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Throwback Thursday - Issue 2

Throwback Thursday - Issue 2

Nick Patterson2 Sep 2022 - 10:22
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The merger. And the club's first game.

1st September 1982. It was a Wednesday. Forty years ago.

It was the day that the new born Bradford and Bingley Rugby Club fell out of the birth canal and rolled out onto the Wagon Lane pitch for the first time. If I was a Max Boyce type of singy-songy person, I might claim to have been there, but I wasn’t. I was on the Greek Island of Ios, but those recollections will have to stay on tour, I’m afraid.

The newly formed Bradford and Bingley or Bingley and Bradford as some die hards from this side of Saltaire roundabout wanted to call the club, were led on to the greensward by skipper Dave Bartlett.

The opposition that night was Keighley. The final score was 27-7 in favour of the home side, but as I have been unable to unearth a match report from any online archives, I can’t tell you how the game panned out.

I can confirm, however, how the infant Bradford and Bingley first First XV lined up. I am uncertain if any wag had already had the wit and repartee to christen the side “the Bees” for this first game, but for the sake of brevity, I will refer to the club as the Bees from this point on.

I also notice from the picture, attached, that the Bees were wearing what appears to be Bingley shirts for that first game; obviously there were problems with kit manufacturers delivering on time back then, too.

Anyway, we begin at Loose Head Prop. Number 1. Here we find Dave Balmforth. “Barney”, to you and me, the very same Barney who was your favourite bar keep at Wagon Lane for more than a decade at the front end of this century. A goal kicking front rower to boot, Barney’s skill set must have been as rare as hen’s teeth back in the early Eighties.

Alongside Barney, Hooking that night, was Steve Milnes. I don’t know whether Mr Milnes was preferred to John Fletcher to open the club’s account in the number 2 shirt or whether Fletch was unavailable, but for opening night it was Steve Milnes who got the shirt. So having 2 county hookers available from the off, shows the standard that was available to the fledgling Bees.

Completing the front row, we find a tousle haired upstart, young Peter Rae. You will notice in the accompanying team pic, that Peter and next to him, Simon Scull, are the two players sporting what appears to be a head band. It was after all, the Eighties and perhaps Jane Fonda’s Workout, which came out the year before, had formed part of the warm up?

The second row partnership, a formidable duo by any measure, was formed by Steve “Sid” Burnhope and Paul Wood. Again, both also County players and I am told by those closer to the side than I, that both were unlikely to take a backward step in a bar-room brawl, should there be one on offer.

In the number 6 shirt we find the skipper Dave Bartlett and next to him on the offside line, at open side was Alan Duttine, who was one of the key figures in managing the merger of the Bradford and Bingley clubs. Alan was already 37 when this inaugural game took place, so I assume he was the oldest player in the line up.

Completing the pack, wearing number 8, was Bob Hood, who later coached the First XV before moving on to be heavily involved with the Yorkshire RFU set up.

At scrum half, we find Nick Cummins who was the youngest player in the starting XV, at 19. His half back partner in crime for this game was Chris Storr.

The three quarters were wing men, Ade Sofolarin and Dave Burton, with Kevin Rooke and Mike Ward in the centres. The XV was completed by Simon Scull at full back.

The bench was a simple affair back in those days: one back and one forward. Stuart “Boogie” Booth being the back and Rick Glover the forward replacement.

We know the score was 27-7, so who scored the tries? As I said, without a match report to back this up, I believe the tries were run in by Dave Balmforth, Bob Hood, Nick Cummins, Mike Ward and Simon Scull. I can find no record of who took the kicks, apologies for that.

So, in August 1982, the Bradford and Bingley Rugby Club came together from a process similar to nuclear fusion, as two sometimes unwilling partners were merged from the old Bradford and Bingley components. I have already said that some of the Bingley members favoured christening the new venture “Bingley and Bradford” which with the benefit of any commercial sensibility would surely have been foolish, given that Bingley was home to a certain Building Society which employed about 2,000 people in the heart of the town. And it wasn’t the Birmingham Midshires.

The merger of the two clubs must have finally come together at a fair old rattle, as I found online that Bingley’s scheduled opponents for the first Saturday in September, Burton, were a tad miffed that the Bingley club had crossed off the fixture, with the lame excuse that the club no longer existed and had been subsumed into the new joint Rugby Club.

It seems the merger process was fraught throughout, as many members of a BD16 persuasion could not see the benefits of joining up with their “Senior” club rivals from BD7.

On the other side of the fence, the Bradford Rugby Club was at this point in grave financial peril and were being forced to sell off their grounds at Scholemoor and Clayton plus their bar facilities and a Squash club.

Contemporary documentation seems to indicate that the total assets of the Bradford Club, once their various sales had gone through would be about £87,000. However, finance appeared not to be an issue for the Bingley club, which was documented as having a bank balance at £66,000, a secure long lease at Wagon Lane and owning the freeholds for land at Aireview.

So why merge?

It appears to have largely been a rugby decision.

League Rugby was on the horizon. Despite being reasonably successful Bingley was struggling to attract fixtures against the top sides in Yorkshire and contemporary documentation shows that in the summer of 1982, only Roundhay and Hull and East Riding had confirmed their fixtures for the upcoming season. Bingley was also struggling to make much of a dent in the Yorkshire Post Merit table at this point. Although many members of the Bingley club were at best ambivalent about playing Rugby at a more Senior Level, it seems that on balance the ability to guarantee six sides turning out every week and a First XV playing against the better northern club sides swung the membership behind the merger.

Bradford, on the other hand, while not being the powerhouse it had been in the Fifties and Sixties, still had regular fixtures against top National sides like Saracens, Wasps and Edinburgh Academicals. Bradford had been struggling financially for some time and the main pitch at Scholemoor was seen as being in the wrong part of town, being plagued with vandalism.

A merger with Bingley had been mooted as early as the 1960s and other ventures such as trying to introduce greyhound racing had failed to get planning permission in the Seventies.

Apparently Bradford Council offered the club some land out towards Thornbury, which was used by Bradford University, but that was seen as being too remote, so was refused. One throw of the dice from Bradford was to sell their land to Morrisons for a supermarket development, but again Council planners said “no”, so the merger option became the only viable way to maintain anything of Bradford Rugby Union Club.

Ironically, having knocked back planning permission for the Scholemoor facility, it was Bradford Council who bought the land from Bradford Rugby Club, for the bargain price of £80,000 which allowed the Club to have assets to bring to the table at the point of the merger with Bingley.

Further reading