Don’t blame Bill as it falls squarely on the inhabitants of Rugby School, who a bit like Covid 19, spread the game to the four corners of the Empire, or the civilised world as we know it. In the case of Tasmania it’s the Rev John Philip Gell. He was sent to the Apple Isle in 1839/40, not as a convict but with the express aim of establishing a college of higher education, modelled on Rugby School, for the landed gentry to send their children which meant that they did not have to pack their kids off to the public school system in England for a ‘proper’ education. This seemed to be of limited success but part and parcel of this was Gell’s insistence that ‘football’ be played, and that form was rugby football.

After doing a bit of research and reading a very interesting article on the History of Rugby in Tasmania sourced from Saints and Heathens, I’ve reached my own sort of conclusion that the game played in the 1850s onwards was based loosely on the rules of soccer, rugby and the then VFL.

To give you a flavour of the game at that time I dug this little snippet reporting on a ‘game’ that took place in Hobart in 1850 (courtesy of Saints and Heathens):

A correspondent from the Colonial Times lamented the “crying evil” of a recent football match played in the town by a party of at least 70 or 80 players, comprised of boys, youths and children of a larger growth (men of somewhat respectable exterior) who were heart and soul devoting themselves to a game of foot-ball and what made the matter worse, the language – cursing, swearing and shouting were such as would be considered infamous at a fair or on market day”. So I guess that apart from having 15 players on each side nothing much has changed.

We now jump forward to 1933 and the establishment of the Tasmanian Rugby Union and bring us up to 2021, but that is for Part 2