SACSRUGBY

Rugby is the name of a place. Get out an atlas and look it up – in the mid-lands of England, as near to the centre of the country as possible. The game is named after the place.

In Rugby there is a school – Rugby School.

Rugby School really gave its name to the game, and the game has nothing to do with breaking the rules of soccer, as some people believe William Webb Ellis did in 1823. There was no game called soccer at the time.

But people played football – many kinds of football. They had been doing so for centuries, and each game would have it’s own variations which depended on those organising the game.

There were various kinds of football played at different schools in England – Winchester, Eton, which had two games, malborough, Charterhouse and rugby, for example.

A type of football was, according to the records, first played at the Diocesan College (Bishops) in Rondebosch. It was a local variation of the Wincester game for the game was introduced by the principle of Bishops, George Ogilvie, whose nickname was Gog. The game was referred to as the Wincester game or Gog’s game or Gogball.

That is the game that was played in the Cape for well over a decade. In 1909 Sir Henry Juta of SACS recalled the game they had played: “It might interest some to know what the kind of football was that we played and which the two rival colleges continued to play for some years after the Rugby Union game had obtained a hold in the Peninsula. Whether it is the Wincester or Worcester game, I know not, but the principle was that a player was not allowed to touch the ball with his hands unless he caught it after it had touched one of his opponents and before it reached the ground. If so caught, there was the choice either of taking a free kick or of running with the ball. The latter was ground in soccer.

The goal posts were placed as in the Rugby Union game, but there was no cross bar, and a goal was scored whenever the ball passed between the posts and over the a line drawn in between them. The game began with a scrum, but, when the ball found touch, the two sides, saving a few, formed two single lines, shoulder to shoulder, and it was a push when the ball was thrown in.

Shouldering was a great feature, but the finesse of the game was in dribbling. In spite of the comparative simplicity of the game as compared to Rugby Union, experience was that it was quite dangerous.”

Canon Ogilvie initially forbade Bishops to play rugby as it was too dangerous. At the time cricket was the great game of the Empire. Football was played when the weather was too bad for cricket, and tended to be a pick-up affair whitin a school or regiment, or, later, within a club.

There is a story that Bishops first played the South African College in 1862, but I have not been able to confirm it. The earliest match I have found was in 1873, a match which SACS won.

In 1863 the Football Association was formed in England, the birth of soccer. In 1871 a football union was formed, which decided to adopt the rules of Rugby School, because many players found the Association’s game too sissy. That year the Rugby Football Union was formed. But in South Africa they kept  on with Gog’s Game.

The first club was formed in South Africa in 1875 – Hamiltons, to be followed by Villagers, both called Football Clubs, because the Rugby Rules were still not being played in South Africa.

The men who got rugby introduced were WH Milton and Billy Simkins. Joey Milton came to South Africa as CJ Rhodes’s private secretary and was later administrator of Rhodesia as Sir William Milton, after whom a famous school was named. He had played rugby for England, as did two of his sons later. (When Jumbo Milton was chosen for England at the age of 18, he became the first son of an international to play international rugby.

Milton joined Villagers while Billy Simkins was at Hamiltons. They gradually persuaded the clubs to use the rugby game and eventually adopt it altogether. Villagers agreed to play Rugby Union in 1879.

The man who finally persuaded SACS to change was Jack Heyneman, later the “benevolently autocratic” president of the SA Rugby Football Board.

By 1883 the rugby game was well entrenched and by the Western province RFU was founded, chiefly to standardise the rules/laws of the game in the area and to organise competition.

Standardisation of the rules, later called laws, and the need for competition led to the formation in 1889 of the South African Rugby Football Board. This came about because of the confusion about the laws when Kimberly brought a side to Cape Town. The SARFB was founded in Kimberly and it’s first president was a Kimberleyite, Percy Ross frames. He was president for only a short time. After him all the presidents, till unification of rugby in 1992, were resident in the Western Province, three of them South African College men.

The most fertile ground for rugby football to grow in was where there was a conglomeration of physically active young men, especially when they lacked the allure of females. This is why it developed so much at schools, universities and mines and in army regiments. Those were the main carriers of the game in South Africa.

Mines were vital to the development of South Africa, and they were the reason for rugby’s strength in Kimberly, where Griqualand west were the first holders of the Currie Cup, and then up on the Witwaterrand.

The game caught on rapidly and found a special place in the people of Dutch decent. But not only amongst them. The Moslems of the Cape, called Malays, became passionate about the game and in 1888 formed the Western province Coloured Rugby Union, the second oldest rugby union in South Africa. The Xhosa took to rugby, not soccer. There are clubs in the eastern Cape well over a hundred years old, for many of the great educational establishments of the Eastern Cape encouraged rugby – Lovedale, Healdtown, Newell, St matthew’s. Fort hare and Welsh High.

From the start South African rugby was competitive – played for league points. This happened at club level and then, after 1891 when the first British side toured and brought with it the Currie Cup, at provincial level.

-Paul Dobson