Hall of Fame
The Rugby League Hall of Fame was inaugurated in 1988 - the first
national sporting Hall of Fame to be established in the UK. Nine players were
inducted into the Hall of Fame when it opened - Harold Wagstaff,
Billy Batten,
Albert Rosenfeld, Jonty Parkin,
Jim Sullivan, Gus Risman, Brian Bevan,
Billy
Boston and Alex Murphy. Neil Fox was inducted in 1989.
Only players who have been retired for five years or more are eligible to
join the Hall of Fame. They must also have played at least ten years in British
Rugby League. At the Lincoln Financial Group Rugby League World Cup Final at Old
Trafford Manchester in 2000, three more great players were added to the list -
Vince
Karalius, Roger Millward and Tom Van Vollenhoven.
On Thursday October 20th 2005 a further four players, one from each quarter
of the game's history, were inducted in a ceremony at the birthplace of the game
- the George Hotel in Huddersfield. Douglas Clark,
Martin Hodgson, Eric Ashton
and Ellery Hanley brought the number of Hall of Famers
to seventeen.
Comments
by visitors to this site about who they want to see in the Hall of Fame and why
will be posted at the My Hall of Famer page. I -
this section will also feature articles in support of potential Hall of Famers.
Special commemorative stamps commemorating the Hall
of Fame were issued to celebrate the Rugby League Centenary in 1995. The five
players featured on the stamps are Billy Batten, Brian Bevan, Jim Sullivan, Gus
Risman and Harold Wagstaff.
The bulk of the content on the original Hall of Famers was taken from Geoffrey Moorhouse,
"A People's Game: The Centenary of Rugby League Football,
1895-1995", Hodder & Stoughton 1996
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Harold Wagstaff
was only fifteen years and one hundred and seventy-five days
old when he played his first match for Huddersfield, against Bramley in November
1906, easily the youngest first-team footballer the game had seen up to
then. By the time his career finished with the only team he ever knew it
was March 1925, and he had played 494 games for club and country. He was
only seventeen when he played for England against the First Kangaroos,
and every stage of his career began when he was uncommonly young.
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Billy Batten
was the most colourful member of a family whose names have run like a
thread through British rugby league for most of the twentieth century.
His nephew Stanley Smith, of Wakefield Trinity and Leeds was one of the
great wingers, who twice toured Australasia and was one of the few men
to score a hat trick in an Ashes test. His sons Eric, Bob and Billy
Batten Jr. all played top class football, the first of them most
famously, especially during his time with the great Bradford Northern
team of the post-war years, when he scored most of his 435 tries. The
pedigree was continued into the 1970s through Billy Jr.'s own son, Ray
Batten of Leeds, who was a test-capped forward.
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Albert Aaron
Rosenfeld was the son of a Jewish tailor in Sydney and an
Eastern Suburbs five-eighth (stand-off half to the British) when he was
picked for the First Kangaroos who came to England and Wales in 1908-9.
He wasn't by any means a star turn on that tour, appearing in no more
than fifteen of the forty-five matches, in only one of the three tests,
and scoring only five tries. But he was in the side defeated 5-3 by
Huddersfield, who were impressed enough to sign him up that evening,
together with another of the tourists, Pat Walsh. He had, quite
coincidentally, fallen for a local mill manager's daughter, and they
were to have a long and very happily married life together.
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Jonty Parkin was born at Sharlston,
a mining village that has produced many fine rugby league players, including
one other member of the Hall of Fame, Neil
Fox. Almost certainly his first football was played there; and he
signed for Wakefield Trinity as a seventeen-year-old in 1913. He had
therefore matured physically but was still relatively inexperienced when the game got
going again after the Great War. He soon made up for the time he had lost,
and enjoyed an illustrious career. He was the first player ever to go on
three tours Down Under, and with Harold
Wagstaff, he is still the only man to have captained two British sides
from start to finish of such a tour. No one else has brought the Ashes
home twice. Back to Top |
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Jim Sullivan was quite simply, the most prodigious goal-kicker the game
of rugby league has ever seen. This is not to say that he was the most
accurate but no one else, certainly, has kicked so many goals at any level
of the game. In his 928 first-class matches he totalled 2,687: 160 of them
were in internationals, and in a record number of 774 appearances for his
club, 2,317 were for Wigan. He was no laggard when it came to grounding
the ball either, getting 96 tries during his quarter of a century playing
career. Only Neil Fox has scored more points, and he
was in the three-quarter line. Sullivan's feats were achieved as one of
the greatest defensive full-backs the game has known; but he was an
attacker as well. Back to Top |
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Augustus John Risman's parents were Latvian, his father a seaman who
settled in Cardiff, where the most durable of all rugby league players was
born in 1911. He was talent-spotted by Lance Todd, the New Zealand manager
of Salford and one of the 1907 All Golds, when he was seventeen years old
and a ball-player many football teams had their eyes on. The Cardiff rugby
union club were interested in him, and so were Tottenham Hotspur, whose
scouts arrived at his home hoping to secure a left-half, only to find
that he had just signed up for a career as a fall-back, centre or wing
three-quarter and stand-off half at The Willows instead.
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Other great rugby league players are remarkable, astonishing,
prodigiously talented, but Brian Eyrl Bevan was a phenomenon, a superb
athlete and gifted footballer who, even in his incomparable prime, looked
as though he were on his last legs. Bald long before his time, knees
heavily bandaged to save on wear and tear, false teeth out and cheeks
sucked in, tongue licking at the breeze, otherwise noticeable for his
lurching walk, he could be mistaken for a broken-down old chap who had
dreamily wandered on to the pitch from the local twilight home. But he
scored 796 tries in his first-class British career, and the runner-up (Billy
Boston) got no closer than 571. Brian Bevan has been described simply
as the deadliest winger in history.
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Born in the Tiger Bay area of Cardiff
- Billy Boston played Rugby Union for Cardiff
Schools. His boyhood ambition was to play for Wales. Signed for Wigan in
1953 and was immediately chosen for the
Australasian tour that same season. Amongst many notable feats in
his career he twice scored seven tries in a match - and as a points
machine he was second only to the legendary Brian
Bevan in tries scored, with over five hundred to his tally. He
represented Great Britain thirty-one times and made three
World Cup appearances. Back to Top |
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Alex Murphy
was one of many players who matured during their National Service in the
post-war years. He would frequently star in an Air Force team at
union the same week he played for St Helens at league. In 1958 he beat Billy
Boston's four-year-old record as the youngest British tourist Down
Under, and was instantly identified as one of the greatest scrum-halves
Australia and New Zealand had ever seen, a key figure in the 25-18
victory in the Second Test at Brisbane, when
the Lions were effectively reduced to eleven men, though their captain
Alan Prescott played most of the match with a broken arm.
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Neil Fox scored
more points than any other player in the history of the game; 6,220 from
358 tries and 2,574 goals in 828 matches for his six clubs, his country
and other representative sides. He also scored another 102 points when
he was a player-coach in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1975. He was one of
the finest centre three-quarters rugby league has ever seen, but his
last nine seasons were spent as a swift and canny forward, playing
either at number thirteen or in the second row. Back to
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The modern history of Widnes Rugby League Football club has been shaped by
two loose forwards, natives of the town, where careers followed a similar path.
At around the same time that a teenage Doug Laughton was signing for St. Helens,
the veteran Vince Karalius was leaving Knowsley Road for Naughton
Park. It was Vince who set the ball rolling. Back to
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What can be said about
Roger Millward that
hasn't already been said? There is no question that Roger is easily the best
player to pull on the famous red and white Hull Kingston Rovers shirt and
possibly the best player to ever wear the Great Britain shirt. Not only has he
been the most successful Rovers player but also the most successful coach in the
history of the club. Back to Top |
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A Springbok international winger who came to England to join St Helens
in 1957 Tom Van Vollenhoven left Knowsley Road eleven years and 395 tries later as
a hero never to be forgotten. The pace and artistry of the "Van"
left an indelible mark on Rugby League in Britain - especially two
particular big occasion tries that will always be remembered way beyond the
legions of Saints fans who were there to cheer them. The first was in the
1959 Championship final against Hunslet at Odsal when Vollenhoven scored
his most famous individual try. The second, in the
1961 Challenge Cup Final against Wigan, when he finished off a beautiful
inter-passing extravaganza with his Centre Ken Large that covered the
full length of the field. Back to
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Duggy Clark
loved his native Cumberland so much he came out of retirement just short
of his 39th birthday to represent them. A champion Rugby League player -
member of the Team of All Talents and the
side that won the Rorke's Drift Test - Duggy
was also a champion all-in wrestler. Add to this his brave exploits
during the Great War that resulted in the award of the Military Medal,
Duggy is a true legend of our game.
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Martin
Hodgson was a prodigy. He signed for Swinton in January 1927 aged
just seventeen and before he was twenty years old he had won almost
every honour available to him. He was capped for his county, his country
and with his club won a Championship winner’s medal, a Challenge Cup
winner’s medal, a Lancashire Cup winner’s medal and a Lancashire League
medal. Back to Top |
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It is one
of rugby league’s great ironies that Eric Ashton, one of the greatest Wigan players
of all time, is a St Helens man.
Linking up with Billy Boston, he immediately formed one of the deadliest
right-wing three-quarter combinations in the game’s history. Within two
years of making his debut, Ashton was made Wigan captain aged just
22. He held the position for the next twelve years.
He went on to coach Wigan,
Leeds, St Helens and Great Britain before joining the St Helens board
and the chair of his hometown club.
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Ellery Hanley
- the "Black Pearl". In his time the world's
greatest Rugby League player. A legend in both hemispheres, whether playing
with Bradford Northern, Wigan, Leeds, Balmain Tigers, Western Suburbs
Magpies, England or Great Britain. Ellery captained Great Britain with
distinction, and became the first black coach of any British national
sporting team when he coached Great Britain in the home Ashes series of
1994. Back to Top |
Our Mission
This
unofficial site is dedicated to the thirteen sporting heroes in the Hall
of Fame, and the thousands of heroes who have graced The Greatest Game
since 1895. More than this, however, this site will be a chronicle of the
game of Rugby League in Great Britain, embracing historic players and
events, alongside the memories of those players and people who were
privileged to see their exploits on a football field.
2004 was the 50th anniversary of the first Rugby League World
Cup. To celebrate the great players who have competed in the World Cup,
visitors to this site selected the Golden
Lions.
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