Rugby Football: 200th Anniversary

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Friday 3rd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mark Pawsey]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. The game has grown massively and is played at all levels in all parts of the world and all corners of the UK.

I was talking about rugby being a game with discipline and with physical endeavour. It is controlled physical endeavour, but players have to be honest and fair and sportsmanship is the foundation on which rugby is built. There is a great sense of camaraderie between rugby players and their teammates. All those values are seen in charity work that is done up and down the country, with the game of rugby being used as a tool to change lives. These organisations are often characterised by their bright and distinctive blazers—I am thinking of organisations such as Wooden Spoon and the Atlas Foundation, where the power of rugby to make a difference and to give young people a purpose, helping them to create a support network and to get on with their lives, is completely inspiring.

I have been proud to host the Premiership Rugby community awards here in Parliament over a number of years. Premiership Rugby’s award-winning education and employability programme HITZ uses the core values of the game to inspire and motivate young people into education, employment or apprenticeships and has engaged more than 20,000 people since it was created in 2008.

Another programme is Project Rugby, which is run by Premiership Rugby in collaboration with Gallagher and England Rugby. It is designed to increase participation by people from traditionally under-represented groups, perhaps in the basic way my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) mentioned. Project Rugby was extended in April 2022 to bring young women and girls from diverse backgrounds into rugby in partnership with the Asian Sports Foundation.

The growth and spread of the game over 200 years is worth celebrating and that is exactly what is happening in rugby this year. It all starts this coming Sunday on the close at Rugby School, where 140 people—including our very own Sports Minister, who is at the Dispatch Box today, world cup winner Mike Tindall, England Women’s 100 cap international Emily Scarratt and almost all the former captains of rugby at the school dating back to 1957—will make a global pass to send 200 balls around the UK. They will be going, among other places, to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, which has a connection to Rugby’s famous headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold, to Wales, to Llanelli, and over the sea to Belfast.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Will these 200 balls be the ghastly new synthetic ones, or will they be the original leather ones?

[Mark Pawsey]

That is something the Minister and I will discover on Sunday, but there is every possibility that it will be the modern material, which is much easier to catch and therefore makes for a more exciting game because of better handling. Those balls will not just be going around the UK; they will be heading out to Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the USA, Kenya and Singapore. Each one of the 200 balls will be passed to represent each year that has passed since the game started.

That is this coming Sunday, but across the year we have other events. England are going to play on the close at Rugby School against Wales in an under-18 women’s game. We are going to hold an international under-18 sevens tournament. There will be an under-nine and under-11 club festival, which will enable the youngest players to take part, and there will be a veterans rugby club sevens for the oldest. In the same vein, the Commons and Lords rugby club, which is Members from both Houses, will play a veterans team on the close made up from the six local clubs in the town of Rugby.

On St George’s day, we will attempt to create the world’s largest rugby scrum. The current record is 2,586 people. We are aiming for 3,000 pupils from local schools and others to beat that record. There will also be, as has happened a couple of times previously, a re-enactment of the first ever game, in the clothing that the players would have worn back in 1823. Some lucky person will take on the role of William Webb Ellis.