Clapham Rovers
Clapham Rovers will probably be known to most people outside Clapham as the answer to the pub quiz question “Who won the FA Cup in 1880”. Up to a few years ago the team was also known indirectly from the answer to two other questions “who is the youngest person to have played for England in an international?” and “who is the youngest person to have played in a Cup Final?” - the answer in both cases being James Prinsep of Clapham Rovers in 1879. I will come later to the circumstances in which his records were overthrown.
Football historians will be more familiar with Clapham Rovers, since they will know it as one of the leading teams of the 1870s, and will recognise the 1860s and 1870s as key decades in the evolution of the game as we know it today. Or to be more precise, the games, since those were the years which saw the creation of the codes for the two very different games, that which we call football, but is strictly association football or soccer, and rugby. (In this talk I will normally use the term football in its modern sense to cover soccer, but will occasionally use it as a generic term for both games – I hope without causing too much confusion.)
Clapham Rovers was founded in 1869 and folded during the First World War. I will set out their history so far as it is known over those forty five years, against the background of the games as they evolved in those years, but will deal in most detail with the glory years of the 1870s and some of the players of that period. But first I need to go back in time, to explain how and why the 1860s and 1870s saw the emergence of club competitive football, both types, played to rules we recognise today, even though much about the games has changed, especially at the top levels.
Football has been played since ancient times. In England, there are references to the game in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But it is misleading to call these games. They were violent knock-abouts between groups of youths, which we can call football only because they involved kicking a ball. The authorities often tried to ban them, since they were disorderly, dangerous, and interfered with what young men were expected to do, which was to practice their archery. To get to the origins of the modern games, we have to forget about the village and town knock-abouts, and go to a perhaps unlikely source, the early nineteenth century public schools. At these, football was a popular pastime for the boys; they organised the games themselves, and like popular football anywhere, played with only the loosest of rules. Essentially, they were large scrummages, in which your side aimed to get its ball past the posts at your opponents’ end. As well as kicking, handling was allowed; a player could catch the ball, but then had to kick it and not run with it. The big innovation of the 1820s came from Rugby, where running with the ball came to be allowed.
Gradually in the first half of the nineteenth century, the game as played in the schools became more formalised, and schools devised their own codes of rules. But while the rules had much in common, they did not provide a basis for playing elsewhere than the places where they were devised. As university education expanded, that became a source of frustration for undergraduates, since it tended to restrict players to their fellow old boys. One of the main issues in contention was handling. In 1848 at Cambridge, there was an acrimonious match between old boys of Eton and Rugby. A man who was there recalled “how Eton howled at the Rugby men for handling the ball.” The other issue was the rugby style of tackling. This included not just the full body tackle familiar in rugby today, but also hacking, in other words kicking your opponent’s shins – in really rough games, whether he had the ball or not.
A group of Cambridge students drew up rules which aimed to settle these issues. The 1848 Cambridge Rules had a strong influence on subsequent rules, but did nothing to bring about a consensus. Then in October 1863, representatives of the leading clubs in the London area decided that the time had come to unite the clubs under a national governing body. They founded the Football Association, and made a brave shot at devising rules which would merge together the kicking and handling games. The first draft of the rules allowed both running with the ball and hacking; but this proved too contentious, with some members calling it “uncivilised”. So the Association back-tracked and decided to allow the old practice of catching and taking a free kick, but to bar running with the ball and hacking. This led to a walk-out by the representative from Blackheath, who said that without hacking “you will do away with the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.”
After this, the rugby game continued independently, but within it the rights and wrongs of hacking became a matter of hot debate. In the end Richmond and Blackheath concluded that hacking should stop, and in 1871 took the initiative which led to the founding of the Rugby Football Union. Representatives of the leading rugby clubs met in a London restaurant. Only one leading club was missing; the representative of Wasps turned up at the wrong place on the wrong day. That is what Wasps say to this day – though others claim that he got the right day but went to the wrong place and by the time he discovered his mistake was too drunk to make it. Whatever the truth of that, the Secretary of Clapham Rovers, William Rowlinson, got to the right place, and subsequently Reginald Birkett of Clapham Rovers was elected to the RFU’s original committee.
Clapham Rovers had been founded two years previously, on 10 August 1869, at a meeting at the Alexandra Hotel. John Tayloe was elected Captain and Rowlinson Secretary and Treasurer. They rapidly arranged a programme of fixtures for the season, and their first match was played on the Common on 25 September, in front of a large number of spectators. It was against Wanderers, who were one of the top football teams of the day, and were captained by Charles Alcock, who was shortly to become secretary of the FA and is remembered as one the most important people in the development of the game. The Rovers won by one goal to nil.
This was just the start of a very successful first season. At football, the Rovers won 8, lost 1 and drew 2, while at rugby they won 9 and lost 2. The final event was on 2 April, an athletics match on the cricket field which was where Lillieshall Road is now. The Clapham Gazette commented that “a club which plays both codes of rules, and can claim such men as the brothers Tayloe and R Birkett amongst its Rugby rule payers, and A Nash, EA Field and Daly of the Association team, must be considered dangerous to any, even the most formidable, opponents.”
I think we can deduce from these results that the new team did not spring from nowhere, and that many of the players were well known in the London sporting arena. There was already a club called CCC Clapham, which had been founded in 1865 and which also had fixtures against Wanderers. John Tayloe was a member in 1868. It continued into the early 1870s and then disappeared. I have seen nothing to explain the relationship between the two clubs, and certainly nothing in the local press to hint of tensions or disagreements, but CCC played only football, not rugby, and the answer may simply be that a number of good players wanted a club which would play under both rules.
What do we know about the players who formed the new club? Since it did so well right from the start, one question which immediately arises is how far the members came from Clapham or how far the club gathered in good players from elsewhere. The censuses are some help in answering this. In the early years, the club was strongly local, but with a sprinkling of very good non-Clapham players; but at the end of the 1870s, the years of Cup Final glory, very few of the top players were local.
Among the founders were three Clapham families. There were three Tayloes, sons of a medical practitioner living at South Lodge on South Side. The two Field brothers were sons of a wine and spirit merchant living in the High Street. Charles Bryden’s family lived in one of the big houses in the Cedars Terraces. William Rowlinson, the first Secretary, was not a Clapham man by origin but was living in lodgings in the High Street. What all these men had in common was that their families were in the professional or City trading classes, and they themselves were pursuing similar careers – trainee lawyers, brokers, clerks to financial businesses. I have found very few players whose families were lower down the social scale, and even then, I cannot be certain I have identified them correctly in the Census. One of the early players may have been living in Wandsworth Road and working as a clerk to a railway company. One of the players the Clapham Gazette described as dangerous was A Nash, and I was very tempted to identify him with a young blacksmith living in North Street called Alfred Nash. But that it is unlikely in the social stratification of the 19th century, and when I found that the footballing Nash served on the Committee of the FA, I am afraid I had to send the blacksmith off for an early bath.
Of those who came from outside Clapham, the most important for the Rovers’ early successes were the Birketts – three brothers, Reginald, Louis and Perceval. They were sons of a distinguished surgeon, Professor John Birkett, and lived in the West End near Grosvenor Square. What brought them first to Clapham is not known. But Reginald, the oldest, was to become a hide broker in the City, and so did Charles Bryden. In 1871 both were junior clerks, and my guess is that is how the Birketts’ connection with Clapham Rovers came about. It was to play a significant part in the team’s success.
If we could be transported back to the 1870s, how far would we recognise the games as they are played now? The answer depends very much on which end of the 1870s our Tardis takes us to.
For football, at the beginning of the period, perhaps the first difference we would have noticed was that the goal consisted of two upright posts with a tape between them; solid crossbars appeared in the later 1870s and nets in the 1890s. Controlling the game, there were two people on the pitch and a third either on the pitch or on the touch line. The two on the pitch were umpires and the third man was the referee – he made decisions only when the umpires could not agree, hence his name. The umpires intervened only when appealed to, and even an obvious goal had to be the subject of an appeal, and until some time in the 1870s we would not have heard a whistle. Up to 1875, the teams would change ends at half time only if neither had scored, but would always change ends when a goal was scored. There were other developments – corner kicks came in the 1870s, throw-ins were one handed, and there were various changes in the offside rule.
But far more important than all this, the 1870s were the years of significant change in the style of the game, as it shifted from being strongly individualistic to a team activity. In the early period, a player with possession of the ball would try to keep it, and the most prized skill was dribbling. In the 1860s, there was little sense of position, or differentiation of function, and backs could take the ball as far forward as they were able to. The position of goal keeper was not regarded as specialist. There were no substitutes, so an injured player was often sent to keep goal. One of the first specialist goalkeepers was Reg Birkett. But by 1870, the defenders were expected to stay in place. Big changes took place in the forward game. At first, “dribbling was everything”, as Alcock put it, but as the decade went on, passing skills became more important, and passing ability and teamwork was a feature which differentiated top teams like Clapham from the rest.
Rugby games were also controlled by umpires and a referee, with decisions being given only after an appeal. There was also a major shift in the style of the game, even more so than with football. At the beginning of the period, internationals had twenty men on each side; the normal team size for club matches was fifteen, but that was only because few club pitches were large enough for teams of twenty. Of the fifteen, ten would be forwards, leaving only five for the backs. The forwards formed large scrums which spent long periods shoving each other; when the ball occasionally emerged there would be a burst of action by the backs. Because the large and tight scrums took a long time to break up, the back who had the ball had only to dodge the five backs on the other side to get to the try line. As a spectator sport, it was incredibly tedious.
Things improved from the mid-1870s; fifteens became the rule, and with other rule changes a faster and looser style of play developed. The forwards went down from ten to nine, scrums were looser and broke up quicker, while at the back, the three-quarters developed, both as defenders against the rush of the forwards, and as the players who would do the long brilliant runs. As with football, the top clubs began to work as teams, with passing becoming one of the more important skills.
Back to the Rovers, and the achievements of their first decade. In 1869-70, as we have seen they had 22 fixtures, half football and half rugby. Next season they played 14 at football and won 11. At rugby they played 15, won 7 outright and drew 6; but at that time a game in which only tries were scored counted as drawn, and the Rovers finished ahead on tries in four of the six draws. They had 85 members, and played in their colours of cerise and French grey. I am not clear where they played, and it may have been both on the Common and on the cricket filed. But it was about this time that they lost the use of the cricket field, developed for housing as Lillieshall and Macaulay Roads. Whether because of this or because of growing numbers, they moved their pitch to Bedford Hill, changing at the Bedford. They may have used a sports ground there, or they may have played on Tooting Bec Common. The Secretary was now Charles Bryden, succeeded two years later by Perceval Birkett, the middle in age of the three Birkett brothers.