Liverpool St Helens

As the German bombers flew overhead, the Moss Lane anti-aircraft guns burst into action, firing perhaps in hope rather than any certainty of hitting anything in the pitch-black night sky. Once the war was over, the station was dismantled but the weekly battles commenced, and, despite trials and tribulations, in the colours of St Helens RUFC and now Liverpool St Helens Football Club, they haven’t stopped since.

The A580 was an unwitting ally to the German enemies during World War Two. When rain fell, a far from uncommon occurrence in these parts, the A580 – better known as the East Lancs Road – would glisten at night. This then provided the German bombers, the Dornier, Heinkel and Junker aircraft, with a literal road map taking them to one of Britain’s busiest ports, Liverpool Docks. Aware of the unfortunate assistance their treacherous tarmac was giving to the Nazis, an anti-aircraft station was placed on Moss Lane to fire deep into the night sky and repel the enemy. 

Since then, defences at Moss Lane haven’t been quite as ferocious as a hail of bullets, but as home to Liverpool St Helens – having been helped by Colonel Pilkington, of glass-making fame, to acquire the land, in 1931 – it’s seen some pretty tough rearguard actions on the rugby field.

Today, they hope for more of the same for the final home game of the season. Presuming that is, the opposition find it to the ground. Getting there requires you to navigate a clutter of roadworks, a series of turns – left, right, U; the whole set – a trip through a small estate and then a short trip down a country lane, before the sight of goalposts signals that you’ve reached your destination. Which is handy as, by now, the sat nav has long since given up.

It’s normal service down in the clubhouse as we arrive at 12 noon for a 3pm kick-off. “It feels like you’re hanging around all day for these 3pm kick-offs,” bemoans Ray French, the Bill McLaren of rugby league ever since Eddie Waring hung up his trilby, and also the president of Liverpool St Helens since the turn of the millennium. He is one of today’s first arrivals.

He actually hung up his microphone for the final time a fortnight ago, but 79-year-old Ray likes to keep himself busy, checking this and checking that and generally mucking in during the countdown to the first XV’s ADM Premier Division fixture against Stockport side, Heaton Moor. 

The ADM Premier Division is the official title of the top division of the newly-formed Lancashire County Leagues, a two-tier breakaway from the Rugby Football Union league structure that involved travelling long distances to remote parts of Cumbria. “You’re looking at an eight-hour day before the lads get back home and they don’t want that nowadays,” explains Big H, the club’s general manager in all but name, who is busying himself on a laptop doing club admin as we arrive. “The cost of hiring coaches is a problem too. In this new Lancashire League you get to play more local games.”

Tina, who runs the catering section alongside her other half, Tony, comes to offer us some breakfast in a typically friendly Scouse manner while ‘Big H’ and Mally, a local farmer as well as the club’s groundsman, chat about all things Liverpool St Helens. 

Both of them, like everyone else we meet, are former players, either of St Helens (the original Moss Lane occupants) or the Liverpool club before the merger in 1986. Mally played in every position bar one for St Helens – hooker, he tells us. No prizes for guessing where Big H used to line up on the pitch.

Big H, one of those characters that every club needs to hold things together, which he could probably do with one bare hand, steps away from his laptop to light the fire in the large hearth that can be found at one end of the clubhouse. At the other is a wooden board listing the Club’s Presidents. Nothing unusual there, but few clubs could claim a dual-code international and television personality as their president. Ray’s name is the last entry. ‘R.J. French 2000/’, it reads. “Can’t they get rid of you Ray?” we joke. “It seems not,” he replies. 

They got rid of him once, the RFU that is, but they love him to bits here. French’s ‘crime’, as a talented loose forward, was to abandon his amateur status to sign for his hometown club and move to rugby league, the ‘national’ sport in these parts. “We used to live 500 yards from the old Saints ground (at Knowsley Road),” he says. “I was about five-and-a-half when I first started going to matches. Everybody used to play touch rugby in the street using old socks tied together until it was time to walk up to the ground.”

St Helens RFC were one of the 22 founder members of the Northern Union which became the Rugby Football League in 1895. Admittedly Liverpool St Helens’ departure from the RFU League system is not quite on the same scale as ‘The Great Schism’, but it’s a development that other regions will no doubt watch with interest as player retention remains such a challenge.

Head coach Andy Northey, a Saint on the pitch but not always off it – he knows how to enjoy himself, believes the new Lancashire League setup is right for the club, and not just because he can walk home after matches having enjoyed a few beers. “If I go out into St Helens, I get asked, ‘did you win’? Not ‘what league are you in’ or ‘what level are you at’? It’s just a gang of lads who want a game on a Saturday afternoon. If they lace up their boots, they get to go at a sponsored barrel – that’s 90 pints – for a quid. Having a beer afterwards builds a brotherhood, that’s how I’ve always looked at it and thankfully, here at least, that’s still in the game.”

Northey, or ‘Nightclub’, the nickname first given to him during his Challenge Cup-winning days with St Helens before he moved to the original Saints, Northampton, and won the Heineken Cup as a tough tackling, hard-running centre, will always be a legend in the eyes of the Cunliffe brothers, Dave and Matt. The two first teamers are St Helens born and bred and old enough to remember their coach’s exploits on the pitch.

“We’ve both grown up massive Saints fans,” says Dave. “We was at all the finals and would have been shouting his name on the terraces. I was 16 and Matt was 11 when we went to Wembley.

“He (Northey) has been there and done it, and seen it all. He is good coach for us, and we are lucky to have him at this level, a few of the lads won’t know him as a player but we remind them.”

Matt, the younger of the two by five years, mentions YouTube footage of their coach. “If you go on YouTube there’s a clip of him dropping his knees on Martin Offiah, in a big derby against Wigan in the third game of 1989 season. Offiah is on the floor in agony and Northey is over the top of him, shouting at him. He scored in that game as well. It is good to have him around, you get that fiery edge around the place.”

Dave is in the team today, in midfield, but Matt is on daddy day-care duty, and has two kids in tow. As a side note, he looks like Chris Ashton, something we mention. “I met him [Ashton] once at paintballing,” he says. “He slipped in front of me and I shot him loads of times. I was a big Saints fan and he’d just come through at Wigan Warriors and I was like …” He cuts short his sentence to mimic a gun being unloaded in a pump-action motion.

Being a diehard League man, Dave admits he was brought to LSH “kicking and screaming” 11 years ago but now “he loves the place” and its standing in the game as the oldest open rugby club in the world, officially dating back to 1857. “It has got a great history. We often talk in the changing room about how we don’t want to let this great club down. It is a big motivation for us.”

By now, there are plenty of people around wanting to give out history lessons. Across the room, Tina’s strong Liverpudlian accent can be heard cutting through the general hub-bub of noise as the clubhouse starts to fill and food orders come in thick and fast; it’s a constant reminder that although we’re closer to St Helens, roughly three miles north-west of the town famous for the other code of rugby and glass-making, the Liverpool connection still runs deep. 

John Williams, the club’s amazingly helpful and enthusiastic press officer, has arranged for us to meet an array of individuals whose connection with the club runs as deep as some of the old mine shafts around this area. We just got lucky with Big H and Mally.

Alongside Ray, Richard McCullagh, a former Judge with a voice so rich and velvety that condemned criminals might even like to hear it again, delights in telling us how Liverpool FC prospered on the pitch under the stewardship of David Boult in the late 60s and early 70s. “That was probably the best Liverpool side ever, which is a bold claim,” he points out, “because the 1914 side had three International captains.” (R.W. Poulton, England; F.H. Turner, Scotland; R.A. Lloyd, Ireland). Poulter and Turner both lost their lives ‘for King and Country’ in the Great War, as did 57 members of Liverpool FC. Noel Chavasse, the only individual to win not one but two Victoria Cross is another to have been cut down tragically early but whose valour will never be forgotten.

Right up to the 1970s and early 80s, Liverpool was still a pathway to top honours. Mike Slemen and Kevin Simms, now the club’s medical officer, are cases in point, but problems with vandalism at their inner-city ground and a drop-off in player numbers led to the club seeking an alliance. 

“Our first approach was to Waterloo,” Richard reveals, “because we were the two major clubs in Liverpool – Waterloo at the north end and Liverpool at the south end. It was the logical answer to Liverpool’s problems, with the ground at Waterloo, but it never happened because there were conflicts of interest and pride with certain individuals, I wasn’t one of them. I don’t think the Waterloo players wanted it either.”

Instead of being their ‘Waterloo’, Liverpool found a willing partner in St Helens. “It’s the best thing that has happened to the club (St Helens), because Liverpool brought a fixture list with them and some very fine players,” Ray chips in.

In the best traditions of rugby, it also brought old friends and acquaintances together. “I trialled for Lancashire schoolboys, remember it Ray?” enquires Richard. “Yes, I do, it was 1957,” Ray replies. 

“I was from Liverpool College and on one side, and Ray, who was from Cowley (Grammar), was on the other,” continues Richard. “He was playing No.8 and I was at full-back and he ran through me. That trial was the pinnacle of my rugby career. He went on to play Lancashire schoolboys and a bit more besides.”

Ray’s version of how he started the journey from rugby league fanatic to St Helens Rugby Union and then on to England is a classic in one sense. It started in a Latin lesson at Cowley, a former grammar school turned six-form college. “I was sat in a Latin lesson one afternoon and Maurice Clifton, the Head of Classics, said, ‘Ray, come here, I want a word with you. You’re playing for St Helens first team on Saturday’. I was only 16 at the time but I was a big lad.

“I didn’t even know where the St Helens rugby union club was, but he said, ‘don’t worry, I’ll pick you up and get you a jersey and some shorts, just bring your boots’. So that was my first game.”

Ray won four caps for England in the 1961 Four Nations before crossing the divide. “I remember when I got down to Twickenham there was a man called Carston Catcheside (the RFU Chairman), and he gave out the expenses after a game. My expenses were half a crown and sixpence. He asked me, ‘French, where do you play?’. To which I replied, ‘St Helens’. ‘I didn’t know there was a rugby union club in St Helens’, he said back. This was the bloke who was in charge of the RFU, God bless him. He said, ‘what’s it like up there?’ ‘It’s a very good club’, I said, while mentioning that Alan, who was stood behind me in the queue, had played there, too. He was quite taken aback.”

Richard and Ray then proceed to rattle off famous old names of the past with as much regularity as the Ack-Ack guns that once sounded off here around the time the pair were born. We’re then joined by two more septuagenarians: Ron Hall, another of the Liverpool old guard, and St Helens stalwart John Tandy.

To look at either of the elder statesmen, you’d never have guessed they both played front-row, Ron at prop and John at hooker, certainly not in this day and age when size is everything. Both have such gentlemanly dispositions, too, but you can bet that in their youth neither would have taken a backward step. Indeed, Ron has a quiet, steely look about him and apparently possesses a natural strength passed down through his family genes that makes a mockery of the phrase, ‘as hard as nails’. “My father was very strong, he could bend a six-inch nail in half,” Ron tells me later over our pre-match meal of chilli and rice. Like Richard, John has known Ray since schooldays; they were at Cowley together. “He once gave me lines as prefect,” recalls Ray.

Belatedly joining in the chat about the merger, Ron cuts to the chase. “It was a merger of two different cultures, let’s be clear about that, but it worked so well. Liverpool is a rather different city from anywhere else and when I was a kid, I used to go on a tram car from Liverpool to Preston. Once you got off, straight away you felt like you were in a different world. I probably had a Liverpudlian accent back then and the way people talked was so different. But you could tell straight away that there was an empathy between the clubs.”

Privately, though, Ron isn’t the biggest fan of the Lancashire Leagues, which he feels provide a ceiling to the club’s ambition. At best, they can be the top club of 20 in the county rather than in the top 10 in the country as they once were.

Indeed, he makes no secret of the fact that he’d love to roll back time, to the early days of the merger when Liverpool St Helens played two seasons in the top division of the Courage National Leagues. “Personally I find it difficult. When you get to our time of life, you cannot get your head around it,” he says.

“I remember the Bath games, all the top names were here, Guscott and company,” Ray weighs in. “In fact, I well remember I was sat there, (he points to another part of the clubhouse) with the Chairman of Saints and we took him (Guscott) up to the secretary’s house, up the road there, and tried to get him to sign for Saints. He didn’t. I think he was on a good number down there.”

Martin Offiah, then of Rosslyn Park, once sped down the wing of Moss Lane’s pitch, and this time rugby league got their man. “I was the one who got him signed,” explains Ray. “Unfortunately Saints wouldn’t take him, and I rang Widnes up and Doug Laughton had words with him, and he signed for them.”

In the ten years between the merger and Rugby Union going professional, countless promising Liverpool St Helens players were lost to league. With rugby union fast disappearing down the list of priorities at local schools, even famous establishments like Cowley, the quality of the player pool available to LSH waned.

“We became what I call the Vivaldi of Rugby, in that no-one went down better in four seasons than we did,” says Richard. Gallows humour clearly comes easily to a man of the Law.

Around the year 2000, in an attempt to arrest the slide, the club entered into a sporting partnership with St Helens RL and the town’s football club and first-team players were paid and had sponsored cars. Familiar to a lot of clubs in the North, it was a disaster and nearly brought the club to its knees. “This is a club that handled professional rugby incredibly badly and spent all of its money in the eternal search for Valhalla or some league position,” says Andy, bluntly. “They find themselves in a position now where they are holding it together, it’s hand to mouth; we can’t afford the clutch on the tractor, that’s the way it is.

“I said to these guys (the committee men), you can’t gauge success on what you’ve done in the past, success is getting three teams playing on a Saturday and lads drinking in the bar. People who think we may play Harlequins in five years are sadly deluded.”

Once, crowds of around 3,000 would come down to Moss Lane. Today, there are 60-70 if you’re lucky. A disjointed fixture list, a murky day and Sale Sharks playing at home to Exeter are all cited as reasons for the poor turnout.

Inevitably there have been teething problems in the first season of the Lancashire Leagues but they’ve been a welcome answer, in the short- or long-term, who knows, to the protracted debate about how to structure community league rugby in the North West. As things stand, the RFU are handling that as well as Brexit negotiations with the outcome just as uncertain.

The game isn’t a bad one either. Penalties and a misfunctioning lineout – most of the players were brought up playing league so lineouts are alien territory to them – mean LSH are up against it from the first whistle. Our man, Dave, shows the sort of game awareness that once had him on the books of the Rochdale Hornets semi-pro RL outfit. He sets up one and scores another as the home side struggle manfully to stay in the game. But despite a strong performance by half-back and captain Darren “Dazzler” Wilson – a Danny Care-type player but with more tattoos – LSH fall to a 22-26 defeat that effectively puts an end to their already fading title hopes. They are left bemoaning a disallowed try in the final seconds. “The standard of the league (if not the officiating, it seems) has surprised me,” admits Dave, talking to us after the game.

Liverpool St Helens may or may not return to the RFU fold at some point but, for the time being, Ray would like to see the Lancashire League expand to help make up the shortfall in fixtures. Nelson and Colne, to the east of the county, have apparently applied to join the breakaway league.

“Everything is good on the field, but there are not enough clubs in this league, we have blank dates with great regularity,” Ray points out. “They’re trying to get it to 14 for next year, and the four extra games that would bring us would do nicely. We’re in the first week of March now and I think we’ve only got two home games remaining and one of them was a rearranged game.”

The Liverpool St Helens family may be smaller in terms of supporter numbers, but it’s a much more close-knit operation – how could it not be when many of the people involved have known each other for generations – and the place is starting to feel good about itself again.

“This club leaked lots of players in the professional era due to goodwill,” reveals Northey, a former mini and junior here. “The first team were getting paid and a lot of the second and third team lads were chased away because they were made to feel not worthy. We’ve had to get more lads in and now we’re building it back up.”

From war heroes and international representatives to some great characters of North-West rugby, Liverpool St Helens has plenty to be proud of, not least the people involved.

“You see some good rugby, some running rugby – lads trying to play and there is a real rapport within the club, a real good camaraderie,” says Ray. “There is no edge on people at all, it is a club of people of a similar inclination and similar attitude, it is just somewhere good to be.”

As we leave, the last man we speak to is Dave Cunliffe, bobble hat on, pint in hand. “Thanks for bringing you’re A-game Dave,” we say on our way out. “That was my game,” he says self-depreciatively. A game and a beer. That’s Liverpool St Helens. That’s rugby.  

Story by Jon Newcombe

Pictures by John Ashton

This extract was taken from issue 6 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.