Linda Kitson's first awareness of something called rugby league was in the early 1950s, when she was little more than a toddler. She lived in Gibbet Street, Halifax and remembers the sound of supporters pouring out of Thrum Hall, the home of the town's team for 112 years, until it became an Asda store.

"On Saturday afternoons me and my sister would hear the noise of men leaving the match. It was like a rumbling. Many of them wore clogs because they worked Saturday mornings and went straight to the game from work. The sound of clogs and their chattering got louder as they neared our house and we'd rush out to sit on the step to watch and listen. There were waves of men, thousands of them, streaming down Gibbet Street. We wanted to know who'd won."

Linda was about seven when she went to her first match. Her curiosity had increased because one of the players lodged in the back-to-back behind hers. He stood out in another way.

"What we found most unusual about him was that he had different coloured skin to us. He was black and we'd never seen anyone of that colour before. The children round about would pile out and watch for him to come home from work. He was a painter and decorator by trade, but we also found out that he was a really fast winger in the rugby team."

His name was Johnny Freeman. He'd played rugby union for Cardiff and in 1954 joined the list of those condemned as traitors by the union code when he moved north to play professional rugby league.

In the 1956-57 season he scored 48 tries for Halifax, still a club record. Treacherous to some, but a hero to kids in his adopted neighbourhood.

They couldn't afford to pay to see an entire game, but ten minutes into the second half, youngsters, pensioners and anyone else without money were allowed in for free.

"We always asked Johnny to save his tries until we got there," said Linda, "and he told us he would. It always seemed like he did. He got me hooked on rugby league and I've been following Halifax ever since."

At that time spectator sports dominated escapism from the post-war drabness of life. When Halifax and Warrington replayed the 1954 Challenge Cup final at Odsal Stadium, Bradford, the official attendance was 102,569, but after a gate was knocked down, possibly 120,000 were there, with all the blood-chilling potential for disaster. Many more never got near the ground and pleaded with householders to let them listen to the match on the wireless.

Ken Dean played stand-off for Halifax and will never forget emerging from the dressing room and looking down on the heaving Odsal amphitheatre. "It took your breath away. Unbelievable. I've never seen such a crowd. But as soon as you got going you forgot about it." A normal game then? "If you did owt wrong you could still hear the boos."

Dean and Linda Kitson are among those who have been interviewed for "Up And Under", an oral history project which celebrates rugby league's social and cultural past in West Yorkshire through the memories of players, referees, coaches, fans, sportswriters, club officials, and administrators.

It's based, fittingly, at the University of Huddersfield, just down the road from the George Hotel where the game was born on 29 August, 1895.

The breakaway by 22 northern clubs from the Rugby Football Union reflected the gulf between the amateur game's middle-class rulers in the south and those who played in the industrial areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire and wanted compensating for losing wages when they took time off work.

Not until a century later did rugby union also turn professional, by which time the rival code was on the brink of another revolution – the launch of Super League – which still rankles with some of rugby league's own traditionalists.

To embrace the new image, Linda and Ken's team, known to its followers
simply as "Fax", became Halifax Blue Sox (if only to American-influenced marketeers), but amid the club's subsequent decline, at least its original name has been restored.

No such rethink over at Bradford, which means that a friend of mine won't be returning to Odsal any time soon. For him Super League is a betrayal of the game and club he supported for 30 years. Bad enough that it became a mainly summer sport packaged with razzmatazz. The greatest sin for him was that Bradford Northern was rebranded the Bradford Bulls. He hasn't been since.

Others share his sense of lost heritage, including Peter Fox, a former championship-winning coach with the club. In his contribution to the Huddersfield project he recalls how as a boy he would take down the rugby league results from the radio for his father, an ex-professional player who became steward of Sharlston Workingmen's Club.