Rugger Bugger

 

Notoriety shifts your perception.  Because you've heard of somewhere, because it's "famous" for some reason, it gains a prominence it might otherwise not deserve.  I expected Pontefract, for example, to be far more impressive than it actually was, because it was a place I'd heard of.  It was elevated above a hundred other northern towns because something had lodged it in my brain.

I came to Rugby with similarly elevated expectations.  Rugby, the station we've all passed through on our way south on the train.  Rugby, prominently signposted from the motorways.  Rugby, home of the school, home of Tom Brown's Schooldays, home of rugby football, home of Webb Ellis taking the ball in his hands and running with it.  It's Rugby.

 

It gives me no pleasure to report that Rugby's name recognition is about all that it's got going for it.  I left the station and found a tired, beaten down town.  It didn't really exist until the Victorian era.  Rugby School has been here for much longer, since the sixteenth century, but it took a reforming headmaster named Thomas Arnold to transform the institution into one of the first public schools in the nineteenth century.  He did so by effectively privatising it; an establishment set up by local dignitary Lawrence Sheriff to benefit poor local children was slowly dedicated to fee-payers from outside the area.  (Another school, pointedly called the Lawrence Sheriff School, was founded to try and deliver the free education he'd wanted to provide).  

Around the same time, the railways cut across the land to the north of the town, and a junction there swiftly brought industry and new residents.  The town swelled to fill the space between the school and the station and the result is a mainly 19th and 20th century construction that's having problems coping with the 21st century.

My route into town took me past the businesses and homes that you find in station hinterlands.  Ethnic shops, tanning salons, hotels built for builders and salesmen.  A vitamin shop had a large burly plastic man stood outside.  Attempts had been made at regeneration, with new flats slotted inelegantly into the spaces, cul-de-sacs of redbrick turning their back on the main road.  Cut Price Carpets, chemical engineers, tyre shops.  I passed a hardware shop with a window display saying No Bulb Ban Here! (While stocks last) and I was in the town centre.

There is, effectively, a triangle of pedestrianisation at the heart of Rugby, and it's as tired as a thousand other post-industrial centres.  This could've been anywhere UK.  Closed shops turned over to discounters.  A WH Smith (while it lasts).  Coffee shops and burger bars.  An American candy shop as large as anything on Oxford Street.  That meanness, that grimness, that you get in a place where you now need therapy to recover after retail therapy.

How do we solve this?  How do we get our towns back now we've all moved away from shopping in person?  One or two empty shops become four or five and suddenly everything is forlorn, abandoned, unpleasant.  I can only think we need to consolidate and squeeze them together.  Accept the retail isn't coming back, knock them down, build homes for people in their place because we do actually need those.  Do it properly too; we've all seen the bedsits behind cheap double glazing and badly bricked up shop fronts. 

At the end of the road was the school itself, a fortress closed off to the town around it.  It became clear that while Rugby School continues to produce the higher echelons of our society - the Wikipedia page of Old Rugbeians includes bishops, politicians, soldiers and writers - they are not spending their cash outside the hallowed walls.  There may as well be a moat between the town and the school.  I imagine the only interaction between the two institutions is the local bars and clubs being very strict indeed with their ID checks to stop the heir to the Earldom of Farquarson getting steamed on cheap cider in their establishment and attracting the wrath of the headmaster.

At the front is the statue of William Webb Ellis, the boy who apparently invented rugby by picking up a ball and running with it.  This story is, of course, bollocks.  For starters, nobody reported the tale until after Webb Ellis himself was dead - he became a clergyman and died in the South of France in 1872, four years before he got the credit for the game.  Secondly, it's hard to believe that any PE teacher - and particularly a PE teacher at a Victorian public school - would look kindly upon a boy breaking the rules of a sport and would happily suggest they make a new game of it.  We all know PE teachers, nasty little fascists in polyester-nylon mix, ready to bark and scream at the cowering boys in their charge.  

 

 

I actually played rugby in my first year at high school.  There was a science teacher who moonlit as a PE teacher, specifically as a rugby teacher, and he dragged us out onto foggy fields and made us throw the ball around.  I remember two things from this: that the rule of only throwing the ball behind you is bloody stupid, and that the orange rugby shirt that we wore as part of our school uniform was actually quite nice.  The teacher left after first year and we never played rugby again, which was no surprise; my year at school was so nonathletic we couldn't even scrape together enough willing boys to make a football team.  We certainly weren't going to advocate for a sport involving a lot of mud and violence.  (On the other hand, the girls in my year campaigned for the right to play rugby; they didn't actually want to, but they thought it was sexist that they weren't allowed to.  There was no reciprocal campaign by boys who wanted to play netball).

 

I went back into the town, past a Woolworths that still had the sign above, hinting that it'd not been replaced in all the time since it had closed.  I was finding Rugby hard going.  It wasn't nice or fun and the haves of the school ignoring the have nots of the town was all a bit too on the nose.

I ducked down a side street to find the statue of Rupert Brooke, poet and bisexual icon.  He attended Rugby School, the son of a master there, but died in Greece during the First World War.  I'd have got closer but the gentleman on the nearby bench appeared to be in a Special Brew-induced state of agitation so I thought it best to hurry on.

Besides, I wanted to get out of there.  Rugby station has acquired a 21st century ticket hall which is pleasant enough but not exactly distinctive.  It looks like a kit, like a McDonalds restaurant that came off the back of a lorry.

It's far better at the platform level, with nicely restored Victorian buildings and plenty of space to move.  As befits its prominent spot on the West Coast Main Line, Rugby is popular with trainspotters, and I was delighted to see three teenage boys spending their Easter holidays filming cargo trains passing through.  Not every thirteen year old is snorting nitrous oxide and stabbing their way round a shopping precinct.  Most of them are being quite boring and lovely.

There wasn't much to Rugby, and if it didn't have an internationally renowned sport named after it I suspect I wouldn't have felt so let down.  Take away the name and it was basically Crewe with funny shaped balls.  Still, I'm pleased with myself for managing to write a thousand words about it without once mentioning Ben Cohen, Dieux du Stade, or that ITV2 documentary where the rugby lads all got drunk and the cameras filmed them.  Don't pretend you don't know which one I mean.