From The Vaults

19 July 2021

Tom Richards, the Australia Campaign and the road to the King's Cup

“I don’t feel the coming danger [the forthcoming Gallipoli invasion] any more than I have felt anxious the night before an international football match.”

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19 July 2021

Tom Richards, the Australia Campaign and the road to the King's Cup

“I don’t feel the coming danger [the forthcoming Gallipoli invasion] any more than I have felt anxious the night before an international football match.”

11 January 2021

Denzil Batchelor's All-Star XV

Denzil Batchelor was a sports and war correspondent, poet and playwright. He played rugby at Oxford University in the 1920s and was a lifelong fan of cricket and rugby. This All-Star XV is an extract from his book ‘Babbled of Green Fields’ published in 1961.

02 November 2020

International Triplets

There have been around 30 known cases of "triplets" appearing for their country, but only a select group of six families have produced siblings who have appeared alongside at least two other brothers in the same international team on the same day.

05 October 2020

Ernie Crawford - a legendary Irish full back

The Irish selectors alighted on the Lansdowne and Leinster player William Ernest ‘Ernie’ Crawford as their full back when they chose the team for the first post-war Ireland international against England at Lansdowne Road, Dublin on February 14th 1920.

14 September 2020

The Stellenbosch Three-quarter line

If asked to name the most illustrious three-quarter line from one club or country, northern hemisphere rugby historians are most likely to name the Oxford University and Scotland three-quarter line of the 1920s...

08 June 2020

Dai Gent's All-Star XV

Swansea born Dai Gent twice trialled for Wales before being selected for England. A prototype scrum-half at a time when the English were playing half-backs, he memorably partnered Adrian Stoop in the English midfield in the first test-match to be held at Twickenham, in 1910, where England beat Wales for the first time in 12 years.

29 March 2020

Remembering Prince Alexander Obolensky

Born in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) on 17th February 1916, Prince Alexander Obolensky was the son of an officer of the Tsar’s Imperial Horse Guards and his wife Princess Luba...

03 February 2020

World Rugby Museum to Host Exhibition of Charlie Pritchard's Career

As the 2020 Guinness Six Nations approaches, the World Rugby Museum will be hosting an exclusive exhibition to highlight the career of acclaimed Welsh rugby star, Charlie Pritchard...

27 January 2020

Weighing up the Competition

Rugby is a very physical contact sport, and as such the physicality of the players has been of great interest to supporters for the majority of the game’s history. Some programmes for tours and matches have listed player weights and heights ever since the early 20th Century...

09 December 2019

Lions on the High Veldt

The Lions forwards of the 1938 party were widely admired for their refusal to give up despite the first two Test defeats...Off the field Bunner Travers struck up a friendship with Blair “Paddy” Mayne...a loose cannon and a constant disciplinary headache for the tour manager.

10 November 2019

In memory of the fallen...

World Rugby Museum Curator, Phil McGowan, remembers the rugby players that served in the First World War…

10 June 2019

After the War: The Victory Internationals, 1945-46

With the onset of the Second World War, official international rugby was put on hiatus in 1939. After the war ended in 1945, there was one season before fixtures officially resumed and it was in this period that the Victory Internationals were played to fill the void…