by Tony Collins

The modern sporting scenario of players travelling across the globe in the lure of reward is not a new phenomenon.

For over a century the richer clubs of English rugby league have recruited players from beyond its home counties in the north of England.

Lacking the penetration of soccer domestically, yet still needing to provide appeal to patrons, English rugby league has looked to Australians and New Zealanders to bring in that wider (or worldly) appeal.

Even before the 1895 split, hundreds of Welsh rugby union players went 'north' to benefit financially from their rugby skills.

Rugby league was not unique, thousands of Scottish soccer players took their talents to England to earn greater rewards than they could gain at home.

The major difference with rugby league is that from 1908, when the first Australian rugby league touring side arrived in Britain, over 1,500 Australians have played for English clubs. Many of their exploits have been recorded in British journalist Dave Hadfield's 1992 book Playing Away.

Australian players have helped to shape and define the culture of English rugby league. Some have also returned home and altered the face of Australian rugby league with what they had learned. More importantly, these player exchanges have forever linked the working class societies of NSW and Queensland with Yorkshire and Lancashire.

1907-1937: Pioneers

Of the 1907 "All Golds" from New Zealand, six went on to play for British clubs, including Lance Todd, whose name lives on in the trophy for the Wembley Challenge Cup Final player of the match. When the first Kangaroos arrived from Australia the following year, ten, or almost a third of the tour party, went on to play in English club football.

The great Huddersfield 'team of empire talents' which won 12 out of a possible 16 trophies between 1911 and 1915 period had two Australians. One was them Albert Rosenfeld who scored what was thought to be a never-to-be-beaten record of 78 tries in a season in 1912 - in 1914 he scored 80 tries. Oldham signed three of the first Kangaroos who helped them to two rugby league championships in 1910 and 1911.

By 1912 five English clubs were captained by an Australian or New Zealander. The Hull side which won the 1914 Challenge Cup had Australia's Jimmy Devereux and Steve Darmody directing the side.

In the six years between the initial Australian tour and the outbreak of World War One, only two sides without an Australian in a key position won the RL championship. One of those was Wigan - they were built around New Zealanders and Welshmen.

Such was the strength of the Australian and New Zealand presence in the British game that a combined Australia / New Zealand 'Colonial' team thrashed the returning British tourists 31-15 in September 1910.

The Yorkshire Post estimated that there were at least 20 'Colonial' players playing in England. Unsurprisingly, the fledgling Australian and New Zealand rugby leagues were not pleased with the loss of some of their best players and the first restrictions on player transfers between the hemispheres was soon implemented.

However, by 1927 the British clubs' desire to boost their attendances through antipodean glamour proved too strong and they forced the removal of the restrictions on international transfers. This marked the beginning of a new wave of imports led by Ernest Mills and Ray Markham at Huddersfield, Vic Hey, Eric Harris and Jeff Moores at Leeds, Hector Gee at Wigan and Bill Shankland at Warrington. Many more would light up the football fields of northern England in the 1930s.

Without so many of its best players, Australia and New Zealand continued to be dominated in the Test arena by Britain - it seemed unlikely they could ever be beaten in a Test series.

Once signed to an English club, a player's contractual obligations and the difficulty of international travel meant that they were no longer eligible for international selection.

This meant that Eric Harris, the 'Toowoomba Ghost', a truly great winger who played for Leeds from 1930 to 1940, never had the chance to play for his country. Indeed, it would have been quite possible to select a formidable Australian test side from those playing for English clubs in the 1930s.

1945-1983: Reversal of Fortunes

In 1937 the transfer ban was reinstated, however it lapsed in the midst of WW2 and was not raised again until early 1946 when New Zealand complained that Wigan had breached the agreement by signing the Ponsonby winger Brian Nordgren.

By the 1947-48 season the ban was renewed, but by then the English clubs had taken their pick of the Antipodean talent from the far poorer Brisbane and Sydney clubs. A new golden age for overseas players helped raise the British game to even greater heights, among them being Brian Bevan, Harry Bath, Arthur Clues, Lionel Cooper, Pat Devery, and Johnny Hunter.

Workington Town came within a breath of securing Clive Churchill before the shutters came down - Churchill had already agreed to terms but couldn't beat the ban.

The English didn't give up on importing more players - they soon turned their attention to rugby union players from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The local RL players soon complained that Union players were getting their contracts and by 1951 it was agreed that all overseas signings, whether from league or union, had to be sanctioned by the player's domestic rugby league authorities.

Bevan became the most prolific try-scorer ever, with 796. Hunter, Devery and especially Lionel Cooper became the crucial triumvirate in Huddersfield's success of the early 1950s. Arthur Clues and a complete three-quarter line of fellow Australians raised Leeds back to the heights they had conquered under their previous generation of imports. The Australians of this era became identified with the huge boom in post-war rugby league attendances.

Unappreciated at the time, the British game would soon pay a very heavy price for the influx of Australians.

When these players returned to Australia in the late 1950s they took back new approaches to the game. Future Australian coach Harry Bath left Warrington to play for St George in 1957 and was shocked at the poor skills and bash and barge tactics of his new team mates.

Much of the success of St George's record breaking eleven-premierships between 1956 and 1966 was due to the influence of British playing methods learned by Bath and captain-coach Ken Kearney, who played for Leeds between 1948 and 1952.

The highly organised and brutally effective defence of St George was based on the straight defensive line which many British sides employed at that time. By the mid-1960s these methods had helped to raise the Australian game to the level of the traditionally dominant British - rugby league's international balance of power was perceptibly shifting towards Australia.

The 1963 Kangaroo tourists demolished the British, scoring an unprecedented fifty points in the 2nd Test match at Swinton. Off the field, another major change had an immediate impact - Leagues Clubs in NSW were allowed to operate poker machines opening up extensive sources of revenue for clubs.

It meant with or without an International transfer ban, the Sydney clubs could financially match it with their English counterparts. A steady stream of British players, starting with Barrow's Test centre Phil Jackson in 1960, began to arrive in Australia. In 1963 Derek Hallas moved from Leeds to Parramatta and, over the next decade and a half a series of leading British players made their way down under. The football boot was now firmly on the other foot.

If the Australian game had suffered in the past because of its talents being siphoned by British clubs, the reverse was now true. Britain lost almost an entire test team to Sydney clubs in the 1960s and 1970s. Dick Huddart to St George, Dave Bolton to Balmain, Malcolm Reilly and Phil Lowe to Manly, Roger Millward, Cliff Watson and Tommy Bishop to Cronulla and John Gray to North Sydney were some of the players who became league stars in both hemispheres.

British league was becoming seriously weakened at international level and the historic Kangaroo tour of 1982 highlighted just how far the domestic game had fallen behind Australia. Seeking to learn from Australians as much as possible the RFL called for an end to the transfer ban. Consequently, in September 1983, all restrictions on international transfers were lifted... and the floodgates opened.

1984-1995: Aussies and Kiwis Everywhere

In the following ten years, 757 Australian players came to play for British clubs. In the first two seasons clubs were free to sign as many players as they wanted: Halifax owner David Brook took this at face value and signed 13 Australians. This led to a situation in early 1985 when Halifax played Leeds and fielded ten Australian players while Leeds fielded five, with another as a substitute.

Many of those that played, often on short-term contracts, became local icons, including Mal Meninga at St Helens, Peter Sterling at Hull, Brett Kenny and John Ferguson at Wigan. Wally Lewis played ten games for Wakefield Trinity.

In an attempt to nip in the bud the growing reliance of some British clubs on their imports, not to mention their increasing financial burden, the RFL introduced a quota of five Australians per club in 1985, reducing it to four in 1986 and three in 1987.

Australian rugby league had soon come to represent 'a new civilisation'. A minor industry sprang up importing Australian rugby league videos, books, magazines and playing kit. Kangaroo jerseys were worn by British supporters in the same way that Brazil shirts are worn today by soccer fans.

Ironically, it was New Zealanders who were far more prominent in winning English club sides and it was they who provided the backbone for Wigan's long dominance of the game from the late 1980s.

The telling change though was predicted by Parramatta coach Jack Gibson who suggested that British clubs should recruit Australian coaches rather than players.

This began to happen in the late 1980s, with John Monie being the most prominent, along with Chris Anderson at Halifax and Brian Smith at Hull. It was Monie who built the side which won both the Championship and the Challenge Cup for seven consecutive seasons. He was the most successful of the 24 Australian coaches who moved to the British game in the late eighties and early nineties. In hindsight, it may well be the case that it is the importation of Australian coaches rather than players which has contributed more to the changing face of British rugby league over the past 15 years.

From being the dominant power in world rugby league, the British have not won an Ashes test series since 1970. The decline in competitiveness of the British national side has led to the New South Wales versus Queensland 'State of Origin' series becoming the pinnacle of the sport internationally and, arguably, to a growth of insularity in the Australian game.

Nowhere was the decline in the strength of British rugby league so clear than in its utilisation merely as a bargaining chip by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation against the Australian Rugby League in 1995.

Finding a Home

For many Australian players during the 20th century, playing in the north of England saw the strands of national, local and self-identity become inextricably interwoven - they made it their home.

Many settled in the towns that had welcomed and made them a focus for civic pride. Those who chose to stay slipped easily into the culture of the north of England. Albert Rosenfeld settled in Huddersfield until he died in 1970, working for most of his life as a dustman. Arthur Clues too stayed on in Leeds and Brian Bevan has a statue erected to his memory in Warrington.

No published biography of an Australian player who spent time with a British club is without comment about those who watched them play. Ken Thornett, who played for Leeds in the early 1960s, encouraged fellow players to get out and meet them. Even players who, like Brett Kenny, had little liking for the British way of life, praised the British supporters. Rex Mossop's comments about Leigh in the 1950s are also representative of the view of the players of the 1980s: "I loved these loyal supporters, the way they'd cheer and sing at matches and shout you a pint in their cosy, friendly pubs. They made you feel part of a community."

A similar observation was made in 1990 by Australian journalist Adrian MacGregor: To east coast Australians, Yorkshire and Lancashire towns are more relevant to their education than the Tower of London. England and Australia have cricket in common but nobody pretends that singular game, by its very nature, possesses the camaraderie of rugby league.

It may sound naive to refer to an international brotherhood of rugby league, yet hundreds of Australians have come to England to play, many to stay. I found that, in the North, to be Australian was to be welcomed, to be an Australian on the rugby league trail ensured a hospitality bred of an intangible bond.

Although the wheels of commercialism and the lure of hard cash transported Australian players to Britain, it was the culture of the game which made them feel part of a community.

Rugby league, forged in opposition to the social exclusiveness of rugby union and bolstered by its own self-image as "the working man's game", embodies some of these common elements of British and Australian working-class culture.

It was this that enabled British rugby league to welcome Australian players and, in doing so, to act as a bridge linking the sun-kissed beach of Bondi with the dark satanic mills of Batley.

Full version published in
Sporting Traditions, Volume 16 Number 2, May 2000