What about the players whose schools we do not know?

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What about the players whose schools we do not know? Of these cheap fifa 15 coins 267 players, twenty-five attended university, medical school, naval academy or the Royal Indian Engineering College. We know that sixty-eight of those for whom we have no educational data had what can be termed ‘middle-class’ jobs, ranging from sales managers and accountants to company directors and, in the case of John Matters who played for England in 1899, a rear admiral in the Royal Navy. And of those for whom we have neither educational nor occupational data, fifteen played for socially prestigious elite clubs such as Blackheath, Manchester or Richmond. This would indicate another 108 players that could be categorised as being clearly from the middle classes.

What of the remaining 159 players? There are fifty-five for whom we know only the name of the club for which they played. They played for clubs in the Midlands, south-west or pre-1895 north that traditionally had a socially mixed, cross-class playing personnel, making it impossible to draw any inference about their social background from their club. This leaves us with 104 players whose schools we do not know but who are recorded as having manual occupations, beginning in 1882 when storeman Harry Wigglesworth of the Yorkshire club Thornes made his debut. The most common employment was that of publican, which provided gainful employ- ment for twenty-two England internationals. Becoming a pub landlord was invariably an inducement to a player to stay with a club or to join a new one, offering an attractive way out of direct manual labour. Thirteen of these publicans became rugby league players. Indeed, thirty-eight of the 104 manual workers went on to play league. The only other significant manual occupational groups were thirteen police constables and eight ship and dockyard workers who played for clubs on the south-west coast and were employed mainly in naval dockyards.

We can therefore say that of the 1,088 England players for whom we have verifiable educational or occupational information, only 170 (or 15.6 per cent) were unambiguously not part of the middle classes, either because they attended non-private or grammar schools or were employed in manual labour.

Which sections of the middle classes did rugby union draw its strength from? Much of it came from the universities. There were 415 England internationals who went to universities or medical schools, eight attended polytechnics, eight went to Imperial Service or Imperial Engineering colleges and seven were educated at physical education colleges such as Carnegie in Leeds or St Mary’s in London. Another forty-seven attended military or naval academies such as Sandhurst or Dartmouth. Thus 485 internationals– 44 per cent of the total – had some form of higher education.