PENRYN owes the beginning of its Rugby, if long ago memories are to be trusted, to a watchmaker and a pig's bladder. The watchmaker came first .....

 

His name was John Marshall Thomas, and in 1872 he returned to Penryn from London, where he had served his time learning everything there was to be learned about clocks and watches, and set himself up as a jeweler.

 

While in London he had interested himself, in his spare time, in Rugby. He had played for Blackheath - and when he came back to Penryn he was intrigued to see, on the Town Quay, the young men of the borough kicking around a rag ball in a vaguely Rugby fashion. They were stone-cutters and bargemen and quay-porters - the name, in those days, for dockers - and John Marshall Thomas suggested that a better ball than a rag one would be an inflated pig's bladder. 'With something to protect it', he said. 'A covering?', they said. 'Yes', he said. 'To make it last longer'. So they decided upon canvas sail-cloth, a commodity readily at hand, and they blew through the stem of a broken clay pipe to inflate the bladder, and Rugby, on an organised basis in Penryn, was born.

 

That was in 1872, and the story was told many times by the late Mr. George Basher, who took it upon himself to research the early history of one of Cornwall's most notable clubs. 'Records of the early days', he scribbled in an old exercise book, 'are rather obscure. But what I have been able to write has been told to me by old players and officials, including my father, who was a keen member of the committee in the early years of this century'.

 

The Penryn club has reason to be grateful to Mr. Basher. Their own written records are sparse, but Mr. Basher saw, earlier than most, the value of spoken history and he recorded it with a deal of affection. He also saw (again more early than most) how closely inter-twined were the triumphs of Rugby football in Penryn with the pride of Penryn itself.

 

But what Mr. Basher, even, was never able to persuade himself of, was when Rugby football actually began in Penryn. Was it in 1872, when John Marshall Thomas returned (and who, incidentally, introduced the red and black hooped shirts of Blackheath to Penryn): or was it before that, when a team from the local Freeman's granite yard played a team from Sara's Foundry in a field near the Cross Keys Hotel?

 

No-one really knows, but it is surely enough to record that Penryn officially celebrated its centenary in 1972; that it is today the most senior of all Cornwall's  clubs; that it has maintained a reputation much to be envied; and that in a quite unique fashion it has upheld the strongest of bonds with the tiny town that gave it birth. In relatively modern times, for example, three of its players have been honoured with the town's Freedom; and if you watch the Penryn side today and things get excitable, the shout is never 'Penryn' but 'The Borough', as if there were no other borough in the length and breadth of the county. In such instinctive ways are the ties of town and club preserved.

 

The 'Borough', then, began its Rugby in the early 1870's, if not before, and by 1877 it was a side of excellence. John Marshall Thomas was its captain, and only one game was lost - that against Hayle - for the whole of the season. In the 1880's, too, there was no club side throughout Devon and Cornwall who could afford to take Penryn lightly. Through the seasons of 1885, 1886, 1887 and 1888 they stormed to being just about the best club side around; although, during that period, too, they had the unenviable distinction (according to Mr. Basher) of being involved in the shortest Rugby match ever played. It lasted precisely three minutes. 'The game took place', he wrote, 'on the Green Lane ground in January 1886, when Redruth came here. Redruth scored a try from the kick-off, it was disputed and fists began to fly. A free-for-all ensued. Play, however, was re-started, and Penryn scored. It was then that fists started to fly again, and play ended.

 

There were at that time some quite outstanding players in the Penryn side, not the least of them their full-back Billy Halls, who, as well as tackling with immense ferocity, kicked a prodigious length. In the late 1880's, a national weekly magazine, Answers, offered a £5 prize for the player who could kick a Rugby ball the farthest. The competition was open to the entire United Kingdom, and Billy Halls won it with a kick of 79 yards, 30 inches.

 

The late 1880's, however, were marked, in Penryn, with more significant happenings than that - more significant and more sad. A massive slump hit Cornish mining and the town's important granite industry, and many of Penryn's finest players - Billy Halls among them - emigrated.

 

'Those players who stayed at home', records Mr. Basher, 'carried on under the name of Green Albion, with Billy Pinch as captain. In 1892, Halls returned home and took over the captaincy. Another notable captain was George 'Mashie' Collins, and, then, A. G. Chapman came back from Taunton College, where he had become a very fine wing; he was soon to play for Cornwall - and he introduced the four-threequarter formation. He was dedicated to coaching as well, and Penryn began to recapture their former glory.

 

'Not that Rugby was as well organised then as it is now. On one occasion Camborne were due to play Penryn, and they were two short of a team. Coming through Ponsanooth in their Jersey car on the way to the match, they saw two French onion sellers, who were well known in Cornwall in those days (they used to come over from Brittany with strings of onions which Cornish housewives used to buy and hang in their pantries).

 

'The Camborne players stopped, and a bargain was struck. Camborne would buy all the onions if the two Frenchmen would play for them. Camborne did, the Frenchmen did, and Camborne won; and, the story goes, so enamoured of the game were the Frenchmen that they took it back to their own country and established it in their own town.

Mr. Basher's reminiscences are fascinating, and the sort of aural history that he so lovingly recorded gives, as little else could, the flavour- of the Rugby played in those times. What dreary minute book could convey it half as well? But there are times, of course, when individually recollected memories are at variance with one another. What, for example, was the state of Rugby in Penryn in the years leading up to the First World War? According to Mr. Basher, it was not good. 'In the 1911-12 season the club had a very lean time, and were on the point of packing up when the Falmouth club closed down. But Penryn were able to buy the Falmouth jerseys for £5 and, with the help of some of the Falmouth players, were able to carry on until the War'.

 

Mr. W. H. Williams, however, who has also contributed to this history of the Penryn club, sees matters in a rather different light. 'There took place', he writes, 'a successful reorganisation'.

 

The chances are, of course, that both are right.  Penryn in the early 1900's went through a particularly difficult time, but in 1910 there came to the town a man called Dr. L. B. Hopper. He was an Oxford Blue and an England international, and to him, more than to anybody, credit is due for the club's survival up to the outbreak of the war. He took over an ailing club, as Mr. Basher suggests, and he reorganised it, as Mr. Williams says - and he did more besides. He provided the verve and interest needed to span the fallow war years, and a foundation from which Penryn could resume their Rugby when the war ended. This Penryn did, not without a certain relish.

 

In one of the first post-War seasons, Penryn became the champions of Cornwall, whilst their reserve side took the Junior title - a joint feat that had never been achieved before; and into the Borough side, in those years of recovery, came a succession of talented young players, - none more admired than the legendary George Jago, who, incidentally, to the delight of the Penryn club, joined, in 1982, in a re-union of former players at the club's even further enhanced Memorial ground.

Jago was one of those players who come to a club - if they are a fortunate club, that is - once in a generation. His speed was formidable, and no-one could score tries from deeper positions than he could. Against Gloucestershire in one match he scored 13 pts; for Penryn, in 1921-22, he set up a club record with 261 points, and the Penryn threequarter line in the days when he was part of it was the finest in the county.  

 

Jago, however, was not alone. The surname Richards figured large in the Penryn side of the Twenties. Arthur, a prop forward, played for  Cornwall (as Jago did) 25 times; Harry was at scrumhalf; but so, too, was his brother Eddie, who, according to the memories of those who saw him play, worked the Penryn scrum better than any scrum-half, before him or since him, ever has.

 

The trouble with Eddie, the Old Men remember, was that the Cornwall selectors felt him to be too young. Not that you would have thought so if you had seen him play. He tackled like a tiger, and when his work took him to Plymouth, he joined Plymouth Albion, went on to play more than 40 times for Devon (opposing his own brother when Cornwall played Devon), and became, in 1929, the first Penryn player ever to be capped for England. (In modern times Nigel Coombes played at scrum-half for both Devon and Cornwall, and won England Under 23 caps as well).

 

In the inter-War years, Rugby in Penryn was dominated by the Jagos and the Richards but other players, too, came into the side to grace it, to add to its history and to represent their county. The earliest of the early enthusiastic years were repeated, and when the Second World War ended, the club not only immediately fielded an attractive side, but also, under an equally enthusiastic band of officials, led by Mr. Nelson Barrett, set about improving their Parkengue ground. It was a formidable task of much faith, and it all came to fruition on September 27th, 1947. The ground was re-named the Memorial Ground, in lasting memory of the 14 club players who had died in the two wars, and Aberavon, one of the foremost Welsh clubs of the day, came to play the Borough in tribute. It was the forging of a friendly Celtic link with Wales who, for years afterwards, continued to bring some of their finest teams to Penryn.

 

The celebration game itself, however, was hardly celebratory as far as Penryn were concerned. Even with Keith Scott making a guest appearance, they were trounced 27-3. But in the Penryn side on that day was a young man who was to bring back to Penryn all the local pride that George Jago had brought all those years before. His name was Victor Roberts - and what lay before him was as an illustrious Rugby playing career as any Cornishman has ever achieved. What lay behind him was the fact that at Falmouth Grammar School he had not been thought worthy of his Rugby colours, but in front of him, as a player of tremendous courage, exceptional style and noteworthy commitment, were 16 caps for England, 45 for Cornwall, the captaincy of England, and the Freedom of his native town. Few Rugby players have achieved so much; none have deserved it more.

 

The 'Admission to the Honorary Freedom of the Borough' came to Vic Roberts in 1956, 'he being a person of distinction in Sport, whereby he has brought the name of the Town to the attention of the Nation': and as things turned out, two other notable Penryn players were subsequently to be similarly honoured: Roger Hosen and Ken Plummer. Both played for England (Hosen, 10 times; Plummer, 4), and both played more than 50 times for Cornwall: and it is a measure of Penryn's embracement of Rugby football that its burgesses should set such a lustre upon it.

 

It is, however, hardly surprising - for one of the things that has distinguished Rugby in Penryn is that town and team have been so much at one. Much of the Rugby there has been played by young local men anxious to parade their skills to their own locality. The game began on the riverside quays of the town, and among the men who worked in glistening granite quarries, - and the 'Local-ness' of its origins has never been forgotten. Even as late as the 1960's, when Roger Hosen was kicking goals not for Penryn but for Northampton, there were those in Penryn who still nodded wisely and said, 'Ah, when he was a boy he lived in sight of the Memorial Ground!' ..... as if that explained it all. And who is there to say that it did not? Few places can have nurtured its local talent more assiduously than Penryn has done: and players of the calibre of Graham Bate, another in the extraordinary line of Penryn full-backs (in the season of 1967-68, when Penryn won all their 29 games and scored 534 points in the process, Bate got 318 of them), and Roger Harris (who played 62 times for Cornwall) were the proof of it. And as for full-backs, among their distinguished number is Paul Winnan, and most lately Chris Martin (Under 23 International and England).

 

The 1960’s were a golden era for Penryn.  They won the CRFU ‘unofficial’ Championship eight times and the Cornwall Cup in the first season it was re-started .  In the 1967/68 season they were unbeaten, winning all 29 of their Cornish inter-club games.

 

By now, too, Penryn were in possession of a splendid new clubhouse, further improved in 1982, which had been built in 1956 and dedicated to the incomparable Nelson Barrett who, in many ways, set the pattern for an unbroken line of committed officials the club has always been fortunate enough to attract.

 

The club could reflect as well upon the fact that no less than 60 of their 'players had played for Cornwall, and no fewer than five had captained the county side. There were additional satisfactions, as well, one of them that Jack Chinn's Colts had proved such a valuable adjunct to the club. Two of its early members - Leslie Roff and John Cobner each went on to make over 600 appearances for the senior side in a span of 20 seasons.

 

But while the club continued to draw most of its strength from its own locality, it was never so insular as to neglect the potential of Rugby men who happened to move into the area, and in the early post-War years two 'foreigners' - Ted Rose, from Lancashire, and Elfryn Matthews from Wales - put their own abiding stamp on the attractive kind of Rugby that Penryn consistently played.

 

In the early Seventies, Penryn celebrated their Centenary with a match against a representative side of British Lions - a game that in stature rivalled the two distinguished fixtures the club had played in the Fifties against International XV’s brought by Hylton Cleaver; and after winning the Cornwall ‘Sevens’ for three successive seasons, the Club was invited to play in the Middlesex Sevens.

 

It was a fitting jewel to place in the crown of Cornwall’s oldest club – a club whose history takes an honoured place in the history of an old and honoured Cornish town.  ‘Penryn without its Rugby Club’, someone once said, ‘would be like Perranporth without a beach’ – and you can’t say fairer than that.