Hard men, tough times: RL's lost world revisited

Long before vitamin supplements and tanning salons the game was played by no-nonsense Yorkshiremen like Alf Burnell and Frank Wagstaff, who emerged from a world where street kick-abouts centred on a pig's bladder and rugby fans walked to games on cobbled streets in cloth cap and clogs.

This lost world has been captured in a book, No Sand Dunes in Featherstone*, a collection of memories from West Yorkshire players, coaches, fans, journalists and administrators.

Among the players remembering that golden age is Alf Burnell, a graduate of the Hunslet schools rugby league competition, who signed for the Parkside club after he served in submarines during the Second World War.

Mr Burnell, who went on to represent Great Britain, with whom he toured Australia in 1954, put his fearlessness on the field down to a tough life in the Royal Navy.

"When I started playing I found it easy. I think it was the four years in the submarine. All right, four or five times a day you would walk 100 yards, that was the maximum exercise you got. But it must have stood me in good stead being fit; you never got 'owt to eat.... as a half-back as well, a bit of cheek, a bit of flannel which I learnt in the Navy."

Frank Wagstaff, another Hunslet lad, worked as a miner during the war and appeared for Huddersfield, Keighley and Batley.

Hard work down the pit did him no harm when it came to playing such a brutal game.

"I worked down the pit all the time when I played. I was 14 (when I first went down the pit). During the war, I used to work every Saturday morning and play rugby in the afternoon. Day shifts started at six o'clock in the morning till two. It was pretty tough really."

Former Hull and Bradford player Bak Diabara recalled the drinking culture he encountered in his playing days from the Sixties and later. "I didn't socialise too much because, some of the lads, there were drinkers and then there were drinkers, and we had a few Welshmen in the team who could drink a bit.

"In those days I'd just got married and I couldn't afford to be stopping out till all hours. It wasn't just from the money aspect, it was that you didn't want to do it, you had to get up for work.

"There was a hell of a lot of that culture, a hell of a lot. But I'm not knocking it. I don't know what it is like now but there were some bloody drinkers about in them days."

Diabara recalls working alongside the fans and their reaction at work if he had a good game.

"It made your working week a lot more pleasant when you'd had a good game on the Sunday because for the remainder of the week you were the king of the factory."

Peter Fox, the oldest of the three famous brothers from Sharlston, recalled that his rugby education began at an early age – in a bar at Sharlston Working Men's Club, where he used to listen to rugby league greats and where his dislike of alcohol began.

"It terrorised me working behind the bar, because I hated it. But I was in there for eight to 10 years and I've been teetotal all my life. I've never drunk and you can imagine why. I saw people that drank in the club as a young lad."

The book includes the experience of players who travelled to West Yorkshire, including South African David Barends, whose chances back home were restricted by the apartheid regime.

Barends moved to Hemsworth in 1972 and fitted in straight away, partly thanks to his father-in-law. "My father-in-law was a gentleman who never looked at race. He looked at people about ability. I became virtually his son. He loved rugby league, he loved coming to the games."

The book is the result of a three-year oral history project at Huddersfield University called Up and Under, managed by Dr Rob Light, a lifelong rugby league fan.

Players and coaches who are featured include Ikram Butt, Trevor Foster, John Atkinson, Bev Risman, Karl Harrison, Maurice Bamford, Mick Sullivan, Tommy Smales, Garfield Owen, Ken Senior, Mick Morgan and Carl Gibson.

They reveal how they first encountered rugby league and developed their passion for the tough, uncompromising game and the role it played in West Yorkshire communities where heavy industry, such as mining and textiles, still dominated the urban landscape.

Dr Light, a Leeds fan who conducted most of the interviews himself, said the game was the perfect subject for oral history.

"One of the things that is distinctive about RL is that the links between communities and the sport extend from the grass roots level through to the top professional level.

"Things have changed more recently, with full-time professionalism, but until the late 1980s or early 90s, all the players worked outside the game and I think that that reinforced this bond between players and community."

* The title was inspired by an anecdote from Featherstone–born player Mick Morgan, who became a Wakefield Trinity star. Reminiscing about training he recalls a book about an Australian athlete who used to run up and down sand dunes in Queensland. "Well, there were no sand dunes in Featherstone, so we used to run to Sharlston pit and run up and down the steps".