The Military Men and the “Upmire”

Let’s Try These Rules…

In late May 1870, High School and the 18^th 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 18^th Regiment

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

The 18^th 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 18^th Regiment was split amongst the colonies where they soon immersed themselves in social engagement and playing sport. 

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

We already know the 14^th 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 18^th. 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 18^th 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