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Rugby’s first lady
The story of Emily Valentine, so well told by John Birch who
runs Scrumqueens.com alongside me, is one of the earliest
documented records of any woman playing rugby at any level.
While there are some records of attempts for social games to be
played before this, there is nothing definitive, and his research
produced a remarkable tale that has gained global interest.
The story began in the 1880s at the Portora Royal School
in Enniskillen, Ireland. The school had a wealth of famous
alumni with former students going on to have high-profile
careers in football, cricket, athletics and the arts. Playwrights
Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett both attended the school.
But it’s the tale of a ten-year-old girl that entered women’s
rugby folklore.
The school was going through a particularly difficult period
in the 1880s after the departure of a headteacher who took
many pupils with him to a new school and a decision to stop
taking on boarders.
The arrival of new assistant headteacher William Valentine
in 1883 brought three new pupils who all loved the game of
rugby – his children William, John and Emily. They played
among themselves and with friends.
Although the school didn’t have an official team, intra-
school matches were played every Saturday and matches against
Enniskillen RFC were recorded.
The discovery of Emily’s journals revealed that one day in
1887, the boys were playing a match and they were short of
players, summoning their sister to come and join them on the
field. Her memoirs vividly recall the moment.At last, my chance came. I got the ball. I can still feel the
damp leather and the smell of it and see the tag of lacing
at the opening. I grasped it and ran dodging, darting,
but I was so keen to score that try that I did not pass it,
perhaps when I should.
I still raced on, I could see the boy coming towards
me; I dodged, yes I could and breathless, with my heart
thumping, my knees shaking a bit, I ran. Yes, I had done
it; one last spurt and I touched down, right on the line. I
had scored my try.
I lay flat on my face, for a moment everything went
black. I scrambled up, gave a hasty rub down to my knees.
A ragged cheer went up from the spectators. I grinned at
my brothers. It was all I had hoped for.
Her story is remarkable, not just because its history has been
preserved and was told so many years later for the first time,
but also because it would be another 100 years before Ireland’s
first women’s rugby club was formed.
It’s unlikely that what Emily Valentine did at the time was
unique. There were probably plenty of other girls who picked
up the ball and ran with it or got involved informally. But hers
remains the earliest recorded written story.
We know, thanks to archive newspaper reports, that a
version of women’s football was being played in England in
the 1870s and 1880s, but it is not entirely clear whether it
was football or rugby, with write-ups describing the scores
invariably as goals or touchdowns. Furse’s PhD also points to
research from Dr Victoria Dawson indicating that in Hull, also
in 1887, two women’s teams played against each other but the
crowds were not amused and invaded the pitch.
It’s clear now that the women who did play rugby in the
1800s likely did so either sporadically, anonymously or in the
face of misgivings from many around them. While Emily hadthe support of her brothers and loved her involvement, there
will likely have been many more women and girls desperate
to play but simply not allowed. Perhaps they played in secret.
Women were certainly playing sport at the time. Women
competed at Wimbledon from 1884, the first women’s cricket
clubs date back to the late 1880s and the 1900 Summer
Olympics in Paris introduced women’s events for the first time.
But rugby itself was only 60 years old as a sport when Emily
Valentine describes playing in her first match in 1887 and it
is likely that the earliest attempts of women to get involved in
such a physical sport would not have been encouraged.
Though the start of women’s involvement in other sports,
most notably football and cricket, faced similar challenges –
although by now cricket was being played by women regularly
and it was widely played in girls’ public schools by the early 20th
century – the contact and physical nature of rugby made the
idea of women playing even less acceptable, and press clippings
and coverage from the era show that attempts to get it up and
running were fiercely resisted.
While a young Emily Valentine was reflecting on the joy
of playing and scoring in her first rugby game in rural Ireland,
serious efforts around the same time were being made on the
other side of the world to get women’s rugby up and running
in a more formal way.
Though it would only be a couple of years before New
Zealand would become the first country in the world to give
women the right to vote in parliamentary elections in 1893,
attempts to empower women to play rugby – which had only
existed for 20 years in the country that would go on to dominate
the sport – faced significant opposition.
Dr Jennifer Curtin’s research, plus club histories from the
brilliant New Zealand Rugby Museum, describes the efforts of
another remarkable woman, Nita Webbe, to organise a women’s
team and an international tour in 1891.There is evidence that women in New Zealand were
attempting to play socially. A game had apparently been played
in Wellington in 1888 between a team from Wellington Girls’
High School and the Hallelujah Lasses Club, although it was
considered a one-off.
Webbe, just 26 years old, came up with a plan that can
only be described as radical given the era. She decided to get
30 women together, divide them into two teams of 15 each
and, after several weeks of training, tour the Australian
colonies before returning to play a series of matches around
New Zealand.
Inspired perhaps by other changes afoot in New Zealand,
where women’s suffrage was a powerful political issue and
women were seeking more rights across all aspects of life,
Webbe was taken with how popular rugby had already become
in just a few decades, particularly among women who made up
vast chunks of the crowds attending games all over the country.
She placed advertisements in several major newspapers
around the country to attract women to come and set up a
team in Auckland. The deal was that women could apply, with
parental consent, and if selected, Webbe would pay the players
ten shillings a week. Her advert said that players were to wear
gymnasium suits with a jersey, knickerbockers and short skirts,
and their hair was to be cut short.
Though there was interest from women to take up the offer,
her efforts were greeted with scorn in local media with the
consensus being that the game was far too rough and dangerous
for women.
TheAuckland Starran the following editorial after Webbe’s
advert appeared:
THE PROPOSED FEMALE FOOTBALL TEAM
We subscribe most heartily to the doctrine that every
sphere in which women are fitted to take their part shouldbe as freely open to them as to men, but there are some
things for which women are constitutionally unfitted, and
which are essentially unwomanly. A travelling football
team composed of girls appears to us to be of this character.
Moreover, making every allowance for vitiated tastes in
the popular craving for amusement, we cannot conceive of
either men or women who have sisters of their own being
attracted by such a spectacle, or encouraging a number
of girls to forsake womanly employment for the purpose
of entering upon a life of an itinerant footballer. It would
also be well for the parents of girls who think of engaging
in this enterprise to consider what will be their position
if the enterprise proves a financial failure, which we
sincerely hope and believe it will be. Have they obtained
substantial guarantees that they will be returned to their
homes, or are they liable to be left stranded – homeless and
penniless in some distant city? If any respectable girls are
determined to persist in this foolish enterprise, we strongly
advise them to make it an indispensable condition that
return tickets shall be placed in their possession before
leaving Auckland, so as to ensure them a safe passage
back to their homes when the venture has been proved a
financial failure, as it unquestionably will be if we rightly
gauge the taste of the New Zealand public in the matter
of amusement.
Webbe fired back immediately with a lengthy letter defending
her plan:
It is only quite recently that your paper announced that
an English team of lady cricketers were about to tour the
Australian colonies, yet not one word had you to say against
it. And now a team of lady footballers is projected here,
you charitably hope it will end in a financial disaster. The
football team are being taught by a regular trainer to play a
clever game without any of the roughness characteristic of
men’s play. Strict observance to the rules will be enforced,
and when they play in public, I am confident that the
verdict will be not only that there has been not the slightest
breach of propriety, but that a cleverer game has seldom
been seen here. If it is permissible for ladies to participate
in gymnastics, swimming matches, and cricket teams, is
it not equally permissible for ladies to play football! To
draw a line between them would be to make a distinction
without a difference.
There is evidence that Webbe managed to get her players
together – a newspaper in Poverty Bay wrote in June 1891 that
30 girls were training in Auckland – but the overall mission
never got off the ground. About a month later, newspapers
reported that the scheme had been abandoned with suggestions
that Webbe and her husband Frederick did not have the money
to carry out the plan.
But while that specific tour might not have gone ahead,
women’s rugby in New Zealand did start to put down real roots
in the years that followed.
