Colours, a cap and connection

This month’s Throwback Thursday takes us back more than 135 years – well beyond the era of our more recent posts, and deep into the school’s story.

Our photograph is the 1889-90 ‘Rugby Football’ First XV, captured at the corner of Chapel just below the east window. At first glance, the scene feels surprisingly familiar. Its location and the mix of confidence, concentration, and comradeship on the players’ faces are easily recognisable. Look more closely and another world emerges.

The tightly fitted flannel jerseys seem familiar but the heavy fabric, the flannel trousers and thick woollen socks belong firmly to another age. Most striking are the boots: sturdy leather footwear more like walking boots than today’s lightweight rugby boots, with soles pitted with hobnails rather than studs.

The leather ball, held by the captain, was a world away from today’s precisely engineered versions. Easy enough to handle when dry, the leather became heavy and slippery when the weather was less kind. Those hobnails were much needed for gripping the Brecon mud and the boots packed enough power to kick a weighty, wet ball.

And then there are the colours.

A modern eye might assume the familiar green and gold, but those colours were still several years away. The First XV of 1889-90 wore alternating light blue and dark blue halves. The same 'blue and blue' are still the colours of the school's standard sports kit. The ‘green and gold’ that distinguishes the first teams was not introduced until 1896 – and then only in Rugby Football and Cricket. 

The XV includes two future Oxford Rugby Blues: L C Humfrey (School House 1887-91) is seated centre front, and W Llewellyn Thomas (Day Boy 1881-90) who was later capped three times for Wales is seated behind him on the right. Yet perhaps the most fascinating story in this photograph is not about rugby at all. It is about the connections that survive across the centuries. 

Standing at the far left is a self-effacing young player, C T Davis (Day Boy 1884-92), always known at school as ‘See-Tee’, who went on to captain the school side in 1891. His name may no longer be familiar to us, but he was well-known to generations of Old Breconians because of his academic success and his subsequent career. He gained first place in the Open Balliol scholarship awarded for Classics, History and Literature, went on to achieve further distinctions at Oxford and was knighted for his service in the Commonwealth Office.

C T Davis married the sister of Old Breconian, H C I Rich (Day Boy 1896-98) – whose father had joined the school in 1864, beginning a continuous sequence of generations of the Rich family that lasted into the current century.

It is this web of connections that brings the photograph, the player and the school’s history unexpectedly into the present.

Through that family link and the generosity of Malcolm and Charles Rich (Orchard 1970-76 and 1963-70), C T Davis’s colours cap recently found its way into Christ College Archive. The years embroidered on its peak confirm its ownership and the unfaded dark-blue velvet and light blue tassel look almost new. 

Thanks to the tangibility of a cap in such remarkable condition, more than a century later it is easy to imagine those colours worn by the players in the featured photograph and, for a moment, we bridge the distance between then and now.

That is perhaps what makes photographs and artefacts such as these so compelling. The boots, the ball, and the jerseys belong to another century, but the connections and sense of belonging remain. The players were part of the same school community that continues today; their friendships and families carried those connections forward; and objects such as this cap have travelled through time to reconnect us with them – reminding us that the past is never quite as far away as it seems.