Essex

Southend RFC’s 150th anniversary is testament to many things. The commitment of volunteers down the generations, fiscal responsibility spanning two centuries, plus the resilience to ride out a pandemic or two. But most of all, it underlines that, in Essex, watching a joy-riding lion taking on a vertical ‘wall of death’ at 50mph isn’t as entertaining for the locals as a simple game of rugby.

Pick any year from the past 150, and Southend-on-Sea can boast a war chest of entertainment possibilities, from a timeless stroll down the world’s longest pier with an ice cream in hand, to playing football in the mudflats when the tide is out, to cruising through the town’s various arcades and amusement parks.Many of the attractions have come, and gone, and come again, including the old Kursaal fairground where our lion’s escapade on the ‘wall of death’ took place in 1934. Type “Lion on car rides The Wall of Death” into YouTube to view a very strange moment in Southend’s history. Quick spoiler – the lion is fine, if a little dizzy and rightly unhappy with humanity.

Yet amid the contemporary entertainment options available in this corner of Essex, rugby has laid down stronger roots here, than anywhere else in the county. 

Rugby first came to Southend in the 1870s when a British Navy Admiral brought a copy of rugby’s by-laws with him on his return from Japan, handing them to a couple of open-minded boys in Southend who formed the club. Or so the story goes. 

Whether true or apocryphal, Southend RFC then stood alone as the area’s only rugby club until 1922 when Old Westcliffians (now just Westcliff RFC) joined the party, followed by Rochford Hundred in 1961/2.

The three clubs are within two miles of each other, all located close to the train line which links Southend to London’s Liverpool Street station in just over an hour’s travel. The clubs also straddle London Southend Airport, meaning that, in normal times, the sound of Euro-hopping aeroplanes accompany every match. 

It’s this short and (normally) noisy corridor of Essex which represents the county’s rugby stronghold, a ‘rugby triangle’. Were you to rank the 44 clubs affiliated to the Essex Rugby Football Union by league position, Westcliff and Rochford Hundred would be first and second respectively – Westcliff having stayed up in National Two South this season with Rochford Hundred gaining promotion into it by winning the division below. 

While Southend would be ranked fifth, having finished behind Colchester and Eton Manor in London One North (level six), it has still been the cream of rugby in Essex for many of its 150 years. The 1980s were a particularly exciting time at the club when they put together impressive runs in the John Player Cup, pushing the likes of Blackheath and Nottingham close and even experiencing the bright lights of a televised game against Gloucester – who fielded a young Mike Teague at No.8 – in the third round of their 1981 campaign. Southend were leading into the last quarter too, but the Cherry and Whites came through to win 12-6.

Three other Essex sides – Chingford, Woodford and Brentwood – compete with Southend in London One North and there’s a further five Essex teams in the division below that. Another level down, and you have the likes of Braintree, Basildon, Chelmsford and Barking, the club where Jason Leonard plied his trade.

Theirs has been the biggest fall from grace. Having seen promotion to the Championship snatched from their grasp by London Scottish in 2011, Barking has dropped down the leagues, and so far stayed down.

On the talent front, although the county can’t point to a production line of England internationals, it has done a sideline hustle in hard-edged forwards down the years. As well as Leonard, Saracens stalwart Kris Chesney developed his uncompromising game at Barking, and, in more recent times, England hooker Jamie George spent a short while at Southend with his Saracens team-mate Jackson Wray having come through the ranks at Westcliff. 

Rugby’s popularity in Essex has proved consistent down the years, yet neither club nor county – where they competed mostly as Eastern Counties, reaching two finals – has had an abundance of mantelpiece moments. “I think that has something to do with the schools’ system and the elitism that used to be there,” says Southend president Neil Harding, who has been associated with the club for 32 years. “But we have 40-odd clubs, and when you consider that Buckinghamshire has sixteen clubs, that tells you there’s a lot of rugby played in Essex. And in unlikely places. Canvey Island has a club, Benfleet has a club, Runwell has a club, Dagenham has a club. Barking were one minute away from playing Championship rugby and, although they’ve dropped down, they’re still going. Thurrock have just got promoted. Essex rugby is thriving.”

Indeed, the health of rugby in the county is something which Southend, Westcliff and Rochford all agree on. 

Westcliff especially cuts a thriving figure as a community rugby club. Its impressive youth set-up provides a steady stream of players for the senior teams – with its match-day squad in National Two South averaging fifteen players who have come through the youth system – the club is financially sound and don’t pay players, plus, like Southend, they have a booming women’s section.

Their coaching team would also be the envy of most National One clubs, comprising former Wasps and Newcastle winger John Rudd, former Harlequins centre Jordan Turner-Hall, and Jacob Ford, the youngest son of former England defence coach Mike, and brother of England fly-half George and former Leicester and Sale fly-half Joe. In addition, Jackson Wray helps out his old club on the coaching front once a week.

Jacob, at just 21-years-old, is the club’s head coach. But despite having no professional playing career to call on, he hasn’t encountered any problems in winning over the players. The local media however, were a little trickier. “At the start of the season, we lost seven straight games and I had loads of interviews with the Southend Echo,” he tells us. “They were saying ‘is this above your weight?’ ‘is it going to be a tough season?’, and I remember saying, ‘yeah, it will be a tough season!’

But Jacob – who is the youngest person ever to qualify as an RFU Level 3 coach – stuck with his attacking style of play and the results began to come. By the time the season was called off, Westcliff had done more than enough to preserve their status in National Two South.

It’s easy to form a pre-conception about how Jacob might approach the game based on how George plays in an England shirt. Yet the youngest Ford is carving out his own style. “Our principle at Westcliff is ‘run-first’,” explains Jacob, “to which everyone is like ‘woah – what are you on about?’ but actually if you are in your own 22 and they have three or four defenders in the backfield, you’re going to run it every time because it’s ludicrous if you don’t.

“My principles over-ride execution. Where you are on the pitch, what you are going to do, how you are going to play, I feel like my role as a coach is to give players as many options on the pitch as possible.”

How does that philosophy compare with the rest of the Ford household? “If we were all sat around a table, as we have been during this lockdown, we would all have a different way of playing, I guarantee it,” says Jacob. “My dad wants to play this way, George wants to do this, Joe wants to do this. 

“George is very open minded and very simple, very simple. He always says to me that if he’s playing for England and they win, next week they cut back and simplify everything down. 

“I think he wants to have an understanding of the key players in the team and how they play and then everybody else around him just does their job the best they can. He speaks about speeding the game up and slowing it down, when to keep the ball, when to kick, when to play. His understanding of that is very impressive and in that regard I’ve got a lot to learn.

“Joe [who recently joined the coaching set-up at Doncaster Knights] is very execution based,” continues Jacob. “How you execute a play, how you want to play through teams, dad is as well, how you want to come to the line, which hole you’re running into, rugby league to an extent.”

Jacob’s preferred style of play has a big impact off the pitch.  “The way of playing is arguably more important that results, in my opinion,” he says. “A lot of people challenge me on that. But there’s a strong argument for playing an attractive style of rugby that creates a great environment. And I’d like to think that if you play the right way, results will come as a by-product.”

At Westcliff, Jacob is very happy with the Essex raw materials he has to work with. “There are things you can’t coach,” he says. “That desire, want and culture. It takes time to build that, but it’s already there, it’s in the club.

“So it was a no-brainer really,” he continues. “I thought, ‘I want a bit of this’. I want to help them. It’s something bigger than money. If I could have signed there and then [at the first meeting] I would have.”

His employers have also been impressed with him. The club’s chairman Peter Jones speaks of the 21-year-old as ‘wise beyond his years’; adding in the same breath that ‘he’ll be going on to higher levels once he’s left us’.

But Jacob – who is also a coach at Ipswich School where he works with Turner-Hall – is in no hurry.  “I don’t want to get to the top as quickly as possible,” he says. “I just want to get the best out of people in certain environments. Going about getting the most out of people in the right way is very important to me.” 

Jacob might have followed his brothers into playing, but the opportunity he was exploring with MLR side Dallas Griffins in the US didn’t work out. And life moved on. He became a rugby agent, then a sports agent, before an opportunity arose in coaching with Loughborough University which he says, “I couldn’t turn down. And now I’m very, very set on coaching”. 

Being relatively fresh on the scene in Westcliff, means the local rivalries are all new to him. But he’s aware of the recent past between Westcliff and their nearest rivals, Rochford Hundred. After all, it’s what led to his job. 

Rochford Hundred were founded in January 1962 when two players, tired of schlepping into London to play rugby, formed a club on their doorstep instead. They adopted the name Rochford Hundred after one of them – John Roden – saw an advert for the ‘Rochford Hundred Licensed Victuallers Association’. A ‘licensed victualler’ being a formal name for a pub landlord. They placed an advert in the Southend Pictorial for players and went slowly on from there. Old Westcliffians also saw the advert and invited the new committee to a beer and cheese evening to welcome them into the fold. Yet at some point over the next 50 years – both clubs point to one, or several, youth team dust-ups having played a part – relations moved from the ‘beer-and-cheese’ bracket to a more traditional rivalry. Fast-forward to May 2019, and Westcliff’s coach, Chris Waring, decides to up sticks and make the short journey to fast-rising Rochford Hundred. Chris’s presence helps Rochford win a third promotion in three years, whilst his departure from Westcliff opens the door for Jacob.

Whilst this move may have ruffled a few feathers, Westcliff’s Chairman Peter Jones says there is no animosity between the teams.

And Southend’s Neil Harding is similarly sanguine when reflecting on the swathes of players (possibly counting, eighteen in total, he informs us) who have left Southend for Rochford Hundred since 2017.

“Players were approached [by Rochford] with a fairly helpful budget and I can understand that players who consider themselves semi-professional would go over there,” Neil tells us. “It happens, as they say, ‘shit happens’. Years ago, Southend were probably the best, and the worst, offender in terms of recruiting players to play in the first team.”

This is corroborated by Peter. “When we [Westcliff] were in the lower divisions but had good players, Southend took a lot of our players,” he says. “Southend also wanted to merge with Westcliff at one point. We said no.”

While Westcliff don’t pay their players, Southend and Rochford do. The extent of which is not revealed to us but Rochford’s director of rugby, Chris Green (who has played for both Rochford and Southend, the latter for over ten years), was keen to point out that the contingent of Southend players who went over to Rochford, “certainly weren’t paid anymore despite what some might think”.

Chris is spearheading Rochford’s greatest period of success on the field. The catalyst behind it, he admits, is money. “Investment is one thing, you can’t deny that. It is mostly about the players but the set-up is a professional one too,” he says. “We were taking it as seriously two divisions below as we are now.”

This pandemic is of course hitting all three clubs hard, and for long-time club men like Rochford’s John Drinkwater, the excitement around the club competing in National Two South next season has been superseded by worries about what effect the economic downturn will have on the club. 

“I just hope that we can keep the team together in the season or two to come,” says John, who is a former club chairman and ran the bar for 20-odd years. “It will depend on how the team enjoyed playing together and whether they are willing to do it again.”

Rochford are at least in a better place than the last time the domestic rugby season was stopped dead in its tracks by the big freeze of 1962/63.

That winter rugby hit the buffers from Boxing Day 1962 until the Spring thaw. Although incredibly some Five Nations encounters did go ahead, including England v Wales in Cardiff where anecdotes from the game focus on how players avoided frostbite, rather haymakers at the line-out.  “I had an outside flush toilet and the water in the pan was still frozen in April!” explains John. “Even the seawater close to the beach in Southend would freeze. Then, when the thaw started, the ice on the river Crouch started taking boats off their moorings. But we could all still go to work at least and I remember slipping and sliding in my car all the way to work in Leigh-on-Sea.”

Rochford’s rivals are confident of weathering the COVID-19 storm.  “We are a financially robust club and we will be absolutely fine,” says Peter of Westcliff’s chances, “we’ve built up money, put away money, so we will be absolutely fine.”

Neil at Southend is similarly defiant. “We’ve been here for 150 years,” he says, adding, “and we’ll be here for another 150 years.”  

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Jonathan Wagstaff and Tim Browne

This extract was taken from issue 10 of Rugby Journal

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