The Fishermen 1875-2025

Reverend ‘Eighty-one-ton-gun’

By Kevin Coughlan

When 21 clubs gathered at the Pall Mall Restaurant in January 1871 to found the Rugby Football Union, the young men of Brixham were still playing a form of ‘mob football’ on windswept Furzeham Common overlooking the harbour.

As recreation it was rough, raucous and unruly, yet meat and drink to the teenagers and young men whose working life revolved around the Quay and its fishing smacks with their distinctive red sails.

Ralph Gardner (1909-2003), in compiling his history of the club’s first hundred years, drew a picture of ‘robust, trawling lads, togged out in dark guernsey frocks and white hob stockings who fetched scaffold poles from a builder’s yard to use as goal-posts’. There were umpires – two on each side –  but they ‘did not dare venture on to the pitch’.

Soon after George Bayfield Roberts arrived at All Saints in 1874 as the newly-ordained curate of the Lower Brixham parish, he might well have seen groups of excited players and spectators striding past the church and up the hill to Furzeham. Perhaps he even joined in.

To a man who had been educated at Cheltenham College and Oriel College, Oxford, the roughhouse of ‘Brixham football’ must have seemed quaint, to put it mildly.

What we do know is that Reverend Roberts decided early on to convert the locals to ‘Rugby football’. Not only would he create a club, called the ‘Brixham and Churston Football Club’, but he would recruit players and captain the team himself.

What were his credentials? First of all, the curate was no weedy specimen. He was 28 years old and from a recently discovered photograph taken in his later years he struck a physically imposing figure. He was also an accomplished musician who loved to perform in comic opera roles and had been one of only two pupils to be organist at Cheltenham College. All this suggests an extrovert character who was born to lead rather than to follow.  

George Bayfield Roberts (1847-1937), founder of Brixham and Churston Football Club

More pertinently in the context of rugby football in Brixham, he would have been familiar from his schooldays with a form of football played under ‘Cheltenham Rules’, which were absorbed into RFU laws as the game became properly codified.

I have only recently identified Reverend George Blakemore Bayfield John Roberts, to give him his full name. He features in an obscure tome, ‘Distinguished Churchmen and Phases of Church Work’ by Charles E Dant (1902). This is the brief but relevant section from a chapter of nearly 7,000 words dedicated to The Rev George Bayfield Roberts:

In 1874 he was ordained by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, then Bishop of Exeter, to the curacy of Lower Brixham. During his three years residence there he found a football and cricket club, of both of which he was captain, very evangelising agencies. In 1877 he went to Folkestone as senior curate and precentor at the parish church.

The reference to ‘very evangelising agencies’ is significant. In making team sports an important part of the curriculum from the 19th century, public schools such as Cheltenham College were becoming wedded to the concept of ‘muscular Christianity’. The phrase, associated with the clergyman and writer Charles Kingsley, described a belief in the moral and religious benefits to be gained from sport. These days it tends to be  called ‘character building’.

The evangelical message was a powerful one in the Victorian age. Reverend Roberts would have been keen to grow the congregation at All Saints, trusting that the young people of Brixham would  strengthen body and soul – and attendance at services – through the discipline and team ethic of rugby football. If there was a cricket club too, it does not appear to have prospered.

Distinguished Churchmen and Phases of Church Work, p125.

The church, built in 1820, is most closely associated with Rev Henry Francis Lyte who wrote the hymn Abide With Me. During his ministry the church had to be enlarged to accommodate a congregation of up to 800. In the 1870s Brixham’s population numbered nearly 5,000, reflecting its growing significance as a fishing port and market town.

The number of vessels belonging to the port in 1862 was 100, of an aggregate tonnage of 18,098 tons, value £181,649, besides 215 decked vessels for trawling. Large quantities of turbot, soles, mackerel, and other fish are taken, and exported to London, Bath, Exeter, and Bristol. The fisheries employ about 1,600 seamen, and yield an average of 20 tons of fish weekly. [The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868)]

Brixham was not the first town in and around South Devon to have a rugby club. Both Newton Abbot and Paignton were formed in 1873, and ‘gentlemen’ from Torquay split off from Paignton to found their own club two or three years later. Totnes also appear to have beaten Brixham to the touch, on the basis of this report from the Totnes Times of 15 October 1875, researched by Philip Wills (A History of Brixham Rugby Football Club 1875-1952):

Following in the wake of Totnes, the Brixhamites have established a Football Club in connection with their two Cricket Clubs, a meeting to consider the advisability of the same having been held at the Bolton Hotel on Thursday last when it was considered advisable to form such a club. The Rev R B F Elrington was chosen as its President, Rev G B Roberts captain and Dr Searle hon. Secretary and treasurer. The Club is to be called Brixham and Churston Football Club, and we have no doubt in the course of the ensuing winter matches will be arranged.

That would date the inaugural meeting of the club to Thursday, 7 October 1875, which also helps to confirm that 2024-2025 is the 150th season of the club’s existence.

A minor but nagging anomaly concerns the first president of the club, clearly identified in the Totnes Times report as Reverend R B F Elrington but listed on club honours boards as W H Balkwill. One explanation could be that having agreed that it was ‘advisable to form such a club’, it then required an extraordinary general meeting to create a functioning organisation.

As the long-serving and much respected vicar of Lower Brixham parish, Reverend R B Fenwick Elrington would have been an obvious choice as president for his curate’s sporting evangelism. However, he might have decided to step aside or been voted out when lay people of equal standing but superior organisational skills were needed.

That would explain why a ship owner, William Hancock Balkwill, then assumed the presidency of the club. The elected chairman, A Banfield, was almost certainly Arthur Banfield, owner/proprietor of the George Hotel, Quay Street. Mr Banfield appears bespectacled and suited with bow-tie and bowler hat in a team photograph of 1896-97.

Press coverage in the earliest years of the club had been sporadic at best. The Sporting Intelligence column of the Western Morning News catered mainly for devotees of rural sports and those ‘wagering’ on racing, supplemented by seasonal coverage of university rowing, cricket, golf and regattas.

‘Football’, meaning rugby football, seems not to have featured at all until 11 December 1875 when the newspaper reported on a match between Plymouth and Paignton, played on a snow-covered field at Totnes. Plymouth won with a very late score.

Another football snippet appeared in the WMN of Monday 17 January 1876: “A football match was played at Totnes on Saturday between the Totnes and Brixham Clubs and was won by Totnes.” The result was also picked up two days later by the Daily Telegram of the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette: “On Saturday a football match was played between the Brixham and Totnes Clubs, on the ground of the latter. Victory favoured the home team.”

Western Morning News, 17 Jan 1876

We cannot know how quickly Reverend Roberts was able to get players organised and acquainted with a new form of football, let alone arrange fixtures with other local clubs. It could have taken weeks, if not months, which begs the question: could Totnes have been the first opponents of Brixham & Churston Football Club?

Early the following season, a fixture was arranged with Paignton for 28 October 1876, to be played on Paignton Green. The first match report to provide any detail – and significantly a Brixham line-up  – was again in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette (15 November 1876) after Teignmouth hosted a 12-a-side game on a very windy Saturday. Brixham’s Spurdens, Knott and their captain, Roberts, earned honourable mention but the home side won with a goal kicked by skipper Addison.

The teams were as follows: Teignmouth – Addison (capt), Blanchford, MacManns, Heafield, Reid, Ward, Morris, Christian, Triplett, Barden, Hammett, Swinburn. Brixham – Spurdens, Knott, Martin, Roberts, May, Ryder, Salisbury, Cobley, Wyatt, Carlile, Hoare, Turner.

Evening Express, Exeter, 15 Nov 1876

With no local newspaper exclusively covering news in Brixham, we have no way or knowing if there was a home match the following weekend but Reverend Roberts and his team were travelling again two weeks later on 25 November 1876, taking on Newton College in a 14-a-side game. Brixham’s strength was in their forwards’ scrimmaging but the College’s superior all-round game ensured victory by ‘two goals, two trys, and many touches down to nil’. There were fine runs for Brixham by Hamlyn and Dames while Roberts and Ryder were conspicuous for their ‘hard play’ up front. Brixham team: Danes, Hamlyn; Turner; G W Searle, Martin; Cobley, Ryder, May, G C Searle, Salisbury, Spurdens, Collins, Roberts, Carlile.

By this time the Reverend was earning a reputation outside Brixham for being ‘no mean fellow with whom to tangle’, according to Ralph Gardner. Another report, apparently in The Dartmouth and South Hams Chronicle, described a drawn game between Totnes and Brixham early in 1877 in which a downpour had left parts of the pitch under water, and ‘the Brixham team went home very muddy and very pleased.’

Bizarrely, it was written in comic Teutonic-English and by-lined ‘From our German Correspondent’. However, we learn that that Reverend Roberts had a nickname, ‘Mr Eighty-One-Ton-Gun’, likening his size and impact on the rugby field to the latest and most fearsome weapon being fitted to the Royal Navy’s warships.

Exeter & Plymouth Gazette, 11 April 1877

Then, no sooner had he made his mark than Rev Roberts was gone, promoted to a senior curate position at Folkestone. The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette reported on 11 April 1877 that he had been presented with a ‘handsome timepiece’ by parishioners at All Saints. There was no mention of his rugby prowess, but a telling reference to ‘hard-hitting but good-tempered’ contributions to the letters pages of newspapers on the arcane subject of creeping ritualism in the Anglican Church.

And that would have been the last chapter in the compelling story of Reverend Roberts and his time in Brixham, except that research for the 150th anniversary has revealed an intriguing Western Morning News match report from 6 March 1879. It was a home fixture at Furzeham Green and the opposition were Newton Volunteers.

By this time the club had adopted the more  evocative title of Brixham Trawlers and were captained by Michelmore but among the forwards is the name Roberts. Could it be anyone other than ‘Mr Eighty-One Ton Gun’, back in town for a reunion with Dr Searle and other rugby mates? If so, there would have been hearty celebrations.

Western Morning News, 6 Mar 1879

As curate at Folkestone he had come to wider public attention in the wake of a maritime disaster off the Kent coast on 31 May 1878 when the German navy’s SMS Grosser Kurfurst was accidentally rammed on her maiden voyage by another ironclad, SMS König Wilhelm. The curate conducted in German a succession of burial services for more than 250 victims and was presented with a Bible inscribed, ‘William, Emperor of Germany, to the Rev G Roberts, in recognition of his services’.

My research into Reverend Roberts has thrown up a fascinating footnote. During the Brixham curacy his wife Ida had given birth to a third child, John St Clair, born on 2 August 1875. St Clair Bayfield, as he preferred to be known in adulthood, inherited his father’s physical presence and musical ability and made a career on Broadway, also becoming a founder member of Equity in the US.

The son’s relationship with an amateur soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins, dubbed ‘the worst opera singer in the world’, was the subject of an eponymous 2016 film, with Meryl Streep in the starring role. St Clair was played by Hugh Grant who, by happy coincidence, was a keen rugby player and cricketer, educated at Oxford University just like Reverend George Roberts.

©Kevin Coughlan