The Hounding Of The Baskivilles

The article below was publshed in the recent St Patrick's College, Wellington, Rugby Football Club newsletter.

Somewhat like the phantom haunting by a spectral hound (the centre of the plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's third Sherlock Holmes mystery), New Zealand's Baskiville family were hounded by our rugby authorities, as a result of the family's role in creating New Zealand's first professional representative rugby team.

A Clerk in the Stores Department of Wellington's Post and Telegraph Office, Albert Henry (Bert) Baskiville quit his job in 1907 to focus solely on the formation of a professional rugby team to tour the north of England, following an offer he made to the Northern Rugby League. While this team was not the first from New Zealand to tour England, it would be the first in which the players would share in the gate-money arising from their fixtures.

Notably, the northern hemisphere tour of the 1905 Original All Blacks arguably broke rugby's professionalism rules, as players were paid one guinea per week, in addition to their travel expenses. However while this flouting of the RFU's comprehensive professionalism rules was quietly swept under the carpet, the blatant receipt of gate-money by players was too much for rugby authorities to bear.

All of which was perhaps slightly ridiculous. One commentator at the time observed, "professionalism has been around in one form or another for many years - Clubs and Cities have touted for crack players. They have been brought from the country to the town and been found billets for the playing season possibly, have even been paid their wages. Therefore, this latest development of professionalism need not be a matter of so much surprise after all."

Despite widespread condemnation from around New Zealand, Baskiville successfully recruited a team comprising players from Auckland, Taranaki, Wellington, Wairarapa, Canterbury and Otago, including six of the 1905 Originals. The team was known as the Pro-Blacks at the time, and latterly as the All Golds. Each member of the team was reported to have received 300 pounds. 

As a result, Baskiville (who had played for the Wellington and Oriental Clubs) was banned by WRFU from entering any ground at which WRFU fixtures were being played, or training undertaken, including the Petone Recreation Ground and Athletic Park. "Socks" McEwan, the Mayor of Petone at the time, was one of the more vocal supporters to call for the stamping out of this example of professionalism. This may have been due to the fact that there were five star Petone players in Baskiville's team.

As history records, Baskiville's tour was so successful, that he is credited with the Northern Rugby League game being successfully rooted in Australia. On the team's return to New Zealand via Australia in 1908, Baskiville contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. A benefit match held at Athletic Park for his mother, a widow, attracted 8,000 spectators and raised 600 pounds.

Such was the respect Baskiville earned overseas, in 1924 members of the touring English Rugby League Team visited his grave in Karori Cemetery.

However, of note, at the time of his untimely death, in New Zealand, only one club sent a message of condolence to the Baskiville family, the Alhambra club in Dunedin, as well the New South Wales Rugby Union, with one local newspaper noting such poor treatment in this country was both "vile and unsportsmanlike". Baskiville was eventually posthumously admitted to the New Zealand Sports Hall Of Fame in 1996, 88 years after his death, hounded no longer.

By way of an interesting coincidence, in 1908, Arthur Conan Doyle passed his own comment on professional football, noting "after all, [it] is but a small section of the whole game. For every dozen professionals there are thousands of young amateur players who indulge in football solely for the muscular benefit and pleasure it affords. This is a fact which should be remembered when one is so ready to talk wildly about professionalism having ruined the game."