Rugby League Rose From Cricket's Ashes

Sean Fagan of RL1908.com

A century ago Australian cricket was in the midst of a battle - not with England, but with itself. The fight between the fledgling Australian Board of Control, and the country's top cricketers, produced an unexpected off-spring - Australian rugby league.

The first decades of cricket's Ashes contests were driven by money, as promoters and prominent cricketers organised the tours and shared in the gate money.

Barely a decade after the first Test between Australia and England, at the MCG in 1877, thoughts turned to the possibility of organising similar contests between footballers.

A plan to take an Australian "football" team to England - combining rugby union players from Sydney and Australian footballers from Melbourne - came tantalisingly close to fruition in the early 1880s.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Australian (25 November 2006).

Ultimately though, the initial international tour came in 1888, when the first British rugby union team journeyed to Australia. The tour was organised by English cricket professionals Arthur Shrewsbury and Alfred Shaw, who were looking to recover financial loses from their 1887/88 Ashes tour down under.

The two men recognised though that bringing out a rugby union team to play solely in Sydney and Brisbane would not be profitable. They were well aware of the large crowds attracted to Australian football's club matches in Melbourne, and decided that their team would play both codes.

Given the team was set to play Australian football as well as rugby union, and was clearly a money-making exercise for the players and promoters, the English RFU were particularly reticent to endorse the tour. The mainly upper-class RFU officials were especially fearful of the tour's effects upon the growing trend towards professionalism in their sport - something they were hell-bent on keeping out of rugby union after having witnessed soccer overrun by working-class men once they allowed payments to players.

The RFU's concerns were well-founded. The majority of the team were from the mills and mines of Yorkshire and Lancashire in Northern England - the region that gave birth to professional rugby league barely seven years later.

It was not until 1899 that the next British rugby union team came to Australia - this time there would be no matches against VFL clubs in Melbourne, and the team was comprised entirely of amateurs.

After the Wallabies first test match, the local rugby community pondered, as had happened in cricket, the possibility of sending a team to England. Unlike in cricket, where professionals and amateurs played alongside each other, the RFU forbade any form of payment to players - the birth of English rugby league in 1895 had made them even more determined to follow the path toward pure amateurism.

As Australia's best rugby players working men, it was obvious that no representative team of substance could be banded together - to take part in such a tour a man would have to absent himself from work for nine months. Of more pressing concern for those that were married, was who would look after their family financially while they were away playing football?

The Referee astutely offered, "this makes a problem to be tackled by football legislators of the future, so let it pass on to them." However, even The Referee did not forsee how soon the "problem" would erupt.

Through the 1890s Sydney rugby union had been dominated by a handful of gentlemen's clubs. Long before salary caps and player drafts, these clubs touted for the best footballers on offer - not only the city's finest rugby players, but also from New Zealand, Queensland and country NSW. The top footballers gained lucrative benefits, while the rank-and-file got nothing.

In an era where labour issues and a fair-go for all prevailed amongst the working class, a call began to grow to follow the lead of cricket, which had been "democratised" in 1894 via the introduction of residentially-based district clubs to Sydney cricket.

Aware of the increasing signs of discontent, in 1900 the NSWRU followed suit, disbanding the old clubs, and giving birth to districts with names and colours now synonymous with rugby league, including South Sydney, Balmain, Newtown and Eastern Suburbs.

By 1905 "district football," which engendered local rivalry and tribalism, had revolutionised Sydney rugby union. The code began to enjoy greater popularity with the city's sports fans - a timely happening for supporters of the English game, as Sydney was then on the cusp of falling to Australian football.

Cricket had indirectly provided the means to reinvigorate Sydney rugby union, and was cited as a game where men of all classes were treated fairly. However, the summer sport would soon have a more direct impact on rugby union across Australia.

The NSWRU continually suffered criticism for raking in large profits (gate-receipts) from the unpaid labour of their footballers. In comparison, Australian cricket teams and their tours to England were organised by the players themselves and their financial backers - they alone shared the often spectacular profits. Cricketers such as Victor Trumper, who toured with Australian teams to England in 1899, 1902 and 1905, did particularly well financially.

A former rugby union player himself, Trumper played fullback in a representative match on the SCG in 1898 alongside Dinny Lutge (who later captained rugby league's first Kangaroos) and 'Jersey' Flegg (ruler of the NSWRL for its first fifty years). Trumper was also a friend of Dally Messenger. It was not lost on Sydney's best footballers how unequal the financial rewards and opportunities to tour England were between the sports.

Trumper though, and Australia's other prominent cricketers, were facing a battle to hold on to their control of Ashes tours. Ironically, it was this cricket dispute that gave rugby league the financial backing it needed to get up and running.

In 1906 the NSW and Victorian cricket associations began moves to wrest control of Ashes tours from the players and their promoters. The newly formed 'Australian Board of Control' (ABC) issued an invitation to London's Marylebone Cricket Club to send an England team to Australia for the 1906/07 summer. On the advice of prominent Australian cricketers, and the Melbourne Cricket Club, the Marylebone club chose to ignore the ABC, instead opening their own negotiations for the tour.

The Melbourne club and its contacts in Sydney secretly signed the best cricketers, including Trumper and M.A. 'Monty' Noble, to form an Australian team to play England. Trumper and other senior cricketers were not keen to simply let the ABC put an end to player-controlled tours.

Aided by Sydney entrepreneur James J. Giltinan, and the Melbourne Cricket Club, The Bulletin claimed the cricketers were making a determined effort to, not only secure the 1906/07 Ashes series, but to permanently grab control of the summer game and run it as a professional sport.

The Melbourne Cricket Club denied that the latter two objectives were part of their plans, however, ultimately it didn't matter as the challenge against the ABC failed, and the players lost control of international tours.

Australia's top cricketers were reduced to receiving allowances in the same manner as their rugby counterparts, while the ABC began to build up financial reserves from test match income.

To be fair, the plight of the cricketers was not as poorly as that of the rugby union players - the 3s-a-day doled-out by the NSWRU to Waratahs players on NSW's tours to Queensland wasn't enough to get them through one round of beers if they were called on to 'shout' in a Brisbane pub.

Unlike in cricket though, two organisations controlled rugby in England, giving the Sydney footballers a choice - the amateur RFU, and the professional Northern Union (rugby league).

Giltinan and Trumper, inspired by the financial success of the 1905 All Blacks tour of Britain, which profited over £10,000 for the NZRU, turned their attention to rugby. Through Trumper's rugby connections they were aware of the considerable dissatisfaction amongst Sydney footballers over their tour allowances, and poor compensation for injuries and time off work.

While it is clear Giltinan and Trumper were on the look-out for financial opportunities, they also had a desire to aid the working-class footballers in their fight for a fair share of the income from the gate-takings at their matches (a NSW game in 1907 attracted over 52,000 to the SCG - a century later, that figure is still yet to repeated by the Waratahs).

Both men genuinely believed in the principles that they were fighting for - that the preference of the NSWRU to stay bound to the English RFU, and its strict abhorrence to paying footballers for time away from work for tours and injury, was totally unrealistic in working-class Australia.

Giltinan and Trumper had the foresight to see that the sympathy of largely working-class Sydney would side with the footballers, and the uprising had every chance of succeeding. Secret meetings were held with leading footballers, and their political and financial supporters, at Trumper's Sydney sports store - a business he operated in partnership will fellow test cricketer Hanson Carter, and then later with Giltinan.

In mid-1907 the rebel group made contact with similar-minded counterparts in New Zealand, and aided them in the preparation of the "All Golds" rugby league team, readying itself for the first professional football tour of Britain. They sent to the Kiwis a contract from one of Trumper's English cricket tours, which they adopted as a template for their tour agreement. Trumper and Giltinan also convinced the New Zealanders to include rugby union's star player, Dally Messenger, as a member of the team.

When the "All Golds" arrived in Sydney, their leader Albert Baskerville was at great pains to point out that his touring party was going to England under the same "share-and-share-alike" terms of Australian cricket sides, and that the footballers were no more professionals than the nation's cricketers had been.

Giltinan (secretary) and Trumper (treasurer) became the founding fathers of rugby league, the first professional football code in Australia, and oversaw the NSWRL's inaugural season in 1908.

Without their involvement and organisation, rugby league would not have been formed, and in time, pseudo-amateur Australian football or soccer would have met the need's of Sydney's working-class footballers.

As it was, rugby league quickly established itself, and Messenger became the star attraction of the sport, (a team mate in Eastern Suburbs 1911 premiership victory was future Australian test cricket captain Herbert Collins).

This article is based on Pioneers of Rugby League.

By the end of the winter of 1910, after the visit of the first British rugby league tourists, rugby league had usurped rugby union and Australian rules from controlling NSW and Queensland.

Many of cricket's traditions were quickly taken up by rugby league, the most notable being the establishment of a regular exchange of Ashes tours between Australia's Kangaroos and Great Britain's Lions.

The most prominent, though subtle, tribute to rugby league's cricket origins, lies in the now iconic and unique double-V on the Kangaroos' jersey - a design styled to follow the V-style neck-piping used on Australian cricket vests and sweaters.