London Scottish

The new season kicked off, but the side who’d finished the previous one with a record win, were nowhere to be seen. London Scottish, for the second time, were missing from professional rugby.

When the Championship returned after its Covid hiatus in 2021, there was one significant name missing, one that had been part and parcel of the division for over a decade – at least in its modern incarnation. 

While their fellow Championship clubs took to the training field to ready themselves for the league’s return, to all intents and purposes, London Scottish did not exist. And not for the first time. 

In February 2021, the southwest Londoners had made the decision to opt-out of the upcoming season, albeit a shortened ten-game format, due to start a month later. Rejecting the Sports Winter Survival Package, a ten-year government loan, Scottish believed that participating in the league would cripple the club’s long-term financial future, with matches guaranteed to be loss-making and the burden of a loan too great for them to shoulder. 

So instead, on 6 March, rather than taking on Jersey Reds in the opening round, the London Scottish players and staff were sat at home. 

Survival instincts are heightened at London Scottish – after all, this wasn’t the first time the club had stared extinction in the face. In 1999, after falling into administration alongside their neighbours Richmond, London Scottish lost their place in the Premiership and had to begin again at level nine of the RFU pyramid. A then thriving amateur section, with strong minis and juniors, provided the support needed for a charge up the league ladder, even beating their now landlords Richmond to the second tier, arriving five years before in 2011. 

But the ravages of the pandemic threatened to undo all that hard work, so the club had no option but to go into hibernation in 2021. “We were training as normal, within the regulations of what we were allowed to, up until the point the decision was made. And then, we just kind of stopped really,” remembers Kenny Simpson, sports therapist and now longest serving staff member at London Scottish, even with just five years under his belt. “In my time at the club we’d gone from working forty hours a week, fully professional, to nothing. It was a massive shame we couldn’t play in the league that season, but the decision was actually a good one.” 

Even before they pulled out of the league, the financial strain caused by the first lockdown and the significant funding cuts to Championships clubs from the RFU had already forced Scottish to change from a full-time professional training environment at the Lensbury Club [the state-of-the-art training base in Teddington, also favoured by England], to part-time evening training in Maidenhead. 

With such major change, departures were inevitable, most significantly their hugely experienced head coach Stevie Scott, formerly of Edinburgh, Sale and the Scotland national team, who departed to join Romania in January 2021. 

Other plans also had to be temporarily shelved, such as those to finally leave Richmond Athletic Ground (RAG), the home they’d shared with Richmond FC since 1894 but which they were now tenants rather than co-owners of, as part of the clean-up operation that followed both clubs’ financial meltdowns. The relationship has been an uneasy one at times, especially since the change in dynamic.

Forced into semi-professionalism, with uncertainty where they’d play and a head coach down, the pandemic had hit London Scottish hard. “The club communicated everything with us, but it was just that everything was up in the air,” Kenny continues. “When we were full-time at the Lensbury it was easy, but since then it’s been much more of a challenge. We were off for so long, and now the only actual time we see each other is at training nights and match days. It’s just harder to manage, you’ve got boys whose priority isn’t rugby, because they’ve got to earn a living.

“From what I understand, the RFU loan would have bankrupted us,” he continues. “I’d much rather have a club and sacrifice one season than not have one. Ultimately, we kind of knew the aim of that season was just to get Saracens promoted anyway [Saracens had been demoted from the Premiership following the salary-cap scandal].”

Withdrawing from the league was necessary for survival, but such a long time out took its toll. They returned to the Championship for the 2021/22 season, over eighteen months on from their last league game on 1 March, 2020 – a 73-26 victory away to Yorkshire Carnegie. On 18 September 2021, they lost 7-47 at home to Jersey Reds. They finished the season bottom of the table with just one win and further change came as director of rugby Matt Williams retired from the game.

It was time for another rebuild. A strategic partnership with neighbouring Premiership club Harlequins was announced in 2022, and with it the appointment of sixty-cap Scot Bryan Redpath as director of rugby, with former Quin Joe Gray joining as head coach. After two and a half years of turmoil, the club could finally breathe. “I’ve been here for five years, so I’ve seen everything that’s gone on really,” says Kenny, “but the stability that Brushy [Bryan Redpath] and Joe have brought is great. We’re almost there.”

The partnership with Harlequins, which involves a sharing of players and coaching resources, is key to making Scottish competitive again, which is why the club sought a man with Bryan’s CV. “They asked me to come in and support the understanding of that process with Quins – as I’d been at Gloucester and Sale, I had some experience of that,” he says. “That was why I initially came in, but also, we wanted to survive, we want to stay in the league.”

Four games from the end of last season, Scottish were bottom of the Championship table, trailing their RAG companions Richmond by ten points. It was all or nothing – to survive they needed to win three of their last four games and, with the help of some extra players from over at the Stoop, they won four on the bounce, including an emphatic 49-3 victory over Richmond. 

This season, Scottish are once again sitting bottom of the league at the halfway point, their only victory in their first eleven matches coming in a shock 19-17 upset against favourites Ealing Trailfinders, but with the demise of Jersey Reds there is no threat of relegation this time around. “I don’t want anyone to think because there’s no relegation, there’s no pressure,” Bryan tells Rugby Journal. “I hate the mentality that it’s alright if we finish bottom. We have to win more than the four games we won last year. I don’t want boys who just cruise through it, I want boys who really give a monkey’s about the club.” 

After the turbulence of the pandemic, Bryan has not just brought vast experience and a strong sense of purpose to the club, but he is also a proud Scotsman. “You have to have something to hang your hat on, so I think in the modern day it’s important [to have a Scot in charge], it gives us an identity. The people who invest in the club, they want that fighting mentality, they want a little bit of dog in it and that little chip on the shoulder. I want the players to understand what it is like to have that mentality, and to represent the people that played here forty, fifty years ago. If I think the players have disrespected that, then I’m not interested in them.”

In theory London Scottish have a fair-sized catchment when it comes to audience. Scots have been part and parcel of London ever since James VI brought his entourage down to the English capital (in the 1600s), and some 200,000 call it home today. The actual rugby club’s origins can be found in the London Scottish Regiment who, in 1878, founded London Scottish FC in a meeting at MacKay’s Taverns in Ludgate Hill. 

The first of the Exile clubs – and today, still the highest in the league system – they attracted a huge number of Scotsmen in their early days. At the time, while the rules stated that you had to live in Scotland to play for Scotland, there was an exception made if you played for London Scottish, leading to the club having a number of internationals. Scotsmen working in the city, from London regiments and from universities flocked to the club in order to play for Scotland. Bill MacLagan, a Scotland and British Isles captain who joined in the early 1880s, was the first Scottish international to play for the club, and today around 230 players either before, during or after winning their Scotland caps have worn the club colours – just under a fifth of the total capped men’s players. 

Scottish also share the record for providing the most British and Irish Lions captains – four – with Leicester. “You look at Scotland team photographs from the pre-war period and you will often find five, six, seven London Scottish players in the side because they were soldiers, bankers, or teachers working down here,” says former secretary Paul McFarland, sharing just shy of 150 years of club history off the top of his head. “But the first World War was defining for us in many ways. We had four teams in April 1914, roughly sixty players, and either 45 or 46 were killed during the war. Adding in the past players or members who were also killed, our war memorial has 103 names on it, and it’s missing at least one we recently discovered.” With Woolwich and Sandhurst down the road, London Scottish had been a Mecca for soldiers soon to head off to war.

A rebuild in the 1920s was again interrupted by the Second World War, and this time they lost 57 players, but the club emerged strongly and by the 1960s were again supplying a large number to the Scotland team. Before competitive league rugby was introduced, they proved themselves distinguished in sevens, winning the Middlesex Sevens five times over and Melrose twice, as well as making the John Player Cup Final in 1974, losing 26–6 to defending champions Coventry. 

When the leagues did arrive in 1987, Scottish were placed in Division Three, worked their way to Division One by 1992, and despite finishing tenth out of thirteen teams, they were relegated after one season due to league restructuring. 

The next frontier was professionalism. In 1996, a financier came forward in Tony Tiarks, an ex-player, money broker and friend of Ashley Levett, the big spender making moves at Richmond. Tiarks paid £500,000 for the club. “We didn’t go quite as hard as Richmond, paying huge amounts of money to sign elite players, but we did well,” recalls Paul. “We had leading lights like Gavin Hastings already in the club, and we thrived enough to go up to the Premiership in 97/98.

“However, that was the year the league decided to go from twelve to fourteen teams. Nobody had done the arithmetic and thought, ‘Sky are going to give us this amount of money, which we divide by twelve; if we divide it by fourteen, we’re going to get less, aren’t we?’. Then, when Richmond and ourselves showed the merest signs of financial difficulty, we were not supported by the league.”

In the summer of 1999, Tiarks quit the club. Scottish were roughly £250,000 in debt, tuppence in comparison to the eye-watering £8 million that Richmond owed, but financial relief couldn’t be found. It’s safe to say that Tiarks is not always remembered fondly among the London Scottish members. “I do think that’s partly unkind,” offers Paul. “As an ex-player and a businessman, he was prepared to put his hand in his pocket and try and drum up some support for the club to go professional. He was a money broker, and those who want to take a cynical view might say they’re used to doing a deal and handing the paperwork to someone else to make it all work. I think that’s unfair, but I think it is true to say that Tiarks had no management experience, no team-building experience.”

After one season, London Scottish said their goodbyes to club rugby’s top tier. The P shares (the percentage of the central income of the Premiership) of both London Scottish and Richmond’s were taken on by London Irish, in what was reported at the time as a ‘Super Club’ merger. “There was a legal merger between our defunct club, Richmond and London Irish, but it was never a merger,” asserts Paul. “The problem was the RFU didn’t want the P shares to wind up with a liquidator, so there was a nominal merger so they stayed within Premiership rugby. But the whole thing was fiction; those poor buggers had to wear our badge on their shirts. Nothing changed hands financially, it was a device dreamed up by a lawyer, I don’t think we even signed anything.

“So, in 2000 we were faced with life at level nine,” he continues. “We had been promised that we could just drop down a couple of leagues, but that promise was made by someone from the EFDR [precursor to Premiership Rugby] who had no clout. Why would any league allow you in, because someone else would have to be relegated?”. Herts and Middlesex Division One was to be their new home, Richmond pipping Scottish to the title in the first season on points difference. “For the first home game when we played Richmond, we had a crowd of about three and a half thousand. There were games at Sale and Newcastle on the same day, both in the Premiership, which didn’t get 2,000 through the gate. It just showed the strength of support for the two [RAG] clubs.”

It looked as if the two battle each other through every rung of the pyramid, but at that point Richmond split with the Middlesex union to join Surrey. As a result, their ascension back through the leagues was in parallel, but it was Scottish who beat their rivals to the Championship with seven promotions in eleven years.

In 2012, with new financiers on board (such as David Reed, then chairman of Tesco but also a former player), London Scottish were able to move back to full-time professionalism. They rapidly climbed the table and were briefly serious promotion contenders, director of rugby Mike Friday leading a team including Dave Cherry, Mark Bright, Tai Tuisamoa and James Chisholm to finish third in 2014/15, losing to Worcester Warriors in the semi-final. Scottish have settled for mid-to-low table finishes in more recent years, and with the pandemic and RFU funding cuts bringing an end to their full-time professional set-up, battles to avoid the bottom are likely to be their immediate future.

The question of the future, and the uncertainty of it, has been a malaise at London Scottish for too long. With the Professional Game Agreement – the deal between clubs and the RFU that defines how the game is managed – set for renewal later this year, fundamental changes to the English system are likely on the horizon given the struggles it has faced. Where London Scottish fit into that new system is yet to be seen, with Championship clubs lacking any clarity on their futures. “We as a club are looking at rugby’s finances and wondering what we’re doing it for,” admits Paul. “What is the future of the game? What are we investing in? What does the RFU want from the Championship? Will it ever recognise that we are developing players and referees? The RFU doesn’t appear to recognise that, or if it does it’s not prepared to put any proper backing into it. 

“We are waiting for what will come out of the professional game reviews, and the future of the Championship will be decided by those discussions,” he continues. “And guess how many seats we have around that table? Nil. We will just be told what the Championship’s future is.”

The instability from the top, many would argue, was a significant contributor to the demise of Jersey Reds, last season’s Championship winners. For Scottish, focusing on carving their place in the new landscape is their only option – other than, perhaps, finding a way out of it. 

London Scottish are, at their core, a Scottish club, but after falling into administration, their status as provider of players to the Scotland national team, and thus their importance to the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU), evaporated. At the time the SRU were excoriated for not aiding Scottish with their debt, and since their return to prominence, while discussions have taken place many times over, against the backdrop of clamours for Scotland’s need for a third professional outfit, it has been false dawn after false dawn. 

The first came in 2004/05, when Sir Ian McGeechan was director of rugby at the SRU. The terms of a deal to establish a properly funded academy at London Scottish had been agreed, however that was voted down by the SRU committee on the basis that Scottish players needed to be developed in Scotland. Ironic, given the make-up of the Scotland team today. Discussions picked up again a few years later, and a partnership between London Scottish and the SRU was announced in January 2016, seeing a number of young players including George Horne and George Turner joining on loan to develop in London. However, six months later in a public tiff, the SRU threatened to end the deal amid accusations of bad faith. It was later revised and reduced, the SRU loaning eight players instead of the original fourteen, and the deal has not continued long-term. Instead, the SRU have opted to invest in a partnership with French fourth tier club Stade Niçois, take a thirty per cent stake in Washington DC-based franchise Old Glory DC, and establish the FOSROC Super Series, launched in 2019. In another false dawn, London Scottish looked set to join the Super Series in an expanded format from 2022/23, but again this fell through. 

“I remember speaking to George Horne and George Turner at the end of their time with us, and I asked them: ‘You’ve played club rugby in Scotland, you’ve played under-20s rugby, you’ve played for London Scottish in the Championship, what was the best development path?’ And they both said the Championship,” says Paul. “Under-20s games are quick, light, but players aren’t fully developed, it isn’t until you’ve had a 6ft 5in Bedford lock run at you that you know what you’re getting into.

“If you want to invest money in player development, why not do it in a place where the players want to go, where they speak the language and there’s a Scottish club already waiting for them? It seems a hugely obvious thing to do. You’d have to ask Mark Dodson [the Scottish Rugby CEO] why this relationship doesn’t really work.”

Regardless of all the possible futures for London Scottish, there is one thing that is certain – they need their own ground. The RAG has been their home since 1894, but the critical change came after the clubs went into administration. Previously both clubs had been joint tenants, each with 48 per cent of the holding company, but when the clubs went bust, Richmond amateurs were able to buy their 48 per cent from the liquidators, as well as the 48 per cent from the Scottish liquidator. As a result, Scottish became a fully-fledged tenant in their own home. 

Commercially, it has been the source of many of Scottish’s struggles – the current arrangement sees the first team pay rent per match at the RAG, while the minis play in Chiswick. “It’s limited in terms of how we can utilise the venue,” says Nick Grecian, ex-player and now London Scottish CEO. “When we have it on match days, we effectively buy out the main pitch and the bars, but we still only get a percentage of the takings over the bar. If we want to hold any other events outside a matchday, we have to pay extra for it. I would have us hosting a load of other events internally as fundraisers, but to hold any of those there’s a big cost side to it.

“Moreover, our product off the field was wearing thin. It was like supporters were arriving for a Richmond game, the only difference being London Scottish running out on the pitch. We needed to re-brand it and make it feel like London Scottish.” 

The strength of the club is rooted in their Scottish identity – many Scottish sponsors have remained part of the community despite the current rugby climate – but as tenants that has inevitably been diluted over the last 25 years. 

To thrive in the long-term, an alternative has to be found, as difficult as it may be to move away from their home. “My opinion, I don’t think we have an option but to find another ground,” continues Nick. “When you start talking about the revenues to try and create a sustainable club, you need to be in control of the revenues of the ground. And we’re not. I think that’s fundamental to what we have to do. It hurts me to say so, because it is my favourite pitch anywhere, and we’ve been there for so many years. It has been our home, and a lot of older supporters won’t share my view, because they’ll want to stay there.

“We are looking. We are still London Scottish, so we will be in London. I have a strong view that, whilst Richmond’s a lovely area, there’s a lot of big clubs fishing in the same pond for supporters, for players, for minis, so I think it would do us no harm to go out into some fresh turf.” Around forty spaces in south London, from Croydon to beyond Heathrow, have been explored by the club in the last few years, and there are two or three options now being pursued very closely. “We have our 150th anniversary in 2028,” says Nick. “We’ve got a massive history; the legacy is incredible. So, if I can help put us on a path for the next 100 years with a new ground, I think we’ll be in a good place.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Tim Anger

This extract was taken from issue 25 of Rugby.
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