Rugby Towns #1 Aspatria

In the kind of town you’ve driven through a thousand times, Viking chiefs once roamed, a shop-keeping British & Irish Lion was raised, Russian KGB agents were snubbed and ‘the Wasps’ were given an almighty fright by the rugby kings of Cumbria.

Cockfighting was once big in Aspatria. Blood sports in general really, as was the case across all of rural England at certain times in history. But in Aspatria, the pitching of one bird against another was king. And king of kings in this world was the black and red cockerel, bred by the men of Aspatria.

Today, almost 200 years since the sport was outlawed, a black and red cockerel struts the turf of Bower Park, home to Aspatria RFC. And, given his portrait adorns everything from doors and windows, to weathervanes, waterproofs and changing room floors, if he’s going to feel as if he’s cock of the walk anywhere, it’s here. Even if he’s tethered to a rugby post. “Aspatria was famous for cockfighting and one of the most notorious breeds was a black and red,” says 78-year-old Willy Clark, Aspatria’s resident stalwart. “That’s why it was adopted as the rugby club’s mascot.

“When we were playing in the national leagues,” he continues, “we were away to Exeter, one of our longest trips, and someone came up with the idea of copying the French and taking a cockerel down and letting it off before the game.

“One of the locals who bred the black and reds gave us one, and we took it down, let it off and never managed to catch it. But for several years after that we always received a Christmas card from it.

“It had escaped into a nearby churchyard, a local vicar had adopted it and he’d send the card ‘from’ the cockerel telling us he was keeping well.”

Settled by Vikings who had fled Ireland, the Cumbrian town of Aspatria is home to fewer than 3,000 people. Just north of the Lakes, west of Carlisle, a short drive from the Solway Coast; Aspatria is surrounded by the greenest of lands, with industry built on coal and dairy, but maintained today with the help of mattresses [Sealy employs 260].

Rugby has given the town its biggest days, including the visit of Wasps in the late 1980s. “I’ll always remember when the Wasps came,” says Willy, “that was the biggest, because there must have been 5,000 here. After that, I thought how unique it was, because for a few hours the population of Aspatria more than doubled. There had never been as many people in Aspatria before, and there will never be as many again.”

The topic of Wasps we’ll return to, not least with Willy, but also virtually every person we meet.

But with Willy, there are also other stories to cover ... so many stories.

For every story he begins, he squeezes a thousand more into the narrative, before he loops back to the first one. Flicking through old programmes in the clubhouse, he stops on USSR versus the Northern Division from 1989, telling us how the side arrived with KGB agents in tow and while locals were happy to put up the Russian players, none would house the agents, who instead had to stay in a local hotel. Or the Romanian army side who arrived and had players considered a flight risk due to the communism back home, only to be proven right with one player ending up staying and playing in Britain. Or the England U18s game where teenage future stars such as Matt Dawson, Simon Shaw, Richard Hill, Tony Diprose and Will Greenwood all graced the Bower Park turf against Gregor Townsend’s Scotland.

But we start at the beginning, of the town, and the club. “In the earlier days Aspatria was mainly known for agriculture and coal mining,” says Willy. “There were five pits around here too and we also had an agricultural college that brought in people from far and that would’ve provided a few rugby players too. Although I don’t remember it, it was where the current school is now.”

From rugby’s earliest days [Aspatria was founded in 1875] into the 1920s, Cumbria produced a dozen internationals, half of whom came from Aspatria. “They came out of Aspatria [rugby club] too,” says Willy. “They were Aspatria, Cumberland, England. You wouldn’t get that nowadays; you’d have to play for a top club.

“One of them who played in the 1920s was Tosh Holliday,” continues Willy, “and he went on to play for the British Lions too, in 1924 against South Africa.

“I can remember when I was a young lad, and he had a shop in Aspatria, it was half hardware, half drapery. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I just remember this big, tall fella, elderly, always in a brown suit, and he was this famous Lion.

“And then there was Bob Hanvey, he was a cobbler and won four caps for England,” adds Willy, proving his reputation for telling stories within stories, like a storytelling Russian doll. “When I first met him, he was president, and had no motor car, so someone needed to pick him up and take him to rugby. I’d volunteer and on the way he’d tell me all these stories. Like the time he was asked to speak at this world rugby congress about what it was like to be a local lad from a small village playing for England.

“Bob also started our President’s Tatty Pot Supper [tatty pot, being the Cumbrian equivalent of Lancashire’s hot pot] and would get the England chairman of selectors and presidents up to give a talk, Sandy Sanders, Sir William Ramsay...

“He carried on as president until he died [in 1989, aged 90], he’s on our honours board 23 times [for each year of his presidency].”

As well as driving presidents around, Willy has been volunteering for things at Aspatria for more than four decades. “I bought this piece of land in Aspatria when I was in my twenties and built a bungalow on it,” begins Willy. “And at the time I was building it, this place [Bower Park clubhouse] wasn’t built yet, and they’d play on the local park and so had to walk by my house to get to the games.

“Every Saturday, I’d hear this pitter-patter of boots walking past as they went to and from the game, and then once I’d finished my house, I came to watch the games. I’d never played, it was just as a supporter.

“Then eventually, someone said, ‘well, you’re down every week can you do a few jobs, putting flags out, take buckets out, then I joined the committee.”

He’s still doing the ‘few jobs’ today. So far, in readiness for this afternoon’s training session, he’s put the post protectors and flags out, pumped up the balls and is checking the medical supplies for physio Tash as we talk. “On match days, I’ll also go and collect the balls that get kicked over,” he says, checking the bandages and assorted creams, “I’m the oldest ball boy in the league.”

Then he’s off to run the team bath. A throwback for every ex-rugby player of a certain vintage, even the bath is tied to the land around the club. “It was an old cheese vat,” says Willy, as the steam begins to fill the room, “they used to make cheese in it – it came from the creamery.”

Back outside, Willy wants to ensure we don’t miss anything during our stay in Aspatria, giving us the lowdown on the area. “That’s Grizedale Pike over there,” he says, pointing at a hill in the distance, “and that’s Skiddaw Pike,” he adds, pointing to a second larger, more mountain-like shape on the distant horizon, “it’s the fourth highest in the Lake District.”

The players have started to run out for the session and Willy begins another debrief, starting with a nearby man mountain. “See that big number five, that’s Dickie Miller, he’s a farmer, seventh generation, but we lose him around lambing time,” he says. “Then there’s Graham, the prop, he works down at Sellafield, and that’s Phil – he’s an artist, he drew the cockerel in the changing room [a giant painting of a black and red adorns the floor], he works at M-Sport, the racing team [who engineer cars for the World Rally Championship]...

“We still have a lot of farmers,” he says of both the squad and support. “And we get on well with the local farming community too, they always help us out if we need machinery to dig stuff out or what-not.”

Texel sheep are not the prettiest. Faces like the meanest of square-jawed boxers, with a stare that could curdle milk, the one facing us is looking even angrier than her brethren, not least because they have a full body of wool, and she doesn’t. “They’re supposed to look like that,” explains Joe Peaty, one of the club’s farming contingent, who invited us to the family dairy farm, just five minutes from the town. “The people who buy them want them to have that square face, one
of them went for £350,000 recently [a six-month ram called Double Diamond]. I mean they’ll get their money back eventually, but it’ll take a long time.”

After shearing the Texel, Joe then takes us to see the rest of the farm, where the topic naturally turns to bull semen, as we head towards his cows. “If the cow doesn’t hold after two or three AI [artificial insemination] with dairy semen, they’ll try beef semen, it’s cheaper,” he says. “It’s £100 a time [for dairy], but beef is £2 or £3.”

And the reason for the price difference? “You might get male [with beef],” he explains, “but the dairy is sexed semen, so only one in every ten or fifteen will be male...

“We’ve got 800 acres I think,” says Joe, going on to broader topics. “There’s around 700 head of cattle, including calves, and we’re milking about 300, then there’s about 100 sheep.

“We’ve always been farmers,” he continues. “My dad, my grandad and, like a lot around here, it’s dairy.

“I started playing rugby because there were other farmers’ sons who played,” says Joe, as we finally get onto the rugby. “I didn’t like it at first but I fell in love with it. Then I got signed into the Falcons academy when I was fourteen and went to Gosforth [school].”

Although in the junior academy, Joe didn’t get offered a senior academy contract, and returned to Aspatria, which was always the plan, at some stage. “I was always going to come back,” says Joe, now twenty, but who made his Aspatria first-team debut aged seventeen. “It’s so local, it’s where I started, quite a few farmers play for them still, and quite a few of my friends who I first started rugby with still play for them too.

“It’s a very close little town or big village,” he says. “A lot of people born in Aspatria don’t leave, they stay.

“And the club is the centre of everything, it’s a massive part of the town, there’s always something going on whether it’s the rugby, women’s darts, weddings, it’s always happening down at the rugby club.”

Needless to say, the big game days such as Wasps, often get brought up. “They’re always talked about,” he says. “And the people who played in those games are always telling us how good they were in their day, but it’s quite nice to show them that we were very good in our day as well.

“We’re a very young side,” he continues. “We’ve got eight or nine under the age of 23, then there’s a little bit of an age gap to some more experienced lads, that have played such a long time, and can teach us a bit of game management.

“I think we just need to keep pushing on,” he sums up, “we could keep going up [the leagues] if we stick together as a group, because everyone gets along in this group.”

And it also helps having a club that understands the farming life. “I’ve got to be up at 3am, to milk the cows,” he says. “We’ve got to do it then to keep the spacing even. A lot of farmers wait until later in the morning, but that can make the wait too long and it’s fairer on the cows to do it at 4am, and then they might produce a little bit more milk too.”

The past is always present at Aspatria. A timeline of Aspatria rugby history fills the walls of one room in the clubhouse, taking us from the early internationals, through the barren years, and to the moment when things started to change. “I joined when I was a schoolboy, about 1970, so I’ve been here about 52 years,” explains Melvyn Hanley, currently director of rugby, but holder of countless roles over the years. “It was pretty basic then, our clubhouse was an old shed, not a lot of coaching was going on then, lads just turned up and played.

“The success started around about 1976, where people had been away to college and came back,” he explains. “In, 1977 we won the Cumbria Cup for the first time in about 40 years and we started our dominance really [winning the cup fifteen times from 1977 to 1999]. We have won it 32 times and our nearest opposition is in the teens, so won’t be catching up anytime soon.

“From then on, we started attracting better players from other clubs as well.”

In the pre-league days, the Cumbria Cup was initially the only real barometer of success, and there were plenty of sides vying for it. “Cumbria in those days had the best part of 30 clubs; in every small town you had a rugby club,” says Mel. “We’re probably down to twenty now.

“I think the population of the whole county – and it’s probably one of the biggest counties in the country in terms of land – is about half a million people. So, the challenge is the numbers of players we have in a very wide, wide isolated area – and it is isolated in the northwest corner here.”

Country miles make even seemingly simply journeys challenging. “Down to the south of Cumbria, we’ve got Barrow, where all the nuclear submarines are made, and it’s 60 miles from where we are, but it’d take us two hours to get there.”

When the league system arrived, Aspatria climbed it quickly, winning North 2 in 1988, North 1 three years later, and then National 4 North in the first season. “The claim to fame, basically,” says Mel, “is that, in the early 90s, we were one of the top 39 clubs in the country.  This was before the days of the Premiership and we were in the third division of the national leagues.

“Rugby put Aspatria on the map, big style,” continues Mel. “I mean, Aspatria were the kings of Cumbria at that particular time. And those achievements, even by today’s standards, will never be repeated, by anybody here, or even be repeated by anybody in much of the north, northeast and northwest, really.”

The success did come with something of a price, at least in terms of petrol. “Redruth would take us a whole day to get there, 500 miles to the bottom of Cornwall,” says Mel. “We played them five times over five years, three to Cornwall, twice here, we’d also play Plymouth Albion, Exeter, Havant. One week we played Redruth at theirs, then the following week we had to go back to play Exeter in the cup – Rob Baxter was playing in them days.

“Those two or three years going to the south coast knackered everybody, it was tiring. For those journeys we had to leave on a Friday dinner time and didn’t get back until Sunday evening,” says Mel. “We didn’t have a big squad, but those players that did play, competed with the likes of Exeter, we didn’t get beaten up by anybody.

“Anybody we played we’d win and lose against them – Plymouth, Clifton, Redruth – we gave as good as we got.”

And they also started to add England internationals [full, or B] to their honours board, having had something of a gap since the days of Tosh and Bob. “We had an international combination,” says Mel of the class of 1980s. “We had David Pears at fly-half, who went on to play for Sale, Harlequins and England, and next to him was the best scrum-half in England at the time, George Doggett.

“His competition for England then was Dewi Morris. But he went to Sale, got homesick, couldn’t hack the travelling, and I think he lasted two months, but he was in England B at the time.

“Doggett and Pears were renowned in national rugby but here they were in a small town called Aspatria,” says Mel, adding, “outstanding players...”

Although the club would fall from the national leagues [more of that later], they had a hand in the career of one more international, at the turn of the Millennium, namely Steve Hanley, who scored a try on his only England appearance, in a 32-31 defeat to Wales. “My lad [Steve is Mel’s son] got on the map when he was seventeen or eighteen, and signed for Sale in about 1998.

“He played for Aspatria when he was seventeen, which didn’t do him any harm at all, but because of his age, it was very difficult to get him registered in those days, so he had to wait until he was eighteen to play national leagues for us. He only played the one season, but I think he got 30 tries in that season, got selected for England Colts and Adrian Hadley signed him for Sale, John Mitchell was the coach then.”

Pride of place, not only on the clubhouse walls, but also in the memories of every Aspatria fan and former player is saved for the two John Player/Pilkington Cup runs, which both ended in defeat to Wasps. In 1989, they beat Moseley 6-3 at Bower Park, only to fall 39-7 at Wasps, but it was the campaign before that gets the most airtime during bar stool chats.

When Wasps travelled to Cumbria in January 1988, they had a side flush with internationals, including Rob Andrew, Nigel Melville, Jeff Probyn and Paul Rendall, who had helped England beat France 10-9 at Twickenham just the previous week. “Once the draw was made and people knew it was happening, it just built up very, very quickly,” explains Jimmy Miller, who’s arrived at the club just to meet us. “Local newspapers were all here, and every time we came out to train there was a camera crew with somebody being interviewed, we were even on Rugby Special.

“All four sides of the pitch were four deep,” he continues. “It started first thing in the morning. We went for lunch, then came back here and as we came down, there was a silver band playing over in the corner, but it was hammering down with rain, it had been doing it for three or four days. The longer the band played the more they sunk into the ground.”

The weather, which had included snow, was to play as much of a role as the fervent home support. “You were literally standing in puddles and I think that kind of evened out both teams,” says Jimmy. “We had a real good pack of forwards who were able to stand toe to toe with Wasps so they couldn’t get a foothold in the game.

“As the game wore on, it became obvious that we weren’t going to get a hammering and as the clock ticked, we started to think we might win.

“But they just scored late on over in that top corner,” he says, pointing to the pitch where they eventually lost 6-13. “We did front up that day though and you couldn’t get in the clubhouse afterwards, people were spilling out here.

“I don’t think they [Wasps] had planned on it being quite such a match. Nowadays, it will never happen again, just turning out on the same pitch as somebody from the Premiership is impossible.

“But we’re still afloat,” he says. “We’re more than afloat, we’re competitive at our level, and the club is on a stable financial footing too, so I think that’s success. My kids both played here, one of them still does, and the other [Rob], ironically now plays for Wasps.”

The current level is seven, Durham/Northumberland One, where they finished fifth in a league of fourteen that included former top-tier side, West Hartlepool, a club that plummeted through the leagues. Unlike them, Aspatria’s descent was slower.

A league restructure in 1993, one of many around that time – a habit not broken for long by the RFU – led to them falling to the fourth tier, along with eight other teams from the same division.

Then, ironically for a club with agricultural foundations, foot and mouth cancellations caused them to leave the national leagues altogether in 2001. Today they’re level seven, although waiting on news of another league reshuffle that could see them back up to the sixth tier. Former player Mike Scott is now the head coach. “I’ve been here since under-13s, and I’m 48 now,” he says. “I grew up in the town, and like everyone else, I just followed the path down to the rugby club. There’s not much else in the town really, but we had a really good team back then in the 1980s, so all the youngsters played rugby rather than football.”

A former England Counties fly-half – he toured Chile with the side – Mike left for Orrell in 1997, when they were gunning for the top flight, but returned to Aspatria in 2006. “I was always going to come back to Aspatria,” he says.

His departure from the club had come on the back of arguably the club’s last great day in the sun, when they’d provided the bulk of the squad for Cumbria’s first County Championship title since the days of Tosh, beating Somerset 21-13 in the 1997 Twickenham final. “There were about fourteen Aspatria players in the squad when we beat Somerset,” he says. “And we’d beaten the big three on the way: Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cornwall, so we did it the tough way.

“The game that stood out was away in Cornwall, at Camborne, there were 10,000 people there, but it was only a ground a bit like Aspatria, and they were 30 deep all around the field – we had about 30 Cumbrian supporters in one corner. And we ended up turning them over! But to beat Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cornwall in the same season, I don’t think it will ever be done again.”

Even by this time, Mike had already noticed that the club’s status in the national leagues was under threat. “I noticed the spiral happening around professionalism in the mid-1990s,” he says, “when it became okay to pay players.

“We couldn’t live with what people were getting paid, there weren’t many sponsors, at least not the kind the big city teams had, and we started dropping down a couple of leagues.

“When you’re winning, everyone wants to join,” he continues, “but it’s harder when you’re sliding a bit, and we couldn’t offer the money that the likes of Kendal and other teams were paying. We just did travel expenses, but players could get £150 or £200 to go and play each week, which is hard for anyone to turn down.”

As Joe alluded to earlier, Mike has a good young crop of players on his hands, but despite the lack of league and cup wins [they last won a Cumbria Cup in 2013], the way Aspatria did – and still does – get behind its rugby club feels unique. “It might sound cliched, but it’s just the togetherness of the town and the team spirit,” he says. “The big goal for every week, was always Saturday afternoons, and not just the player and supporters, but for the whole town. We all worked towards Saturdays.

“Aspatria is just a good hardworking, honest environment really,” he continues, covering both town and club in one sentence. “We’ve always had to work hard for everything we’ve had, and it’s the same with sport. Everybody knows what you get from hard work, and it’s the same with sport in the town.

“We’re good honest people, very friendly, and know how to enjoy ourselves at a weekend. And the hub of Aspatria is still the rugby club just as it always been.”

The challenges still come in securing sponsorship. “Sponsorship is the biggest thing,” says Mike, also namechecking the club’s ‘big two’ sponsors: Sealy, and the Milk Marketing Board, the local creamery. “The RFU did a survey and, according to them, we need less games of rugby, but certainly that’s not the answer at our club. Less games, less revenue, and we’re dependent on sponsors for the buses alone. They cost about £15k a season. Buses are not cheap, so we need sponsors, and sponsors need games.”

After the training session, when Mike, the players and even the cockerel have left, Willy is among the last to leave. He’s packed away the balls and kit, emptied the bath, and the flags and post protectors are stored safely until next time. He’d popped home to his bungalow straight after the session, but returned to say goodbye and to tell us the best way to see the sights of Aspatria. They included a replica Viking cross in the village church; a Viking longboat-shaped flower planter; a miner’s bath; and a sign saying, ‘Spyatri lowp oot’ on a wooden cart full of milk churns – the wording means, ‘Aspatria jump off’ because trains didn’t stop here, so miners had to jump off. “It’s only really a bit of a stretch of road,” he says, explaining the town layout.

He even offers to escort us to the shortcut that takes us the scenic way back to Penrith and the M6. We ask when he’s going to be back at the club. “I come to the club nearly every day even if it’s just for half an hour to do odd jobs,” he replies. “I live locally and it’s a bit like a second home.

“It means a lot [the club],” he says. “There’s always plenty of things to do. You can make a list of jobs, plough through them, then when they’re done you can make another one and start over.”

For Willy, and Aspatria, even at level seven and without the likes of Wasps and Moseley paying visits, the club has never been more important. “It’s part of the town’s heritage, it would be difficult to think of Aspatria without a rugby union club,” he says. “However low we go, however high we go, we’ve got to have a rugby union club, it would be criminal to let it go.

“I would be a bit lost without rugby, it keeps me going really,” he says. “It would be odd to think of the town without the rugby club. If it ever went, I don’t know what would happen really, it just wouldn’t be the town.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by James McNaught

This Rugby Towns story was created in partnership with Canterbury.