At the George

If you are in Huddersfield on Sunday, you go to the George. For all that times have changed enormously since its textile heyday, Huddersfield retains many of the airs it began to wear halfway through the nineteenth century, when it prospered on the manufacture, design and colouring of woollen shawls and mantel cloths. Nothing is much more memorable of that period now than the buildings round St George's Square in the centre of the town, which still speak of Victorian confidence and growth. One side of the square is occupied by the colonnaded length of the railway station, which J. P. Pritchett designed on ambitiously Corinthian lines in 1847-8; and at right angles to it is another of his compositions, the George Hotel. Four storeys high, Late Classical from quoin to pediment, this might easily be mistaken, were it not for its name in huge gilded letters across the front, for some quite important hôtel de ville in Burgundy or the Dordogne. Its greatest significance is that a very English revolution was once proclaimed within its walls.

It is to the George that people go on Sunday if they feel like celebrating, or merely expanding, in the middle of the day. They can eat a three-course lunch, at a fixed price, in the pastel-shaded dining-room, where long mirrors are ranged along the walls and the deep windows are curtained heavily in chintz. The Trust House food seems often to be washed down not by traditional Yorkshire beers, but by beverages from Huddersfield's later experience: flasks of Mateus rosé, half bottles of sparkling French white, or even more trendy mineral water with, in this case, a patriotic emphasis on Ashbourne rather than Perrier. Middle-aged couples treat great-grandparents to this fare; youngish couples treat themselves and their children; still childless pairs make the most of each other while the opportunity remains. Occasionally, at a long table in the middle of the floor, a function is simultaneously held, a twenty-first birthday party or maybe an octogenarian event, and everybody in the room looks genuinely pleased while the flash-bulbs pop; including the young people who are waiting on and who are clad, both male and female, in a uniform black and white with a bow tie at the throat. The George at lunch-time on Sunday is as homely as one of Mr Forte's establishments can possibly be.

But the revolution, I ask one of the waitresses, after she has sweetly enquired if everything is to my satisfaction, sir; whereabouts did the revolution take place? She hasn't a clue, which is sad. But (and this is much more important) without being prompted, she goes to find out and comes back five minutes later with a delicious grin. 'It was in the Tudor Bar, sir,' she says.

Ah, the Tudor Bar, which Mr Forte's architects have done their best to render in a Home Counties stockbroker mode, full of dark beams and white plasterwork and spurious wooden dowels, and the sort of wrought-iron chandeliers that Errol Flynn used to swing from when he was Robin Hood. And in a not very conspicuous corner, where you would probably miss it unless you knew what you were looking for, a little monument to the revolutionary act. Three small bronze figures are mounted on a stainless-steel plate affixed to the wall. One figure, carrying an oval football, is about to pass it to another, but is already tackled by someone else. Below is the relevant inscription, engraved on the steel: 'In this Hotel, at an historic meeting on August 29th 1895, was founded the Northern Rugby Football Union, known since 1922 as the Rugby Football League.'

It may be thought exaggerated, quite out of proportion, to speak of a game and revolution in the same breath. This will almost certainly be the response of anyone who has never felt the powerful affiliation of a whole community with the group of players representing it in a team sport: for among the many divisions of humankind is that which separates those who enjoy various forms of athletic or other sporting activity, and those to whom these things are an unmitigated bore, even anathema. Yet it is at least a matter for argument that man at play down the ages has been as significant as man at war and man at work. The American historian Barbara Tuchman is one who has argued this, and gone so far as to suggest that, 'In human activity, the invention of the ball may be said to rank with the invention of the wheel.' But we do not need to invoke this judgment in order to see revolution in the meeting at the George in 1895. What happened that day in Huddersfield was, with smaller repercussions, as much of a social, economic and political insurrection as the resistance of half a dozen farmworkers at Tolpuddle, sixty-one years earlier, to a reduction in their wages. It, too, was fundamentally about artisans and labourers making ends meet.

The game which gave rise to the dispute, although the result of a popular evolution across centuries, had been systematically organised in the nineteenth century by the upper and middle classes, who played a similar role at approximately the same time in the development of golf, soccer, athletics and cricket. William Webb Ellis's famous handling of the football at Rugby School is supposed to have occurred in 1823, but it was not until 1871 that the Rugby Football Union was founded, to be followed within a few years by the formation of similar bodies in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. By then, rugby was no longer the sole preserve of the well-to-do, as it had originally been. It had become the people's game as well, most notably in South Wales and in the North of England, for reasons connected with the great industrialisation of these areas in the nineteenth century. 'Sport provided pleasure where work did not, and the more strenuous the physical labour the more strenuous the physical release it demanded.'

In time, the majority of rugby clubs in the North drew their playing strength from the mills, the foundries and the coal-mines of the region, and these footballers were not often from the salaried management: they were wage-earners of the rank and file. Such were the men who started to play rugby in Huddersfield in 1878, when the local team was formed.*

Though managers and people in trade from the outset appeared on its committee, folk from that class and age group generally enjoyed themselves in less robust ways than on a football field. Some of those belonging to the textile communities strung out along the Colne Valley of the West Riding gravitated with their wives and daughters to the Huddersfield Choral Society, which had been launched in 1836 and was by mid-century widely celebrated for its performances of oratorio. One step ahead of the artisans and labourers in organising their lives, these middling citizens who had an ear for music and a voice to match, found their own release from work by opening their lungs in harmony.

The five-day week was still two or three generations away and Saturday was no different from Monday, whether you were labouring on piece-work or in shifts. If you wanted to play football or otherwise pleasure yourself on the sixth day, you forfeited that part of your wage. There was the rub. Many of the finest rugby footballers in the land simply couldn't afford to. These were rules codified by men who could take time off from their properties, their businesses and professions whenever they had a mind to play games, to go fishing, to hunt fox, to shoot birds. But gradually a number of northern clubs sought to revise them, and it is likely that they were impelled by a desire to maintain their success on the field as much as by any considerations of equity off it. For the North had become the English stronghold of rugby.

The very first fixture between county sides was Lancashire versus Yorkshire, arranged up there the year before the RFU was formed. After only 4,000 people turned up at The Oval to watch England play Scotland in 1878, home internationals were removed to Manchester, where 'an unprecedented crowd' was overflowing the ground within a few years. When the ardent Welsh sought opponents who could match their own mettle in club matches, it was to the crack sides in the North that they looked most of all. The dominance of Northcountrymen, not only in English but in British rugby at this time, may be seen in the team selected to tour Australia and New Zealand in 1888, which was as follows:

BACKS, J. T. Haslam (Batley, Yorkshire and North), A. Paul (Swinton); THREE-QUARTERS, H. C. Speakman (Runcorn, Cheshire), H. Brooks (Edinburgh University, Durham), J. Anderton (Salford, North), A. E. Stoddart (Blackheath, Middlesex, England); HALF-BACKS, W. Bumby (Swinton, Lancashire), J. Nolan (Rochdale Hornets, Lancashire), W. Burnett (Hawick); FORWARDS, C. Mathers (Bramley, Yorkshire, North), S. Williams (Salford, Lancashire, North), T. Banks (Swinton, Lancashire), R. L. Seddon (Swinton, Lancashire, England), H. Eagles (Swinton, Lancashire, England), A. J. Stuart (Dewsbury, Yorkshire), W. H. Thomas (Cambridge University, Wales), J. P. Clowes (Halifax, Yorkshire), T. Kent (Salford, Lancashire, England), A. J. Penketh (Douglas, Isle of Man), R. Burnett (Hawick), A. J. Laing (Hawick).