Bournville RFC

Four years after the Cadbury brothers gave us Dairy Milk, and six years before they delivered Milk Tray, the world’s most famous chocolatiers gave us Bournville RFC. More than a century later, the club have finally joined their plastic-wrapped Bournville siblings on the national stage. 

Go south of Birmingham’s city centre, through Edgbaston and past Birmingham University, and you’ll reach Bournville. It’s a fifteen-minute drive, a 35-minute cycle or an hour of narrowboat cruising on the Worcester and Birmingham canal.

Taking the latter option isn’t just the scenic route, it’s also the historical one, taking you back to the Victorian ages when Birmingham’s sprawling canal network – more extensive even than the canals and lagoons of Venice – was creating untold opportunities for the city’s industrialists.  

Two of the most far-sighted were Richard and George Cadbury. The brothers had inherited their father’s tea, coffee and cocoa business in 1861, and swiftly resurrected its ailing fortunes by focusing exclusively on cocoa products. By 1878 business was so good that Richard and George were looking to up-size and move their Birmingham factory to the leafy suburbs. 

They noted that a plot of land surrounding Bournbrook Hall, five miles outside of Birmingham’s industrial centre, was a heaven-sent intersection for chocolate makers: where milk could be brought by canal to the same point that cocoa could be delivered via the newly-constructed Birmingham West Suburban Railway.

The brothers snapped up the hall and the surrounding estate, changing its name to Bournville – ‘Bourn’ being the name of a local trout stream on their land, and ‘ville’ a nod to the heartlands of chocolate production at the time: Switzerland and France.

On Bournville’s 130 acres of lush countryside, the Cadburys began building their factory and – as devout Quakers with a fierce moral compass – they wanted to guarantee the quality of housing for their employees. In the words of younger brother George, every factory employee was to ‘have his own house, a large garden to cultivate, and healthy surroundings’ giving them ‘a better opportunity of a happy family life’.

In Victorian Britain, this was enlightened thinking. And it didn’t stop there. Over the next 40 years, Cadbury employees would also gain access to hot meals in the factory canteen, schools for their children, a pension scheme, medical and dental care, and acre after acre of green space, leading to Bournville being dubbed ‘the factory in a garden’.

With Richard and George both keen sportsmen, much of that space was set aside for the pursuit of cricket, football, hockey, tennis, squash, swimming, bowls and, in 1909, rugby. 

In Bournville RFC’s first season, they lost just two out of 22 matches, posting a similar set of results in their second season, leading to the establishment of a second XV in 1910. 

Although playing numbers were growing, the rugby club had no delusions of grandeur. In Bournville, football and cricket were the big draws with, at one point, twenty football pitches on-site and ten cricket pitches. 

Even with the supporting welfare provisions, working on a production line in the Victorian era was monotonous, isolating and physically strenuous, but sport was an effective release valve which bonded the Bournville community together. Inter-departmental sports matches provided the majority of sporting competition, and fostered the same spirit of togetherness which public schools relied upon to unite – and control – boarding houses.

As Cadbury thrived in the first half of the 20th century, so too did sport in Bournville. Many of Cadbury’s most iconic chocolate ranges were launched in this period: the Milk Chocolate bar in 1905, Milk Tray in 1915, Flake in 1920 (developed by chance when an employee noticed that thin streams of excess chocolate from moulds cooled into flaky ripples), and Roses in 1938.

On the rugby fields, Bournville were developing keen local rivalries with nearby opponents such as Five Ways Old Edwardian, Selly Oak and most notably, Kings Norton. An inter-company sevens’ tournament also emerged in this period which all departments could enter.

The interruption of World War Two saw Cadbury re-purpose their factory to make rifles and other war effort supplies including a ‘ration chocolate’ bar made with dried skimmed milk, instead of fresh milk. 

The war had seen Bournville’s sports fields ploughed for crops but once rationing ended in 1950, business quickly picked up again, and sport was a major feature of life at Bournville again.

For local lad David Kappler, the presence of sport was a deciding factor in choosing to join the company in the 1960s. “I was eighteen, straight out of school, and with a couple of job offers in the Birmingham area, Dunlop being one of the others,” he recalls. “But Cadbury was a very sporting organisation, and I was attracted by that. I was looking to train on the job as an accountant and having been a county rugby player in Lincolnshire and having played a lot of cricket too, it was the style and attitude of the sporting environment that I liked the most.

“We worked 8.30am to 5pm and then went off to play sports, not every night but in the summer, spring and autumn you would be doing that a lot.

“Rugby was played up at Rowheath, [a short walk from the factory across the Bournville estate] and we had changing rooms but there wasn’t a clubhouse as such. After matches we would go to one of the local pubs, but not in Bournville because there weren’t any pubs due to the Cadbury family being Quakers.”

Cadbury would prove a long-lasting fit for David, as he spent almost all of his 40-year career at the company, rising to become Chief Financial Officer before retiring in 2004.

But back in the 1960s he was simply known as the lanky, youthful lock alongside Jim Price, who worked in the factory’s power plant. “There was me, a trainee accountant and Jim, who stoked coal in the factory,” says David. “He was ten to fifteen years older than me, a great guy, and our paths wouldn’t have crossed if we hadn’t played rugby.”

David reckons that “80-90 per cent” of his team-mates in the 1960s were on the Cadbury payroll. “There was the odd brother of an employee who played for us, so it was semi-open to others but not really,” he says. “We were a works team, and there were many others: GKN, Birmingham Police, the City Officials, and the civil service had a team too.

“Bournville was not one of the top teams in Birmingham, but we held our own. Kings Norton were our nearest rivals but Birmingham was dominated by Moseley in those days, a third or a half of them were internationals.”

Towards the end of the decade, the harmony of the rugby club, and
of life at Bournville in general, was under threat. In 1969, seven years after floating on the stock market, Cadbury merged with American drinks brand Schweppes. And any intention that Adrian Cadbury – the grandson of George – had in maintaining the company’s Quaker-influenced business principles ended almost overnight.

At boardroom level the change was immediate. Between 1969 and 1989 (when Adrian retired), Cadbury’s turnover of £262m had multiplied ten times,  with profit margins also increasing. 

David was present at the company throughout its transformation. “It became a much more commercial organisation,” he says, “but it needed to because it had become a public company.”

Yet public ownership meant the company lost the hallmark that had defined it for so many years: family ownership. By 2000, the percentage of the firm owned by Cadbury family members amounted to just one per cent.

Adrian was also keen to balance the company’s geography, and this meant reducing the number of employees at the Bournville factory in favour of other sites in the UK and abroad. 

While Cadbury moved with the times, the importance of playing sport in the name of the company diminished and Bournville RFC was no different, drifting further and further away from its association with the factory that created it. 

When Rugby Journal arrives at Bournville RFC’s Tuesday night training session, the slow separation between club and company is summarised by chairman Mick Palmer. “We’ve tried over the years to get in contact with them [Cadbury] but we’ve not heard anything back,” he says. “I started in the 1970s when there were maybe ten players at the club who worked for Cadbury, but that has dropped to almost none.”

The last symbolic association with Cadbury was cut when the club moved their home from the Rowheath pitches to Birmingham University in 2010.

Less of a divorce, a ‘conscious uncoupling’ over 40 years is perhaps fairer. In any regards, neither party is losing any sleep over it in 2020.

At the time of visiting, Bournville RFC are riding the natural high of being a level four club for the first time, due to compete in National 2 North when rugby re-commences. 

Furthermore, the club is the proud owner of its own facilities for the first time, having moved into a £3m purpose-built complex in Avery Fields in 2017, a fifteen-minute drive from the town of Bournville.

The vibes are good at training. Especially for George Foley – a lifetime President at the club – who is relishing his club’s new era.

A scrum-half for Bournville in the 60s, 70s and 80s, he introduces himself as ‘Eternal President and Supreme Leader’ and is quick to point out that before Bournville moved into their new digs, “there was prostitution and drugs in the area”. 

Mick – who used to be in charge of policing around here – puts it more delicately: “the night-time economy was a bit different,” he explains.

“There was some anti-social behaviour because there had been no usage on this site for 40-odd years. We took that away and wanted to engage socially with the community, we wanted everyone to come here and use it.

“So, part of my role was going to various neighbourhood meetings and explaining what we were doing to alleviate any feelings of a rugby club being in the area. Rugby has had a reputation for lewd behaviour, so I wanted to reassure people we weren’t going to be carrying on drinking until three in the morning.”

The club have been good to their word. Just the weekend prior to our visit, Bournville RFC turned the club’s grounds into a socially distanced drive-in cinema for anyone, showing classics for every generation: Grease, Jaws, The Lion King, and Back to the Future all featuring. Cars were even allowed to park on the 4G first-team pitch to watch the screening. 

Prior to the pandemic, Bournville had also attracted local businesses to use their facilities as a work space for meetings, supplementing the usual rugby club fare of weddings, bar mitzvahs, and everything in between. Other sports teams use their facilities too, including football and American Football teams.

It’s hoped the club’s off-field endeavours will grow to cover the club financially, allowing the benefactor who helped finance the new development to continue stepping back.

The club does pay its players, but is keen to point out that it is pursuing financial self-sufficiency over the pursuit of on-field success, especially after what happened to another local side.

In June last year, Birmingham and Solihull voluntarily pulled out of the league structure after relegation from National 2 South coincided with a financial shortfall leading to swathes of players leaving. Rather than face the music in the league below – Midlands Premier – the club took the decision to pull out of the league structure entirely.

Bournville’s director of rugby Dean Lewis believes that decision was the right one and helped Birmingham and Solihull – who once famously beat Wasps in the quarter-finals of the 2004 Powergen Cup – avoid, “a death by a thousand cuts”.

“They’re moving back up the leagues now [having dropped into the Birmingham Merit Table], so it’s probably the best way to do it,” he says. “Otherwise you just lose players incrementally as they get beat and you plummet down the leagues. There’s also South Leicester….”

The experience of South Leicester also makes grim reading. Having been relegated from level four in the 2018/19 season, the club decided to stop paying players and the departures mounted up, meaning that when Bournville faced them in the opening game of last season, South Leicester were fielding second teamers. For those that don’t know what happened next, it might be worth reading this from behind the sofa: the club shipped an average of 132 points per game in their opening seven fixtures, including a 240-0 loss to Bromsgrove. 

Like Birmingham and Solihull, the club pulled out of the league and joined the Leicestershire merit tables.

Such stories – and the depressing predictability of them – have made a frugal club out of Bournville RFC. “Those models were, and are, unsustainable,” says Dean. “At some point people are going to get bored putting their hand in their pocket for no return. Rich people don’t get rich by giving their money away. It’s a fact of life.

“We only pay players what we can sustain from the income of the club. Our model is to be sustainable and to still be providing rugby in years to come.

“I believe the market will come to us. We set our stall out that this is how much we pay. And if you want to come and join us, that’s fine.”

Although Dean doesn’t share this season’s wage bill with us, he does reveal that last season’s title-winning campaign totalled £56,000 in player wages - £9,000 under the £65,000 salary cap for level five rugby. But Dean rejects the idea that paying players at this level is inappropriate or detrimental to the game.

“Last season in Midlands Premier, we went to Doncaster, Sheffield, Sandbach – none of those are Midlands sides. So, in order to go to those places, the guys have got to give up their Saturdays from nine o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night. When we go to Tynedale and Blaydon next season we’ll be leaving on Friday night to get back late on a Saturday, people need to be recompensed for that because you can’t just do two training sessions a week either, you need to go to the gym a couple of times too. There’s a whole host of logistical reasons for it. 

“And also, when I was playing, wages were far higher. There’s just a bit more scrutiny now. Wages must, though, be sustainable and reasonable.”

Since Dean joined Bournville in 2015, the club has risen two divisions but he insists that National 1 is the extent of ambition. “And that’s still a few years down the line,” he adds. “Right now, it’s about consolidating in National 2 North, while spreading the joy of rugby among the wider community in Birmingham.”

George then adds his own caveat to the long-term vision: “we also want to smash Moseley.”

George has been harbouring this ambition for a long time as both he and Mick played for Bournville the last time the two teams met, in 1982. 

George recalls Bournville’s 52-3 loss that day, with ‘Mose’ fielding an enormously talented XV including England internationals Martin Cooper, Nigel Horton, and Lion-in-waiting Nick Jeavons. 

With Moseley currently in National 1, George’s much longed-for encounter won’t happen this season. But with Bournville rising steadily and Moseley only just avoiding relegation last season, a re-match may not be far away.

First though, Bournville need to survive their maiden bow at level four. The feeling at the training ground is that mid-table is achievable. 

Also on the up, is the women’s game, having founded a side just four years ago. “Our first season was at Rowheath, and we would spend the first ten minutes of our warm up, clearing dog dirt from the pitch,” captain Liz Gooda tells us after training. 

“So moving here, we feel like we’ve stepped into the professional leagues. And it’s no coincidence that we’ve now stepped up from the development league. Because if you come to play here, you come to do business.

“We get more people watching here, and therefore more people wanting to come down to play. At Rowheath we were struggling to get fifteen players. Now we have 20-25.” They also have one active playing link to the club’s origins. Alexia McGahan, a fly-half, works in Programme Management for Mondelēz [Cadbury’s parent company] in Birmingham. She’s not at training tonight, though, having given birth to her son Mason just yesterday. But she’ll be back and, either way, whether the club counts one, none, or 90 players from Birmingham’s chocolate industry, Bournville RFC will never lose the Cadbury’s purple that runs in its blood.  

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures from Henry Hunt

This extract was taken from issue 11 of Rugby.
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