Nottingham

In the days of the British Empire, Nottingham was the epicentre of the world’s lace trade. It was then that a lace baron by the name of Birkin sewed the first stitch in turning the city’s rugby club into one of the nation’s finest.

Some stood, some sat, others hovered between the two, restless and unable to settle. Nottingham’s players, coaches and officials had gathered on the pitch at Stourton Park waiting to hear their fate. Had Newbury won? What about Wharfedale? And Launceston? 

This was everything. They’d pulled off a 40-38, last-minute win against Stourbridge, but would it be enough to keep them from falling into the fourth tier of English rugby for the first time in the club’s history? They’d fallen before, but never that far. 

Nottingham had gone into their final game of the 2002/03 campaign sat in the relegation zone, following a run of just three wins from fifteen  games since November. Beating Stourbridge was not enough, they also needed other results to go their way in order to pull off one of the greatest escape acts the National Leagues had ever seen.

Fellow relegation candidates Newbury were at home to already promoted Henley Hawks; Wharfedale had a short trip to Harrogate; while Launceston – who were furthest away from the relegation zone, in ninth place out of fourteen – had the unenviable task of hosting Cornish rivals Penzance & Newlyn (Cornish Pirates) at their Polson Bridge home. The Pirates were on a fifteen-match winning run and looking to secure the title in style. 

They remained Nottingham’s best hope. “It wasn’t that straightforward because Penzance had a load of injuries and I think the head coach (Kevin Moseley, aged nearly forty) had to go on the bench,” recalls Simon Beatham, then Nottingham’s director of rugby and still heavily involved with the club today as a board member, having previously been CEO. “They had a weakened side out so we were really worried.” 

As if watching his team throw away the lead three times only to regain it each time wasn’t enough, Simon then had the anxiety of waiting for his Nokia to ring. “Back then there was no internet,” he explains, “and you were reliant on people ringing you and trusting they’d got the score right!

“We’d done everything we could but ait wasn’t in our hands. We were literally just praying that one of the others would lose.

“It was our now president Nigel Eatch that got the first call and yelled out a massive, ‘YES’. At that point everybody knew.”

Newbury and Wharfedale both secured unlikely victories against Henley and Harrogate, to finish on 22 and 21 points, Launceston’s 25-13 defeat to their Cornish rivals left them on 20 league points, level with Nottingham, but with -106 next to their name. Nottingham were on -99, seven scoreboard points all the difference.

Relegation would have cost them central RFU funding of circa £62,500 (a king’s ransom compared to what they get now – i.e. nothing) and the demise of the club as a semi-professional entity. “If we’d have got relegated then, we’d have been an amateur club and it would have been incredibly difficult to come back from,” admits Simon. “We’d been dealing with the after-effects of the professional era going wrong for us. The club had set itself up to be professional and an investor was going to underwrite it but unfortunately that didn’t happen.

“As it was, we went from that (do-or-die match at Stourbridge) to getting promoted the following year. We’ve been there ever since; ourselves, Pirates and Bedford are the longest-serving clubs in the Championship.”

But how did Nottingham find themselves in this situation? The former club of Brian Moore, Rob Andrew, Neil Back et al. The club of England full-back Simon Hodgkinson, who so infamously struck the post against Harlequins with three minutes to go, with a place in the final of the 1990/91 Pilkington Cup at stake? 

While some clubs are built on the steel industry, others fishing, some shipbuilding, Nottingham had far more delicate, refined beginnings, which go back to the Birkin family in the late 19th  and early 20th centuries. Back then, in the days of the British Empire, Nottingham was the centre of the world’s lace industry, and the Birkin family were among those to make their fortune in it.

While specialising in ‘delicates’ off the field, the family were anything but on it, with Leslie Birkin making his debut for the club in 1883 – seven years after the first Nottingham rugby side took to the field. He’d be joined by four of his five brothers and would later become president. 

Home, back then, was almost anywhere they could find a patch of grass. For the first quarter of a century of its existence, Notts Rugby Football Club, as it was originally known, had as many as eleven different ‘home’ grounds, the first of them at the White Hart in Lenton (amazingly, both the pub and the rugby club are still going concerns). 

In search of a stable home life for his club, lace baron Birkin agreed to pay the £25 annual lease – and an additional £5 for loss of grazing rights – when a piece of land at Rylands Road, owned by a sheep farmer, was offered to the club. He bought the ground outright for an undisclosed sum two years later. 

Rylands Road – which would become Ireland Avenue in 1947 – saw its first Notts rugby action in September 1904, against an ‘Old Crocks’ XV and the club stayed put, save for half a season when the ground was requisitioned by the MOD, for the next 102 years. It was only in 2006 that the club vacated Ireland Avenue and moved to its present home of Lady Bay, more of which later. 

That first proper home witnessed success almost from the start, even before it had all the soft furnishing of a rugby club. Two years after moving in, Nottingham won the Midland Counties Senior Cup, albeit they had no clubhouse in which to store it, as the players were instead changing 300 yards down the road at the Victoria Hotel. But, being rugby players, even that arrangement didn’t last long, as the hotel grew tired of their messy ways, and banished them to the stables. 

Birkin stepped up again, adding a wooden grandstand – at a princely sum of £800 – and on-site changing rooms and converting a tennis pavilion into a clubhouse, known as ‘The Shack’. 

Improvements off the field were reflected on it, with Nottingham enjoying the roaring 1920s on the pitch, too, thanks to the try-scoring exploits of Arthur Derry. Either side of World War Two, Nottingham showed further promise, but the fixture list truly became star-studded in the 1980s and 90s, the club’s golden era. 

In a seven-year period, from 1984 to 1991, Nottingham reached two National Knockout Cup semi-finals and three quarter-finals as well as making considerable progress in the embryonic league system.

Foundations for the decade that made them part of rugby’s elite were laid in 1966 with the appointment of David ‘Dai’ Roberts, the first-ever officially appointed club coach in England. The schoolteacher created a gnarly pack capable of competing against England’s finest and, slowly, the big names of English rugby began to take heed and accept fixtures. 

Departing for Canada in the late-70s, Roberts was succeeded by one of his former players, Alan Davies, who continued his work.

Born in Ynysybwl, in the Rhondda Valley in Wales, but having moved to Nottingham as an eleven-year-old, Davies took the abrasive pack, but added to their game an expansive and exciting brand of rugby, one that brought in bright young English talent and helped them win promotion to Merit Table A in 1985/86. 

They’d already bloodied the nose of one top-tier side that season, as they drew 13-13 with Wasps in the quarter-finals of the John Player Cup, losing out on the ‘home advantage’ rule. It still rankles with Nottingham’s long-suffering supporters that one of the Wasps officials running touch that day had raised his flag for a foot in touch after Wasps had scored, but then dropped it to overturn his original decision. 

Two years previous, Nottingham had also run mighty Bath close on a mud-bath of a pitch at Ireland Avenue, losing by four penalty kicks to one in a semi-final that had been rescheduled due to flooding in Nottingham.

Through his Cambridge University connections, Davies persuaded the likes of Rob Andrew and Chris Oti that Ireland Avenue was the place to be. More fortuitously, Scotland international Chris Gray had moved to the area to take up a dentist job and would captain the side for six seasons, while Brian Moore was a student in the city. Moore would go on to become the only Nottingham player to be capped by the British and Irish Lions (in all three Tests in 1989) whilst still with the club. 

With such talent, complemented by local tearaway flanker, Long Eaton’s Gary Rees, and spidery former Stamford School pupil and full-back Simon Hodgkinson, both future England internationals, Nottingham were set up for success.

In the first National Merit Table A season, Nottingham finished second, and then fourth the season after that. In 1987, the Merit Tables formed the basis of the top three divisions of the brand-new Courage League structure, and Nottingham rightly took their place among the country’s elite. 

After finishing eighth first time around, despite losing the electrifying pace of Oti to Wasps, the Green & Whites came fourth overall, a fresh-faced Neil Back packing down on the openside and England full-back Hodgkinson’s kicking establishing him as one of Jonny Wilkinson’s idols and setting him on the way to becoming the club’s all-time record points scorer (2,778 points from 318 first-team appearances). Had it not been for the width of the post in that Quins semi-final in ‘91, he’d have three more. And had that kick rebounded into the arms of winger Richard Byrom following up, instead of bouncing away from him, Nottingham could have been in their first-ever major final. Instead, they lost 22-18 (AET) and such heights were never reached again. 

Nottingham’s progress under Davies had not gone unnoticed. His talents had already been recognised at international level with England – he took charge of England B between 1986 and 1988 and was assistant to Geoff Cooke on England’s tour of Australia and Fiji in 1988 – then Wales came calling. 

Just two months prior to Rugby World Cup 1991, Wales coach Ron Waldron had dramatically resigned after a player revolt. The Welsh Rugby Union were in need of a coach and appointed Davies in a caretaker capacity. His second Test in charge and Wales’s first match of the tournament, ended in a crushing 16-13 defeat to Western Samoa. Off to a disastrous start, Wales failed to make it out of the pool stages – a far cry from their bronze medal finish of four years earlier – yet the WRU board offered Davies the role on a full-time basis, which he accepted.

Now shorn of the talent of Oti and Andrew (Wasps), Moore (Harlequins) and Back (Leicester), Hodgkinson and Rees (England Rugby World Cup duty) and prolific try-scorer Steve Holdstock – rated then as the best uncapped English winger – to a job in Australia, Nottingham also had to cope without their inspirational figurehead. 

Unsurprisingly, the new Courage League season did not start well. A 32-0 loss to Bristol was followed by a 23-6 defeat on the road to Leicester and after that poor start, their form never recovered. Only two wins were achieved, at home to Northampton and Rosslyn Park, and they were relegated to National Division Two with only Park keeping them off the foot of the table. 

Following more key departures, Nottingham failed to bounce straight back up, finishing fourth. While Rees and Hodgkinson stayed around to clock up a triple century of appearances before hanging up their boots in the late 90s, the long, slow descent to the ground zero of Stourbridge had begun.

The Stourton Park win led to an overhaul of the squad as stalwarts like Mark Bradley and Alan Roy followed Rees and Hodgkinson into retirement, and the likes of Craig Hammond, Dave Jackson and Neil Fowkes became more prominent voices. The trio would rack up more than 800 appearances between them, the latter only leaving after thirty years when he became Wasps scrum coach last May. Jo Brun’s arrival was also transformational, the strength and conditioning coach whipping a young squad into shape. His appointment as the club’s first-ever full-time employee also signified Nottingham’s intention to become more professional in their approach. 

The move to full-time rugby also involved a move away from Ireland Avenue, with the ground sold to housing developers. The only existing sign that the club was ever there is in the name of the adjacent street, Cartwright Way, named after Vince Cartwright, one of four brothers to play for Nottingham in the early 1900s. The Nottingham-born solicitor was the first Green & Whites player to be capped by England and captained his country in nine of his fourteen Test appearances, including the first fixtures against New Zealand, South Africa and France. 

Moving to the Lady Bay complex in 2006, in Nottingham’s sporting triangle, they had the intention of only training there, and playing first-team fixtures across the Trent at Notts County’s Meadow Lane. It was to be another new era for Nottingham. 

Having been promoted from forwards coach to DoR in the Christmas of 2005, New Zealander Glenn Delaney [most recently head coach at Scarlets] would go on to lead Nottingham to the dizzy heights of second in what is now the Championship. There’d be more semi-final heartache, in the Powergen Trophy, too.

But the revival hit stumbling blocks, not least due to the attempted eviction from Meadow Lane by then owners Munto Finance. These were heady times for Nottingham’s footballing flat-mates, the arrival of Munto had seen the unveiling of the ‘dream team’ England defender Sol Campbell and ex-England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson. ‘The Premier League in four years’ was the goal, a lofty one.

More plot twists came when a BBC Panorama investigation found that Munto Finance had lied about backing from the Middle East and the club was on the brink of bankruptcy. It was this that prompted Nottingham to consider their options.

A year later, stability seemed to beckon, as Ray Trew took control of both Notts County and Nottingham Rugby Club, but he lasted just fourteen months. “The original owners of Notts County took ownership of the rugby club and we carried on being tenants at Meadow Lane and then invested in the team,” explains Simon [Beatham, who’d stepped down from the rugby side to focus on his business, but was still involved at board level]. “We had a great team and got into the play-offs. Then, what people probably don’t know about is that on the 13th of January, the tap on the funding we were receiving from the new owners got turned off, literally overnight.

“We had to sell shares in the club, going from single ownership to getting around twenty investors to buy into the club and move it forward. 

“Going from an expensive full-time team, to one on a fifth of that budget, and maintaining ourselves in the league was the hardest task to deal with by a country mile and people external to the club don’t really know about that.”

In January 2014, the future of the club was again brought into question due to financial peril, but a fifteen-strong consortium called the Friends of Nottingham Rugby, including Simon and chairman Alistair Bow, raised £750,000 and the club managed to stave off relegation. 

A year later, Nottingham played their first game at Lady Bay Sports Ground, under shared ownership with Nottinghamshire County Cricket and Boots PLC. A world away from sharing a pitch with ex-Premier League footballers, today they tread the same grass as Boots Hockey and Nottingham Corsairs, the amateur section of Nottingham Rugby. 

In this small corner of Nottingham reside the city’s most famous sporting clubs. The area is dominated by Trent Bridge, home ground to Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club and where some of cricket’s most memorable moments have taken place, such as local boy Stuart Broad’s 8-15 in the Ashes. Neighbouring it, is the City Ground, where Forest fans once enjoyed the Brian Clough era and all the European riches that came with it.

Nottingham Rugby are the third point in this sporting triangle, and while they’ve had their moments, it’s hard to stand out with glory shining so brightly nearby. 

They at least have stability, of sorts. “We’re now largely in control of our own destiny, we get more control and more benefit from ‘secondary spend’,” says Chris Simon, a director at the club. “At Meadow Lane, there was no influence, no ownership and it was purely a hire agreement. 

“Lady Bay is greenbelt land, so we have got some environmental planning to take into consideration, but none of that should stop us from trying to achieve what we want to achieve. 

“We are part of a quarter of Nottingham where there is an emphasis on elite level sport, health and wellbeing and also the economic impact that can bring for the local community. 

“If you take Forest, the cricket and Nottingham Rugby, there is a three there that could be collectively providing a benefit for both the local authority, local communities and the economy. That is how we have to present the opportunity as we move forward.”

Nottingham’s plans on the pitch have had to be revisited, since the RFU decided to slash central funding to Championship clubs to a fraction of the £534,000 they received two seasons ago. 

Like several other second-tier clubs, they moved to a part-time model, and as a result, have become increasingly reliant on the ever-strengthening links with Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and dual registration deals with Premiership clubs.

The recent funding cuts to the division, have brought that familiar feeling of uncertainty back to Lady Bay. Bow sat in the boardroom at Twickenham the day RFU CEO Bill Sweeney announced his swingeing cuts to the Championship’s outraged club chairmen. “Bill Sweeney has come in, sits there and tells us we have failed on every KPI (Key Performance Indicator) going and therefore they were pulling our funding,” he recalls. “What KPIs? We hadn’t seen any KPIs. Then they say we are not value for money.

“If we are not value for money, then Premier Rugby (Premier Rugby Limited) certainly aren’t value for money. They (the RFU) give them (PRL) £220m and that is so Premier Rugby will let them have some England players when they want them. Is that good value for money? It certainly isn’t, not in my view. Then, we are getting what? £6m a year? I think we were very good value for money.

“I think the RFU saw the Championship, in truth, as too difficult to deal with. They couldn’t deal with us as well as Premier Rugby. That is where I think the RFU have got it totally wrong. 

“They should have said, ‘I’m sorry, but the Championship is ours, we own it. We are going to put our time and resources into the Championship and the National Leagues as we own them’.”

For some unfathomable reason, the RFU felt they weren’t getting enough bang for their buck from the Championship in terms of player and coach development.

A brief look at England’s Rugby World Cup 2019 squad quickly puts this argument to bed. All but seven of the 32 players selected by Eddie Jones for the tournament had spent some time in the Championship or the National Leagues, prior to becoming established club and international players. Two of them had represented Nottingham in the early stages of their career, namely tight-head Dan Cole and hooker Jack Singleton.

Cole’s heir in the England and Leicester No.3 jersey, is Nottingham-born Joe Heyes, while ex-England and Lions hooker Tom Youngs spent three years at the Green & Whites honing his throwing skills having been converted from a centre. Had it not been for the time Delaney spent with him, the 31-cap player might still be chucking the ball in at 45 degrees like he did on his Nottingham debut at Doncaster.

Gloucester’s Ed Slater recently described his six months with Nottingham as some of the most enjoyable of his career, whilst former Saracens and USA wing Chris Wyles began his professional career in the East Midlands. More recently, Ollie Chessum departed Lady Bay for Leicester Tigers, citing his time in the Championship as “massive” for his development.

Coaching-wise, Welshman Davies set a bit of a trend with his move from Nottingham to a job higher up the food chain. In the pro era, Glenn Delaney (London Irish/Scarlets), Martin Haig (RFU/England U20s), Ian Costello (Wasps/Munster) and Neil Fowkes (Wasps) had the club to thank for acting as a springboard for their careers.

Now that funding has been whittled away – a recent report in The Telegraph claimed that Championship  clubs only received around £160,000 in funding in 2020/21 – the next man in the hotseat, Craig Hammond, will have to maximise what limited resources he has more than ever. The former flanker knows Nottingham well: he first arrived at the club in the early 2000s with the promise of a job as a forklift driver at the city’s Benson & Hedges cigarette factory and went on to make 289 appearances for Nottingham. This time, the Kiwi arrives from Hong Kong, where he worked in the union’s professional set-up. “I only ever intended to go to Nottingham for six months back in 2001 and I ended up staying for a dozen or so years. Now, after nine years away coaching in Hong Kong, I’m going back,” he says.

“Nottingham is a special place for me and my wife and I wouldn’t have left my job with the Hong Kong RU for any other role. Our three kids were all born in Nottingham and we’re all excited about what lies ahead.

“Having been away for so long, I’m sure some things have changed and other things are just the same. People will still say, ‘me duck’!”

Calling on the student pipeline and the support of current Nottingham backs coach and head of rugby at NTU, David Ross, will be crucial if the Green & Whites are going to improve on last season’s tenth-place finish. So too, will the formal link-up with Leicester Tigers involving player, coach and idea sharing

The joint NTU/Nottingham Rugby programme has proved to be a fruitful pathway in the seven years it has been operating, with current squad members Josh Poullet, Ben Brownlie, Jake Farnworth, David Williams and Jamie Jack among those to graduate with flying colours. 

Josh Poullet is a story in himself. A promising tennis player, he had seen his hopes of becoming the next Andy Murray dashed at sixteen years of age by bone marrow oedema, an over-use injury, but was surprised to hear from the medical experts that he would be okay to play rugby.

After returning to play at his boyhood club, Paviors RFC, in his home town of Arnold, the No.8 quickly caught the eye of Nottingham’s academy before going on to attend NTU.

Identified as one of the top players in that crop at university, Josh was invited to train with Nottingham’s first team along with several of his team-mates, making his debut in 2013 against Stirling in the now defunct British & Irish Cup. Last season he went past a century of appearances and is the longest-serving player in the current squad.

While the club’s decision to revert back to part-time status saw some of his former team-mates move on, including Doncaster-bound ex-NTU winger Jack Spittle, Josh agreed to have his contract terms revised. Ironically, the club’s call-out to local businesses to help players in his situation find paid employment led to Josh training to become a financial planner.

“I can probably speak on behalf of the lads that were full-time for a few years and are now part-time with work, we have just got to focus on what we can control. I can’t control how much money Nottingham have to use on contracts. No one can,” says Josh. “If the money isn’t there, we can’t control that, and we have gone semi-professional. It is up to us to keep the environment going, to keep the positivity up there as well and try to keep moving forwards. 

“If you sit there and dwell on it, it is then going to become negative, isn’t it? Poisonous is probably the term you would use. That’ll then fester through and it will become an even poorer situation.”

Nottingham as a city used to benefit from someone stealing from the rich and giving to the poor but in the absence of any men in green tights, its premier rugby club will have to continue to try and punch above their weight. Adversity and losing their prized assets – players and coaches – is something they have become accustomed to dealing with in their 144 years of existence. 

At a time when drawbridges are about to be raised, temporarily they claim, to the Premiership, Nottingham’s chances of ever rubbing shoulders with the very best in England again, appear to be over. “Even though I accept it purely on the basis of the financial situation the clubs find themselves in,” says Alistair [Bow] of the decision to temporarily suspend promotion from next season, “I think even having a temporary moratorium is not good. It is not good for rugby as a whole. The pathway must be kept open and we need to see annual promotion and relegation in all leagues and to keep the spirit of the game alive and allowing those clubs with aspirations to succeed and those clubs who fail, to fail. 

“That is what sport is about – it is about winners and losers. Sport is not about who has got the deepest pockets. I’d like to see in the future a very clear strategy of how they are going to deal with promotion and relegation and it needs to be a very fair competition and very open. We need honesty from all stakeholders. I think any form of fixed league which is run on a franchise-type model will eventually die a death. I don’t think this country is used to having stagnant competitions.”

And should it re-open for promotion, could Nottingham one day regain a place in the top tier?

“Our aspiration is to concentrate on the ground development (at Lady Bay) for the next two to three years (they want to build a permanent stand for community use, install a 3G pitch and a new clubhouse) and we will continue to keep playing in the Championship, to the best level we can, whilst still operating a financially stable model. 

“We have got the aspirations to be the best we can,” continues Alistair. “If that means playing in National One, the Championship or the Premiership, then so be it, providing there is a very clear strategy and the commercial and financial model allows us to be sustainable and compete.”

Would you want to go up if you won the Championship/Premiership play-off as things stand?

“No, I wouldn’t do it,” he admits. “At this moment in time it is not a fair competition and it is not sustainable. The Premiership is not a sustainable competition. In normal times, only a couple of clubs balance the books. What Nottingham are trying to do, and I think we are pretty well there, we are sustainable on a part-time model in the Championship. We were sustainable in the Championship on a full-time model until they pulled that funding. We have got a flexible approach to it. Once we know what the strategy is and the ultimate end game, we will move to what that strategy is.”

Whenever that strategy is revealed, 62-year-old club historian David Green – a man who’s witnessed too many semi-final defeats – hopes that wherever Nottingham find themselves, they have the chance of achieving one thing.  “My one wish for the club is that we win something,” he says. 

But by surviving in the current climate, they have already won.

Story by Jon Newcombe & Joe Harvey

Pictures from Nottingham Rugby Heritage Group

This extract was taken from issue 15 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.