Landseer Avenue, Dings Crusaders, 1948-2017
A windowless clubhouse with a single changing room for both teams, a pitch that sloped four feet from one touch line to the other and a strict no cancellation policy, Landseer Avenue was a uniquely intimidating ground for any opponent of the Dings Crusaders.
To locate the spiritual origins of Bristol’s Dings Crusaders you have to start in the late Victorian period. Hoping to divert working men away the distractions of alcohol and into activities less damaging to the soul and the depth of their pockets, missionaries established coffee taverns, working men’s clubs and organised sporting activities as a new outlet.
These activities included rugby and so the Dings Crusaders Rugby Club arrived in 1897 as part of the Dings Boys’ Club, an arm of the Shaftsbury Crusade mission. The Dings area was notorious as one of the poorest and most degraded slums in Bristol, and so Herbert William Rudge, one of the foremost members of the Shaftesbury Crusade, saw it as an obvious area in which a sports club could act as a positive influence.
Dings made home at a number of grounds in their early years, and it was the founding Christian values of the club that would eventually bring them to their first long-term permanent home at Landseer Avenue in 1948 in the northern suburb of Lockleaze. Modest facilities were initially established, enough to home the rugby club and to carry out some youth work, but it wasn’t until 1962 that permanent dwellings were built following crowdfunding through the church. The 30-seater Steadman Stand built two years later by club volunteers put the finishing touches on the Landseer Avenue ground.
“While at Landseer Avenue, Dings had a no cancellation policy,” recalls Trevor Denley, who first played for the Dings in 1963. “Consequently, we often played on frozen pitches, snow-covered pitches, flooded pitches, which meant an end-of-season pitch devoid of grass other than the four corners. The water-logged nature for one game caused the referee to announce that the most likely injuries would be drowning.”
Denley says that intimidation was the name of the Dings game at that time, with calls to ‘push ‘em in the stingers’ that surrounded the pitch often heard. “We also used to change in the same room as our opponents,” says Denley. “Phil, our fullback, would walk in prior to kick off and looking around would say in a loud voice: ‘Ah, well not much opposition today then’.
“The changing facilities were 'Spartan' to say the least,” chuckles Denley. “The after-match bathing experience was quite something, with the players relaxing in two communal concrete plunge baths of limited proportions accommodating four rugby teams and two soccer teams.”
The Dings won their inaugural silverware at Landseer in the 1972/73 season as they triumphed in the Bristol Combination Cup. A first official league title, hoisting the Gloucestershire 1 trophy after consecutive runner-up finishes in the two seasons before, came in the 1989-90 season, also securing promotion. A six-season spell in the late-90s saw the Dings soar into the National Leagues for the first time, and other than a small blip between 2015-2018 the club have remained a fixture at this level. Now National League 2 West, the club finished second this season with 104 points, their noses in front of Bristolian rivals Clifton in third.
This status meant the club had begun to outgrow their tenancy. The club was ready in invest and a site in Frenchay was the target. After twelve years of planning, with an agreement to build housing on the Landseer Avenue site, the plans were finally financed and approved in 2014, turning ‘Shaftsbury Park’ from blueprint into reality – ironically, today their rugby home is one of the best grounds in the national leagues and is also the match day home of the play-off-chasing Bristol Bears women.
