Rugby Towns #2 Penryn

Two years after beating the All Blacks, the legendary 1971 British & Irish Lions decided to get together for one last hurrah. The men who’d faced down the haka now headed for Penryn, an ancient Cornish borough on a river where pirates once hid, men hauled granite and Spanish ships were sent fleeing by the townsfolk.

Across a fourteen-acre stretch of Cornwall’s finest land, on a hilltop in an ancient borough, National League side Redruth are hoping for a better reception that their forefathers once had when they visited their local rivals. 

With a backdrop of upwardly curving land, where both woodlands and hamlets cling to the steep sides, Penryn RFC have repelled many visitors, but none in quite the fashion they dispensed with Redruth some 136 years before this 2022 pre-season ‘friendly’ between Cornish neighbours.

The first club in Cornwall, founded in 1872, Penryn were not a side to be toyed with and when, in 1886, a Redruth try was disputed, fists flew from players and fans alike. Police were called, arrests made, and eventually the home side won. 

Far from the convivial handshake post-match, the supporters of Redruth were then run out of town, with flying stones providing the incentive for a hasty departure. “It reminds me a lot of South Wales, where you have your real tribal warfare across the valleys,” says Gareth Tedstone, a former Penryn player, now assistant coach, having returned to the club after playing professionally for Swansea, Cornish Pirates and, ironically, Redruth. “You’re representing your town against the other towns and although you don’t play each other as much [due to the leagues], those rivalries are still there; it’s embedded from a young age.”

This huddle of rugby clubs in the heart of Cornwall is indeed akin to the Welsh valleys where rugby towns and villages elbow into each other and fierce rivalries remain, despite the smudging of borders making it not always clear where one begins and another ends. 

“We’ve got Falmouth five minutes down the road,” continues Gareth, “Helston about fifteen, Truro twenty, Redruth and Camborne about twenty too, and all these towns have nothing in between, it’s just little pockets of towns everywhere. 

“Just lots of little rivalries and they’ve all got their little beefs with each other too,” he continues. “And the towns are all different, different mindsets, different cultures, so they all bring something unique to the table.”

Tonight’s game is competitive, Penryn belying their league position – three levels below in Western Counties West – to run Redruth close, but not out of town, succumbing to a 12-19 defeat. “We don’t get to play them as much these days as they’ve climbed the leagues,” says Gareth, “so it’s good for them to come down here to keep the rivalry going.”

Once, the result would have been a foregone conclusion, and not in favour of the visitors. “We had a special set of players back in the 1960s and 1970s,” says Gareth, “and special coaches too, like Benji Thomas, and they just caught the imagination of the people. The squad we’ve got now is very young, but having [events to mark] the 150th year, they learnt a lot about the history of the club and what it means to play for Penryn. It’s not just a game of rugby: they’re representing that history, and the town.

“Rugby means a lot to the town,” sums up Gareth, “when everyone talks about Penryn, they think of Penryn rugby club. That’s how Penryn has always been known, there are other sports, but Penryn is rugby.”

A town destined for greatness, Pennryn was founded in the 1200s by the Bishops of Exeter, but the creation of the granite-built Collegiate Church of Glasney meant that it could have been Cornwall’s cathedral city and not Truro.

Henry VIII put paid to that, so instead, greatness came on the rugby field. 

As with every rugby club, the proof is the wallpaper of the clubhouse. Three framed posters succinctly tell the story. The first, Exeter v Penryn at the County Ground in 1972, proclaiming the hosts as the ‘undisputed champions of the south west’ facing the ‘famous team from the Royal Duchy’. The second, a year later, has Penryn as ‘the undisputed champions of the south west’ and facing London Welsh in the John Player Cup, a game for which even the princely entry fee of £1.25 didn’t stop 5,000 flooding into the Memorial Ground. Only months later, remarkably, the opposition was even grander, the British & Irish Lions, and coming to Penryn too. 

Just two years before, the Lions made history in beating the All Blacks twice and cutting a swathe through New Zealand provincial rugby with nineteen wins. And now, they were coming to a small Cornish town squeezed onto a hillside on a river’s edge, between the far more illustrious Falmouth and Truro. “We’d written to Dr Doug Smith to ask him to bring the team down after they won the series in New Zealand, for the centenary, and, amazingly, he did,” says 76-year-old Neil Young, a stalwart of the club since he was five, and as much a storyteller as his musician namesake, (who is also 76, but we resist the temptation to ask this one for a few chords of Harvest Moon). “It was jam-packed, 6,000 we had,” he continues.

“We were taken to task, it was 38-10, but we were the only club in the British Isles to have played the British & Irish Lions. They were class; faster, fitter, and they had all the big names.”  

He reels them off: Williams, Duckham, Gibson, Dawes, Edwards, Bennett, Quinnell, Slattery, Spencer, Taylor... names so associated with an era, they don’t need first names. Even the iconic coach Carwyn James made the journey to the far west. “Twenty-five years later, we put on a reunion for them and they all came down again,” adds Neil. 

He is close to the club in every sense, living on the road opposite, in an impeccably kept bungalow, that wife Liz continues to ‘tidy’ while we’re there, despite the absence of any obvious mess. Aside perhaps from the kitchen table, which Neil fills with assorted paraphernalia that tells the life story of his club. Several decades’ worth of fixture books, programmes, newspaper cuttings, random scraps of paper with snippets of history. A report telling of Penryn’s punishing fifty-game 1964 season that saw them play eleven games in one month, yet still end up as the best in the south west; a list of games from the 1960s, including the likes of Cambridge University, Harlequins, Richmond, Sale, Cross Keys [all wins]; and a cutting headlined ‘Tiny-town tigers on new hunt’ – telling how Penryn (population then 4,750) was ruling the south west. 

He’s a storyteller in the truest of rugby’s traditions, flitting from tales of otherworldy scrum-time flatulence to how the club has produced players for England, the Barbarians and the British & Irish Lions. He tells of the town itself as well, a thriving medieval port when Falmouth was little more than shacks on the river, and home to more than forty pubs, and with the nickname of Shag Town, due to the seabird. That Penryn happened to once also have a high propensity of night workers only adds colour to Neil’s story – although he is quickly berated by Liz for telling such a story. 

The medieval, granite-built town centre means listed buildings are plentiful in the tight streets and narrow alleyways, bunched together around the curve of the Penryn River, as if collectively trying to keep their feet dry from the water’s edge. But perhaps rather than cowering from the water, the togetherness of Penryn is more about strength in numbers to keep invaders at bay. Pirates hid stash in caves, ships took shelter, and royals spent evenings as they passed by, some were welcomed, others less so, some were just misunderstood. “There’s one story,” begins Neil, “of a Spanish ship coming up the river, landing, and their crew were making their way up the hill when they heard such a noise, they thought they were going to be attacked and ran all the way back to their ship – but it was just the Penryn carnival crowd being raucous!”

“I’ve heard that story so many times,” chips in Liz, clearly unsure of the validity of her husband’s tales. “I’m not even sure what’s true, probably a lot of it is just rubbish.” The best kind of stories often are.

“And do you know the story of Billy Halls?” Neil asks us. “Well, he won a magazine’s kicking competition to see who could kick it the furthest in the UK. He won £5 and kicked it the best part of eighty yards.”

Neil talks also of the bad times, and how the arrival of a league system stopped the big sides coming down, then the arrival of professionalism pushed the club to the edge. “The teams stopped travelling, the likes of Cardiff and Aberavon wouldn’t come down here as they had leagues,” he says. “Then players were paid, so they didn’t have money to tour, and now the only side that comes down is Old Dunstonians, who come here every year, this is there 83rd year, I think. Our standard went down, and other sides were poaching our players, the likes of Redruth and that, we became their nursery.

“The club got really down, it was in a real mess, so we had to ask the people of the town for £50 each to save the club, and they all did it, that’s what kept us going. We’re fighters though, we don’t give up.”

A watchmaker from London, J Marshall Thomas, who’d played for Blackheath (hence the black and red colours), started rugby in Penryn when he saw a group of young quarrymen playing a game similar to rugby in the streets. “A lot of Penryn was built on the granite works,” explains Ken Plummer, when we meet back up the road at the club. A former player, chairman, president, he had used his time away from Penryn well, by playing 279 times for Bristol, scoring 139 tries, earning four caps for England. “The granite was huge, it was hauled out of Mabe, a neighbouring hamlet, taken through Penryn, into the harbour, then loaded up and sent around the world. A lot of it went to London to build things like the Embankment, Tower Bridge, London Bridge.

“And way before that there was no Falmouth as such,” he says, a sentence wefeel is always said with a little bit of glee; the club’s nickname, the Borough, acts as a constant reminder to the county that they were there first. “So, all the packet ships would sail up to our harbour, and there’d be a lot of trading, and pirates too – there was a lot of pirates running out of the creek into the Scillies and France.”

Ken talks to us beneath the honours board, filled with his surname – either through the efforts of him, his dad or brother. “Mother was on the ladies committee too, so I’ve been here all my life.

“One of my earliest memories was going to Enys Woods, with my father, and with Barry Quintrell – who was ‘Mr Penryn’ at the time – to go and cut down some trees for goalposts. I must have been about five.

“In those days we used to change in the Fifteen Balls pub, it was run by my great uncle, and both teams changed in the pub, then we’d climb on the coach, and come to the Memorial Ground, put our boots on and play a game of rugby.”

A flying winger, Ken made his first-team debut aged sixteen in 1963, at the beginning of the golden era that would lead Penryn to win the first-ever official county cup – having dominated the unofficial one in the years leading up to it – in 1968 [5-0 against Redruth], before winning it outright three more times, and drawing once, in four years. “Les Williams started it really,” begins Ken. “He was a Welsh international, he was a teacher who’d moved down here, but he’d been dual-code and played league, so he couldn’t coach rugby union back then. We got around it by having him coach us at the school. 

“We won the south-west merit table, we won county cups, we got to quarter-finals, we were the best in the county,” he says.

“We [Cornwall] had a very strong County Championship side too and in 1969 we went to the county final, and Penryn had eight players in that starting team, but we just lost to Lancashire 11-9 right at the end. It was at Redruth and there must have been 25,000 there.

“Cardiff, Bristol, Northampton, Cambridge Uni – they all came down for a bit of a jolly and ended up with a rude awakening on the pitch,” Ken continues. “We were very, very back orientated, spreading it wide, getting the ball wide to the wings, and fit too. That’s what Les Williams gave us and it was carried on by
Dave ‘Benji’ Thomas, that’s the rugby we wanted to play.” 

Ken thrived with the expansive game, scoring 100 tries in his 150 appearances, earning a call-up to the Barbarians. “I was only a young mechanic, on about ten bob a week, when I got called up to the Barbarians,” he explains. “The thing was, you had to have a blazer, and I couldn’t afford the blazer, and so what they did...” He stops, collecting himself. “Sorry, it makes me a bit emotional. So the dock workers heard about this, and they did a whip-round for me to buy a blazer, and presented it to me at the club... that was so special.”

Playing for Penryn, he’d been told, wasn’t going to help his England ambitions, and so he was forced to leave for Bristol. Where he duly got capped. “I played at Cardiff Arms Park, and it was when Wales were coming good in 69, so they had JPR Williams, Barry John, Gareth Edwards, John Dawes, Gerald Davies... and we got stuffed 30-9.

“I think the moment that stands out for me was the very first minute and Barry John put up an up-and-under and I caught it under our own posts and Denzel Williams, the Welsh prop, took me out. 

“I thought, ‘bloody hell where did he come from?’, he must have been twenty yards offside to catch me. He hammered me to the ground, the ball went loose, and wide too and Maurice Richards scored in the corner, and that was the first five minutes of the game.”

“You caught the kick though,” says a voice to one side, president Tim Nicholls, also a former player, and returned to the club, after a spell in Welsh rugby.

“Yeah, I did do that,” agrees Ken, who made three more England appearances after that debut in Cardiff.

“We also had Eddie Richards,” continues Ken, listing other internationals, “then Vic Roberts in the 1950s – he also captained the Barbarians.” 

“And captained England,” adds Tim, “and the Lions too.”

“Then there was Roger Hosen,” says Ken, “he played for Northampton, England and Cornwall. Chris Martin, he was very strong, and Tom Voyce too, although he only played minis here not first team. Then Hugh Vyvyan...” 

“Good player,” adds Tim, before continuing. “He was one of seven brothers and we used to have an Easter sevens down here and they entered as seven brothers and won it. I think Hugh is back down living here now...”

“Yeah, somebody told me that too,” concurs Ken.

For all of Ken’s big games, one had his stomach doing somersaults. “I used to get more nervous playing against Falmouth than any game I played for Bristol or anybody,” he says. “It was such a big derby.”

“The expectation on you to do something special was huge,” agrees Tim, adding, “this guy was like shit off a shovel, very fast...”

Ken and Tim bounce off each other, taking turns to tell different parts of the story. “Barry Quintrell built this club,” says Ken, “he was a sales rep, but his life was this club, he attracted players, worked hard behind the scenes and even changed our strip from red and black to the rugby league style, white with red and black Vs to freshen things up.”

“Marek [Churcher, the head coach], tells this story,” starts Tim. “His dad is one of three brothers, and when they were young, they always used to put the team sheet up on the pub in town every Friday morning. So, every Friday, his grandmother would send one of the boys running down to the pub to find out who was playing – that was the level of interest.”

“One of my earliest memories,” responds Ken, “was when I was about six, and we were playing Redruth and we never used to beat them. Mother was so nervous, she couldn’t go to the game, so I went with me father, there must have been 4,000 people there, and we won. I remember running all the way home from the club at the final whistle and knocking on the window shouting, ‘We won! We won! We beat Redruth!’.”

The club are in a good place. Under Marek, a Penryn man, but also a full-time coach with Exeter Chiefs’ Truro academy, and Gareth, the first-team is brimming with young, local talent. The ladies’ side are the best in the county, the only Cornish side playing in Women’s National Challenge One South West (West), facing teams from Devon and Somerset. “And for a town this size [6,800], we’ve got 280 kids on a Sunday morning,” says Tim.

Ken dovetails with Tim’s train of thought. “We’ve got fourteen acres here, we’ve got no debt, we’re ambitious, we’re blessed with what we’ve got, and we’ve got areas that generate income – a vets over there, a charity over there [he says, pointing to different parts of the ground]. And we’re in the process opening up a gym in the grandstand. The professional rugby league team play here, the School of Mines play here.”

Much of the credit for the club’s stability they give to the young committee – “in their 40s and 50s” – who’ve brought energy and organisation to the club, including the chairman Matthew Gray, a quantity surveyor who also had a hand in the building of the university campus that’s now in Penryn and a source of positivity, and players, for the club. Even as we talk to Ken and Tim, he’s meeting with a new fund-raiser on the other side of the ground, to help grow the club further. “Now we’re rebuilding,” says Tim. “We want to get back, we’re an ambitious club, we’re in Western Counties, level seven, which is quite a good standard of rugby, but it would be nice if we could get a couple of leagues up.”

“That would be nice,” agrees Ken.

As high as Redruth? “Redruth must be National Two,” says Tim, “that would be serious money to do that...”

But if they can find more people like Ken... “I’m not just saying this to massage his whatever,” says Tim, pointing to Ken, “but this man, he personifies Penryn. Penryn family born and bred, mother and father both Penryn people, and he achieved what he did, and came back to the club, no airs and graces. 

“There’s a Tuesday gang which is a group of codgers that turn up and do all the odd jobs and all the rest of it,” continues Tim, “and if there’s a dirty job to be done, he’s the first one there, you know, and he’s been president of the club, chairman of the club, president and chairman at the same time at one stage.

“I’m embarrassing him now,” admits Tim, “and I’m not just speaking for me here, but he was one of my heroes. For me then, as a youngster, to play for Cornwall with you that one time was just, well...”

“I gave you a lift home too,” adds Ken. 

“And you told me to fill in the expenses form too, what an honour,” laughs Tim.

“You’re just putting something back in, aren’t you? I want to see us as a club do well,” sums up Ken. “This rugby club means everything; it’s been my life since I was six. When you went to school, all you wanted to do was play for Penryn. Penryn first, then Cornwall, that’s just the way it was.”   

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by James McNaught

This extract was taken from issue 19 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

This Rugby Towns story was created in partnership with Canterbury.