Gill Burns

In front of a packed wooden stand that once belonged to Everton FC, Gill Burns made her England debut at Waterloo, in a game she’d helped organise. Impressed by what he saw, an alickadoo congratulated her while steering her away from the players’ bar. There were, after all, no women or dogs allowed.

The living room on the YouTube video is like any other around Christmas time. Tinsel, Santas and elves on shelves aplenty; cards neatly lined vertically on walls; stockings around the fireplace; and a saxophone and guitar in two corners, giving hints of the musical family in residence.

Then the music starts, Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, and a 73-cap, 34-try and goal-kicking Rugby World Cup-winning number eight dances into the room, followed in perfectly timed unison by her 85-year-old mum Ann, signalling the start of a three-minute dance routine.

There are other videos too. A lot. Sixty-two in total, including renditions of Three Lions, Saturday Night at the Movies and, naturally, The Lonely Goatherd, all with costumes, choreography, and usually singing and instrument-playing too, often with the back-rower taking the lead.

Gill Burns MBE, former England captain, isn’t your average rugby girl. “I love dancing,” she explains when we meet in the clubhouse of her beloved Firwood Waterloo. “Mum was a dance teacher, so I did ballet, tap, modern, everything, and I still dance now.

“I’m contrary to most people’s idea of a rugby player, although I still looked like one in a tutu. Mum said I was the only one in the lineout jumping with pointed toes.

“We used to go in and sing for a dementia group every Friday before lockdown,” says Gill, explaining her YouTube video series, “it was the same group that helped us when dad [Ron] had dementia.

“Mum was worried about how much they’d miss the singing, because a lot of people with dementia were basically locked in and they switched off until music comes on, so we decided to do a dance or a song and post it every Friday for them to watch, just to make them smile really.

“Lockdown was only supposed to last a few months,” continues Gill, whose dad Ron passed away in 2018, “but we ended up doing more than a year’s worth of them. They might not remember many things, but they know all the words to Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do... [Daisy Bell].

“We even tried TikTok briefly,” says Gill, “but we got abuse and negative comments about how ugly we were and things like ‘what are we doing putting ourselves on here’ so I’ve deleted the account. I never got any negativity from Facebook or YouTube, but I did on TikTok.”

TikTok’s loss. Gill isn’t the type to be put off, whatever the obstacle. Even the room we’re in, the members’ bar at St Anthony’s Road, the Blundellsands home of the club since 1921, once banned entry for women – and dogs. “The sign on the door used to say, ‘no women or dogs allowed’,” laughs Gill, who has played at the club since 1986, first in the colours of Liverpool Polytechnic, three years before the women’s club side even existed. “It was full of old alickadoos, and they’d be like, ‘oh, it’s lovely you’re here, now go over to that bar over there and we’ll come and chat to you later’, it was all a bit posh like that.

“I remember one of them who was a real character and watched when we held an international [at the club] a year or so later: England v Sweden, 1988. He was waiting for me at the end of the game at the entrance to the players’ bar and said, ‘Gill, I have to admit to you, I came here to watch tits and bums, but I’m sorry to say, after five minutes, I was watching a bloody good game of rugger’.

“They were all sceptical, they came to laugh really,” she admits, “but they were pleasantly surprised to find that, ‘oh my god, they can play’ and, that ‘Karen Almond can kick goals from 35 yards out’ and ‘there’s a game plan’, but we got more support from then on as people had their eyes opened to the women’s game.”

The sign is long gone, which says something, as not a lot has changed around the clubhouse. It still comes with all the comforting quirks and quaintness of a rugby club, dusty in all the right places, where buildings are a familiar hodgepodge of rooms and eras. Going from the toilets with ceramic turn-of-the-century urinals that could live in a museum to long-forgotten changing rooms designed to make the opposition feel as uncomfortable as possible [and now filled with old chairs and boxes]. Corridors and stairwells are full of memorabilia, acting like a work-in-progress scrapbook, joining everything up – eras and rooms, alike. Even that once forbidden bar now has an international board for women, starting with Gill Burns, and with impressive numbers to match their male counterparts.

From the moment you arrive at Firwood Waterloo through the old-school, red wood-panelled, pavilion turnstiles, you get the feel of a rugby club you want to spend time at, and Gill has certainly done that. She’s played, coached, chaired and even presided over the entire club.  Waterloo has, in its time, seen both male and female first fifteens ply their trade at the very top of the English game.

Today, even though, as the current president of the county, she’s wearing the official blazer of Lancashire Rugby when she sits for the photographs, the red, white and green of her Waterloo socks shows beneath the hem of her trouser leg. “Well, it’s my club isn’t it, my only club,” she says simply, when asked about what it means to her.

A promising athlete at shotput, discuss and sprinting – 12.1 was her best time over 100m – she also played basketball, tennis, swimming and hockey. “But I never liked any of them enough, to give up the others for,” she says.

It was while playing hockey that, ironically, the former teacher found rugby. “I knocked someone over, and she said, ‘the way you play hockey, you should be a rugby player’. I said, ‘well, you obstructed me’, and she said, ‘no, I’m not being funny; I play rugby and you should play’.”

The girl, who played for Liverpool Polytechnic, sought out Gill after the game, impressed by her physicality. “I was tall too, 5ft 11in, although I’m 5ft 10in now after all the neck compressions, and I was quick for a big girl,” she adds.

And that’s what brought her to St Anthony’s Road, the most salubrious of postcodes, home to several footballers of Liverpool and Everton, but with a rugby club right in the middle of it. “We used to have a back pitch over there, behind this big wooden stand,” she says pointing across to the far side of the current field. “That stand was huge,” she continued, “it was from Goodison Park, an old wooden Everton football stand, and behind there was a second-team pitch.

“I remember so clearly pulling up apprehensively in the car,” she continues. “The coach was Steve Peters – who I ended up spending ten years of my life with as a partner – but from that first session I knew within half an hour I’d found my sport, I loved it.

“Two weeks after that training session I played my first game.”

She took up the number eight position due to a friend from the local pub quiz, a Waterloo player who played in that role. “I had a teacher who played here but he was a prop and I didn’t fancy that, but I quite liked what the number eight was doing, so I told them I played there,” she says.

She played two games and found herself at trials for the North. “They asked who played number eight and about six of us put our hands up,” she explains. “Then they asked who could also play second row, and I was the only one to put my hand down – I didn’t know what a second row did, I’d only played two games. But I think that made them believe I was a specialist so I got in the side.”

Selected for the region, they won two from three games, losing only to the star-studded London region. “Next thing I know, after five games of rugby, I was in the England squad,” she recalls. “All the girls knew each other, and I remember Cheryl Stennett, a winger, saying ‘who’s this from up north?’.

“I was the token northerner; she was being funny, but it didn’t feel very welcoming. Two or three sessions later though, you knew everybody.”

Jim Greenwood, then of Loughborough University, coached England and Gill, ever the student, ‘read all his books’. Not only to understand him but to better understand the game in which she was a complete novice.

That inexperience didn’t stop her from offering to host an international at Waterloo, for what was to be her debut with England. “We were in the days of people volunteering to host a game,” she says. “In the changing room after England training, they said, ‘so Sweden want to play us, anyone fancy organising it?’, and I put my hand up. All the games for England (and Great Britain, which had preceded England, who were only one Test in) had been down south so it would be good to get a game up north.”

The outcome of the game – a 66-0 win, and a nod of approval from the alickadoos – was one thing, but it was before kick-off that Gill realised what she’d done. “I was only a squad player and so I was organising the game itself: making sure the programmes had arrived – I’d even hand-drawn the front cover – checking the kids were selling the t-shirts and the ushers were in the international suite. Then I found out I was playing, twenty minutes before kick-off.

“Next thing, I’m literally standing in front of the old stand, singing the national anthem, and it hit home, ‘oh my god, this is my childhood dream’. I’d always wanted to represent my country, I just never thought it would be rugby.”

The response to England changed opinions of women’s rugby. “We had a few thousand here, it was packed,” she says. “And there was all kinds of press coverage, we were on the front page of the Liverpool Echo although, unfortunately, a lot of the papers focus on there being groups of girls, singing songs and swigging out of a sherry bottle which wasn’t really the image we wanted. But it was a novelty for the crowd, women playing rugby.”

Soon after, Gill was asked by Waterloo to start a women’s team, and she’d also appointed herself – as nobody else was going to do it – as the north-west development officer for the sport. “Jane Schindler played for England A and she did the north east and we’d meet on the M62 to discuss how we were going to get women’s rugby going. There was no governing body telling us what to do, but we’d organise some brilliant training weekends with 50-60 girls and people like Mike Slemen coaching.

“It was just about skills, it was about educating women in rugby, so if someone had only ever played in the backs, we’d have a session to learn about what goes on in the lineout.”

The RFU, at the time, “weren’t really interested”, and so the game was run by their own governing body, the Rugby Football Union for Women [RFUW]. “It took ten years of working alongside the RFU, to then eventually, in 2012, became part of the RFU, which is where we should be.”

Waterloo were a force to be reckoned with from the beginning. “We started in 1989 and we had 50-odd women join, most of whom hadn’t played, but we did well from the word go, we won most of our games.

“We were always in the first division, the Premiership at the time, and we only played one season in the second, every year in the first division we’d finish either fourth or fifth.

“Teams hated coming here,” she explains. “We beat all the big sides here, and we’d only take the odd scalp away, that’s why we always ended up fourth.”

Waterloo are one of the sport’s most famous clubs, drawing five-figure attendances in the 1950s, and perennial contenders in the cup competitions, including a final appearance in 1977, losing 11-27 to northern rivals Gosforth.

The likes of Greenwoods Dick and Will came through the ranks, together with Austin Healey, Paul Grayson, Kyran Bracken and Ben Kay. “I still remember him [Kay] playing at under-16s, a giant on the field, handing everyone off,” recalls Gill.

When the women’s side began, Waterloo’s men were still contenders at the top end of the game, in fact playing in the First Division that same year [albeit getting relegated]. “They were a big deal,” says Gill, “and we started to get crowds from Waterloo coming to our games too. There’s one who’ll be here today, Dave Ward, and he said it was his proudest moment that he tried to stop me playing rugby.

“He always said to me that it wasn’t right women played rugby,” she continues. “And yet he’d come to our games and constructively criticise and applaud good rugby.

“He came every week and was a fan but it took him a while to actually get it into his head that he was enjoying women playing the game. Now he jokes it’s his claim to fame, he tried to stop Gill Burns playing rugby.”

Sure enough, when we take in the game later – they’re playing Altrincham Kersal in North One West, the sixth tier, with the home side strong favourites and in the top four – the jovial Dave repeats the story, beaming with pride, but clearly with a deep fondness for Gill. It’s the same for everyone who sees her.

Together with mum Ann, who’s also an honorary vice president of the club, they run Waterloo’s 200 Club, which raises funds for teams. Until this season, everyone who joined the fund-raising group got a personalised card, with a hand-drawn picture of a rugby player and their face on top of it. The artist, obviously, was Gill, who also runs a sideline in bespoke cushions made out of old playing shirts. “I’ve changed the design this year, they get photos instead,” she explains. “But before that I’d individually draw all the cards, although it got a bit much when there were 120 members.”

We move from the old bar to the pre-match lunch. Gill and Ann give out the latest 200 Club cards from our table, with every member keen to stay and chat to Gill, most of them also taking time to tell us how good she is. Another former president drops off some Champagne for the table, while telling us of his role in the 1977 John Player Cup final side (top scorer that season with 36 tries, Mark Flett).

Even for a club that helped produce four Rugby World Cup winners in Greenwood, Bracken, Grayson and Kay, Gill’s career takes some beating. In the club’s international room, her achievements almost completely dominate one cabinet across an entire wall, naturally including the 1994 Rugby World Cup win.

The one that preceded it, the 1991 and first-ever Rugby World Cup for women, taught England that they needed more than good players to win. “We could have won the final against America, but we were so naïve, and they were streetwise,” says Gill. “We did things like giving their hooker the ball back before we got on to the pitch. We literally did that and their hooker threw a quick lineout to the back of the line to their back row who catches it and flops over to score. We set up their try. We lost 19-6, but we gave them six points [tries were worth four points] for nothing.

“America were good though,” she admits, “they were better athletes and had toured New Zealand before the World Cup and heavily beaten every side. Everyone was frightened of that American team.”

England didn’t make the same mistakes in 1994, winning the final, also against America, 38-23. “It was a dream you’d never had,” she says of being a world champion, “because you never thought you’d get the chance.”

The 1998 World Cup was always going to be New Zealand’s [who beat America 44-12 in the final, having defeated England by an almost identical scoreline, 44-11]. “I still think that New Zealand side was the best group of rugby players I’ve ever seen on a pitch together,” she says.

So dominant were New Zealand that when England finally defeated them on their home ground in 2001, it was a moment that still ranks among her finest. “I just remember when the final whistle went, when we beat them, a side that hadn’t been beaten since the 1998 World Cup,” she begins, “and it was only then you realised there were 43,000 people in the stadium.

“Our match had been a curtain-raiser to the All Blacks versus Samoa and when you’re playing you don’t realise how the stands are filling. We’d played in front of maybe 7,000 before but nothing like this, and so we had 43,000 New Zealanders watch a very good England team beat New Zealand in New Zealand.”

The end didn’t go as planned. Gill had captained England from the 1994 Rugby World Cup until the 1998 campaign and, having seen injury end her tournament at the quarter-final, decided to stay on for the following Five Nations. “The Grand Slam was going brilliantly, the coaches were Eric Field and Steve Peters, who were doing a good job,” she explains. “The North were the strongest team at that time and quite a lot of northern players were in the England team.

“At some point during that season,” she begins, “and I don’t know who, and I never want to know who, but there was a players’ group who got together behind my back and went to the organisers saying they didn’t have any confidence in the coaches.

“Now, the majority of the team weren’t involved in that, because they told me they didn’t know that had happened.

“The coaches were winning games,” she continues, “and after we’d just beaten France, who were the team to beat in those days, we were doing the after-dinner speeches. And, during the dinner, the two coaches – who had got us to three wins, we’d won the Championship that day – were told that they weren’t needed anymore.

“I wrote my letter of resignation that night. I said to them, ‘if there’s been a players’ group that have told you that my coaches are not up to standard, yet I know nothing about it, then I resign. I’ll carry on playing, but I’m not being the captain with another coach.

“They brought the Saracens coaching team in,” explains Gill, still disappointed with what went on back then. “Interestingly, lots of Saracens players were brought into the squad for the final game. That was the only game I ever played at six because I was moved from eight. It was chaos, absolute chaos.

“Then we played one tournament away in Italy with the same coaching setup, which was dreadful. We lost, that was the European Championships.”

Although pushed to the fringes of the squad, and aware that a group of fellow players had undermined her during her captaincy, Gill carried on. “I was frustrated,” she admits, “but I loved playing for England so much that I would do anything to wear the rose and I knew it wouldn’t last.”

“I was on 49 caps and I was determined to get to 50 because I would be the first person in the world to get there.”

Out of favour, Gill continued to travel from Liverpool to Newbury for any weekday England sessions. “There was an injury the week before the Wales game and the coach had to come cap-in-hand to ask me to play.

“That coaching regime finished after the end of that season and thankfully they brought in a professional set-up with Geoff Richards who was great, a breath of fresh air – I didn’t always agree with the selection, but I agreed with everything else he did.

“He was a good coach,” she concludes, “and he was fair and justified why he did things, which was something that hadn’t happened before.”

Richards introduced the modern squad rotation at a time in her career when Gill needed to be playing every game. “It never felt right for me,” she admits, “because the majority of my career was when rugby was all about picking your best fifteen and then staying on unless you broke your leg.

“But that’s the way they wanted to do it,” she says. “And I can remember those seasons having this ridiculously hard training programme – I was in my late 30s then – but I was sticking to it because I wanted to be fit.

“I remember being told at a training session, ‘you’re getting on a bit, and you’re looking a bit tired and you’re perhaps not as good as you were’.

“If I’m doing the training, 10 x 200m on a Thursday night, then I’m going to the gym on a Friday morning, and I look rusty on a Sunday, it’s because I’m doing what I was being asked to do, to ensure I peaked at the World Cup.

“But I think they’d decided I wasn’t as good as I used to be,” she concedes.

She trained every day. Even on rest days she’d head to the rugby club, put the exercise bike on the sidelines, and pedal away while watching the men train. “I was as fit as I could ever be,” she explains. “I think being 37, I was conscious that people would say I was too old.

“I wasn’t looking sharp in the Six Nations, because I was still training, still doing the hard graft, but the training schedule was perfect and I did peak for the World Cup – because I was doing what I was told.”

Gill’s swansong arrived a game too early. “The Canada semi-final was probably one of the best games I’ve ever played, because I was making a point,” she says. “It was 90 minutes long in 90 degree heat – we had a huge injury-time.

“I played my heart out and thought, ‘you can’t not pick me for the final’, but sadly I was on the bench and only got seven minutes.”

The 2002 Rugby World Cup, held in Spain, saw England defeat Canada 53-10 to set up a final against reigning champions New Zealand. “Twenty minutes to go, and the crowd are shouting ‘Burnsy, Burnsy’ and they didn’t send me on. I was sat next to Helen Clayton, the best openside by a mile, and she was equally frustrated, should’ve been on the pitch.

“We both got seven minutes,” she concludes. “Georgia Stevens, the best six you could come across, was picked at seven.

“I genuinely think if we’d started with a back row of Helen at seven, Georgia at six and me at eight, we’d have won the 2002 World Cup. I’m absolutely convinced of it.

“I was deflated,” says Gill of the aftermath from the game. “I did my best for the seven minutes, but it was too late.

“I was devastated deep down,” she admits, “because that would have been a wonderful high to finish the career on. We were always going to win that [final], and that was going to be the end, I was going to finish on the World Cup, play the game and live happily ever after.

“You know,” she adds, “that was the dream but it didn’t work and you’ve just got to learn to live with it and not dwell on it and not let it stop you doing things.

“I didn’t fall out with anybody,” she says, giving a nod to her respects for Richards, “I didn’t mope about it, didn’t complain about it. It was just what happened. It was a judgement call, I wouldn’t like to have to make the judgement call that a national coach made.

“Geoff Richards is a lovely guy and a great friend of mine and I will always be his friend and always respect him. He was the best coach that ever coached me, I just didn’t agree with his last selection decision, that’s all.”

She finished playing because of the ongoing ‘pain in my life’.  “I didn’t have major injuries, but I thought that stopping playing rugby might mean that I would be pain free, because I trained so hard, I was just constantly stiff.

“Even when I was fighting fit, because you train even when you’re fighting fit, you push yourself more.”

Gill Burns’ England era had its fair share of quality players, as she namechecks Nicky Ponsford, Emma Mitchell, Karen Almond as the truly world-class spine of the side. “The difference is now one to fifteen is world class, and if three of the world-class players get injured the girls that step up are world class,” she says. “That’s why it’s become a guaranteed better spectacle than it used to be.

“It still used to be entertaining though,” she says in defence of the early days, “you’d still see great tries, great tackles, great discipline, great defence. But everything wasn’t quite so structured and therefore the game wasn’t quite so clinical.

“I do get upset when people say it was rubbish; it wasn’t actually, it was actually a pretty good game of rugger.

“I sometimes wonder what sort of athletes we could have become, what sort of team we could have gone on to be, if we’d had the support that they get now.

“But I wouldn’t change a single thing,” she quickly adds. “I wouldn’t change the fact that we stayed in a youth hostel before the first Great Britain game, and the fact that, thankfully, I was cleaning dishes and not toilets, like some of them had to before we played an international.

“I wouldn’t change the fact that we stayed in a b&b in some little town in Wales,” she continues, “in a little town and there weren’t enough beds, and we ended up with three of us sharing a twin room in the roof space and the roof was leaking.

“I wouldn’t change any of that, because it’s the great stories that I’ll always remember and cherish. And we just had a great time.”

Altrincham Kersal are being put to the sword. The scoreboard reflecting a one-sided game that Waterloo never look likely to lose. “We’ve got that electronic scoreboard because of the women’s team – it was a requirement for being in the Premier division,” she says, “but it still didn’t stop them from kicking us out.”

Like Lichfield and Richmond, Waterloo have been mainstays at the top-end of women’s club rugby since their beginning, only losing their place two years ago, replaced by Sale Sharks. “My heart was broken that Waterloo were out of the Prem,” she admits. “But my brain understood why they are looking to get Premiership sides on side. And this isn’t the infrastructure for an elite team.”

Gill has never not been involved in the side, and is willing to play, even now. As recently as last season, she knew the side had no reserves and so travelled to a game with her boots and kit in the car. “I never told mum about that though,” she says, “but I was ready to play.”

And if she had made it on to the pitch, she’d have been ready to hit hard again, although always fairly. “I can hold my hands up and say I have never struck a punch,” she explains. “I used to think if I ever need to strike anybody, it’s because I’m not good enough at rugby.

“I’ve been hit many times and just said things back to them, but you know, next time I tackled them I would put them into next week.”

Before she officially hung up her boots, Waterloo had already lined her up as a vice-president, with a view to taking on the president role, which she did at a time when the club were challenging for promotion to the Championship, something they achieved in her second and final year. “Seventeen years before, women weren’t allowed in that bar and now they were asking me to become a president and have my name on the wall,” she says. “I’m well aware that during my time I’ve often been a token, because people think they’ve got to invite a woman.

“Quite often, I’ve been invited to things and I’ve been used in ways that perhaps wouldn’t happen now.

“But I was also aware that I needed to be used in that way, because I was hopefully coming in and trying to foster some respect from people and trying to let people know that women in rugby is not a bad thing.”

Being president of Waterloo was no tokenism, and neither was presiding over the RFUW, which she did for ten years, before stepping down once the union was firmly embedded with the RFU.  The Lancashire Rugby role she’s also taking seriously. Not waiting for lunch invites, she’s making it her mission to visit all 63 clubs during her tenure. She’s at about 40 already.

“It’s the token woman in the room that gets some respect from other people in the room so they listen to you, and then you get another woman and then suddenly, it’s not just women in kitchens.”

Starting those conversations, and being the one to break new ground, is what led to her MBE. “The Queen said something like ‘I’ve never been lucky enough to see a women’s game’ and I said, ‘well, ma’am, it’s a very good game and the boys kept it to themselves for far too long’. She laughed, and said, ‘Oh, indeed’.

“She was very well informed though, she even asked me about being the first woman to referee at Twickenham.”

Another claim to fame for the YouTube sensation. “I was the first woman to ref at Twickenham,” she confirms, “it was for an under-12s match as a curtain-raiser to the 1991 Grand Slam decider, when England played France and it was the first Red Nose Day ever.”

More claims to fame: with her school side she’s coached the likes of England’s Holly Aitchison and Sarah Beckett, helping them get to two national finals at Twickenham, “but lost them both,” she adds.

There are also hall of fame entries and even an RFU privileged membership, the first women to be awarded it, although they perhaps weren’t quite ready for it. “There was one event at the East India Club, but they didn’t allow women in at the time, so they had to sneak me in around the back,” she says.

Some members weren’t quite ready either. One in particular – no longer with us – said how good it was they had a woman on board, before adding, ‘hopefully one day there’ll be enough of you to have your own dinner somewhere else’.

Gill would’ve made a brilliant president of the RFU, but they missed their chance. She’s applied twice, once losing a split vote by the chair’s vote, and now she won’t run again. “I don’t want to be an old grey, female president that looks very similar to the old grey male presidents who are not really in touch with the grassroots or the young people involved in rugby anymore,” she explains.

Instead, she hopes Deborah Griffin, on both the board of England Rugby and World Rugby, will be the first female president and she’ll back her all the way.

Once Gill’s tenure with Lancashire ends this season, she intends to take a break. Does she feel she’s spent too much time with rugby? Her mum Ann nods in the background. “I don’t think I’ve put too much time in,” she says. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it all, but I just think it’s time just to be off duty.

“I want to learn to play the piano properly, I want to pick up the guitar and the saxophone again, which I play badly. I want to write a book, whether I’m capable of doing that, I don’t know.

“I’ve got tonnes of rugby memorabilia, I’d like to organise it properly.”

So spend time writing about rugby and going through rugby artefacts? Rugby stuff, basically.

“It’s not a bad thing is it?” she laughs. “That’s me really, all rugby.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Russ Williams

This extract was taken from issue 17 of Rugby.
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