Sunday 21 April 2019

Hobart 1870: Final Thoughts and Conclusions


My aim over the previous posts has been to establish whether a game of soccer was played in Hobart in May 1870, and explore the circumstances surrounding the game. I am confident High School and the 18th Regiment were playing soccer under the 1863 FA Rules, as refereed by the recently arrived Cambridge graduate T.D. Warner.

This would mean Hobart becomes the location of Australia’s earliest confirmed soccer game, which occurred five years before the next confirmed game, played at Woogaroo Asylum in Goodna, near Ipswich.

That said, there were other games in Melbourne and Sydney around 1869 and 1870 where hints exist as being soccer but without final conclusive proof. Hopefully further evidence can appear on Trove or elsewhere which can clarify these games. I don’t expect the High School game to forever be the earliest confirmed game of soccer in Australia.

I’d like to finish with some final thoughts and theories to stimulate further research into our game and early soccer in Australia.

“The General Game”

The rules printed in the Tasmanian Times were modifiers of “the general game”.

I would like to propose “the general game” was Rugby. My reasoning based on considering who was the intended audience of the article. I think the audience wasn’t purely the general Hobart sporting public, but the 18th Regiment.

Both the 18th and 14th Regiments, posted in New Zealand at the same time, seem far more conversant with Rugby than any non-carrying football code which may have been played in the UK before the early 1860s.

I propose the rules printed in the Tasmanian Times were written out to explain the home club rules of football to the 18th Regiment to ensure both sides were playing the same game on that Saturday afternoon. These rule modifiers may have been sent to the garrison and the newspaper.

We know Hobart teams didn’t play under a unified code in this era, and players tended to get rather annoyed if their opposition pulled out obscure rules halfway through a game.

The other hint “the general game” was Rugby is the modifier explicitly banning throwing. Throwing was already banned under the 1866 Melbourne Rules. If Melbourne Rules was “the general game” there would be no need to mention it in the rules printed in the newspaper.

1869

Did the arrival of T.D. Warner introduce soccer to Hobart, or strengthen an existing soccer sensibility?

 In Inglis and Warner, High School had two recently arrivals from Cambridge in leadership roles, either of which could have seen the school adopt soccer.

This leads to two considerations regarding the 1869 Hobart football season.

The year 1869 is the least documented year of Tasmanian football in Trove. A few games in Launceston, but with their oval ball we know they were leaning towards Melbourne Rules. There is no mention of what was going on in Hobart at all.

What if some Hobart teams were already playing soccer in 1869? What if Inglis bought the FA Rules to Hobart in 1868? If soccer was already partially established, this would explain why the High School insisted the Army Rugbyites learn new rules.

Men Versus Boys

There is another possibility – that High School played Rugby in 1868 – that is this was their general game. If High School played Rugby, why the need to print the rules at all? Why not play Rugby against the military.

That said, if High School did play Rugby, would you really want your boys up against the fighting men of the 18th, especially if the visitors had a fearsome reputation?  Maybe you want to play a code where physical bulk may not make so much of a difference. 

Maybe you adopt soccer for the game?

Questions

There are many questions which, if answers could be uncovered, would give us a clearer picture as to why soccer was played in Hobart in 1870, and possibly why it faltered.

Are there any surviving records from the 18th Regiment or High School detailing information about this match?

Why did the Tasmanian Times republish the piece from the Standard?

Who was Drop-Kick?

Did a meeting ever take place to formalise the rules, as suggested by Drop-Kick, for the 1870 season?
Were all the games in Hobart, 1870, played under the same rules?

Did T.D. Warner play football at Trinity Hall?

Did Inglis play soccer at Trinity College?

Were McMahon’s Cricket and Sports Manual or certain Cassell’s publications available in Hobart around the turn of the decade?

Under what rules was Hobart football played in 1869?

Some of these questions may never be answered, but with new material appearing on Trove all the time, more of this story may appear soon.

Or maybe an earlier game somewhere else in Australia will be uncovered.

Coda
On the 13th of May, 1871, exactly a year after Drop-Kick called for unified rules, The Mercury reported a meeting of the Break O Day cricket club to form a football team. Their first match was against High School. The reports into their game included the words “spills” and “scrimmage”

Clearly this was not soccer. That experiment, such as it was, was over for the time being.

What happened in the next few years is hard to guess, though it seems clubs played under a variety of rules, often decided ahead of the game.

Perhaps the most vivid voice from this period is our mysterious Drop-kick. The mononymous writer, if the same individual, managed to secure a regular column which ran in the Tribune.

Drop-Kick is very useful for modern day researchers. He has opinions. He praises teams. He chides teams.  He annoys people

What, for instance, to make about this game between Richmond and City where running with the ball, tripping and hacking were banned?  It is through Drop-Kick we have additional evidence rules continued to be often arranged game-by-game.

The best place to go next in the story of Tasmanian soccer is Ian Syson, whose work on this decade has already been acknowledged. One of the quotes he discovered was the remembrances of one W.H. Cundy in September 1931, who claimed football in Tasmania in the 1870s:

 “consisted of Soccer, Rugby and a cross between the two games known as the Tasmanian game.” Mercury, September 22, 1931

This gives further weight to the 1870 game being soccer, and for the code to linger in Tasmania prior to game’s confirmed return to Hobart in 1879.

By 1879, T.D. Warner was undertaking his priestly duties in West Maitland. Inglis had died. The 18th Regiment was in Afghanistan. High School’s days were number, closing in 1884.  Drop-Kick had been silent since 1877.

A new generation had taken over, but that is (as told by Syson) another story.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the various members of #SokkahHistoryTwitter including Ian Syson, Paul Hunt, Paul Mavroudis, Peter Eady, Paul Nicholls, Mark Boric and Troy Chandler for answering questions, offering encouragement, feedback and or just creating an inclusive environment for someone new to start exploring the history or Australian soccer. . 

I’d like to also thank the many who have tagged and edited Trove articles, many who had no interest in soccer, but made the articles easy to search.

Lastly, thanks also to the National Library in regard to my Cassell’s enquiry.

Part 1: Introduction - Australia's Earliest Known Soccer Game?
Part 2: The Rules of the Game
Part 3: When Did The FA Rules Reach Australia?
Part 4: Game Day
Part 5: The Military Men and the "Upmire"
Part 6: Final Thought and Conclusions

Wednesday 17 April 2019

The Military Men and the “Upmire”


Let’s Try These Rules…

In late May 1870, High School and the 18th Regiment of the British Army played a game of soccer. 

We know this because The Tasmanian Times printed the rules of the match in the newspaper the day before. 

The game was played in an environment where clubs were not playing to unified rules, leading to calls for one set to be adopted by all. It is possible the rules printed in the Tasmanian Times were an attempt to answer this call.

Our next question is who was most likely to have decided to play the game under the rules of the Football Association?

Today we will look at those in and around the game. Were any of the participants likely to have rocked up with a knowledge of and will to play soccer?

The 18th Regiment

The 18th Regiment had arrived in New Zealand to join the wars against the Maori in 1863, before the rules of association football were codified.

The 18th subsequently became the last regiment to leave New Zealand, in February 1870, when they were sent to Australia as a staging post for the return to the UK.

On arrival in Australia, the 18th Regiment was split amongst the colonies where they soon immersed themselves in social engagement and playing sport. 

In terms of football, the 18th Regiment came into Australia with a strong footballing reputation:

“On Saturday next the Melbourne Club play a match with the 18th Royal Irish, who have brought with them from New Zealand the reputation of being expert football players. It is said that on one occasion the regiment were challenged to play a match by a number of civilians in New Zealand, but that when they entered the field they presented such a formidable appearance that their opponents beat a hasty retreat.”
The Argus, May 23, 1870

On the same afternoon as their fellow soldiers were losing to High School, another section of the 18th Regiment were soundly trounced 4 nil against Melbourne Football Club.

Overall the press was not impressed with the military’s skill, with one the writer questioning the soldiers’ tactics:

“The military no doubt lost the match, by playing en masse, instead of spreading over the ground as is the practice of the Melbourne men, and in this particular they follow the example of their predecessors in the 14th Regiment.”
Leader, June 4, 1870

Another match report was more scathing, highlighting the same issues found in the game on the other side of Bass Strait:

“It was evident up to this time that the soldiers, though they played with great energy and determination, were not as familiar with the game as people had been led to expect, scarcely seeming to be aware of the advantage of a "mark," and making few efforts to obtain one.”
The Argus, May 30, 1870

It was clear the 18th Regiment were not familiar with either association football, or those precursor football forms which gave rise to Melbourne Rules.

But there was one football code in which at least one member of the 18th Regiment gave a good account of himself.

In early August Sydney University played Walleroo under rugby rules. In the subsequent match report, it was noted:

“Three or four touch-downs took place, in which Lieutenant Jackson, of the 18th, was specially conspicuous.”
Evening News, August 5, 1870.

Wallaroo had seen Jackson, and other members of the 18th Regiment (plus the Navy) in action two months earlier when the rugby club played the combined forces, in what was described as a fair match.

It seems the 18th Regiment was familiar with Rugby-style football, which seemingly precludes them as the reason their game against High School was played under association rules.

The 18th were not the only recent members of the British Army in Australia. The 18th replaced the 14th Regiment, who had already started the journey home from New Zealand.

We already know the 14th played Rugby, thanks once again to that article the Fremantle's The Herald:

“As the Game of "Foot Ball" is becoming a favorite amusement since the advent of the 14th Regt. we have been earnestly requested to publish the Rules of the Game. The following are from CASSELL'S Out Door Games.”
The Herald (Fremantle) October 17 1868.

The rules as published are Rugby, as for example, the following rule shows:

9. A player shall be entitled to run with the ball towards his adversaries' goal if he makes a fair catch, or catches the ball on the first bound
The Herald (Fremantle), as  October 17, 1868

We can rule out the British Army in introducing soccer to Hobart in 1870. They were too Rugby, which did them in good stead in Sydney, but not elsewhere in Australia.

For a likely culprit, we must instead look towards the scholars.

Centre of Learning

When we talk of High School in 1870, we aren’t talking about Hobart High School. That government secondary school was started in 1913 and kept the name until the mid-1960s. It is now called Hobart College.

Instead, our High School was first conceived in 1847 with the following fundamental regulations:

1st. "That the Holy Scriptures shall be read in the school."
2nd. "That, to preserve the catholicity of the institution, this rule shall not be enforced in the case of any pupil whose parent or guardian may object to it."
3rd. " That the inculcation of the peculiar tenets of any religious denomination shall be scrupulously avoided, as foreign to the design of the institution.''
The Courier (Hobart) September 1847.

It was a non-conformist religious school

The newspapers first mention football in relation to High School in 1866. A match against the Town Club is advertised in The Mercury on the 18th of August 1866.

A year later they kick-off again against Hutchins School, another private school in Hobart. Further games are mentioned over the next few years. Again, because of the reticence of the Tasmanian press in describing the play, we do not know under which rules these games were played.

But something changed in May 1870 which required explicit rules of soccer to be published, a couple of weeks after the school was asking around for games.  

That change might have been a new arrival, someone who arrived in Hobart around the same time as the 18th. Someone who took up a leadership position in High School, and was subsequently involved in the soccer match.

For there in the advertisement for the 1870 match is:

“Upmire. T. O. Warner.”

Cox, Upmire and Reverend

Yes, it says Upmire.

And if you allow such typo gets through editing, maybe you will also confuse a pen-written capital D for a capital O.

Now while for all we know T. O. Warner may have been the local football-refereeing butcher, the game was played a few months after the Launceston Examiner reported the following:

“Mr. T. D. Warner, of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, has been appointed English master at the High School; Hobart Town in the place of at Mr.Richards, resigned.”
Launceston Examiner January 29, 1870

We know a lot about Thomas Davenport Warner: rower, teacher, sports administrator, priest and father-in-law to a premier.

We have knowledge of Warner because before Tasmania he went to Cambridge University, and afterwards, he became an Anglican clergyman.

As a Reverend, Warner become a newspaper-worthy figure within the communities he tended.

But the outline of his life can be found in two big books, one each from the two big institutions to which he was associated.

The “Alumni cantabrigienses” come with the subtitle: “a biographical list of all known students, graduates and holders of office at the University of Cambridge, from the earliest times to 1900”.
Warner’s entry was partially cribbed from “Crockford’s Clerical Directory”, a regularly updated publication listing the whereabouts of each member of the Anglican clergy.

Warner’s Alumni biography ends with the ominous line “disappears from Crockford in 1940”, a fact explained by Warner having died four years earlier.

Warner was born in 1848 in New York, though whether this was in Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, or the United States is not clarified. Warner grew up in Australia, where he attended Church of England Grammar in Melbourne. He matriculated to Trinity in Easter 1867, where he stayed until moving to Tasmania in 1870.

By 1874, Warner was being ordained in Brisbane, before embarking on a nomadic journey as a priest in Roma, Maitland, Cassilis and Toowoomba, a decade back in England, and a final return to Australia during the Great War.

Behind him, Warner left plenty of newsprint regarding the numerous marriages, funerals, general socialising and close involvement in each community in which he lived.

Warner’s Cambridge biography does not mention his time teaching in Hobart’s High and City Schools, but the trail of newspaper articles can be pieced together to confirm this fact.

When he died, Warner received a lengthy, (if erroneous) obituary, while his wife Emma Eugenie McDowall, (but normally referred to as Mrs T.D Warner), earned her own detailed obit in 1940 and was praised for her philanthropy.

Their daughter Mary was married to Queensland Premier Arthur Moore. It seems the Warner family was both an extremely noteworthy family, and an eminently trackable one.

But we are interested in Warner’s sporting interest, and there is plenty of evidence of this too.

The first results for most searches of T.D. Warner in our period is the 1868 Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge. The “Alumni cantabrigienses” states Warner was a “Rowing ‘blue’ (cox), 1868”.

What the biography does not explain is Warner was the first non-British rower to compete for Cambridge.

Nor the fact they lost.

That said, if Cambridge had their way, Warner would not have even raced. 

In February 1868, team member John Bourke died after accidentally shooting himself. Cambridge offered to pull out of the race, but Oxford wasn’t having any of it. Cambridge raced, Oxford won, and Warner’s name became etched in sporting history.

We know he continued to row on arrival in Tasmania. In 1870  Warner agreed to be the coxswain for a Hobart crew which was being planned to travel to Sydney for the famous Balmain Regatta, though they seemed to have cancelled the trip late in the piece. We also know he was a rowing coach in Hobart.

Warner was also heavily involved in cricket, becoming the secretary and treasurer of the Wellington Cricket Club.

He continued his interest in sports administration years later, in the 1890s, when he became president of Pirate R.F.C union club in Toowoomba, and vice-president of the Toowoomba Rugby Union.

Perhaps Warner’s most widely reported sporting association was one in his day job as a clergyman, a tragic story coincidentally linking rowing and rugby.

In 1888, the British Football Team arrived in Australia for a series of games. However, on a visit to Maitland, team captain B. L. Seddon drowned in the Hunter River whilst rowing.

The funeral was presided over by the local reverend, T. D. Warner. Later Warner gave a detailed speech to the acceptance of an engraved tablet funded by a memorial fund set up by the NSW Rugby fraternity in Seddon’s memory.

To have been referee of the game against the 18th Regiment fits Warner’s keen interest in sport.

That Warner came from Cambridge, a hotbed of soccer in England at the time also increased the likelihood he was exposed to the sport during student days.

The Cambridge University Association Football Club started (or rather re-organised themselves) in 1866, just before Warner arrived. We have no proof Warner played soccer at Cambridge, but the game was available to experience.

Did Warner convince High School to play soccer? We don’t know.

Alternatively, the rules may have already been known in Tasmania, but it took the arrival of T.D. Warner, as one of the Masters of High School, for someone in a position of influence to organise a game. 

For The Sake Of Completeness…

Warner was the Third Master of High School. All three masters came from Cambridge.

The First Master was Rev. R. D. Powlett Harris, who apparently went to Trinity College. I’ve searched “Alumni cantabrigienses” and cannot find him, but he was well established at High School by 1860, before the FA drew up their rules.  

The second master was Earnest Ingle of Trinity College (and not Trinity Hall as some advertisement stated.) Ingle is mentioned in “Alumni cantabrigienses”, though there is nothing in there of interest.

Inglis arrived in High School in 1868. His remaining life would be sadly short.  Ingle would marry the daughter of the first Master, found Melbourne’s Kew School , and die of typhoid in 1875.

Like Warner, Inglis was in Cambridge as soccer was taking over, and may have had an influence over the game in Hobart in 1870. Again, we simply don’t know.

Where’s the Trophy?

We cannot prove Warner or Inglis introduced soccer into Hobart in 1870, but we do know Warner refereed the match.

This makes Warner the first known soccer referee in Australia.

So anyone looking at giving a name to a refereeing award might be in luck. The T.D. Warner Award for Excellence in Whistle-blowing perhaps?

Part 1: Introduction - Australia's Earliest Known Soccer Game?
Part 2: The Rules of the Game
Part 3: When Did The FA Rules Reach Australia?
Part 4: Game Day
Part 5: The Military Men and the "Upmire"
Part 6: Final Thought and Conclusions

Tuesday 16 April 2019

Hobart 1870: Game Day


The State Of Play
On March 25, 1867, the pseudonymous Dropkick wrote to the Launceston’s Cornwall Chronical calling for a meeting to form a football club which would play under an agreed set of rules chosen or adapted from those of an existing public school code.

Dropkick’s request was in reaction to the lack of uniformity of rules between different clubs.

 “Particular attention should be paid to establishing a code of laws for the guidance of players, as everyone plays in the way in which he has been taught, and, of course, there is great confusion, as there are such a number of ways of playing the game.”
The Cornwall Chronicle (Launceston) March 27, 1867

Dropkick’s concern was not without merit. 

When Mr A. Swan’s Eleven played fourteen from the Hutchin’s School in 1866, a goal was overturned due to a rule the eleven were unaware existed.

There is no evidence Dropkick’s call to arms saw any change in the way football was run in Tasmania. 

However, a couple of weeks later the existing Launceston club, which had formed in 1866, agreed to play under a slightly modified version of the rules used by the Melbourne club. That said, there were no reports of any other clubs following suit.

Further south, at least two clubs already existed in Hobart. New Town formed in 1864, while Hobart Town Foot Ball Club commenced in 1866.

On formation, Hobart Town went so far as to draft formal rules under which the club would play, though the newspapers of the time did not describe them.

Over the next two years, football continued in Hobart with games taking place between New Town, Hobart Town, “the military”, and both High and Hutchin’s Schools. These games featured varying numbers of participants and complete lack of description of the play.

In short, we don't know what game they were playing.

This Mess Where In

Have a look at this link.

It’s the rulebook of New Town and Hobart Town Football Clubs, and it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. 

There’s a bit of Melbourne Rules, with the run and bounce. There’s a bit of post-1866 soccer (or maybe Cambridge Rules) with having to score under the tape which went between the posts. There’s the rule about no projecting nails in the boots which is ripped word from Rugby or FA Rules.

But sorry Rugbyites, no throwing is allowed.

We cannot date these rules. Paul Hunt’s best guess is 1877. But their existence suggests the mess football was in during the 1860s to 1880.

Once again I defer to Ian Syson who has already written about the chaos of rules in Tasmania during this time.

Suffice it to say in the period from Drop-kick’s call to arms to New Town and Hobart Town’s hodgepodge rulebook, there seemed to be several attempts to adopt set football rules in Tasmania without much success, with soccer, Rugby and Melbourne Rules all tried, adapted and discarded.

One such attempt to adopt soccer may have occurred in 1870. We first hear about it when a syndicated article from London's Standard newspaper caused the return of the mysterious Drop-Kick to again pick up a pen.

In May 1870, The Tasmanian Times ran with the headline:

“FOOTBALL REFORM”

At the heart of the lengthy piece was an argument calling for the unification of football laws, but more specifically the writer advocated soccer over Rugby, with the full abolition of handling.

“Already signs of a reformation have appeared, the Wanderers and Civil Service Clubs taking the lead in proposing the total abolition of handling under any pretence whatever. Such a rule is necessary for the salvation of legitimate football, and before the commencement of the 1870-71 season it is to be hoped its adoption under the association code will be universal, so as once more to put football on its legs, and to make it a recreation within the tastes of growing up beings whose yearnings for a romping game, however strong, require at least some protection from the undignified hacking and scragging which the legitimate Rugby code permits and many other clubs tolerate.”
The Tasmanian Times, syndicating Standard, May 11 1870.

A few days later, as seen in my last post, The Geelong Advertiser reported that handling had been abolished by the FA. The Standard article may have been part of the preceding public debate over the change of rules.

The Standard article seems not to have been syndicated anywhere else around Australia. Neither, as we’ve seen, was it the first article to appear in Australian newspapers calling for the adoption of the code.

(Here, again, I’ll guide you to Ian Syson’s ‘The Game That Never Happened’, or his preceding article “Waiting for Association football: incipient soccer in Australia, 1850–1880” which covers soccer advocacy in Australia since 1867.)

We can only imagine the editorial reasoning to reprinting the Standard’s piece in the Tasmanian Times and can but speculate whether this was an act of soccer advocacy in and of itself. 

The Standard article quickly attracted the attention of the, or possibly a different Drop-kick. 

“DEAR SIR.—Your remarks as to football in a recent issue, copied from the Standard, has induced me to write to you on the subject. Now that the season has commenced, would it not be advisable to have a meeting of the secretaries of the different local foot-ball clubs, and determine upon a set of rules by which all matches here would he played, and to arrange a list of matches to be played this season.
Yours truly,
Hobart Town,
May 12,1870.
DROP-KICK.”

The Tasmanian Times, May 13 1870

I have not uncovered any evidence such a meeting ever happened, but within a fortnight of Drop-Kick’s latter came the announcement of the High School game against the 18th Regiment game, under the rules printed in The Tasmanian Times.

We do not know if the printing of the High School’s rules was a reaction to Drop-Kick, part of a larger piece of coordinated soccer advocacy, or merely coincidental?

That said, five paragraphs above Drop-Kick’s letter in The Tasmanian Times was the following observation:

“FOOTBALL.—Now that the season has commenced we understand that the High School football club is open to play any other of the school clubs a match at football on any Saturday afternoon that may be chosen on the lower ground.”
The Tasmanian Times, May 13, 1870

On the same day Drop-Kick was arguing for set rules, High School was calling for games.

At the end of May, the High School's rules were published in the Tasmanian Times. Drop-Kick might have been pleased.

And a day after the publication of the rules, High School and the 18th Regiment played soccer.

Match Summaries

High School and the 18th Regiment played two games over May and June 1870.

The first game ended as a 1-0 win to High School, which was reported in The Tasmanian Times the following Monday:

“FOOT BALL. - The match, which was announced in our issue of Friday last, between twenty of the High School Club, and twenty of H.M. 18th Regiment (Royal Irish) was played on Saturday last in the Domain. The game commenced at half- past two o'clock, and after an hour's hard play resulted in a goal in favour of the High School, kicked by E, Hughes. The play on both sides was very good, and on the High School side those especially deserving notice were Messrs Perry, Nairn, O. Thomas, J. Stansfield, and C. Ford. The soldiers played a good game, but were in decidedly a disadvantageous position from not knowing the rules of the game well. A return match is to be played on Thursday next at two o'clock p.m., and on Saturday the High School meet the New Town Club, fifteen a side.”
The Tasmanian Times, May 30 1870

Unfortunately for us, newspaper’s in Tasmania in this era regularly reported football games by listing the participants, praising individuals, giving kick-off times but few other details: good news for modern-day genealogists but of limited use for our purposes.

It is most likely the game was played by the rules as published given only a day had elapsed, but a further hint this was the case was given in the report on the rematch which took place a couple of weeks later.

“FOOT BALL.—A match at Foot Ball was played yesterday afternoon on the Domain ground between the High School and some of the 18th Regiment, which resulted in a drawn match, a dispute having arisen as to a goal claimed by the 18th Regiment, but not allowed, owing to the ball having been thrown, and not kicked. The High School will meet the New Town Club on Saturday next.”
The Tasmanian Times, June 10 1870.

The throw clearly went against the published rules regarding handling and throwing, though it is not made clear whether the incident referred to the way the ball passed through the posts or was in relation to the lead-up play.

What is clear from both match reports is the 18th Regiment’s unfamiliarity with the rules of association football, which we will return to in the next post.

But first, there was more football to play.

The 1870 Season

The two games between High School and the 18th Regiment were but two games played in Hobart’s 1870 football season.

The season seems to have unfolded thus:

May 28: High School 1 (E. Hughes) v 18th Regiment 0
June 4: High School v New Town (score unknown)
June 9: High School 2 (E. Wright, T. Crisp) v Mr Pike’s School 0
 June 9: High School 0 v 18th Regiment 0
June 18: New Town v Military (18th Regiment?) (score unknown)
June 25: New Town 0 v Military 0 (18th Regiment?)
July 30: High School v New Town (score unknown)

There may have been other games, which The Mercury sniffed as unimportant

Were all these games soccer?

Were Drop-Kick’s hopes realised and all clubs played by the same unifying rules.

Again, the newspaper reports lacked the required description of play to answer this question.

But Paul Hunt has found one clue.

On July 14, The Mercury reported:

“Two football matches have been played during the month between the Now Town Club and the Military, but the game seems to be regarded with less favour than cricket, and there is wanting spirit, enthusiasm, and emulation to make it become general amongst Hobart Town athletes. The games that have been played this season have been well contested, and unattended, as, is too frequently the case when equal parties meet in a football contest, with serious accidents.”
The Mercury July 14, 1870

Could the phrase “to make it more general amongst Hobart Town athletes” imply a specific set of football rules?

Could the fact the games were “unattended” imply a waning interest of a specific version of the football – the association rules published on the 27th of May.

The season kicked off with High School calling for challengers. Did they request all games be played under their rules?

Until further evidence appears, either on Trove or elsewhere, we do not know, but neither can we rule it out. 

It also does not help the Hobart newspapers make limited mentions of football at all in 1869, and nothing about specific games. This could imply it is football in general which was on the nose compared to cricket and had been for some time.

If soccer was taken up in 1870, we know it was quickly dropped.

In 1871 Tasmanian newspapers finally described games enough to have some idea as to what was going on. The words “spills” and “scrimmage” appear for the first time in local match reports. No discontent with the state of play seems evident.

All this gives the impression Hobart’s football community experimented with association football for the 1870 season and it didn’t catch on.  Twelve months later, they tried something different.

It should be quickly noted Launceston Football Club was still going strong in 1870. We do not know if they continued playing modified Melbourne Rules. 

Soccer was played in Hobart in 1870 by High School and the 18th Regiment, and possibly by every team that season. What may be his the first soccer game in Australia may also be the first season of soccer in Australia.

Regardless of what sort of football was generally played in 1870, the season was curtailed by the weather. And soccer slept for the moment at least.

Who?

Drop-Kick may have called for unified rules, but who may have encouraged decided a football game would be played under the FA Rules in Hobart in 1870?

In the next post, we’ll look at the participants to see if we can find clues as to why High School and the 18th Regiment played soccer.

Part 1: Introduction - Australia's Earliest Known Soccer Game?
Part 2: The Rules of the Game
Part 3: When Did The FA Rules Reach Australia?
Part 4: Game Day
Part 5: The Military Men and the "Upmire"
Part 6: Final Thought and Conclusions

Monday 15 April 2019

Hobart 1870: When Did The FA Rules Reach Australia?


Over The Waves

In the last post, I argued that a set of football rules printed in the Tasmanian Times in May 1870 were modifications which change the “general game” (either Rugby or Melbourne Rules) into soccer.

Specifically, these modifiers changed the “general game” into the Football Association’s original rules of 1863.

Before we look into the specifics of the resulting match between High School and the 18th Regiment of the British Army, one question nags.

Why play a six-and-a-half-year-old version of soccer when the Football Association had updated the rules four times in the interim: in 1866, 1867, 1869 and in February 1870?

These changes were not minor. The most significant changes came in 1866. Catching gone! Marking gone! Crossbar (well, crosstape) in! All at odds with the rules printed in the Tasmanian Times.

Surely, I asked myself, four years would have been enough time for these changes would have made their way to Hobart.  

But is this a realistic view? We are talking about the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century. How long would it take for the FA’s 1866 modifications to reach Hobart from London, roughly 17,000 kms away?

In fact, do we even know how long it took the original 1863 FA Rules took to reach Australia, let alone Hobart? And did the rules of soccer reflect everything which took place on the field?

In other words, what would have people identified as soccer in Hobart, 1870?

Caveat

There are others who may have a better understanding of the distribution of the FA Rules than I do. I have read speculation that FA Rulebooks were floating around Australia in the 1860s, but I have been unable to find a copy, not a reference definitively stating this is the case. I am not going to cover this possibility.

It is entirely possible FA rulebooks were passed around between clubs, much in the same way Melbourne Rules were distributed at the time.

Instead, I am going to explore whether the FA Rules were reprinted in the newspapers or other publications during the ‘60s. Were the rules available to the masses?

In The Know

We know someone in Australia knew about the FA Rules as early as 1867, and we also know they weren’t happy with the 14th Regiment of the British Army.

In July of that year, the rugby-loving 14th tried their hands at Victorian Rules against Melbourne Football Club. This led our unimpressed someone to write to The Australasian newspaper:

“The soldiers evidently had never read the Victorian rules, which are very similar, if not identical, with those adopted by the Football Association in England.”
The Australasian, July 13, 1867.

We learn several things from this. Firstly, the 14th are rubbish at Victorian Rules, and by implication soccer and secondly, the writer was familiar with the FA Rules.

We can also assume which version of the rules the irate writer was familiar:  

 “The mark and free kick for catching was evidently not understood by the red coats. The ball to be caught so as to entitle the catcher to a free kick must come "direct" from the boot or leg of any player;" the catcher then calls "mark," which means that no player can come within a line drawn across where the catch was made, or within five yards in any other direction.”
The Australasian, July 13, 1867.

If our writer was comparing Melbourne Rules with soccer, we can suppose they were familiar with the original 1863 FA Rules which explicitly allowed catches and marks and free kicks, which were missing from later revisions to the rules.

(There is, however, another possibility. Our letter-writer may have experienced soccer played under the 1866 or 1867 rules but where the catch and mark were still considered legitimate. This is something we shall quickly explore below.)

The year 1867 seems to be when knowledge of soccer generally starts to appear in Australian newspapers. This is the year advocacy for soccer starts to creep into the sports columns.

Such advocacy between 1867 and 1870 is detailed in Ian Syson’s ‘The Game That Never Happened’ and needs not repeating here.

What this advocacy means is either the rules were available in Australia, or soccer back in the UK was becoming popular enough to ensure subsequent immigrants to Australia wanted to bring the game with them.

Let’s look at the former possibility. When did the rules of soccer start appearing in Australian newsprint?

In Black and White

The earliest mention of the mere existence of the 1863 FA Rules in the Australian media occurred mere months after they were adopted in London.

However, the earliest reference I’ve found in Australian newspapers as to what the FA rules actually contained was in1870, two weeks before the High School Match:

“We glean from the home papers that the Football Association held a meeting in London, when two important resolutions were carried. The first of these was "That handling the hall, under any pretence whatever, shall be prohibited." This rule has not been made before it was required, as with many clubs "football " had become quite a misnomer for a game which mainly consisted of a series of desperate scrimmages, in which the ball hardly ever touched the ground;”
Geelong Advertiser May 14 1870.

These latest rule changes were announced in England in early February and took just over three months to reach Australia.

Why did it take almost seven years for the contents of the FA Rules to appear in Australian newspapers?

(There is an obvious possible answer here – such articles might DID appear in the intervening years but have yet to have been digitised by the National Library’s Trove project.)

The earliest complete copy of the FA rules I’ve found in an Australia newspaper did not occur until 1874, as printed in Melbourne’s Australasian newspaper.

This date came after 1872, the year when Australia was plugged into the international telegraph system, thus speeding up communications with the outside world. Before this, the communication of information would have been based on boats, which, in 1870, took around three months to reach Australia from Britain.

The FA Rules, it seems, were not in the mainstream media during the 1860s. Nor can I find pressing evidence that official rulebooks were for sale, advertised in the same newspapers. (Again, such evidence may just not be uploaded to Trove as of the time of writing.)

There is, however, circumstantial evidence the FA Rules had reached Australia in printed form during 1867.

In This Month’s Edition…

We’ve already met British publishers Cassells.  In 1868, The Herald in Fremantle copied the rules of Rugby from “Cassell’s Out Door Games” to explain what the 14th Regiment preferred to do on a football field when not annoying letter writers.

Cassell’s was started by John Cassell, who believed in educational publishing for the working class. Later versions of Cassell’s “Out Door Games”, called “Cassell’s Sports and Pastimes”, included the rules of both Rugby and Association Football. However, copies of “Cassell’s Out Door Games”, as evidently existing in Fremantle in 1868, are not easily found so I cannot prove that edition included the rules of the Football Association.   

However, the same publisher did produce a monthly periodical called “Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper”. There, in the pages of the March 17, 1866 edition, can be found the officially worded rules of association football. In particular, the Family Paper printed the original 1863, scoring at any height, catch and mark version of soccer.

We know “Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper” was available in Australia in 1867, as advertised in South Australian Register. (Within a year Cassell’s pulled the plug on the Illustrated Paper so it disappears from Trove.)

Could the March 171866 edition of “Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper” been available in Australia later that year? How widespread was it distributed? Should we presume it had less distribution than the local newspapers?

I asked the National Library, which had editions of “Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper”, if they had the March 1866 edition. Sadly, they did not, and their searches found neither did the Victorian State Library. In fact, there are no copies of the paper from 1866 within the network.  

It is possible the March 1866 edition of Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper did make it to Australia. It is also possible for the 1868 version of “Cassell’s Book of Out Door Games” included the FA Rules. 

Either could have introduced the rules of soccer in Australia, but we currently do not have the evidence available at the moment.

It would take another three years before the Football Association Rules would be printed in Australian, albeit in a much-mangled form.

Merchandising, Merchandising...

McMahon’s, by all accounts, was a seller of sporting equipment in Sydney, and what better way to encourage the public from parting with their hard-earned cash than to provide the rules of various games which require equipment to be bought.

McMahon’s Cricket and Sporting Manual was released in 1869, and mostly covers cricket.

Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Chronicle’s review in August 1869 stated  the manual contained “the newest rules and laws of the great English public schools.” The same publication would go on to reprint the McMahon version of the football rules in March 1870.

The first thing to note was the rules as written were not in the format used by both Football Association and Rugby. The order of rules is different, the wording too loose.
But were the rules printed in McMahon’s one of the two major English codes? 

So here we go again with another rule comparison, though I will try to keep it short. McMahon’s rules are bolded, the FA italicised.

We can quickly rule out McMahon having printed the rules of Rugby, thanks to Rule 9 as printed in the Manual:

Rule 9: “No player shall carry the ball, throw it, pass it to another with his hands, or lift it from the ground with his hands, under any pretence whatever.”

Instead, this rule seems to be a combination of the following contained in the 1869 version of FA Rules:

8. No player shall carry or knock on the ball.

and

11. No player shall take the ball from the ground with his hands while it is in play, under any pretence whatever.

But does this mean the rules printed in McMahon’s soccer, and if so, which version.
The tenth rule printed in McMahon’s states:

Rule 10: “All charging is fair, but holding, pushing with the elbows or hands, tripping up, and hacking, are forbidden.”

This rule is clearly at odds with those contained in the 1869 FA Rules:

9. Neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed, and no player shall use his hands to hold or push his adversary, nor charge him from behind.

But had these 1869 changes made it to Australia in time for McMahon to publish? 

If we look instead at the 1867 FA Rules, we will find the rules regarding carrying, knock on and picking up the balls the same as the 1869 version, but, more significantly, there is no mention at charging at all.

McMahon’s Rules seem to be a version of the 1867 FA Rules, re-worded and formatted. It is not simply a reprint from an official source.

Thus the printed rules of soccer were available in Australia in 1869, though whether they were more widely available than Sydney is uncertain. 

It also seems the official wording of the FA rules may have been available via Callell's as early as 1866.

There is one quirk of both the Cassell’s and McMahon’s rules. There is a small question of the drop-kick.

Drop-Kick (noun/verb)

My basis of the FA Rules are those printed in WikiSources, which are sourced from newspapers, starting with Bell’s Life in London in 1863. These are the official wording, as far as I can tell, and include the accompanying definitions of various game concepts like "place-kick". And, as far as I can tell, the definition of “drop-kick” is not among any version of the FA Rules of the 1860s.

Yet, the version of the 1863 Rules published in Cassell’s Paper includes a definition of a drop-kick. This makes some sense, as the drop-kick is allowed by implication when a free-kick is taken, but it seems odd that the definition is included. Maybe someone along the line added the definition of something which was happening in soccer anyway.

What is odder is McMahon’s rules, which line up with the 1867 FA Rules, also includes the definition of the drop-kick. The catch and mark had been removed from the FA rules in the 1866 update. The definition of the free-kick had been removed in the 1867 update, so why did anyone need a drop-kick.

This opens two interesting ideas.

The first is the rules in McMahon’s were partially cribbed from Cassell’s, and possibly re-written to avoid some form of plagiarism. McMahon’s may have updated the rules to take into account the various changes the FA ha made to the game but left the definition drop-kick in.

The other, more intriguing, idea is that McMahon’s was not copied and changed from a written form of the official FA Rules at all.

Maybe the rules in the Manual were written from memory? Or it was written by someone who had only ever watched the game? Or had the game described to them? Or had played the game but never read the official rules?

Because if the written rules were not distributed in written form maybe they were distributed within people’s heads?

And if McMahon’s rules were composed of a remembrance of how the game was actually played, how much did the play align with the official written rules.

Wriggle-Room

It is all very fine to agree on a set of rules, but what if those rules leave large grey areas open to interpretation. 

Let’s at our old friends the catch, mark and free-kick.

A striking characteristic of the original FA Rules of 1863 is their open-endedness. 

Take the rule we have already seen:

8. If a player makes a fair catch he shall be entitled to a free kick, provided he claims it by making a mark with his heel at once; and in order to take such a kick he may go back as far as he pleases, and no player on the opposite side shall advance beyond his mark until he has kicked.

In and of the rule itself, there is no definition as to what constitutes a free-kick.

Thankfully, if you had an official copy of the rules, a list of definitions was appended at the end. The definition of a free-kick stated:

A Free Kick is the privilege of kicking at the ball, without obstruction in such manner as the kicker may think fit.”

If a player had taken a catch, the definition implies a choice could be made on how to restart play via some form of a kick. Would our player choose to place the ball on the ground before a kick (a “place-kick” according to the list of definitions), taking a punt or a good old-fashioned but officially undefined drop-kick. 

In the first revision of the rules three years later, the FA did not so much ban the catch and mark as simply remove original contents of Rule 8 entirely.

Despite this change, the open-ended definition of the free kick remained:

Rule 8:  “A free kick" is the privilege of kicking at the ball without obstruction, in such manner as the kicker may think fit.

So again, the punt and the drop-kick seem allowable under the 1866 FA Rules, as only throwing, passing or carrying the ball was banned.

In contrast, the catch and mark now existed in a grey area of an act of handling the ball which was not outright banned and commonly practised up until this point.

Did clubs, who were used to catching and marking, stop doing so once the rule was removed, or continue to take screamers considering these acts were not explicitly banned?

In 1867 the FA removed the definition of free-kick, but still the catch-and mark, punt and drop-kick were not explicitly banned. In fact, carrying the ball and the knock-on were the only hand-related activities which were explicitly banned.

Again, how would these changes have played out on the field? Would clubs have quickly implemented every utterance from London, or would they see a large grey-area where catches and drop-kicks could continue as before.

This is not an unreasonable idea. Look again to the article in at the start of this section, where the 1870 no handling rule was mentioned in the Geelong Advertiser.

“This rule has not been made before it was required, as with many clubs "football " had become quite a misnomer for a game which mainly consisted of a series of desperate scrimmages, in which the ball hardly ever touched the ground.”
Geelong Advertiser May 14 1870

Let's assume the Advertiser's "many clubs" are soccer clubs, as the story is in the context of soccer rules.  

The catch and mark many have been removed from the rules of soccer since 1866. 

However, if we are to believe The Advertiser, here are the FA explicitly banning the handling of the ball because it was being played too often in the hand by clubs which had not taken the hint from the earlier rule changes.

Clearly how soccer was written and played was often some ways apart.

Back To Tassie

With all this in mind, it is plausible for those playing a football game in Hobart 1870 to see nothing wrong with the catch and mark, even if they had access to the FA’s updated 1866, 1867 or 1869 rulebooks.

Such a determination could have been made due to the lack of clarity in the FA’s own rule book.

Alternately, those who compiled the modifiers for the High School game in Hobart may have been relying on a memory of playing or watching a game of soccer in England where the catch and mark were still in use.

I am no expert on how the game was interpreted in the UK in the 1860s. 

I would suspect how soccer was played there would have a large influence on how it was spread overseas. It may be that immigration and travel and the lived experience of playing may have been more influential than the distribution of any written rulebook.

Nothing above precludes High School playing a game of soccer against the 18th Regiment.

Rules were slow to come to Australia and seemingly not widely distributed in the media.

Rules may not have been not always followed in England, and anyone who brought a memory of soccer to Australia may have remembered different interpretations of the FA rules as played rather than the word-for-word rules.

And there was enough grey area in the FA rule book to allow such interpretations to take place.

Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper printed the original 1863 Rules in 1866, and the paper may have been available in Australia. The same publisher's book of outdoor pursuits may also have included the rules. 

An annoyed letter writer in Melbourne in 1867 seemed more familiar with the original 1863 Rules when judging a game of Victorian Rules. The 1867 rules seem to have  been nicked by McMahon’s in 1869.

Transport limitations mean ideas took months to travel from England, and there is a lack of evidence of those ideas, in the case of soccer, regularly arrived in a written form.

High School and the 18th Regiment played a form of soccer which can be reasonably considered current, at least for Tasmania in May 1870.

(Or maybe they just preferred the original 1863 rules).

Which brings us to the next question – why did a school in Tasmania want to play soccer in 1870?

Part 1: Introduction - Australia's Earliest Known Soccer Game?
Part 2: The Rules of the Game
Part 3: When Did The FA Rules Reach Australia?
Part 4: Game Day
Part 5: The Military Men and the "Upmire"
Part 6: Final Thought and Conclusions

Thursday 11 April 2019

Hobart 1870: The Rules of The Game

Line by Line

Was the game of football played by High School and the 18th Regiment soccer?

For the same of clarity, let us call the rule modifications printed in the Tasmanian Times the ‘High School rules’.

The first step, as onerous as it is, is to look at the High School Rules and compare them with those of the Football Association.

And if FA Rules are missing from the Hobart Rules, do they exist in the “general game”?

The Football Association Rules were drawn up in London in December 1863 and tinkered with regularly throughout the decade on their slow march toward the modern game.

It is noticeable the High School rules are not written in the same official format of those of the Football Association or Rugby, but given these are modifiers, not base rules, such formality may not have been required.

So, let the comparison begin.

To avoid confusion, the High School rules will be in bold, and the FA rules will be italicised.

Rule 1: The ball to be kicked (any height) between two goal posts.

In one succinct sentence the High School rules define the how and the where of scoring. These stipulations are covered between of the FA Rules of 1863:

 “1. The maximum length of the ground shall be 200 yards, the maximum breadth shall be 100 yards, the length and breadth shall be marked off with flags; and the goals shall be defined by two upright posts, 8 yards apart, without any tape or bar across them.”

 and

4. A goal shall be won when the ball passes between the goal posts or over the space between the goal posts (at whatever height), not being thrown, knocked on, or carried.”
Football Association, December 1863

It is clear the High School rules are a simplified, if not comprehensive, version of these FA Rules. 

Where High School explicitly states a goal is scored by kicking, the FA Rules instead rule out any involvement of the hands. By implication the FA Rules allows goals to be kicked.

Both sets of rules also explicitly state the ball can pass the posts at any height.

(We should note the FA introduced a height restriction in the form of tape in the first major modification to its rules in 1866.  We will discuss the feasibility of these changes making it to Australia later.)

The major deviation between these two sets of rules is the definition of the size of the ground. We don’t know if High School played on an oval or a defined rectangle, and can only assume such considerations were covered by the “general rules” or the limitations of the ground availability.

2. No running with the ball except dribbling.
While dribbling is never mentioned in the original FA Rules, there is a ban on running with the ball:

9. No player shall carry the ball.”

As carrying is running with the ball in hand, the two rules are equivalent.

3. No holding, hacking, tripping or throwing of the ball.

Here is another direct correlation between the High School and FA Rules:

10. Neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed and no player shall use his hands to hold or push an adversary.”

and

“11. A player shall not throw the ball or pass it to another.”

We can already see a large correlation between the High School and FA Rules.

We can also note that if High School’s “general game” had been Rugby, the last two modifications would have completely re-written the game.

4. The ball not to be handled except in the case of catch.

As with scoring a goal above, the correlation of this rule with those of the FA is partly a process of elimination.

We’ve already seen both throwing and carrying the ball is explicitly banned under both sets of rules.

The FA Rules goes further on restricting the use of the hands:

12. No player shall take the ball from the ground with his hands while it is in play under any pretence whatever.

This leaves the catch and the knock-on.

Both sets of rules allow a catch, which the FA described in the following.

8. If a player makes a fair catch he shall be entitled to a free kick, provided he claims it by making a mark with his heel at once; and in order to take such a kick he may go back as far as he pleases, and no player on the opposite side shall advance beyond his mark until he has kicked.

This leaves the knock-on, banned by implication by the High School, and allowed by the 1863 FA Rules by a different set of implications.

The FA would change their tune in 1867, when they explicitly removed the knock on:

8. No player shall carry or knock on the ball.

So, we are back at the question of which version of the FA Rules could have been known in Tasmania in 1870, something we will be looking at in time.

Suffice it to say, the knock on is the only point of difference between the High School and original FA Rules regarding this rule.

5. The ball when kicked out of bounds to be thrown in at the place it went out of play.

Again, the High School rules seems a simplified but not comprehensive version of the FA Rules.

6. When the ball is in touch the first player who touches it shall throw it from the point on the boundary line where it left the ground, in a direction at right angles with the boundary line.

The only difference here is the FA Rules defines the ball be thrown out at right angles. But, so did the Rugby Rules, with the exact wording,  as printed in Cassell’s Out Door Games, as reprinted in a newspaper in Fremantle in 1868

And so did the Melbourne Rules of 1866, though with different wording.

If the High School rules are a modifier for a “general game” there is a high chance the “general game” already specifies right-angled throw-ins.

6. A free kick to be the penalty of violation of rules 2 and 3.

Under the High School rules, a free-kick is given if there is tripping, hacking, throwing and carrying.
Here we find our first major deviation between the two sets of rules, but only because the FA Rules do not explicitly state what happens when one of these banned actions is undertaken.

The free-kick itself is mentioned in the FA Rules, both in rule 8 above, and rule 7:

7. In case the ball goes behind the goal line, if a player on the side to whom the goal belongs first touches the ball, one of his side shall be entitled to a free kick from the goal line at the point opposite the place where the ball shall be touched. If a player of the opposite side first touches the ball, one of his side shall be entitled to a free kick (but at the goal only) from a point 15 yards from the goal line opposite the place where the ball is touched. The opposing side shall stand behind their goal line until he has had his kick.”

The FA’s seventh rule details what happens when a ball goes behind the goal. This situation is not mentioned at all in the High School rules, the only game-play rule substantially missing.

All three major codes mention free-kicks when the ball goes behind, and though there is some variation in terms of placement. Both the FA and Rugby rules are almost word for word, though the Soccerites are told an attaching free-kick must be towards goal.

If Rugby is the “general game” then the FA Rules would equate with those of High School.

Melbourne Rules only gave a free-kick in this situation to the defending side, so only partially match those of the FA. If Melbourne Rules were the “general game” then the resolution to a ball going behind the goals partially would see the High School rules partially equate with those of the FA in this matter.

This leaves three FA Rules which are completely absent from the High School version:

2. The winner of the toss shall have the choice of goals. The game shall be commenced by a place kick from the centre of the ground by the side losing the toss, the other side shall not approach within 10 yards of the ball until it is kicked off.”,

3. After a goal is won the losing side shall kick off and the goals shall be changed.”

And

13. No player shall wear projecting nails, iron plates, or gutta percha on the soles or heels of his boots.

The FA rule on footwear is word for word the same as those from Rugby but is not mentioned at all in the Melbourne game, perhaps a case of not needing to state the obvious in term of player safety.

Changing sides after a goal is consistent with both the contemporary Melbourne and Rugby rules, as was the toss. While the FA Rules stipulate a place kick to start the game, Rugby and Melbourne Rules simply ask for a kick-off, which might not be inconsistent.

Considering the generality of these FA Rules missing in the High School list, there would have been no reason to explicitly state them in the Tasmanian Times. All of these rules could have been assumed to have come under the “general game” which the readers were expected to be familiar.

If “general game” could have been Melbourne Rules or Rugby, then the High School modifiers align the game being at the Domain that Saturday afternoon towards the original Football Association Rules of 1863, with only a small number of variations or uncertainties, including the knock-on and behind.

Can we identify the “general game”? Both Rugby and Melbourne Rules in the newspapers of the 1860s had the catch and mark. They differed in terms of the behind rule, but not the throw-in. And the High School modifiers so completely change the way the game is played – no handling except the catch, no holding etc, as to make the “general game” possible unrecognisable.

And this is if the “general game” was either of these codes. We shall see later there was no obvious agreement on the rules in Tasmania in 1870, which may have been the reason the High School rules were printed.

It should be noted the Melbourne Rules were known in 1866, and, as mentioned, were adopted by the Launceston club in a modified form in 1868.

The Tasmanian newspapers do not seem to indicate any games were played under Rugby Rules during the 1860s, though a 1869 edition the Cornwall Chronicle claimed the only rugby ball in the colony had just arrived in Launceston.

But the case for Rugby as the "general game" is strong in terms of the written rules. 

Firstly the rules for the behind between the FA and Rugby Rules are almost identical. 

And there is the rule on throwing. Throwing was already banned in Melbourne Rules, so why should High School need to ban it. Conversely, throwing was allowed in Rugby, so a rule modification would have been required. 

And finally, as we shall see later, the three leaders of High School came from the UK, one of which is involved in this game, and a certain military force seems to have been more at ease with Rugby. We shall cover these issues later in regards to how the FA Rules may have come to Tasmania in 1870. 

We can also speculate the "general game" may have been an existing Tasmanian Rules, but this is likely to have been a hybrid of Rugby or Melbourne Rules anyway. 

With an emphasis on dribbling, no carrying and a strong similarity to the original FA Rules, an argument could be made the Tasmanian Times had printed rules which gave the necessary modifications to allow a Melbourne Rules or Rugby-literate playing group enough information to learn original 1863 rules of association football.

But Hang On?

The catch and mark had disappeared from the FA Rule book in 1866.

A height restriction came in the same year. 

Did the High School know about these changes the FA made before May 1870?

Surely, if the High School banned the knock-on were they aware the knock on was only banned in 1867?

But are these fair criticisms?

Had, indeed, those at High School even see the FA Rules written down? 

Or was there some dodgy memory at play? 

We'll explore how the rules may have gotten to Tasmania next. 

Which set of FA rules had made it to Tasmania in 1870, and how did they get there?

Part 1: Introduction - Australia's Earliest Known Soccer Game?
Part 2: The Rules of the Game
Part 3: When Did The FA Rules Reach Australia?
Part 4: Game Day
Part 5: The Military Men and the "Upmire"
Part 6: Final Thought and Conclusions