Beschreibung:

AN EXCEPTIONALLY RARE 1908 PRE-BRITISH LIONS ‘ANGLO-WELSH’ RUGBY UNION JERSEY ISSUED FOR NEW ZEALAND & AUSTRALIA TOURThe red and white hooped cotton jersey to represent Wales and England, with white collars, three buttons, interior label for George Lewin & Co, London, inscribed ‘RK’ for Neath forward R K ‘Bob’ GreenProvenance: believed to be the earliest ‘British Lions’ jersey to be auctioned. Likely acquired by Charles Meyrick Pritchard (1882 – 1916) directly from Anglo-Welsh player Bob Green, after a subsequent Neath v Newport match. By this time Pritchard must have been known as a jersey collector. Preserved with other important jerseys, caps and photographs by Charlie Pritchard which form a collection entered to this auction by Charlie Pritchard’s great-grandson. In recent years the collection has been archived and exhibited at the World Rugby Museum at Twickenham Stadium.The 1908 British Isles tour to New Zealand and Australia was the seventh tour by a British Isles team and the fourth to New Zealand and Australia. The tour is often referred to as the ‘Anglo-Welsh Tour’ as only English and Welsh players were selected due to the Irish and Scottish Rugby Unions not participating in a puritanical protest around The All Blacks’s vague flirtations with professionalism. As they saw it, the sport was creeping away from amateurism with payments for subsistence, travel costs and expenses on tours. There was an attitude in Scotland that rugby was for the middle-classes where players ought to be paying their way.It is an interesting side note from a Welsh perspective that the deep-rooted rivalry between Wales and England, still very much in existence today, is fuelled by class differences; the grass roots of Welsh rugby being concentrated in the working-class areas of the south Wales valleys, while the English grass roots dependent on the playing fields of public schools. However, it can be argued that in the 1900s, it was Scottish rugby with the biggest frown over Wales’s adoption of rugby union amongst the working classes.1908 was only three years after The Original All Blacks's seminal tour of Europe, but it was although the Anglo-Welsh team had learnt nothing from their slick practices. The contrasts were stark, and the Irish and Scottish Unions should certainly have had no fears that the 1908 British tour was moving towards professionalism - it was as amateurish as any tour before or after. The hastily assembled team was picked solely from public-school educated gentlemen, and it was although the emergence of rugby union as a sport for the Welsh working classes had never happened. The team was so unfit that on arrival in New Zealand the NZRU were so appalled they appointed a prominent athletics coach, Tom Leslie, to be their trainer at £3 a week. But because the Anglo-Welsh would have nothing to do with anyone in rugby being paid and so they didn’t use Leslie’s services.Led by Arthur 'Boxer' Harding and managed by George Harnett, the tour took in 26 matches, 9 in Australia and 17 in New Zealand. Of the 26 games, 23 were against club or invitational teams and three were test matches against the All Blacks. The Lions lost two and drew one match against the All Blacks.The tour was not received well in Wales, as the Welsh players selected were chosen exclusively from those players from a well-educated and professional-class background. The selection was in fact addressed by the Welsh Rugby Union who stated that when a British Isles team was mooted for a South Africa tour in 1910, that the players should be chosen '...irrespective of the social position of the players.’