Wharfedale RUFC
The beauty of the Yorkshire Dales has a tendency to lull people into a false sense of security. ‘What are we doing here?’ the opposition are often heard asking. It’s then, they know they’ve got them, and the tweed-covered faithful of The Avenue start to roar.
As you drive down the lane to Wharfedale RUFC, the white tops of the rugby posts at either end of the second team pitch can just be seen peeking through the thick, green trees that surround it. Technically, that pitch is in the next village, the club’s original home in neighbouring Grassington, but it feels like it’s little more than a wind-assisted punt away. Backed by the Yorkshire Dales, a lush green rug of grass, criss-crossed with stone walls, Grassington is where you go for the original country pub lunch before (and after) a proper yomp across God’s own country, and where farmers’ markets are actually run by farmers. It was a doctor who’d started the rugby club having been itching to pull the boots on, and noticed a number of locals, heading down to Skipton to get their rugby fix each week. With a ball provided by the vicar, (who else?), the doctor managed to get fifteen names on a team sheet, with some surnames repeated due to it being a close, family-based club right from the start. That was 1923, and although playing catch-up to some of the bigger names of Yorkshire rugby that had already emerged, including arch-rivals and fellow River Wharfe dwellers, Otley, Wharfedale were up and running.
Since then, Wharfedale have certainly gone places. Geographically not so far: just a short hop across the river into Threshfield, a speck of a village with not even four-figures of residents; but in rugby terms, they’ve travelled and discovered whole new worlds.
For a side that struggled to get games against bigger sides before the introduction of the league system, since then some of English rugby’s most famous names have visited The Avenue, and been suitably rewarded for their efforts. “The first thing you get from clubs who haven’t been here before is, ‘where the hell are we?’” explains Jon Feeley, the head coach and former Rotherham and Bradford Bulls wing. “And if they do find us, and it’s in the middle of winter and under two foot of snow, it’s possibly the most difficult place on earth to play rugby. Hull Ionians didn’t lose many games last year when they won the league [League Two North], but they came to us and it was one of those Wharfedale days when you’re ankle deep in mud and just have to scrap to get anything, and we turned them over. “It can be the hardest place to play. But it also means a lot to the away sides too, a bit like when cricketers play at Lord’s, when away sides come here, they raise their game.
“Someone from a visiting team once said, ‘it’s like playing on the set of Emmerdale Farm’, which probably encapsulates exactly what it’s like. Look at that backdrop, it’s just phenomenal, it’s just a wonderful place.”
Farming has obviously played a key role from the start. “Quite a few of our players have come through farming like Dan Stockdale, he’ll work all week, farming his sheep and cattle, he’ll have about three hours sleep and then come and play for us,” explains Jon. “He’s actually fourth generation Stockdale to play for the first team. There’s actually a bit of a race between his family and the Bullers to see who can become the first fifth-generation player in the first team, they both had sons this year. There’s bragging rights there for which one can get in first.
“The Stockdales were one of a number of families who actually formed the foundations of the club. Another family, the Harrisons, gave up one of their sheep fields to build the club on and year by year it’s got bigger.
“We’ve never been reliant on one benefactor, it’s a whole group of people who make small contributions to the club, and those contributions have never been used for player wages, they’ve always gone to grassroots level, to infrastructure, to making sure that the coaching and development in the club is what attracts players. You’re not going to make a lot of money coming to Wharfedale but you are going to do something unique and we are going to do our very best to give you the best coaching possible.”
You’ll also get to wear the finest tweed. “We’ve got very distinctive tweed jackets that we all wear,” says Jon. “We’ve got like a club uniform that you’ll see everyone wearing and it’s like a wonderful tweed jacket with tweet flat caps. The Yorkshire cliché is one that we thrive on and we kind of play up to the stereotype.”
Creosoting a pitchside fence is former England and Cambridge University centre John Spencer, the club’s president. It’s the annual RugbyForce day, and everywhere you look someone is either painting, hammering, trimming or fixing. He’s wearing Barbarians tracksuit trousers and an old Lions shirt. “I was born just above those pitches on the Wisbey’s farm, so I was born and bred into it with my father and uncle playing,” says John, following suit with everyone we meet and being able to point to a nearby village or hillside where they live or used to live. He lives just down the road now. “We played across there where the posts are over the river,” he says, pointing again, this time to what is now the reserve team pitch. “And we changed in the Foresters pub in Grassington.
“I’ve just done 40 years as president, and the last three presidents have done the best part of the century so we don’t go through many, we always say it’s a more difficult club to leave than it is to join.”
As he paints, John takes us through his club’s achievements like a proud parent. The academy programme is top of the list. “Our academy coaches are in 55 schools,” he says. “And that was set up not to pinch players from other clubs, but it was to go into schools to teach kids about team sports and that’s been very successful.
The former British & Irish Lions team manager and England international John Spencer has been chairman of Wharfedale RUFC for 40 years.
“We were quite strong immediately before the leagues were formed in 1987,” continues John, taking his story to the seniors. “But it was difficult to break out of fixtures and get new ones because clubs that were better than you weren’t keen on giving you fixtures.
“The floodlights helped us dramatically, we were one of the first clubs in Yorkshire, if not the first club, to have them.”
Like rugby moths, some bigger sides were tempted to The Avenue, but never to the level they found as they climbed the league system. “The good thing about the leagues for us, it enabled us to find our true position,” says John. “We had a very strong side and we got promoted four times, we quite quickly found our level on merit.”
The promotions were spread across a decade, leading them to National One. “Worcester, Leeds, Exeter – we played against them all when we were level three,” he says. “We beat Rotherham one year in the last match of the season, we beat Leeds too – it just epitomised the character of the guys we have here. They tackle everything that moves here, even if he’s got the ball or not. The strength of character, belief in themselves, the defence, they’re not at all fazed by the strength of the opposition. I think we finished eighth in the league this season, it’s a typical Wharfedale season, you couldn’t pick out any stars, they were just good team performances. If you can throw a blanket over your forwards then they’re doing a good job. They were always within a yard of each other.”
Jon adds another to John’s list. “Our colts last year won the national trophy beating Old Elthamians, that was a remarkable achievement,” he offers. “They were a bit like the class of 92, you know the golden generation for Wharfedale – they were pretty much all the sons of former first teamers.
It brings Jon onto the problem facing the club. “The challenges here are pretty clear, it’s like any rural population – the drain of people from the local area to universities and bigger towns. But we’re working hard with them to forge educational and career paths to try and keep them local to us so they’ll still be around the club and hopefully develop.”
Fixing the lights in the main clubhouse is prop Matt Beesley. He’s one who’s come back having first played for the club after his student days. “I didn’t come up here to do anything really,” he says. “I kind of had an odd job in a warehouse for one of the sponsors but was just trying to pursue rugby.
“A lot of the time, when we were in National One, especially with a lot of the southern teams, you could hear them in the changing room saying, ‘what are we doing here?’ And then the heavens opened and we were going, ‘right, we’ve got em’. They didn’t want to be here, the rain was coming down and we were just loving it and the fans are loving everything that’s happening.”
Playing for Wharfedale and England Counties, Matt eventually received interest from the Premiership. “It was very, very strange really,” he says of how he was signed. “They’d come up to see one of the other boys here and gone away with my name as well. Dusty Hare [the Northampton Saints’ scout] rang me, and I was towing my pallet truck round the warehouse at the time and I was thinking this is a joke. He asked me to come down and see the club, have a couple of days there and was, ‘yeah, we’ll get this into motion’. The trial went from two weeks to two months and then they offered me a two-year contract, so I went from zero to 100 in very little time at all.
“I’d just come back from tour, England Counties to Romania, I was feeling pretty good about rugby itself and that sort of thing, so looking back, I probably did miss a step in terms of maybe getting into a Championship side, earning your stripes and working your way up, but at that time, stuck in a warehouse, you’re not going to not take that opportunity are you?
“Going from here to a top European side was tough. The first year took me by surprise, the pre-season had written me off, I had to shed a lot of weight, but I thought I was getting in the swing of things, then the second year, I didn’t really get much opportunity.
“I played a lot of A League, managed to win two out of three A League tables with a good bunch of boys, managed to play in Europe, so it was good experience, I just wish I’d played a bit more rugby for the senior team but it’s tough going from an amateur team.”
A move to Ealing Trailfinders followed, but was, equally, not quite right. “Living in London was different, I’m very much a northern boy so, again it was almost a carbon copy of Northampton really,” admits Matt. “I always felt like I could push on really, but my face didn’t seem to fit. I enjoyed it nonetheless, and met some mates for life.
“That kind of brought me back here. The reality of it is there’s not a lot of money in the Championship and I’m 27, not 21, so it’s all well and good pursuing rugby but at some point your life is on hold isn’t it?
“My girlfriend lives just down the road,” he says, doing the Wharfedale point. “So I was always going to come back to the area, and the club managed to get me a good opportunity to get into a school and pursue a teaching/pastoral mentoring role, so it’s now a fresh start and I’ve still got an opportunity to play rugby. I always called it my home.”
National One was the pinnacle for Wharfedale. “We got there 24 years ago, 1994 I think it was,” explains Edwin Williams, the club’s press officer. “It was frightening, we were shaking, thinking we can’t survive at this level.
“Look at the clubs we’re playing, and of course there was the national travel and those days there were more south west clubs, so you’d be going down to Launceston, Redruth, all those clubs, massive amounts of travelling. It often meant Friday nights away.
“I loved going down with my lads on a Friday, we’d stay in a hotel in Leicester or Watford on the way, and then just pop into London for the game the next day, it was great.”
The club didn’t just stay in the division for 20 years before being relegated in 2016, but they almost went in the opposite direction. “We always said that we hadn’t got a God-given right to be in National One, but staying that long in that division is a fantastic achievement,” says Edwin. “We survived by the skin of our teeth a few times, and there was the awful season when we were third before Christmas and there was a lot of knee-shaking I can tell you. The bloody Championship, we can’t go up to the Championship!
“But luckily Tom Barrett was our stand off and had helped get us into that position, I think he won probably three or four games with a drop goal, and he was signed by Rotherham at Christmas. After Christmas he left and we lost a lot of games.”
Going up to the Championship could have tempted them to change a finance formula that’s kept them in the black, at a time when so many clubs are in the red. “We’ve got our Cavalry Club which helps sustain us,” explains Edwin. “Once the RFU pulled their funding out, someone had the bright idea of getting the Cavalry Club going. I’m a Lieutenant, so I put in about £700 a year and there’s dozens of us; then Majors put in £2,000; Colonels put in £4,000 and we’ve now got five sponsors who put in £15-16,000 a year, so that keeps the club going.
“It’s a great club,” continues Edwin. “That’s why people support it, because it’s the Dales, and we live and breathe rugby up here. You go anywhere in the local pubs and we’re talking Wharfedale and there’s a great club atmosphere, everyone has played here, they’ve all had a career here whether it’s been with the firsts, seconds, thirds or fourths – it’s a great, great club in that respect.”
And in many other respects too. “I mean you’ve got this beautiful view,” adds Edwin, “if you get bored of rugby, just look around you. It’s just fantastic, it really is. I love it.”
Words by: Alex Mead
Pictures by: John Ashton
This extract was taken from issue 7 of Rugby.
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