Brixham

The champions of England knew little about the Devon fishing town, or what the locals could do on a rugby pitch but, needs must, a game had to be played and, besides, what did they need to worry about? They were Bath, it was Brixham that should be worried. 

Brixham might just be the perfect seaside town. And we’re not just talking aesthetics. While the Devon town’s Tobermory palette of houses perched on the harbour valley is the most literal picture-postcard setting; Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, doubling as a pirate ship (or perhaps a statement on the early British empire), is the perfect centrepiece; and the assorted boats that reside within the harbour are muse enough for any artist; it’s the substance behind it all that makes this coastal town of 17,000 souls, stand out.

Fish have been the lifeblood of this town since long before it was even a town. Once, the red-sailed smacks, wooden fishing boats, would fill the harbour and beyond, with a fleet close to the 300 mark ensuring Brixham ruled the fishing waters. They pioneered trawling, with their boats, built on the edge of their own harbour, combining speed and strength, to bring the catch to the old fish market, where the glistening haul was displayed before it left town for tables near and far. 

A golden age came to an end a century ago when a combination of steam trawlers, adopted earlier and in greater numbers by markets to the north, and World War One, during which the Germans scuttled fish-laden boats, not only decimated the fleet, but left the waters strewn with wrecks, and impossible to fish. 

But, this town knows resilience. Forever, the shadows of its Torbay neighbours Paignton and Torquay have loomed large, but rather than be intimidated, from their outcrop at the end of the southern curve of the English Riviera, the people of Brixham instead decided to conquer the ocean beyond with their boats, allowing them to grow bigger and prosper, in spite of their Fawlty Towers-famed siblings. 

While many in the steam era abandoned fishing altogether, Brixham rebuilt. Today, protecting the town in myriad ways, is the modern-day fish market, on a bad-weather day filled with trawlers and day boats, but often empty as the fishermen (and one or two women) head off to fill their hulls. “The value of fish landed in Brixham is sixty million quid,” explains Adam Mudge, who works for Brixham Trawler Agents that run the market, but also doubles as second team manager of Brixham RFC, the reason we’re in town. “That makes us the biggest support fishing port in England, Wales and Ireland and only Peterhead [in Scotland] beats us in the UK – they take about £200million but it’s a completely different fishery out there. They’ve got factory ships [which can be up to 90m
long] and they’ll do £1m in one trip, and process it all on board, but that counts towards their £200m a year.

“After us though, it’s a long way down to the next port, Newlyn’s probably around £15m, and Plymouth at £12m, and they’re going down, whereas Brixham is just getting bigger and bigger.”

The fleet might not be 300-strong, but it’s still mighty, including within its numbers about twenty beam trawlers, the biggest of which is almost forty-metres long. “And then there’s about forty rod and liners, smaller boats,” continues Adam. “What really keeps Brixham’s fishing fleet alive is Brixham Black Gold, cuttlefish, which is worth £12m a year on its own.”

A walk around the fish market, and you’ll see how the town’s two greatest passions are forever entwined, with trawlers adorned with the crest of Brixham RFC, flying the flag, or workers wearing well-worn jerseys from the club’s lengthy past. “Brixham has two big communities,” explains Adam, “the fishing community and the rugby community, these two bring the town together. The fishing side always help out when they can, they’ve always sponsored the rugby and obviously play too. 

“When I was playing,” continues the former scrum-half, “if the weather was good, you lost players as they were out at sea, but if they weren’t going to sea, they’d be playing rugby on the Saturday – that was the general rule of thumb. 

“And there were some good players who were fishermen too,” he adds, “some class players who could’ve gone a long way, but fishing was their livelihood.”

The long-arm of the breakwater protects the harbour and all within it, and as you walk through the town, you’ll see plenty of characters that help shape it. William of Orange, for instance, whose statue – usually with a seagull on head – stands on the water’s edge, a constant reminder of when he was carried ashore by a local in 1688, having landed with a force of 40,000 to be crowned King William III. 

You’ll also walk past a pirate, a fixture of the town since they launched their Pirate Festival in 2007, breaking world records along the way, varying from most pirates in one place to the longest line of pirates. The event is only once a year, but one man keeps the spirit alive 365 days a year. Nobody really remembers if he lived in the town before the festival years, but at least he’s found a home.

“The value of fish landed in Brixham is sixty million quid  – that makes us the biggest support fishing port in England, Wales and Ireland – but what really keeps the fishing fleet alive is Brixham Black Gold”

Almost directly opposite William of Orange is another staple of the town, Simply Fish, one of a growing number of restaurants in town that have closed the gap between sea and stove, owned by fish merchant, and ex-Brixham player and coach Robert Simonetti. “My dad used to buy fish back here in 1957,” says Robert, wearing, as always, his Brixham RFC polo. “He used to supply hotels, restaurants and had his own fish and chip shop in Torquay.”

Robert went into the trade as a fish merchant, and would once spend his early mornings down at the fish market, checking over the assorted catch from the Brixham fleet, before making his bids at the in-person auction. It was here that he met many of his closest friends almost three decades ago, as he was brought into the rugby fold. “They were short one Saturday, I’d never played, but I fancied myself as a fit boy so gave it a go – I broke two ribs in the first game, but loved it.

“Rugby and fishing go hand in glove,” he continues. “The boats would come in on Friday, lads would go to the pub for twelve hours, get out of bed on Saturday and [rugby club fixture secretary] Danny Irvine would be chasing them all around the town to make up the numbers for the rugby teams.”

Things have changed in the town, if only because Danny – a man who gets mentioned continually as a one-time force of nature within the club – is no longer with them to round up everyone to ensure fifteen players get on the pitch.

Nonetheless, the rugby club remains the beating heart of the town, plying their trade just outside the national leagues, in level five’s Regional One South West where they finished fourth in the recent campaign. 

Key to the progress of the Brixham side have been Robert’s two sons, thirty-year-old fly-half-turned-number eight Jean Pierre [JP] and 26-year-old centre Andre. “I don’t think there’s many clubs like Brixham,” begins JP. “The togetherness we get there on a Saturday afternoon … in December, we played Barnstaple at home and there had to be a thousand people watching, screaming! Some places we go to, there’s only ten to fifteen people watching.”

“And at least half of that thousand,” adds Andre, “you know on a first-name basis, it’s a very tight-knit club.”

“Most people up there,” says JP, nodding in the vague direction of the club, “have worked down the fish quay or are working with fish.”

The fishing industry, both directly and indirectly, employs close to a thousand people in and around the town, but while dad Robert would once catch up on the previous weekend’s rugby at the fish auction, now that’s gone digital, the bidding is done behind a computer screen. “I’m not ashamed to say it, but I had a tear in my eye when they changed the market from us being right there with the fish to it going online,” says Robert. “One of the worst days of my life really, because I used to see all me mates, all the time. 

“Reverend Roberts had a vision for rugby being character-building ... the idea was, lads who played rugby would go to church, be clean-living, upstanding citizens, empire builders and have a few pints.”

“They’re like brothers really,” he adds of his fish industry friends, “because not only did you work with them every single day, but you played rugby with them too, and there’s nothing that makes you tighter than that.”

Both sons now work in the family business, mixing in with all aspects of running a restaurant, and they also share their dad’s passion for the town. “I don’t think there are many places left where people are passionate about where they’re born,” says Andre. “A lot of people don’t really care about where they’re born and move away or whatever.

“But a lot of people that are born in Brixham, care about Brixham, remain in Brixham and have a job that’s to do with Brixham, that’s quite rare now.”

Climbing out of the harbour valley, there are steep hills or seemingly endless steps to tackle before you come to Brixham RFC, perched high, just down the road from the town’s Napoleonic forts, whose cannon-filled walls once served as a deterrent for foreign invaders. The club is reaching its 150th anniversary, and in the months leading up to it, a weekly gathering has taken place on Thursday mornings to rifle through the archives. Although when we say archives, we mean an assortment of boxes, carrier bags and albums that have been collated from all corners of the town and the Brixham diaspora, dragging with them memories of long-since forgotten moments, matches and the odd disciplinary hearing or three. 

Reverend George Bayfield Roberts formed the club back in 1875, arriving in Brixham as newly-ordained curate only a year before, and built for rugby himself, joined with the locals in playing mob football. “Reverend Roberts had a vision for rugby football being character-building,” explains Kevin Coughlan, a rugby journalist who covered Brixham during the 1970s, and has been brought in as part of the 150th team. “The idea was, lads who played rugby would go to church, be clean-living, upstanding citizens, empire builders and have a few pints.”

Roberts had been educated at Cheltenham College and Oriel College, Oxford, and brought with him Cheltenham Rules, which would be amalgamated into the RFU’s when the game was organised. 

Combined with a people used to the extreme rigours of life at sea, Roberts found his congregation in every sense. The rough and tumble of rugby, especially the roughest of tumbles back then, suited Brixham down to the ground. Perhaps a bit too much, if one of the newspaper reports found amid the detritus of programmes, score cards, notebooks, and photographs – not to mention the odd rattle and random trophy from a tour to some far-flung corner of the world – is to be believed. Taken from a match against Dartmouth in 1884, barely nine years after their formation, it remarked that, ‘the game was anything but pleasant on the part of the Brixham men; and, as a spectator remarked, the Brixham men do not appear to have yet learnt the first principle of this manly game’.

Brixham though, have never taken a backward step, even in print, as it prompted a written defence from the captain, D Putt, who promptly set the record straight by letter, highlighting how his side had needed Dartmouth players to fill their depleted ranks, and the fights that broke out were actually between one of those players and his own team-mates. 

Whether earned or not, Brixham’s reputation has occasionally gone before them. “I took a bunch of lads up to Twickenham once,” explains Len Harvey, a club stalwart who’s arrived to add his book of clippings to the piles being sifted through, “and one of them got into an argument in the stands, and somebody shouted, ‘typical bloody Brixham’ – that was from some bloke in London!”

Whichever rugby clubhouse you’re in, at whatever level, wherever in the world, tall tales get taller as time passes. Kicks get longer, tackles get harder, opponents get bigger and celebrations get wilder; but in Brixham’s case, such was the magnitude of their greatest win, it still gets talked about by their opponents. It’s listed in every ‘greatest defeat’ compilation ever made by fans of the defeated side, and for years it served as a warning to the players that wore the shirt not to let it happen again. If anything, the kicks really were longer, and the tackles so hard, they still reverberate through time.

In 1985, Bath were in their absolute pomp. They were reigning cup winners, at the start of a run that would see them not only win four consecutive national competitions, but also take home the spoils in ten Twickenham showpiece finals in thirteen years. A squad packed with eleven internationals, including the likes of Richard Hill, Simon Halliday, John Horton, Gareth Chilcott – only two of their regulars were missing – arrived at Astley Park to play Brixham, a side not considered to even be the best in English Riviera, let alone England.

The furthest corner of Torbay wasn’t usually where sides such as Bath found themselves, the seemingly more illustrious Torquay was as far south as they came, but the English giants were desperate. They needed game time ahead of a cup clash with Blackheath, especially with a thirteen-month unbeaten record to maintain, and with pitches frozen across the country. So, when ‘Brixham’ was whispered into the right ear at The Rec, they couldn’t resist, and the fixture on 17 February, 1985 was pencilled in.  “It came about because there was a big freeze in England and they weren’t getting any rugby,” explains Len Harvey, the scrum-half that day, and a stalwart of some 500-plus first team games. “They were English champions, undefeated for goodness knows how long. They weren’t the only ones either, Wasps came down to play Torquay, and Bath came to us.”

“That game was probably the biggest feather in our cap. Even right up to not long ago, before certain games, in Bath changing rooms they’d say, ‘don’t forget the Brixham game’.”

While for most of the Brixham side, knowledge of their opposite number came only from grainy Bath highlights on Rugby Special or the Five Nations TV coverage, Len knew his man only too well. “I knew Richard Hill as a youngster because he played for Exeter University, and they used to come down here for games,” he explains. “He was pretty handy for England, but he didn’t like me. I was all over him like a rash. Back in those days, you’d do all sorts. A scrum-half would put the ball in and you’d pull his leg or whack the ball out of his hands – I just used to get into his head.”

Bath were overwhelming favourites. “They never thought we’d beat them,” says Len. “We had a decent pack, the forwards held their own against the Bath pack, the three-quarters the same, and then you had one bit of magic. John Horton kicked the ball out of defence for Bath, I was stood on the halfway line just by the touch line and Sean Irvine, our wing, was just in front of me. He caught the ball, and I just thought, ‘he’s lining up a drop-kick’, and it sailed through the posts.”

The fifty-yard drop-goal – interestingly, recorded as just forty by one salty Bath writer, who also claimed the visitors were in ‘another class’ in ‘every department of play’ – was ten minutes into the second-half, making it 3-0 to Brixham, and the wing soon added another penalty to make it 6-0. At the seventy-minute mark, a third Irvine kick made it 9-0. “John Palmer [the Bath centre], he was an international too, he then scored a try and converted it, but it was too late then. I had an easy job,” says Len, “because Richard Hill hated me, I knew I could get to him. I made sure I said hello to him before the game. Yeah, he was a really good scrum-half, captained England and all that, but he was just easy meat for me. I’d just be there, as he’s putting the ball in, standing on his foot, letting him know I’m there…

“It was nothing personal,” he adds, “he was a bloody good scrum-half.

“There was nothing they could do about it because Brixham just tackled everything,” continues Len. “Graham Thorne our lock went off and Steve Wright our winger came on, went in second row and had a blinder. We were down to bare bones, but we took them on. We tackled our hearts out.

“That game was probably the biggest feather in our cap. It was a big achievement. Even right up to not long ago, before certain games, in Bath changing rooms they’d say, ‘don’t forget the Brixham game’.”

Aside from a Rugby World team of the month award – which earned them a pennant and three Mitre Multiplex balls – there was no silverware, but it helped build a reputation for the game that far surpassed what you’d expect from a town the size of Brixham.

Like many at the club, Len’s life has been immersed in the sea, from starting out, aged fifteen, as a boat builder apprentice on £3 per week, to working on pilot boats taking captains to their ships, to setting up his own fish merchant business. The latter has now been taken on by his son Mark, who also followed in his dad’s scrum-half footsteps, earning a place at Colston’s, and the Bath academy, before returning to Brixham. “I was asked to go and play for Gloucester in the 1970s,” says Len, whose first-team days spanned three decades, only playing his final game in 1995, aged 45, before a further decade in the seconds or thirds beckoned, “but there were no motorways, it was a long way to go up the A38!”

Talent has never been in short supply, and while a passion for the town has seemingly stopped many going on from greater things – at least ‘greater’ in the wider rugby sense – they’ve still had their moments. “They played against Cantabrians, a New Zealand touring side, in 1979, and it featured a lot of the All Blacks who’d been on the 1976 tour to South Africa,” explains Kevin, picking through his notes. “The New Zealanders had been  playing big sides across and they’d won them all, and Brixham gave them a really good game, but lost 15-36.

“Two days later they had to play Exeter – the strongest team in Devon – in the Devon Cup, so they were expected to lose, but Raymond [who’d faced the Cantabrians and went on to follow his father Ralph as a president of the club] told his team-mates that after being bruised and battered by the All Blacks, ‘this is only Exeter for christ’s sake’.”

They duly despatched Exeter 11-0 en route to a first Devon Cup final since 1932 (in which they’d beaten Paignton 9-0), where they fell to a strong Torquay side. 

Torquay. On the top end of the bay’s curve, facing Brixham across the water, they were the rivals that Brixham couldn’t get to. “I only played them twice,” says Len, whose first-team career spanned three decades. “They played us in our centenary season, but we had to go over there, and then that cup final.”

“They called us the dirtiest team in the west in The Sunday Times, which I think was pretty unfair.Yeah, we were a pretty tough side, but so were other teams; you’d meet some pretty hard cases.”

Why no more? “The committees fell out I think,” says Len, before asking the room for their thoughts. “Arseholes aren’t they?” responds Alan McInally, a former second row and coach at the club as he moves a 1970s match programme from one box to another. “The trouble with Torquay is,” continues Alan, “and they’re even like it now, when they walk, they walk with this kind of swagger.” 

“Torquay didn’t play us, they didn’t want to belittle themselves,” explains Keith Gardner, the club’s current president, brother of Raymond, son of Ralph. “But when we did start to face them in the cup matches, we started beating them, and we’re in level five now, whereas Torquay are in level eight.”

Big sides would often not travel further south than Torquay, unless heading to Plymouth Albion, but the combination of Danny Irvine’s chutzpah in getting sides down to the fishing town, and the formation of the leagues, meant Brixham could run their own destiny. They rose to the same division as Torquay, level five, eventually becoming the premier side in the Bay when their rivals were relegated in 2003, the season in which Brixham finished fifth.

It has to be said, however successful they’ve been and whichever rugby giant they’ve knocked off their perch, Brixham haven’t exactly been the darlings of local rugby. “They called us the dirtiest team in the west in The Sunday Times, which I think was pretty unfair,” explains Keith.

Perhaps the biggest pile of cuttings and correspondence comes under the simple topic of ‘ban’. It was 1984, a season before Bath came to town, and complaints had been made to the RFU about violent play and, after a warning that another sending-off would lead to sanctions, a youth player seeing red led to the entire first-team squad of forty being banned for the remaining games of the season. “We were unfairly picked on,” says Keith. “We did have a bad reputation, but that was more other clubs picking on us. Yeah, we were a pretty tough side, but so were other teams; you’d go down to Cornwall or up to Wales, and you’d meet some pretty hard cases.”

Len, naturally, was there in the thick of it. “The game in question, which led up to us being banned was a cup game up at Exmouth,” he explains. “It was my 500th first team game, and I’ll always remember it. 

“I shouldn’t say really,” he begins, “but there was a scrum and I just saw this arm come through and, bang, I could see the Exmouth hooker’s legs go. 

“That went down like a lead balloon,” he admits. “After the game, the chairman Reg Brewer presented my cap for the 500, but there wasn’t a lot of cheering in the Exmouth clubhouse.

“The guy that got walloped was a solicitor and I think that was the first lawsuit against the club for the foul play.”

They were, however, different times. Times when, for instance, playing against a police rugby side would be labelled ‘bob a cop’ time, and rugby, let alone Brixham, was very different too – watch a clip from virtually any rugby game of this era and you’ll see far more than just the odd thrown punch.

The ban – initially a two-season one from cups and merit tables but later reduced – was seen as draconian by many. Reports suggesting sides across the county wouldn’t play Brixham were also far wide of the mark, prompting the club to write letters to local rivals, and duly receiving support in spades. 

A call to arms also went out to help them fulfil fixtures, with former Brixham players arriving from all over the country to play games, coupled with the promotion of colt and second team players, to ensure the first team carried on. “We all stuck together, and came good again,” concludes Keith.

Two days after we meet with Brixham’s Thursday morning ‘time team’, the club has a double-header. While the first team have travelled to Exmouth for the first leg of their Devon Cup semi-final, the second team – the Crusaders – host Crediton in their equivalent cup final-four and the colts likewise faced South Molton. In the stands, the club’s chairman Chris Forster is on the mic. “We’re in a good place,” he says of the club. “We’ve now got a 150-year lease on this ground, which is amazing because this ground was bought by [local businessmen] Smardon and Astley when the club got into financial difficulty in the 1930s. We had it under perpetuity; so as long as rugby was played here, it was ours, but that became tricky in the 1960s, and we had to bring in players from Exeter and all over just to ensure rugby was played, otherwise the council would’ve built on this. Now, it’s safe though.”

“We were always the minnows, the cod heads, the small team that nobody gave a chance, the plucky underdogs, but now it’s the reverse. We’re top of the tree now and we’ve got people coming after us.”

Now competing at the top end of the regional game, Chris is aware the next step is a big one. “We do have an ambition of National 2,” he says. “It’s a huge step though, if you push to National 2, you’ve got to bring the Crusaders and others up with you too, and I want us to be in a position where we go up and stay there. I wouldn’t want to be a jack-in-the-box side.”

Behind him, in a full-looking grandstand, there’s characters aplenty, each with their own story to tell. Be it Margo Lovegrove, an eighty-year-old stalwart of the club kitchen, who tells us of the time she abandoned the fryer to tackle a streaker; or 84-year-old Ben Rogers, one of the oldest former players still around, whose colourful stories take you from his building work in Iran, Algeria and Poland to the time the tough-tackling flanker couldn’t lay a finger on the Newbury fly-half, but still had his best game ever.

Raymond, another former Brixham second row enforcer, not to mention president and historian, is also there. He shares the stories of the club’s ups and downs, but for pride points to the flag flying high above the ground. “My father [Ralph] decided we needed to get some pride back in the club, and he went to see his aunt Pol up at Milford Haven – who was the wife of a fisherman, Brixham born and bred – and she said ‘perhaps you should get a new burgee [a ship’s flag], and call it Britain’s Pride, BM15, named after the Brixham trawler… and that’s why we’ve got that burgee [adorned with BM15] flying up there.”

Both the colts and the Crusaders lose their games, the latter with the final kick, having dominated the match. Their coaching team is Adam [of the fish market] and Daniel Stead, or Gribble as he’s known, a nickname taken from his father [a ‘gribble’ being a sort of marine woodlouse that bores into wood], who also played for the club as a free-scoring winger.

Gribble Jr was a hooker with the club during the era in which they finally surpassed Torquay, and knows only too well how far the club have come. “We were always the minnows, the cod heads, the small team that nobody gave a chance, the plucky underdogs, but now it’s the reverse,” he says. “We’re top of the tree, we’ve now got the label of being arrogant and people come after us.

“When we played Torquay it was always all snot and fury because we wanted to put one on them, but that’s changed, rugby’s different,” he says. “I can remember being fourteen or fifteen, and they’d say lose the game, win the fight, that was how we were brought up, very physical, very confrontational. Not that today’s isn’t, but it’s a lot cleaner; I wish I played this game as it is today.”

Together with Adam, he’s charged with helping to transition the club’s successful colts side, into senior rugby through the Crusaders. Not that he’s limiting the ambition to just Brixham born-and-bred players. “We should be aiming for a two-thirds split [local to non-local]; I mean we want to be attracting the best players to our area as well, because you drive to Brixham, you don’t drive through it.”

In many ways, he typifies grassroots rugby and Brixham. His grandfather played for the club, as did his dad, and his own son – Jack, currently in New Zealand – has also turned out for the seniors. “And if I have a grandchild, they’ll play here,” he adds. “It’s somewhere I’ve always felt at home, it’s brought me up if you like. I’ve got lots of mums and dads, and aunties and uncles – who aren’t related to me – here, and all my best friends I’ve met from rugby.  

“It frustrates the fuck out of me too,” he adds, “but it’s something you can’t put down, it’s a place you belong and when I didn’t have it for a time, I desperately missed it.

“It’s the ultimate dysfunctional family, we drive each other mad, we’re all stubborn, but we’re all trying to get the club going in the same direction, we just might have different ways to do it.”

And, as every person we’ve met agrees, it’s more than a hobby. “It’s a way of life,” concludes Gribble, “that’s what the club means to me, and when I don’t have it, I’m a worse person than I am right now.”       

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by  Richard Johnson

This extract was taken from issue 26 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.