Upon arrival in England the New Zealand "All Golds" team travelled to Leeds where they were met by huge crowds in the town centre. All traffic and business had to stop while Baskerville's New Zealanders were welcomed to the North.

Few of the locals probably stopped to think about it, but none of the tourists had ever seen the 13-a-side game! Even the four All Blacks who had been on the 1905 tour who may have seen the NU game would have been at no advantage - the game they saw had 15 players and no play-the-ball.

The All Golds took on a week of intensive training at Headingly with the assistance of local players and they played a full practice match before their first scheduled fixture.

Their tour record was eventually a moderate success with Dally Messenger being rated as the player of the tour. The Yorkshire Post recorded: "He is something more than a goal-kicker. A trim-built athlete, 24 years of age, he has pace, and the faculty of always turning up at the right place. Many critics describe him as "the greatest marvel of the age". Messenger does not suffer from a swelled head nor has he ever been spoilt by flattery."

They played 35 games, won 19 and had 2 drawn matches. Considering their limited knowledge of the NU (rugby league) game it was a credible result. Messenger later recalled that Baskerville's team was slow at the start of the tour to attract crowds due to poor on-field performances brought about as "the boys enjoyed themselves too much and got lackadaisical - Baskerville then became very firm with them and ran the tour on a business basis." Ultimately the tour was a financial success and by the end of it the players had over 5,500 pounds to divide up.

Messenger Recalls Life In England

In 1940 Messenger recounted to a Sydney journalist his memories of life in England during the tour.

"It was a revelation to me to find ourselves ignored by the upper strata of English people. Things were very different to the hale-fellow-we-met practice in Australia. But when we got among the industrial towns and the coal miners we found ourselves vociferously welcomed and we were made very much at home."

"One personage did receive us. I think it was the Duke of Norfolk. He showed us the mounted body of famous race-horse Carbine and permitted us to take a hair each of his mane and tail."

"Like all other teams we found the Yorkshire Luds, one-eyed zealots who wailed when things went wrong for their side, yelled wildly at us and forever invited the referee to send the lot of us back to the pavilion. When their side was winning nothing could have been sunnier and rosier than the Yorkshire disposition."

" They meant no harm and we took it all in good fun. The Aye Luds from Lancashire were just the opposite - good winners, good losers, with tons of encouragement for a tryer on either side."

A by-product of the tour was that many of the Northern Union clubs more than doubled their membership numbers from supporters attracted to the All Golds games.

Many of the New Zealanders also accepted offers from English clubs (either immediately or returned the next season) and became very familiar names to rugby league: Lance Todd (Wigan), ‘Massa' Johnston (Wigan), Duncan McGregor (Merthyr Tydfil), George Smith (Oldham), Edgar Wrigley (Huddersfield) and ‘Jum' Turtill (St Helens).

Turtill became captain of the Saints and was a prolific points scorer until the Great War began. He immediately enlisted and fought as part of a local company of the Royal Engineers. Six months before the end of the War he was killed by a mortar shell.

A Cruel Blow

The All Golds returned to Australia by mid-1908 and found that a new "rugby league" competition was in full swing in Sydney. They played ten more games in Australia and boosted the finances of the fledgling NSWRL.

However, tragedy struck after the team beat Australia 11-10 in Sydney. Albert Baskerville took ill on the boat carrying the party to Brisbane for games in Queensland.

Lance Todd recalled: "He played against Australia in Sydney and in the words of one of my companions got such a gruelling that he did not seem to be the same chap afterwards. Shipping for Queensland a day or two later he was taken ill on board with influenza, but felt well enough to witness the next match. On returning to his hotel he felt bad again and on Sunday afternoon he was conveyed to a hospital where he lingered till Wednesday at 6pm, dying of pneumonia. His chums who had that day been playing arrived at his bedside in their jerseys as they had played, just in time to bid a long goodbye to one of the truest comrades man ever had."

Finally On Home Soil

The tour however continued and the players helped the locals in the finer points of the game at training sessions and club matches. The first game of rugby league on New Zealand soil was a benefit match for Baskerville's widowed mother. The game was played before 10,000 spectators at the Athletic Park, Wellington on June 13 1908. Had Baskerville lived and/or Smith and the others not stayed in England, the game in New Zealand may well have built on the tour's success.

As tough a fight as the rugby league pioneers had in England and Australia with the establishment rugby unions, it was nothing compared to what the NZRU could serve up. The NZRU had permeated itself into every aspect of NZ society, government and business. Potential converts, officials, sponsors and ground owners were all pressured into not giving the rugby league upstarts any room to move at all. But to the game's credit in the "Shaky Isles" it persevered and has continued to do so for nearly a hundred years.

In August 1908 teams from Wellington and Auckland played each other in a two match series. New Zealand Maori teams also went to Australia in 1908 and 1909 with some success. In July 1909 a meeting was held and the NZRL was formed. From 1910 onwards, there has been a club championship in Auckland and a similar competition started in Wellington from 1912. Other clubs and competitions sporadically rose and then disappeared throughout the 20th century across New Zealand. The fact that the first inter-island representative game did not take place until June 1925 says a great deal about the difficulties rugby league in New Zealand has always faced.

However, regular tours by New Zealand teams to Australia and England and vice versa have greatly assisted the game internationally. Much of the valuable income to the NU and NSWRL competitions in their early days can be directly attributed to tours by NZ teams. The irony is the game in New Zealand for the most part has been as truly amateur as the rugby union would have people believe its game was.

The NZRU however did not relent. In 1926 in the prelude to the NZRL tour to England, the NZRU went to the point of undertaking legal action to protect the name "All Blacks" from use by the NZRL team. The League was adamant that it had established equal rights to the use of the name and could call its teams whatever it chose. The use of the term "Kiwis" in the local press was actively discouraged by the League, but as the jerseys included a kiwi on the badge it was no surprise the name has remained ever since.