English translation of ‘La peur de la peine: un compte anthropologique de la diffusion du rugby,’ Ethnologie Française, v.41, n. 4, Oct 2011

THE RUGBY PLAYER'S FEAR OF THE PENALTY: HISTORY AND SPORT DIFFUSION

Tony Collins International Centre for Sports History & Culture De Montfort University, UK

[Abstract: The importance of the penalty to is a reflection of its origins in the mid-Victorian English middle-classes. In general, the English leadership of rugby did not want it to ‘diffuse’ and fear of the penalty, both off and on the field, became one of the sport's defining characteristics. This paper argues that the term 'diffusion' is not sufficient to describe the process of expansion of a sport; the ways in which it is disseminated by its advocates is also crucial.

Résumé: L'importance de la peine de rugby à XV est un reflet de ses origines au milieu de l'époque victorienne anglaise classes moyennes. En général, les dirigeants du rugby anglais ne voulait pas qu'elle «diffuse» et la peur de la peine, à la fois hors et sur le terrain, est devenu l'une des caractéristiques définissant le sport. Cet article soutient que «diffusion» du terme ne suffit pas pour décrire le processus d'expansion d'un sport, les moyens par lesquels elle est diffusée par ses défenseurs est également crucial.

Mots-clés: Sport. Rugby. Diffusion. Dissemination. Rules.

Adresse personelle: 80 Pasture Lane, LS7 4QN, UK. Adresse institutionelle: Professor & Director, International Centre for Sports History & Culture, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK. Adresse email: [email protected]

Of all ball-based team sports, rugby union is unique in the importance of the penalty to the result of a game. For example, in the 2010 Six Nations tournament, penalty goals were the most common method of scoring points, comprising forty-five per cent of all points scored in the tournament. In the six rugby union world cup finals contested since the tournament began in 1987, forty-one penalty goals have been scored in contrast to just nine tries, four of which were scored in the inaugural final.

This predominance of the penalty sharply differentiates the sport from all other types of . In , the sport's closest cousin, the value and thus the importance of the penalty goal was reduced in 1897, just two years after the split in rugby that created the league and union codes. In American, Australian and , early offshoots from the original code of rules based on the game played at , the concept of the penalty goal does not exist. Only in soccer does the penalty play an important role in determining the result of a match, but this is due to the low-scoring nature of the sport, in which a single goal can determine the outcome, rather than the frequency with which the penalty goal itself is scored.

This is not merely a quirk of rugby union's scoring system. Many reformers have campaigned, and continue to campaign, for a reduction in the value of the penalty goal. In 1955 the former captain and president of the Union (RFU) Wavell Wakefield complained that 'there are too many penalty goals scored in most games' [Wakefield, 1955: 6]. The dissidents who formed the rugby league code had argued before the 1895 split for the primacy of -scoring over goal-kicking. Yet the rugby union authorities have steadfastly refused to reduce the value of the penalty. Even though a try in rugby union has been worth more points than a penalty goal since 1971, the importance of the penalty goal to the final result of a match has not diminished. ‘Despite the try value being increased from 3 to 4 to 5 points, the impact of penalty goals on the final result has hardly changed over the last 50 years,' explained a 2005 report by the International Rugby Board [IRB, 2005: 5].

This paper argues that the importance of the penalty to rugby union is not a mere technical feature but a reflection of the sport's internal culture. Rugby union was a creation of the mid-Victorian English middle-classes, who sought order and hierarchy in social relations. To maintain this hierarchy, the sport's leaders developed an elaborate code of behaviour and an extensive structure of sanction against those who transgressed. Fear of the penalty, both off and on the field, became one of rugby union's defining characteristics. For scholars of the expansion of sports, this development of rugby also suggests that the ways in which that sports are consciously disseminated by their officials and supporters are as important as general trends of diffusion.

The Penalty Goal, Professionalism and Structures of Sanction The introduction of the penalty - and subsequently the penalty goal - were part of the process by which the leadership of the RFU sought to control and restrict the influence of those they felt to be alien to the game. In the first decades of rugby’s history, when the game was confined to young men educated at university and British public schools, the control and regulation of matches attracted little discussion. Even after the formation of the RFU in 1871, matches were conducted according to the participants’ shared social background and appreciation of the purpose of the game. Disputes were resolved by discussions between opposing captains.

It was not until 1874 that the rules of the sport even referred to the control of a match. 'The captains of the respective sides shall be the sole arbiters of all disputes,' read the newly amended Law Six. [Royds, 1949: 30]. By the mid-1870s it had become the custom for each side to provide an umpire, who would be the first resort should a dispute over the rules occur. As in , from which the idea of the umpire had been borrowed, the umpire could only intervene if a player made a direct appeal to him about a breach of the rules. Until 1882, no sanctions were specified for an infraction of the rules. At Rugby School and some rugby clubs in the 1860s, it was the custom to allow the non-offending side a hack below the knee against a transgressor following an offence. The ban on in the RFU’s first set of rules seems to have led to the practice of a being formed following a breach of the rules, but again this was due to an unwritten but mutually understood shared code of behaviour [Collins, 2009: 76].

This system of regulation through informal codes broke in the 1880s, as the appeal of the game spread far beyond its original narrow constituency. The massive increase in the number of working class players in the game was acknowledged in 1880 by RFU secretary Arthur Guillemard, who pointed out that ‘the recent foundation of a large number of clubs in the North has resulted in the drafting into club fifteens a large proportion of tyros [neophytes], who may know how to drop and place kick, but are unlearned in the various points of the game’ [Guillemard, 1880: 58]. Although initially welcomed, the new-found popularity of the sport among the industrial proletariat soon came to be viewed with concern by leaders of the RFU. ‘It is an open question whether this interest has not been attained at the expense of our noble sport,’ pondered RFU secretary Rowland Hill in the Football Annual of 1882 [Hill, 1882: 21]. By the mid-1880s, there was a widespread fear that working-class participation was driving out the middle classes.

In response to these perceived dangers, the RFU began to shift control of matches out of the hands of the players. In 1881 it decreed that umpires should be neutral rather than representatives of the two teams. In 1885 a referee had to be appointed to a match with the mutual consent of both teams. The role of the referee at this time was mainly confined to arbitrating on disagreements between the two umpires, but, crucially, he could intervene in cases of violent play or players disputing the officials’ decisions. In 1889 the RFU gave the referee the power to send-off from the field any player disputing his decisions. Thus two of the great fears of the middle-class player - being subject to violence from those he believed to be socially inferior, and the questioning of his authority - were addressed.

As part of this new system of regulation, in 1882 the RFU amended the rules to allow a free kick to be awarded for offside. This initially took the form of a punt or a drop kick, and the rules explicitly stated that 'no goal could be scored from it'. The free kick penalty was gradually applied to other offences but it was only in 1886 that a place-kick could be taken as a penalty and a goal scored directly from it. In 1892 the rule was extended so that penalty kicks could be awarded for all infringements. The penalty goal was now written into the rules [Royds, op. cit.: 175].

The same fears that resulted in the playing code of the game was being rewritten were also manifested in the debate about payments to working-class players. Until 1886 the RFU had no rules relating to amateurism or professionalism. But as great crowds flocked to matches in the industrial north of England, it became an open secret in that leading working-class players received covert payments for playing. At its October 1886 general meeting, the RFU banned all forms of payment to players, with the explicit aim of halting the influence of the working-class player. Arthur Budd, a future president of the RFU, argued that professionalism would inevitably mean that the middle-class amateur would become subordinated to the working-class professional, as had happened in soccer, and called for 'no mercy but iron rigour' in order to 'throttle the hydra'. Harry Garnett, a leader of the club, declared that: 'if working men desired to play football, they should pay for it themselves'. [Collins, 1998: 50]

The new rules led to the suspension or expulsion of clubs and players that gave or received rewards for playing rugby. Leading clubs were suspended for periods of up to fourteen weeks for offering money or jobs to players. Players were put on trial by the RFU’s committees for violating the amateur code, such as receiving cash, testimonial gifts and, in one case, a wedding present from his club.

By 1890 what might be termed a ‘cold civil war’ had broken out between the the RFU leadership, committed to defending the middle-class Muscular Christian traditions of the sport, and the leadership of the clubs in the north, for whom rugby was becoming a form of mass commercial entertainment based on working-class players and spectators. Following the defeat of the northern clubs’ proposal to allow players to receive ‘broken- time payments’, compensation for time taken off from work to play the game in 1893, and faced with more draconian regulations being introduced, in August 1895 the leading northern clubs resigned from the RFU to form the Northern Union, which would evolve into rugby league.

Thus the introduction of the penalty goal on the field and the imposition of amateurism off it were twin components of the system of discipline and punishment introduced by the RFU to regulate and control the influence of working-class players on the game. This link between the introduction of the penalty and the perceived threat to the authority of the RFU was noted by Scottish journalist R.J. Phillips: ‘professionalism had already become a disturbing element, and irregularities on the field had increased. The penalty goal was an English repressive, and was intended as a corrective of prevalent abuses.' [Phillips, 1925: 71]

Principle before Popularity: problems of the diffusion model This history of opposition to mass popularity from rugby’s leaders illustrates the difficulties of using the term ‘diffusion’ as a useful explanatory framework to understand the expansion of the sport. Rugby’s spread beyond the initial narrow social circle of privately-educated British middle-class males was not a natural nor an organic process, as might be inferred from the word ‘diffusion’.

Rather, it involved several different stages of expansion and contraction, each stage being based on specific ideological reasons. Its development owed as much to conscious dissemination by its supporters as it did to diffusion. We can distinguish three different stages in the expansion of the sport, each of which was based on a different impulse and distinct aims.

1. The emulative impulse The appeal of rugby grew in the first place because of its close association with the Muscular Christian philosophy of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School. This was spurred both by the success of Thomas Hughes’ novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays published in 1857 and the endorsement of the methods of Rugby School by the 1864 Clarendon Commission report into the state of English public schools. This initial expansion was therefore very tightly linked to rugby’s close relationship with a newly emerging education philosophy. It led to the game being taken up by other public schools and to the formation of adult clubs by young men, in what might termed an emulative impulse, as part of their middle-class social and recreational world.

2. The evangelical impulse Its subsequent expansion into the working classes was initially largely based on the creation of clubs by churchmen and employers acting under an evangelical impulse. These clubs had a very overt social goal: to bring the ideals of Muscular Christianity to the industrial, urban masses and educate them in the spirit of fair play, gentlemanly conduct and teamwork. In doing this, these clubs hoped to surmount class divisions and, respectively, bring young men into the church or to encourage esprit de corps between factory workers and management. Again, the formation of these clubs was not the natural or spontaneous development implied by diffusion but the conscious work of middle-class reformers closely linked to the ideology of rugby - as was often the case with privately- educated clergymen - or highly supportive of it.

3. The entertainment impulse It was the next stage of development (although none of these stages were completely linear or separate) that most closely resembles the idea of diffusion. This was the creation of rugby clubs by pub landlords, other entrepreneurs and local groups of lower-class players. Due to national and county matches, and the popularity of cup competitions in some areas like , rugby’s increasing social significance as a focus of civic pride made it fashionable. Coupled with the growth in wages and working-class living standards from the 1870s, rugby appeared to be slipping out of the control of its middle- class leadership and becoming part of mass commercial working-class culture. We might say that this stage of development was driven by a view of rugby that saw the game primarily as a form of entertainment, rather than a form of moral education.

It was in this third stage that the expansion of rugby became problematic for its traditional leadership, leading to disputes over payments to players off the field and the control of the game on the field. Indeed it led to the RFU adopting a conscious strategy to reduce the popularity of rugby.

This can be seen in the early 1880s, at exactly the same time that the tighter regulations were being introduced on the field. In 1883, with knock-out cup competitions attracting five-figure crowds in the north of England, RFU secretary Rowland Hill argued against such tournaments on the grounds that ‘we again venture to enter our earnest protest against challenge cup competitions. Why are they continued? It is said that they aid materially in increasing an interest in the game. [Rugby] Football requires no such unhealthy stimulants' [Hill, 1883: 17].

Many of rugby’s leaders were disturbed by the rise mass spectator sport and wanted no part of it. By 1886, the rise of soccer in Lancashire, especially in the two rugby-strongholds of Liverpool and Manchester, was causing much concern in local rugby circles. But the Lancashire Rugby Union refused to do anything to counter this threat. In fact, some in rugby at this time welcomed the rise of professional soccer. ‘The loss of followers to the grand old game is regrettable,’ wrote an RFU supporter in the 1889 Football Annual, ‘yet looking at the present state of all we cannot but think that this possible loss is far preferable to legalising professionalism’ [An Old Player, 1889: 71].

It was this belief in ‘principle before popularity’ that animated the RFU leadership in their battle with the northern clubs over ‘broken-time payments’ to players in the 1890s, and its refusal to compromise resulted in the 1895 split. This desire to reverse the popularity of the sport was obvious to all, as a northern magazine pointed out in 1893 when discussing the possibility that the RFU would force a split in rugby: ‘it would have to sacrifice many fine exponents of the game doubtless, but it would not hesitate. It would lose a good many international games, but it would still not hesitate’ [Yorkshire Owl, 1893: 8]

The 1895 split cost the RFU over half its clubs and destroyed its competitiveness in international rugby for a generation. In 1895 there were 416 adult clubs in membership of the RFU. Of these, 147 were in Yorkshire and 51 in Lancashire, almost 48 per cent of the total. Ten years later RFU membership had collapsed to just 155, of which just five were in Yorkshire and fourteen in Lancashire. On the pitch, in the fifteen years following the split, England won just ten of forty-two matches against the other British nations.

The RFU continued its battle against the ‘diffusion’ of rugby in those areas where it still retained a cross-class appeal after the split. In the North East, the Durham rugby union in 1897 wanted to create a league competition to counteract the immense popularity of soccer clubs such as Sunderland and Newcastle United in the region. The RFU refused to sanction it. In 1902 the Northumberland union proposed the introduction of a national rugby cup competition to popularise the sport, but to no avail. In 1900 the Bristol and District rugby union told the RFU that if league competitions were not allowed, the ‘younger portion of players would go over to the association code’. The RFU refused to give permission. Even in Essex, future RFU vice-president Frank Potter-Irwin of the Ilford Wanderers club pleaded in 1904 for the RFU to ‘do something to popularise the game’, explaining that although the RFU numbered around 250 clubs nationally, ‘in his own district there were 247 association clubs’ [Collins, 2009: 44-5].

The RFU’s reluctance to ‘popularise’ the sport beyond its middle-class constituency was international in scope. It saw rugby as part of the cultural bond that linked the imperial family of British peoples, especially in the white dominions of the . In 1933 the RFU committee expressed the view that it ‘should confine its activities to the English- speaking peoples’, and in 1935 the RFU decided to stop accepting memberships from overseas rugby clubs, preferring instead to focus its attention on ‘the British Commonwealth of nations’ [Collins, 2009: 175]. This view was widespread among supporters of the game. Even in 1961 the rugby journalist Hylton Cleaver could declare that ‘the game of rugby began in this country and will remain here as part of our island rights; there is really nothing to be gained by dissipating these traditional principles in countries where the same attitude to the game is not respected, and in which we can really achieve no success on the field – and then get beaten’ [Cleaver, 1961: 94].

Indeed, one can speculate that a contributory factor to the breach with in 1931 was the fact that the French were perceived to be undermining the RFU’s model of the game. Not only was French rugby rife with what was known in Britain as ‘veiled professionalism’ but it no longer conformed to the stereotype that had been constructed by the British. The French had traditionally been the national ‘other’ against which British national masculinity had defined itself. The muscular and aggressive style of play that had become part of French rugby in the 1920s (and which was in reality no different from that of the Welsh or the English on occasions) could not be understood by the British, for whom French rugby had always been effeminate, emotional and dandified, other than in terms of cheating or bad sportsmanship. Once again, schism was the punishment for the transgressor.

Thus, far from seeking to ‘diffuse’ their sport among the widest number of people, at the very point at which the sport gained its highest levels of popularity the leadership of the game sought to restrict and reduce rugby’s popularity.

The Appeal of Exclusivity Rugby’s culture of control, discipline and punishment ran deep within the sport. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom asks his friend East about boys who don’t want to play rugby football at the school: ‘no School-house boy would cut [miss] the match. If he did, we’d soon cut [ostracise] him, I can tell you,’ comes the reply [Hughes, 1989: 101]. The use of fear of ostracism from the group became increasingly important as the sport sought to define itself. For the British middle classes, ostracism was, as Philip Trevor pointed out in his 1922 book Rugby Union Football, ‘the supreme penalty’ for those who refused to conform [Trevor, 1923: 27].

Nowhere was this attitude more openly seen than in the hostility of rugby union to those who had split from the RFU in 1895 to create rugby league. Following the schism, the RFU forbade all contact with rugby league, whether professional or amateur. It became an offence to sign a rugby league form, play with or against a rugby league player or ‘advocate or take steps to promote’ rugby league, regardless of whether any money was received. The punishment was expulsion from rugby union for life, both as a player and a member of a club. Every player had to be on his guard against inadvertently dealing with the league ‘devil’: ‘Ignorance of the rules is no defence’ warned a poster distributed to all clubs by the RFU in the 1920s. Such sanctions against players were unique in the history of world sport. Other sports that shared similarities never took comparable measures: for example, netball did not bar basketball players. Even at the height of the war between gridiron’s National Football League and the League in the mid-1960s, neither side sought to ban players from the opposing league. And, of course, the ban on playing rugby league harmed rugby union itself. Players who switched from union to league and did not succeed were banned from returning to union to resume their careers. Once again, the desire of its leaders to maintain strict control over rugby union undermined the ability of the sport to increase its appeal.

But for certain sections of the middle classes across the British Empire, rugby’s emphasis on obedience before authority and its ability to regulate who could and could not play were positive features. Thus in England, the RFU’s rules could be used to impose strict social segregation between the classes. In , rugby’s social restrictions dovetailed with racial segregation based on white supremacy - Danie Craven neatly captured the link between the two when he described rugby union’s attitude to rugby league as being ‘the strictest form of ’. In Wales, the arbitrary and inconsistent use of the amateur regulations allowed its middle-class leaders to control and discipline working-class players when it was felt to be expedient [Collins, 2009: 117].

These structures of sanction also shaped rugby’s ‘diffusion’ to France. Although much has been written about the impact of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war on the subsequent development of sport and physical recreation in France, little has been said about the impact of the Paris Commune. However, both of these events were crucial in shaping the mentality of the French upper-classes in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, in which the drive to re-establish national prestige and the need to police a rebellious working-class determined the shape of national politics. This was especially true of the French supporters of 'British sports', such as . For Coubertin, team sports offered both an opportunity to develop a physically-fit nation and also to bring the classes closer together without undermining the hierarchical nature of society.

The appeal of rugby to Frenchmen like Coubertin - who refereed the first French rugby championship final in 1892 - was two-fold. The sport provided both the rhetoric of a national martial mission and a framework for regulating the influence of the working class. It offered a philosophy of self-control and self-denial to the middle- and upper- classes and a structure for the external control and regulation of the working class. Indeed, rugby’s ideology remained central to French rugby, even after it had shed any traces of the Anglophilia that had originally marked its original French supporters and its initial tight links with the British expatriate community. A similar point can be made about the Afrikaner embrace of the sport.

The importance of rugby's overt mechanism of control also explains why the sport did not gain traction in Germany despite clubs being formed there in the early 1870s. Unlike France, there was no self-examination by the German elite and no calls to overhaul the educational system. Moreover, Germany did not have France's history of working-class insurgency; there had been no German Commune. This is not to suggest that rugby had a purely ideological function, but its strident self-belief in its moral superiority made it appealing to those who believed in sport’s wider social purpose. And this was also to be a major factor in the collusion of French rugby union’s leaders with the Vichy regime’s 1941 ban on rugby league. As Philip Dine has noted about French rugby during this period ‘sporting conservatism and political reaction would come together in a particularly potent combination’ [Dine, 2001: 91].

In this overtly ideological stance, rugby contrasted sharply with soccer. In contrast to rugby, legalised professionalism in 1885 and was organised around cup and league tournaments. This lack of overt ideology was soccer's strength outside of the British Empire. It seemed to offer a sport free of British middle-class regulation and exclusivity - it was a game for all men, regardless of social standing or status.

Conclusion The history of rugby union highlights that ‘diffusion’ is an insufficient term to describe how modern sports spread from their origins in the British public school system. As we have seen, the process is both much more complex and contradictory than the organic, linear growth process implied by ‘diffusion’. Sports spread in different ways for different reasons at different times. Central to this was the desire of a sport’s leadership to disseminate its game. In the nineteenth century world, when sport was often viewed as part of a moral, social or even political movement, the ‘subjective factor’ played a crucial role in the expansion or otherwise of particular sports. Of course, the intentions of those disseminating a sport were not always decisive. Social and cultural constraints could prevent the diffusion of a sport despite its advocates’ desire. And, conversely, some sports such as rugby could expand beyond the wishes of its leadership.

But sports could never be entirely free of the constraints placed upon them by their leaders. As rugby highlights in an especially angular way, the leadership of some sports did not want to ‘diffuse’ and indeed sought to resist popularity. The RFU sought to insulate the game from the growing influence of the working class on modern sport. It sought exclusivity and was prepared to sacrifice popularity. In doing so, rugby union erected a structure of discipline and punishment that allowed it to police its participants, penalise transgressors and provide a moral framework against which all could be measured. Fear of the penalty, on and off the pitch, became the most potent weapon in the ideological wars of rugby union’s leadership.

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