History - First Season

The very first Northern Union Championship was won by the Bradford club Manningham (above). Within a few years falling attendances had caused it to abandon rugby for soccer, which it henceforth played as Bradford City. An excellent history of Manningham can be found at Bantamspast.

Rugby football didn't normally start until the third Saturday in September, but Harry Waller and his friends had decided to begin a fortnight earlier. So complicated were the different entanglements, including the matter of referees and touch judges, that an emergency committee meeting had to be called the following week before everything was sorted out, less than forty-eight hours before the Northern Union's opening season was due to start. As it was, it proved impossible to include Huddersfield and Oldham in that first weekend's programme. But the inaugural matches of the other twenty clubs kicked off on Saturday 7 September, 1895 and ended with these results:

Onlookers mentioned 'large attendances' where they did not specify numbers, the smallest crowd reported being at Leigh, where 2,500 turned up, the biggest (10,000 according to one account) at Stockport, where the Yorkshire cupholders were the visitors. The atmosphere of that first Saturday was graphically captured by Yorkshire's leading newspaper:

The competition which those clubs had embarked upon was called The Northern Rugby Football League, and it required each team to meet every other one at home and away before the season's end. That meant forty-two matches, which was a very long season indeed for Victorian footballers and the reason why it began a fortnight earlier than usual: kick-offs were to be at 3.30 in September, October, March and April: 3.00 in November and February: 2.45 in December and January. The results of these games also counted towards final placings in the separate county senior competitions, of twenty fixtures apiece. As Liversedge were the reigning Yorkshire Champions, and Tyldesley their Lancashire counter-parts, these two sides were the most strongly fancied to win the first league title: but it was Manningham that made most of the running in the NU's opening season. One of two clubs representing the city of Bradford, and one of the most improved teams of the 1890s, they were reckoned to have the toughest pack of forwards in the county; who had crushed (among others) the Stade Francais XV during a trip to Paris which celebrated their coming second to Liversedge in the Yorkshire competition that spring.

The new dispensation could scarcely have hoped for such a superb climax to its first year of independence, with two teams disputing the honours right to the end. On the last day of the regular season, Manningham had a tricky away fixture with Hunslet and their chief rivals Halifax had to face Warrington at Wilderspool: and if the first match was drawn while Halifax won, they and the Bradford side would have to play off for the championship. Halifax did win, 8-0, and Manningham were heading for a scoreless draw at Parkside until very near the end, when their centre Jack Brown (who had dropped three goals in a match against Wakefield earlier in the year) did so once more and vitally, off one of the posts; and 15,000 spectators went home satisfied, at the very least, that they had seen history made by only one championship point. It was the forwards again, by and large, led by their veteran captain Alf Barraclough, who had seen Manningham through; their forwards and their full-back George E. Lorimer, who was to die tragically young within twelve months, but who was the leading goal-kicker and the joint leading points-scorer (with 106, like F W. Cooper of Bradford) in the NU's first season. Manningham also took the Yorkshire Senior Competition, again ahead of Halifax, but by a comfortable eight points this time. Runcorn and Oldham tied at the top of the Lancashire Senior Competition, and Runcorn won a thrilling play-off at Wheater's Field, Broughton, 6-5, only because a penalty goal was worth one point more than a conversion. The NU's remaining contest, for a county championship, had been won by Lancashire a few weeks earlier, with Yorkshire second and Cheshire third.

The season ended on 29 April, which made it three weeks longer than the footballers were accustomed to. Because this was thought to be too much of a good thing, the union had decided before it was over to discontinue the championship in the foreseeable future, and play enlarged county senior competitions instead. Clearly, not only Leeds and Hull had found the regular trans-Pennine journeys more than they had bargained for. Before the campaign had got properly started - before the second weekend's fixtures, in fact - there had been a move to change the rules of the game and to make it distinctively different from the rugby authorised by the RFU.