EARLY PIONEERS

SCOTLAND DID NOT send a team to the inaugural Women’s Rugby World Cup, the tournament simply coming too soon in their development. That does not mean, though, that the country played no part in the history of the women’s game. Far from it.

When proposals for the tournament began to be discussed in earnest at the start of 1990, there were only six women’s teams north of the border, all associated with universities. Scotland would not contest a women’s test for another three years, but those clubs were beginning to find their voice.

At a WRFU committee meeting in Loughborough on 13 January 1990, at which Deborah Griffin’s initial plans for a European Cup were first distributed, the Scottish clubs announced their intention, via a letter from Ann Mackay, to form their own league. Up until that point, the six teams had competed as part of the northern section of the WRFU’s Student Cup and came under the jurisdiction of the North of England committee. The cost of travel to matches and distances involved had, though, become prohibitive. Mackay, who was the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College RFC captain, therefore wrote to the committee to inform them that the Scottish teams would be withdrawing from the Student Cup. She requested that they ‘recognise the new Scottish League’.

Minutes from the meeting record that the ‘committee agreed Scottish teams (all college sides at present) should have their own league’. Representatives of the six clubs were also invited to future meetings. It was the first step on the road to the formation not only of a national team but also the Scottish Women’s Rugby Union in 1993. When the WRFU began to disband, to be replaced by individual unions representing England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, it was the Scots who walked away first.

The saltire might have been absent as the World Cup got under way in South Wales in April 1991, but it is possible to trace the origin of the competition’s story all the way back to Scotland. Hundreds of years before football enjoyed a renaissance at English public schools and was co-opted as a barometer of manliness and split into Association and Rugby rules, there is evidence to suggest that women in parts of Scotland were avid players. Certainly, on 21 August 1628, Mr John Lindsay, a Church of Scotland minister in the village of Carstairs, is recorded as being appalled by ‘the break of the Sabbath by the insolent behaviour of men and women in footballing, dancing and Barley Breaks’.

Games of football had been played in the UK since at least the time of the Romans and became a popular pastime to celebrate festivals, such as Shrove Tuesday (or Fastern’s E’en as it was known in Scotland). Matches were huge amorphous affairs which pitted sections of towns (e.g., those who lived on opposite sides of a river, or married men and bachelors) or villages against one another. The aim of these contests was simple: to gain possession of a round object, the football, and propel it, although usually not with the foot, towards a target. These goals might be miles apart, and therefore the fun could last from dawn until dusk without one being scored.

It was not uncommon for these matches to leave a trail of damaged property and broken limbs, and football therefore aroused the suspicion of the authorities. Playing of it was banned in London by Edward II in 1314, and several monarchs over the succeeding centuries issued similar proclamations. Under Henry VIII, it became a penal offence to keep a house or ground designated for football, but that did not do much to quell the sport’s popularity. Indeed, 28 years after the incident in Carstairs, a minister in nearby Lamington wrote of ‘one superstitious and abominable custom that has continued still in the parish, that men and women used promiscuously to play at foot-ball upon Fasting’s even’.

It is in Scotland, too, that the first accounts of women playing against each other (rather than alongside men) are documented. On Tuesday 26 November 1889, theBerwickshire News and General Advertiser carried an article about a female football match in Coldstream on Ash Wednesday 1786. Under the subheading ‘Petticoats R