow periods. In 1867 Charles Barrington arrived in Trinity College to find little by the way of sport taking place in the college in the winter term, with students passing their time drinking whiskey and playing cards. Groups of socialite students dressed in their best clothes and paraded up and down Grafton Street and became known as the ‘Grafton Street Harriers’.
In reaction to this, Barrington set about reorganising the rugby club. Again, they struggled to get teams to play against, but did play matches among themselves twice or three times a week. Over time other clubs were inspired to meet their challenge and the Trinity club ‘was really a great success and did much to introduce the rugger game to Ireland.’ As Liam O’Callaghan has demonstrated in his history of rugby in Ireland, the spread of rugby to Ireland – and then around Ireland – was facilitated by the fact that up to 1,000 boys from Irish families went annually to English public schools in the 1870s. Such boys had been involved in the founding of the Football Club at Trinity College Dublin and in 1868 former schoolboys who attended Rugby and Cheltenham were involved in the founding of the prestigious North of Ireland Football Club in Belfast.
Over the following decades many more alumni of British public schools were to be found in the pavilions of rugby clubs across Ireland. As if to emphasise the importance of ex-public schoolboys in Irish rugby, such men came together and established a team of Irish men who had been to English public schools to play against Irish universities and Irish schools’ teams. Those who attended the meeting had been to schools such as Rugby, Cheltenham, Shrewsbury, Harrow and Winchester.
Vital to the spread of the game in Ireland was also the fact that a growing number of Ireland’s elite schools adopted the emphasis placed on sport by schools in England. Advertisements for the Rathmines and St Columba’s College schools in Dublin included references to their facilities for playing football from the mid-1860s. Outside of these educational establishments, important clubs such as Wanderers in 1869 and Lansdowne in 1872 were formed.
These were followed by the establishment of clubs in the cities of Cork and Limerick, and in numerous country towns such as Dundalk and Carlow in Leinster, Monaghan and Dungannon in Ulster, and in the Munster towns of Queenstown (later Cobh) and Tipperary during the 1870s.
This was a clear imitation of the process then occurring in English towns and cities. Sometimes, though not always, the patronage of existing clubs engaged in other sports and of members of the gentry drove the spread of rugby. The great example of this is County Carlow Football Club that was founded in 1873 and was based at the Club House Hotel. This was the meeting place of the Carlow Cricket Club (founded 1831) and the Carlow Rowing Club (founded 1859).
Central to the club was the Club House proprietor George Wilson and the patronage of Horace Rochford, who owned more than 3,000 acres across the midlands. Rochford was a huntsman who also founded the Carlow Polo Club in 1873 and it was apparent from the beginning that in Irish country towns, rugby enjoyed the support of a moneyed elite.
On 10 December 1874 – in an initiative driven by Trinity College – some of the principal clubs in the country came together to form an Irish Football Union, ostensibly to pick a team to play an international match against England.
Such a match would be the first Irish involvement in what the new Union described as an annual international series between ‘the three kingdoms’ of England, Scotland and Ireland. Following the meeting a circular was issued which read: ‘The committee venture to remind Irishmen that these international contests, conducted as they always are in the most friendly spirit, have a direct and very powerful tendency to remove international asperities, and to inspire the youth of either country with mutual feelings of respect and toleration.’ In this instance, however, mutual feelings of warmth did not even extend across one country: rugby players from Belfast were peeved at the manner in which the Irish Football Union was established and banded together to form the Northern Football Union in January 1875.
The first match against England was played at the Kennington Oval in London in February 1875 and then in December of that year, the return match was played in Dublin at the Leinster Cricket Club Grounds. Players from both Irish unions were chosen for the match; they took to the field wearing white jerseys and green velvet caps but – just as in February – the Irish team were soundly beaten.
And so the trend continued for the rest of the 1870s as Ireland lost every international contest to England and Scotland, even as the game continued to spread across the country.
In 1879, rugby was re-organised with a merger between the Dublin and Belfast bodies into an Irish Rugby Football Union. As part of this re-organisation, provincial branches were established in Leinster, Munster and Ulster and an enduring framework was established to manage the growth of rugby football in Ireland.
Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin
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