Peterborough RUFC

Peterborough Rugby Club is an English rugby union team based in the city of Peterborough. The club runs two senior men's sides, an under-18 team, a senior ladies' team and under-18 girls' team and a full set of junior teams including under-16, 14 and 12 girls teams. The first XV currently plays in Regional 2 East Midlands – a level six league in the English rugby union system.

Three men who started their rugby at the club - Ron Jacobs, Mike Berridge and Harry Wells - went on to play for England. Other former players include internationals who have been capped by Scotland, Lithuania, Germany and Zimbabwe.

Numerous other internationals have played against the club, along with an Olympic sprint medallist, a British heavyweight boxing champion, several cricket internationals and even a Lord of the Realm.

Former club players include a chief constable, a ground-breaking scientist, the father-in-law of a soccer Premier League club's chairman, and a man who took over the running of Rudyard Kipling's country estate. A judge, and a man who he sentenced, even played alongside each other in the same team.

It is amazing how much life has changed in the hundred years since Peterborough Rugby Club was founded. At the time, the country was just a few months into its first ever Labour government and the concept of the NHS hadn’t even been considered. There were no fridges, no television (let alone internet), only one car between every 1,500 people and only one in every 35 homes had a telephone. Peterborough was still in Northamptonshire, the city's hospital was still in the building that is now the museum, weekly markets were held in what was later called Cathedral Square where the Guildhall housed the town council, and Fletton United soccer club had only adopted the name Peterborough a year earlier. The likes of Orton Longueville, Paston and Werrington were villages, well outside the city, whose population was around 35,500, just 16% of today’s figure.

Rugby has changed as much as society. Originally there were separate Saturday and Thursday teams, the latter for those rich playboys who didn’t need to work and people such as farmers and vicars who were not tied to ‘nine til five’ hours. Women and children did not play rugby. The club played on the Eastfield Road Showground, now the site of Peterborough Regional College, where there were no changing rooms and no bar in the pre-war years. Players would have to come back to a hotel just around the corner from where WH Smith now stands, to have a bath and meal after each game.

Rugby and football were born from the same roots but followed very different paths. While football became a business, dependant upon paying spectators, many decades ago, rugby insisted on being for players not spectators and being strictly amateur until the 1990s. That was how so many international players graced the pitches at the old Eastfield Road Showground and then Fengate, with no question of any appearance fee. They loved rugby and a match was a match, regardless of whether it was at Twickenham or on a cow field on the outskirts of a small market town on the Northamptonshire/Cambridgeshire border.

Peterborouh Rugby Club was launched on 25 February 1924, when city councillor Archie Farrow hosted a meeting of like-minded individuals, in his home, which approved a set of rules for a new club and elected a committee. Over the previous two years, young solicitor Arthur Mellows, who went on to become mayor of the city and have the school at Glinton named after him, had organised four matches to raise money for charity, two against King’s School and two against Stamford.

One of them was played in the garden of a vicarage on Eastfield Road and the players were mainly made up of ‘high society’ young men from the area. Amongst them was Leo Price, a teacher at Uppingham school who was capped four times by England, and Graham Doggart, later to become chairman of the Football Association only to die suddenly at the age of 66, while chairing the FA AGM at its Lancaster Gate HQ in 1963.

Club rugby’s piopularity peaked in the 1970s when Peterborough Rugby Club fielded five, sometimes even six, senior teams every Saturday, but women and children still did not play rugby.

Everything changed with the introduction of professionalism and league rugby in the 1990s. Some would say for the better of the sport, others to its detriment. Worcester Warriors were once in the same league as PRUFC, on their way to the Premiership and, ultimately, collapse.

Peterborough Rugby Club have been East Midlands champions four times, firstly under the captaincy of Selwyn Goss in 1978 and then again in 1985, 1989 and 2010.

The club has had its fair share of noteworthy players, none more so than Ron Jacobs, capped 29 times by England and later president of the RFU. Mike Berridge and Harry Wells also went on to play for England. Jon Phillips and Malcolm Foulkes-Arnold played hundreds of top-class matches, for Northampton Saints and Leicester Tigers respectively and Ray Williams went on to be Tournament Director of the Rugby World Cup in Wales in 1991.

And while they progressed to bigger and better things after playing in the red, gold and grey, other men with glittering histories came to the club. Mickey Grant was capped four times by Scotland and played over 150 games for Harlequins’ first XV before work brought him to Peterborough and he joined the club. Tim Smith had beaten the mighty New Zealand All Blacks while playing for the Midlands Counties West side in the early 1970s before he moved to Peterborough. Paul Simpson, capped three times by England, scored a couple of tries for the club’s Extra Fourths (effectively the club’s veterans’ team) as they beat Ampthill Fifths in the early 1990s.

The history of a community rugby club is not the story of capped internationals. It is the story of ‘ordinary folk’ who have had endless enjoyment, made lifelong friends and created treasured memories. It is about the fifth team player who couldn’t catch a ball to save his life, but was the life and soul of the party. It is about the retired old fella who spared a few hours a week to help with the pitch maintenance. It’s about the volunteer coaches, first-aiders and team managers who enable hundreds of people – young and old – to play and enjoy rugby. It’s about the 13 year-old girl who only came to the club because her parents made her, but found a new purpose in life and a new circle of friends.

Many business deals have been struck because of Peterborough Rugby Club, there have been marriages and there have been births.

The social side of Peterborough Rugby Club was once immense. In the late 1970s, there were ‘disco members’ who could attend the popular Friday evening disco nights but not vote on club matters. There were more of them than there are senior playing members today. For years there was a hugely popular ‘Christmas Revue’, invariably held in March, which allowed players to channel their inner thespian. Club parties would end up in the long-since-gone communal bath, both with and without clothes on. The tale of ‘Nick the Crocodile’ is part of club legend. And if anyone fancies attempting the club’s pickled egg eating record, it is believed to have stood, unchallenged, since 1976 – 20 eggs in 15 minutes 52 seconds.

Members of the club's ‘band of brothers’ not only shed blood, sweat and tears for the club, but also for king and country. More than a dozen paid the ultimate sacrifice to allow us to enjoy the freedoms that we take for granted. William Victor Hart was a real hero, the sort who inspired many a tale of gallantry in Boy’s Own magazine. After being awarded the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry’ at Dunkirk in 1940, he found himself isolated behind enemy lines in Tunisia two years later. By now promoted to the rank of major, he decided that he and his 30 men would make themselves as big a nuisance to the Germans as possible. They attacked supply wagons, halted a military convoy heading for the front by shooting at its tyres, sowed mines on the road in front of tanks and ambushed a lorry load of paratroopers, always disappearing before they could be captured. They lived on bread and eggs that they traded for their clothing with local Arabs, and then had to walk a hundred miles in searing heat to get back to safety.

The end of this, the club's 100th season, will see the publication of a very special book, chronicling the history of the ‘Club For All’. That ethos has been the one constant ever since the driving force behind the formation, Arthur Mellows said, in the first few months of the club, “The best man will always be chosen, be he coal-heaver, doctor or farmer, labourer or the labourer’s employer.”

Honours

 * Midlands 3 East (north v south) promotion play-off winners: 2003–04
 * Midlands 2 (east v west) promotion play-off winners: 2005–06
 * Midlands 2 East (South) champions: 2016–17