The Naming of Rugby Union Forward Positions Barnabas Alfons Cksrule, Associate Professor of Etymology and Nomenclature a.k.a David Kirk , The University of Warsaw

The history of how it is that the eight positions in the forwards in the game of rugby union came to have their names could hardly be more unusual. The history bears retelling not least because for it supports the contention that while history may pass in cycles, in the case of rugby union forwards the history that led to the forward positions acquiring their names continues to reflect to a remarkable and depressing degree the qualities of the people who occupy the positions today. Unsurprisingly the positions were all named around the middle of the nineteenth century in England, where the game was invented in 1832.

Let us begin with the props. The story begins in a place that no rugby forward would ever find himself, now or then. A place of intelligence, creativity and artistic endeavour: the theatre.

It quickly became obvious when rugby union was in its earliest days that there was a need for two players whose contribution was limited to standing, bending and grunting. Occasionally these players needed to be relocated on the field but any movement was slow and awkward and only ever approximately accurate. These two players were, as they are today, effectively inanimate; unresponsive objects, lacking in any sort of capacity for independent thought and precious little capacity for direction. It is ironic that the name of the position given to these players came from the theatre.

There are producers and actors in the theatre; the analogous positions in rugby are coaches and backs. It was an actor, a first five-eighth and a pupil of the famous Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, who named the position. At a Tuesday practice session the training flowed up and down and around the two cubic inanimates and then a scrummage was called. The young actor proclaimed,

“Would someone please bring those two stage props over here, so we can get on with the play!”

The description of props as effectively pieces of furniture – unspeaking, heavy and difficult to move – so aptly described their nature and contribution to the game that the name stuck.

It should be noted that at this time there was no such thing as a tighthead or a loosehead prop. This nomenclature crept into the game some twenty years later. In the mid-nineteenth century it became the practice of rugby clubs in England to recruit props from The Royal Bethlem Hospital, sometimes known as Bedlam. This was a ghastly mistake, soon recognised. Alas, a mistake not rectified quickly enough to prevent the establishment of a line of props that has propagated from those most inauspicious beginnings to this very day.

Soon after the recruitment began coaches began to have concerns about the mental stability of the props and they established a simple test. They instructed the props to stand facing them and to shake their heads rapidly from side to side while they listened carefully. In about 50% of cases they heard a faint rattle. The props whose heads rattled were named looseheads and those that didn’t were named tightheads.  Subsequent longitudinal studies have demonstrated no statistical difference in the intellectual capacity of the looseheads and the tightheads, but this is simply because the tools required to measure the infinitesimally low levels of intelligence props habitually display are not yet available.

The history of the naming of the third front row position in rugby union, the hooker, is extraordinary. Most great cities in the world have grown up around water. Paris, Rome, London, Vienna and Moscow were all founded and have flourished next to rivers. New York, Los Angeles, Marseille, Alexandria, Constantinople and Venice are on the coast and Chicago, Geneva and Toronto border lakes. Much land is however located away from the coast and not in close proximity to a lake or a river. In these circumstances human habitation requires the drilling of wells and the tapping of underground acquifers. The well industry was very big in Europe between the fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Water drawn from wells was sold in various containers and named after the container. In Shakespeare’s day in Stratford-upon-Avon, one could buy bucket-water, pail-water, keg-water, vat-water and on special occasions, wrung-water. This last was water wrung from a cloth and dripped over a protuberant tongue. It was very expensive (for the time).

In any event, all successful industries have externalities and one such externality in the well industry was empty wells. What to do with the wells when they ran dry? In mediaeval times it was believed that Satan might, of a Saturday night, make his way up an empty well shaft and get up to no good in the surrounding borough. Later it was the fear of pitching drunk down an empty shaft after a hard night on the mead and cider that convinced the populous that empty wells needed to be properly dealt with. The obvious solution was to fill them in. A whole new sub-industry grew up. It was known as the well rectification industry. These were not prosperous times and everyone in the village had a story to tell of something that had been inadvertently dropped down the well. Accordingly the first stage in a well rectification project was to retrieve whatever it was that now rested in the mud and gunk at the bottom of the empty well.

Wood was not plentiful away from rivers and lakes and accordingly no ladders were available. The solution hit upon was to employ a man prepared to be tied to a rope by his feet and to lower him into the well to retrieve whatever was down there. The perfect man for the job had sloping shoulders (some wells were pretty narrow), limited intelligence and a hard head. This last was necessary because, there being no instruments available to measure the depth of the well, it was very common for the man being lowered to be dropped head first on the bottom of the well. Pulling an unconscious man up and having to start all over again after just one drop was not much fun for those on the rope so hard heads were a pre-requisite for the job. The men lowered head first into the wells were required to sift through the mud and stones at the bottom of the well and bring up the jewellery, clothing, hair combs and what-have-you that had been dropped.

The well rectification industry was big on demarcation. The men on the rope were known as ‘lowerers’ and the man being lowered was known as a ‘fisher’ or a ‘hooker’. There is no recorded incidence of a lowerer ever becoming a fisher (or a hooker).

Fishers (or hookers) invariably developed flat heads and compressed neck vertebrae from being dropped regularly on their heads. Whatever small intelligence they began with was soon extinguished. The average length of a career in fishing (or hooking) was three years. Competition for regular paying jobs was intense, but it got worse. The Industrial Revolution was not good news for full employment in the well rectification industry. By the middle of the nineteenth century there were as many as five hundred unemployed fishers (or hookers) in England. (Lowerers, being less specialised, tended to do better, often finding work pulling barges and occasionally as chimney sweeps).

The first recorded recruitment of a fisher (or hooker) to a rugby team was in Bedford in 1835. Soon after a trickle became a flood. Every team searched for former fishers (or hookers) to fill the middle position in the front row. The reasons were obvious: flat head, sloping shoulders, no neck, used to being groped and grappled by other men and no discernable intelligence whatsoever. For reasons now lost the term fisher died out and these washed up, malformed characters became known as hookers.

There remains an important piece of academic research to be done to determine how it is that with the death of the well rectification industry there nevertheless remains a steady stream of appropriately misshapen, desperately stupid people playing hooker in rugby union today. No doubt a back will undertake the study before long.

The naming of the position of lock in rugby union is a far more prosaic but nonetheless interesting story. Perhaps needless to say, the history of the name does not reflect well on the gangling, witless creatures that occupy the position on the field today. The naming of the lock is a story of neologism derived from born-to-rule mispronunciation.

The mid nineteenth century in England was a pretty jolly time for the landed gentry. Certainly the masters were a bit free with the birch at Public School, but Balliol and Trinity were ever so much fun and one couldn’t wish for more than a lovely little rotten borough for life. Old Sarum would have been a good pick. In pretty Wiltshire, three houses and seven votes. One wouldn’t have to melt down a single candlestick holder to win in a landslide.

Only thing was there really wasn’t a lot to do. You couldn’t hunt everyday after all. So rugger was the thing. Off the sons of the landed gentry trotted to the great rugby clubs emerging in England and a highly disproportionate number of chinless wonders gone down, sent down or rusticated, ended up playing in the position that has come to be called lock.

At the beginning of each season the coaches and captains of the great club teams (all backs) had the difficult job of receiving a mass migration of gormless gits from the great estates and country houses. They had the ball skills of an earthworm, the physical presence of a windsock on a day without wind and a belief in destiny to rival Alexander’s.

The coaches and leading players of the clubs (all backs) devised a system of basic requirements and skills to be tested. There were about ten things to test – fitness, ball skills, speed and strength, that sort of thing – and after the test beside each tested attribute or skill they wrote either “able” or “lack”. They then allocated playing positions according to the areas in which the players were “able” and away from areas that would expose the areas in which they had a “lack”. Every year a small group of players achieved no “ables” and a full house of “lacks”. These players went into the second row and they became known as lacks. “You a real lack, Huffington-Smyth, second row for you.”

Not that it bothered the Hooray Henries. They felt rather good about playing lack.

“I say, where do you play at rugger, Edmond old chap?”

“I’m a lack, Teddy. A jolly fine lack too. A part of the good old engine woom.”

“Bravo, old chap. Absinthe?”

So much for the neologism, however the story does not conclude here. The sub-nation of recessed mandibles thought that when they heard “lack” they were hearing a word spelt l-o-c-k, because that’s the way they pronounced lock. Recessed mandibles, lisps and all, later that century the very same chaps ran the largest empire the world has ever seen and brought rugby to the colonies and the conversion was complete. Lack became lock. One thing certainly hasn’t changed in one hundred the fifty years however. The lacks still play in the second row.

The naming of the flankers is story of such debased, guttersnipe origins it is hard to tell. It is commonly considered that the players in the flanker and number 8 positions are not as stupid as the props, hooker and lacks (to use the original name). This is true but the difference is not great and while these players may start with slightly more intelligence, as their careers progress they lose their mental faculties at a faster rate than the morons in front of them, on account of the number of times they run into people head first at great speed.

Unlike the naming of the props, which occurred in two stages, first the family name – prop – and then the two prenominals – loosehead and tighthead – the openside and blindside flankers were given their names all at once. Oddly enough, the story starts with a garment. In Victorian Britain the well to do chaps wore winter coats that had two side pockets. The pocket on the right was designed with a flap that folded over the pocket opening and buttoned down. The pocket on the left was smaller, had no flap and was in effect a thin slit in the garment that small items, including bank notes, could be slid into.

The pick pockets of the time operated in gangs, as all but the forwards will know, and often attacked in pairs. A particular target were gentlemen in their winter coats. Victorian pickpockets were early adherents to the management theory, most often applied in manufacturing, of specialisation. In the sub-segment of pocket picking focused on garment pockets you had your back-pocket pickpockets, your trouser-pocket pickpockets, your jacket side-pocket pickpockets and your inside jacket pocket pickpockets. There was, and remains, a strict hierarchy in the pocket picking world and those that sit at the two ends of the dinner table are invariably the shoe pickpockets and the under-the-hat pickpockets. In any event, the pickpockets we are concerned with were the left and right-handed men’s winter coat pocket pickers. These two ignorant, smelly simpletons with one great skill would set off together for the thronged streets. One would target the left-side pocket, which was small and tight and had no protection and the other the larger, obvious but buttoned down right-side pocket. The left pocket being unfastened was known in pickpocket jargon as the open-side pocket, and the right pocket, for reasons that will become clear was called the blind-side pocket.

The open-side pocket was invariably attacked first. The blind-side pickpocket was always the larger of the two and he began the process. In the clumsy, ungainly way we are only too familiar with he would stumble into the victim and beg-your-pardoning and hat-tipping all the way would draw his attention. As the victim turned to face the malodorous cretin who had run into him, a smaller, snivelling, weasel like creature – the open side pickpocket – would deprive the gentleman of the bank notes in his open-side pocket. His final act was to tug gently on the pocket so as to draw the victim’s attention to something going on on that side. As the gentleman turned to investigate he became blind to the first man, who did his job and cleaned out the right side or blind-side pocket. Because this pair of pickpockets attacked from the sides, that is, the flanks of their hapless victim, their full names in pickpocket jargon were open-side and blind-side flankers.

When it came it naming the two forwards on the flanks of the scrum in the then nascent game of rugby union it was clear that they so resembled in ignorance, rat cunning and insanitariness the open-side and blind-side flanker pick pockets of the day there could be no other choice. It is distressing to see how little has changed.

The number eight was the last forward position to be named in rugby and, while this reflects absolutely no credit on the witless fools who occupy the position, the naming of the position is a highly elevated story, concerning Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Queen Victoria’s youngest child, Princess Beatrice, later The Princess Henry of Battenberg.

In the early of years of rugby union a number of names were given to the position at the back of the scrum, the position now called number eight. The most common name was ‘spanker’. Apparently the word grew out of usage by the forwards themselves. It seems that this act of creativity represents the high point of forward inventiveness. Why these dimwits should choose to call their final forward colleague a spanker remains a mystery. Three possible explanations have been posited. First it has been suggested that this was the last position to be named and therefore when it was named it would be ‘brand spanking new’, therefore the player occupying the position should be called a spanker. (Good grief). Second, even more feebly, it rhymed with flanker. Thirdly, and this was certainly Dr. Freud’s view because he dedicated a small to moderate sized paragraph in his seminal The Interpretation of Dreams to it, the word was a sub-conscious nomination by public school boys for the man standing behind them when they bent over to enter a scrum.

The final position in a rugby union forward pack was set on the road to its definitive name in 1872. This was the year of the second official Test match between England and Scotland. It was played at Kennington Oval in London and before the match Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s fifth daughter and youngest child, then 15 years old was introduced to the players. Charles Darwin had published his brilliant work On the Origin of Species in 1859 and a ferocious debate continued to rage in Britain as to the veracity of the great man’s theories. Fifteen year olds with private tutors would have been introduced to Darwin’s theories but would also have been taught creationism. As Princess Beatrice moved down the line of players she came to the spanker and as she looked up at the man she had an epiphany. She stepped back and exclaimed,

“Darwin is right! You’re the ape-man!”

Who could blame her? As we see today in number eights, the man had a slack and vacant look, over-long swinging arms, a protruding jaw, thickened brow and hair everywhere. She could not stop talking about the ape-man for the whole match and was particularly excited when he got the ball. The Scottish spanker was of course much the same and the dear Princess, in a burst of creativity entirely consistent with two hundred years of close breeding, named him ape-man 2.  The newspapers, owned by peers of the realm all, picked it up and soon all the players playing in the position at the back of the scrum became the ape-man.

Subsequently ape-man became eight-man and then on, in many places, to number eight for practical reasons. It turned out that two words of one syllable each was a little too difficult for many of the players in this position to grasp and consequently many ape-men of the mid and late nineteenth century ended up playing out of position on the basis that they couldn’t remember the name of their position. A single figure being absolutely the simplest name any person or position could possibly have was therefore introduced to help out the wandering twits. Fortunately the ape-man was the eighth man counting from the back and from the front so when the dopey fellow forgot where he should be on the field so long as he remembered the figure 8 he could count from the back or the front and find himself again

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