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 18^th 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 14^th Regiment of the British Army.

In July of that year, the rugby-loving 14^th 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 14^th 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 14^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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