Women thrived in wartime

Brendan Gallagher begins a new series charting the history of the women’s game

- Brendan Gallagher

GIVEN that we don’t really know who invented rugby – and that the Webb Ellis story is essentially an agreed compromise – we have almost no chance of dating the start of women’s rugby.

What we do know, however, is that women enthusiasts, despite active discouragement from their menfolk for decades, have played a form of rugby much longer that you might imagine.

There are some reports of women being involved in – and then being banned from – annual Shrove Tuesday Football matches between villages in the Medieval ages when the rumbustious action was much closer to what we call rugby than what became soccer, and then in the 19th century we have the first confirmed women’s rugby matches or involvement in the game.

The first came in a noted series of eight football games played between Scotland and England women’s teams on a tour around Scotland and northern England in May and June 1881, but only recently has it come to light that the final two games were almost certainly played under Rugby Union laws.

Six matches into the series and the ladies pitched up at the Cattle Market Inn Athletic Grounds at Stanley in Liverpool on Saturday June 25 for the first of two fixtures there. The first was to kick off at 5pm that night and the second at 7.30pm on the Monday. Admission was 1 shilling, unusually expensive for the time, possibly to deter protesters who had caused the abandonment of two of the earlier games off football in Scotland.