As the various New South Wales rugby league foundation clubs celebrate their 110th anniversaries, it’s reassuring for the upkeep of the sport’s heritage that almost all of the venues which hosted the Sydney clubs’ historic formation meetings back in 1908 still take pride of place across inner Sydney.
To prove that no bad blood exists between connections of the two historic clubs over the “who was first” issue (January 14, 1908 is the historians' arrived-at date for the Jets), the revived Glebe Dirty Reds will act as Newtown’s feeder club in 2018. In any case, the town hall venues of the two meetings stand as proudly today as they would have when they were patronised by their respective groups of league pioneers back in 1908.
According to Middleton and Heads, in an attempt to stop them from switching, rugby union administrators offered Newtown rugby union players of the day everything from free theatre parties, and tickets to the Wonderland City fun park at Tamarama. Some were persuaded to stay, but enough were swayed to the dark side so that Newtown’s rugby league team could get off the ground.
These rebellious rugby league recruits weren’t very popular with a lot of the rugby union folk of the turn of the century, with sections of the media not exactly playing nice when it came to coverage of these mass-defections to “professionalism”.
Middleton and Heads note that “after Easts’ foundation meeting, held at Paddington Town Hall [on the corner of Oxford St and Oatley Rd] on January 24, The Bulletin observed: ‘The fact that a local butcher was unanimously chosen president suggests that this new body is out for gore.’”
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