Dings Crusaders

After five promotions in just over a decade, Dings Crusaders looked to have finally found their ceiling, relegated from National 3 at the first time of asking. That was, until they were given a lifeline. As Wakefield folded, the club from the humblest of backgrounds had a second chance, one they weren’t going to let slip. 

In the mid-19th century, the Dings was one of the most deprived and poverty-stricken of the slums that were scattered across the Victorian cityscape of Bristol. The cramped, squalid and insanitary conditions in the Dings, a collection of tightly packed streets barely a square kilometre in size, were characterised by dilapidated, back-to-back terraced housing, a breeding ground for disease. Multiple families shared a single outside toilet and, with no indoor plumbing, would be left with little option but to bathe with the sewage-ridden waters of the Avon.

A famously polluted area of the city, thanks to the nearby Avon Street Gas Works, for whom many of the residents would have worked, what little relief was offered to the people of the Dings came mainly in the public houses that once packed the area; reports suggest as many as fourteen served the community of a few thousand, where already limited household incomes were squandered on alcohol before they could be spent on their families. Hoping to combat this state of affairs, pioneering Christian missions had begun work in slums across the city, and one of those, soon to become the Shaftesbury Crusade, opened in 1888.  “The Shaftesbury Crusade was one of a number of socio-Christian organisations in Bristol, founded by people from the Redland Park Church, a middle-class area,” explains Dings Crusaders RFC historian Ian Haddrell. “They saw it as their crusade to basically keep men out of pubs – the rationale was that if men weren’t spending money on drink, they’d have more to spend on their family. 

“It started off simply as a coffee house, as an alternative to the pubs, but it developed considerably thanks to lots of donations from middle-class people who shared their vision of doing good for the community. That money allowed them to organise all sorts of activities for the people of the Dings, and so a man called Herbert William Rudge soon established the Dings Crusaders Rugby Club in 1897.”

The early years saw the club grow steadily and nomadically, playing their games three miles up the road on Durdham Downs to the north-west of the Dings. Their first-ever game in 1898 against Elton St Michael’s ended in a 5-15 defeat, but as rugby’s popularity rapidly expanded throughout Bristol, they were soon playing regular matches, winning twelve of their 23 games in the first season. They became an established side in the Bristol Combination, a league set up by local clubs in 1901 to combat the growing popularity of competitive association football, and won their first cup title in 1920, defeating Bristol Saracens 3-0 after extra time.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Dings celebrated their first England international when Arthur Payne made his debut against Ireland in 1935 in a 14-3 victory (while Dings Crusaders have often been credited as the club that Jimmy Peters, the first black man to play for England, joined when he moved to Bristol in 1900, evidence suggests he actually played for another club in the Dings area called Dings Rugby Club).

The club held a celebratory dinner in Payne’s honour, and the menu is a reminder of the Christian ideals on which the club was founded and run. “The Shaftesbury Crusade were very involved in everything that went on with the rugby club and were adamant about no alcohol,” Ian continues. “When they held Arthur Payne’s dinner there was no beer, it was jugs of lemonade on the table. It’s quite ironic when you think about deeply ingrained culture of beer-swilling rugby players, but it actually wasn’t until 1975 that the Crusade allowed a bar in the clubhouse. There’s a standing joke that if you wanted a strong drink at Dings then all you got was an extra tea bag.”

Reverend Canon Trevor Denly, who joined the club in 1963 as a schoolboy, remembers the Christian influence that was still a part of the club when he joined. “The club wasn’t overtly religious at the time, but there were senior members there like Les Fynn, who was the chairman when I joined, who spoke openly of their faith and were very steeped in the Shaftesbury principles,” he says. “But you didn’t have to go to church or be a Christian to play for the club; the ethos has always been to welcome everyone. When I joined the club, I had a faith, but I wasn’t religious, I didn’t feel a call until much later.”

Trevor became a Christian in his twenties and only felt the call to ordination when he was sixty, but the ethos of the club still had an influence. “Until the 70s we used to have an annual sportsman’s service up at Lockleaze, there was a building there which was used for church services. One year Peter Knight, who then went on to become Canon Peter Knight, came and spoke to us at the sportsman’s service when he played for Bristol, and he went on to play full-back for England. 

“When I came closer to ordination and became a Christian, thinking back to the likes of Les and other people at the club, what they said began to make sense to me, and perhaps it was already there in the psyche so to speak.”

The club continues to be an important part of Trevor’s life; he’s always in the supporter pack whether it’s home or away. “There’s always been a strong moral ethic, they’ve always looked after their people and my closest friends are from the club. It’s a club that has given opportunity to anybody, no matter who they are, who would like to play the game.”

The period after the Second World War proved to be defining for the Shaftesbury Crusade and Dings Crusaders. St Phillips, the area around the Dings, had been designated for industrial redevelopment; many of the houses were demolished and residents relocated across the city. After the war, a council estate in Lockleaze [four miles to the north of the Dings] was built, and the Shaftesbury saw it as an opportunity to continue the work they had been doing in the Dings, so in 1948 they decided to purchase twelve acres of land at the end of Landseer Avenue, where the rugby club made their permanent home.

While the modest facilities were updated in 1962, Dings’ unique Landseer Avenue ground soon became a part of national rugby folklore as a fearsome venue to visit. 

“While at Landseer Avenue, Dings had a no-cancellation policy,” Trevor recalls of his playing days. “We often played on frozen pitches, snow-covered pitches, flooded pitches, which meant by the end-of-season the pitch was devoid of grass other than in the four corners. I remember the water-logged nature for one game caused the referee to announce that the most likely injury would be drowning.”

Intimidation was the name of the game for Dings at that time. “Calls to ‘push ’em in the stingers’ that surrounded the pitch were often heard from our forwards,” he continues. “The main pitch sloped by four feet from top touchline to bottom, a feature that we used to full advantage. The proximity of the spectators to the pitch on the bottom touchline created a very intimidating atmosphere. 

“The changing facilities were ‘Spartan’ to say the least,” he adds. “The after-match bathing experience was quite something, with the players relaxing in two communal concrete plunge baths of limited proportions,  accommodating four rugby teams and two soccer teams. Players’ real speed was not witnessed on the pitch, but in the dash to get in the bath first and have a chance of some clean water.

“We also used to change in the same room as our opponents. Our full-back would walk in prior to kick off, and looking around would say in a loud voice: ‘Ah well, not much opposition today then’.” 

Despite the shortcomings of the ground, epitomised by the lack of windows in the clubhouse until their centenary year in 1997, it was where the club tasted its first period of sustained success. After to decades empty of silverware in the 50s and 60s, Dings re-established themselves as one of the strongest clubs in the region in the mid-70s, winning the Bristol and District Knockout Cup in 1974, a conversion from Gerald Williams six minutes into injury time securing a 15-13 win over Old Redcliffians. Another slim winning margin, 19-18 against North Bristol, would clinch top spot in the Bristol Evening Post Merit Table in 1979/80 with a last-minute penalty. They would top the Merit Table again in 1987 and 1989, but this was a period marred by the Dings’ famous intimidation tactics developing into rampant ill-discipline, coming to a peak when Old Colstonians protested by refusing to play them. 

Rugby continued at Landseer Avenue however, and the club game was about to enter a new age with the introduction of league competition in 1987. 

Steve Lloyd, chairman of Dings Crusaders since 1998, was club captain at that time, when rugby was going through this transitional period. “In the early 80s there was an influx of younger players coming into the side and they wanted to train,” he recalls, “but some of the older blokes didn’t want to, they were really old-school. It caused a bit of disruption at the time, but we stuck with it. By around the late 80s, early 90s, most of the old players had started to disappear, so it was a natural progression to start moving towards a system where you were training twice a week. And with that came relative success.”

Despite being one of the strongest local sides, when the league system was introduced, they shot themselves in the foot. “There was a strong feeling that because rugby in the Bristol area was so strong, there was going to be a Bristol-based league,” Steve continues, “so we held back our application to go into league rugby. It meant that when they announced the structure, we were placed in Gloucestershire League 1, almost at the bottom of the pyramid, close to level eight or nine now.”

However, it turned out to be no walk in the park for Dings, and losing away to Gloucester Spartans on the opening day despite going unbeaten for the rest of the season was enough to make them miss out on promotion on points difference. Another second-place finish came the season after, before they finally won promotion in 1989/90. It had been a tiresome wait, yet it was to be the start of an incredible run for Dings, winning three promotions in the next six years. 

“In about 1996 our coach came to me and said he felt he’d taken us as far as he could, so we took on Paul Searle, a chap from the Bath era. He was a very good coach, but the transition to coaching an amateur side was a bit too much, and to be honest the side struggled with his ways – he came from the era of ‘chaos’ rugby, there was no real structure to it. Paul left after a couple of years, and we found ourselves bumbling along, and we knew we needed to get it sorted out.”

By this point, Steve had moved on from playing to become chairman and was now at the coal face of finding a new coach to take the club forward. “Before the 2000/01 season we approached Bob Hesford, the ex-England and Bristol number eight, and he came on board and basically he transformed the club in a couple of seasons,” says Steve. “We had the players, he just got them organised – he had a very simple game plan, and we won the league in his first season.”

Promoted into South West I, Dings were now within touching distance of the national leagues and almost achieved the unthinkable of a double promotion, finishing second in the table before losing out 13-29 to Basingstoke in a South East v South West playoff. “But the season after, we won the league outright,” says Steve. “That was 2003, and that was us up into the heady heights of the national leagues. It was incredible for a club of our background; the biggest thing we did after that promotion was tarmac the car park, it was hopeless.”

National Three Division South presented a whole new calibre of opposition for Dings, now with the likes of Blackheath on the fixture list. “That first season was a real tough ask, the team that got promoted wasn’t the right team to take us forward,” Steve admits. “We were very good at South West level but when you got to some of the teams in London… when I was a kid, London rugby had been a bit of a joke really, old boys with neoprene on their elbows and knees – but the world had changed, and there were a lot of Australians and New Zealanders coming into the game.”

Dings finished in the relegation places with eight wins and a draw from 26 matches, but were spared the drop after Wakefield RFC, who were being demoted from National 2, folded. “We were given a lifeline,” says Steve. “Richard Grant [a Dings stalwart] wrote and explained that we had the best record of all the teams in the same position in the two leagues, and that basically salvaged us, and the rest is history.”

Dings, determined to make the most of this second bite at the cherry, took the opportunity with both hands, an improved season the following year ending in a mid-table finish. Head coach Bob Hesford, who had masterminded their rise to National 3, stood down due to illness, after an incredible five years at the helm, but the club continued to thrive, becoming a fixture at national level for more than a decade. In 2015, after a few seasons battling relegation, Dings were eventually resigned to the drop after twelve consecutive years in National 2 South, but it was only a short wait to retake their spot in the fourth tier, earning promotion in 2018 after dominating the South West Premier. 

Perhaps coincidentally, 2018 was also the first year of the Dings’ move to Shaftesbury Park, their gleaming, £8 million state-of-the-art ground in the suburb of Frenchay, named in honour of the Crusade that founded the club back in 1897. Having outgrown the tired facilities at Landseer Avenue, a decade-long search for a new ground had finally brought them their new home, funded by the sale of the Lockleaze land to housing developers. The move has proved a catalyst for the club to reach even greater heights, culminating in promotion to National 1 for the 2024/25 season, the highest rung the club has ever reached. 

Of course, the challenge will be greater too. A relentless fixture list sees them travel to Birmingham Moseley on the opening day before facing Plymouth Albion, Sedgley Park and Rams to round out their first month in their new division. “I would say we probably have the lowest budget in that league, but we’ve gone into this with our eyes open, it’s not a nasty shock,” assures Steve. “We are happy with the budget, it sits in well with what we’re trying to do, and it has to be sustainable.” 

Once proudly a fully amateur club – their first twelve years in the national leagues were all fully amateur – Dings is now semi-professional, but with the asset of the new ground, the club has a reliable revenue stream to help them towards success. “Shaftesbury Park is now a seven-days-a-week operation, it’s not what it used to be – I remember at the end of the season at the old ground we’d lock the doors and not go back until July, open it up and see what the rodents had done to the place.

“When we were at Lockleaze we had two junior teams, now we’ve got juniors ranging from under sixes all the way through to Colts, and we’ve got three women’s teams. Our first team has just won back-to-back promotions into the Championship and have gone two seasons unbeaten. 

“In Bristol there’s been a bit of a shift, people have had to accept the club for where it is now, which is a well-run club and a well-behaved club. We’re still learning to be honest, but I said at the AGM the other week, we’ve created this monster, and we’ve got to keep feeding the monster.”

Today, it’s hard to think of the Dings as it once was. Sitting in the shadow of the railway arches behind Bristol Temple Meads, the meandering River Avon and the shelter of the railway line protect the Dings from Bristol’s bustling city centre, creating a secluded, village-like feel in the heart of the city. It’s now a close-knit inner-city community – crowned the ‘Best Community in Britain’ in 2010 in fact – but its history is not forgotten; post-war council housing and contemporary flats are punctuated by Victorian terraces and cobbled streets,
and if they merely hint at its past, then the plaques and street art dotted all around the Dings are eager to tell its story. At the gateway to the Dings, on the corner of Oxford Street and Kingsland Street, the Shaftesbury Crusade building still stands, now converted into flats.  

From those humble beginnings, the Dings Crusaders of today and their impressive new home are a testament in timber and glass to those who have helped transform the club over the years. “The club is proud of its history,” says Steve. “If you look around Shaftesbury Park there’s very much a homage to the past, and it’s important that we keep that. I am very much in favour of keeping alive what we stood for in the past.”

What will be the emotions when Dings make their National 1 debut? “There will be a moment to reflect, probably when we play Plymouth Albion [their first home game of the season] – in my day we only played Plymouth Albion 2s. I will just be thinking about all the people that have been on our journey, a lot of who aren’t here to see it.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 27 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.