TheProw.org.nz - Ngā Kōrero o Te Tau Ihu

New Zealand’s first game of rugby

The 1873 Nelson Rugby Football Club. The Nelson Provincial Museum, Print Collection, 290552
Click image to enlarge

The crowd of Nelsonians gathered at The Botanics one May day in 1870 had no idea that they were witnessing the birth of a New Zealand tradition, rugby..... 

The first recognised game of rugby played in New Zealand took place on Saturday, May 14, 1870 between a Nelson College side and the Nelson Football Club. A crowd of around 200, including “a fair sprinkling of ladies and a goodly number of the opposite sex,” gathered at The Botanics to watch a new version of football, brought to New Zealand by Charles Monro. ¹

The term football was used to cover many versions of a team game in which a ball was kicked. The move into rugby is said to have come when a student of Rugby School in England first picked up the ball and ran with it in 1823.² This crucial difference was adopted first by the school, and then universally, apparently because the school was the first to publish its rules, in 1845.³

Charles John Monro, 1930, [founder of Rugby Union in New Zealand], The Nelson Provincial Museum, Cooper-Sharp Collection, 223693/9
Click image to enlarge

Charles Monro, son of the then Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament, Sir David Monro, has been termed the “father of New Zealand rugby”.⁴ He played rugby as a student at Christ College, Finchley, England, and introduced it to the Nelson Football Club in January 1870. He suggested a match be played against Nelson College, whose headmaster, Rev. F.C. Simmons, was himself a former student of Rugby School. This led to the historic match four months later.⁵

Each team had 18 players, a number agreed by the captains before the match, made up of 10 forwards, three half-backs, three three-quarters and two fullbacks.⁶ The college team was decked out in tight-fitting shirts and blue caps, while the “town” team sported street clothes, having no particular uniform.⁷

The Colonist of May 17 reported the “football” match, describing attributes of the game that signalled its difference from the traditional versions of football. “Now some player runs with it (the ball, apparently oval) and a general scrimmage ensues: it is all shove, pull, rush and roll about in a confused mass till ‘down’ is cried, and away the ball goes again till perchance it gets in touch or caught.” Later in the report, readers were told “the ball is ‘touched down’ behind the goal.”⁸

The town team won the game two - nil and everyone went home, apparently unaware of the significance of the spectacle: the first game of rugby in New Zealand had just been played.

Nelson College Rugby team 1876, Nelson College
Click image to enlarge

But, while the 1870 game is the first recognised game of rugby in the country, there are indications in the 1909 Nelson College Register of a rugby-like game being played as early as 1860. At this time the college was in temporary premises in Manuka Street, just four years after its establishment.

Students were taught the new game by two Anglican clergymen in Nelson at the time, Robert Codrington and Henry Turton, both English public school old boys. Records of the match, by an old boy using the pen name “Scrum”, referring to “[players] down like ninepins” and “[the ball] over the bar” indicate a game of the sort played at Rugby at the time. The game did not become popular until a much later date,⁹ however, with the 1870 game played in Nelson being the first recognised game of rugby in New Zealand.

2008

Sources used in this story

Want to find out more about the New Zealand’s first game of rugby ? View Further Sources here.

Related Stories

Do you have a story about this subject? Find out how to add one here.