Redcap's BRL

Records, hoodoos, myths and oddities: The secret history of the Brisbane Rugby League

There are truths we rugby league supporters hold to be self-evident. Some are records, things unique or at least very unusual in the history of top-flight rugby league.

There are thresholds history tells us are inviolable when crossed.

But are we looking at the whole picture? Could some of these records and hoodoos be apocryphal?

The history of the Brisbane Rugby League (BRL) is elusive. A lot of it was washed away by the catastrophic flooding of the city in early 1974, and as a result, it rarely features in discussions of historical precedent.

Some might even contest whether the BRL should be considered part of the top-flight picture alongside and equivalent to the NSWRL.

Regardless, for most of its history and in the days before a quasi-national competition, the BRL was one of two primary metropolitan leagues contributing the bulk of the game’s representative players. It belongs in discussions.

The BRL’s history also challenges a few records and hoodoos, as well as containing some oddities of its own. This is a selection from the secret history of the BRL.

The 50-point hoodoo

We all know this old chestnut: if you concede 50 points or more during the season, history says your premiership hopes are dashed. It is logical – shipping 50 surely indicates you are not a premiership contender – and the ‘hoodoo’ is yet to be overcome in the NRL, despite the best efforts of the 2007 Cowboys.

But a Premier team has conceded 50 points before, and it happened in an era when such thrashings were much rarer. Enter the 1950 Easts Tigers.

Easts were a quality team, finishing as premiers in 1947 and runners-up in ’48 and ’49. But something threw them off their stride in early 1950, namely a resurgent Wests side who handed the Tigers a 25-3 drubbing at the Gabba in late May.

After a narrow defeat to lowly Valleys the following weekend, Easts were swamped by a rampant Souths, suffering a 50-15 flogging which surely signalled they were mere pretenders.

The result attracted surprisingly little commentary at the time, largely because Wests had unexpectedly lost to Brothers and because of a wild brawl in the Norths-Valleys game which according to the Sunday Mail “prompted police action”.

With most of the attention focussed on Wests, Souths and other events, Easts quietly regrouped, winning four on the trot heading into the finals, then beating Wests in the League Cup final, dispatching Souths in the preliminary final, and finally vanquishing Wests in the premiership decider thanks to a try and four goals from second-rower Bruce Baker.

Turns out, the 50-point ‘hoodoo’ hasn’t been a hoodoo for 74 years.

The ultimate journeyman

Conventional wisdom holds that Australian rugby league’s ultimate journeymen are Tyran Smith, Blake Green and Darrien Doherty, all of whom turned out for seven different first-grade clubs.

Sorry guys, you never were the ultimate journeymen. That prize goes to David Harrower, the moustachioed man of many clubs – eight of them – who bore more than a passing resemblance to Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation and set the record decades earlier. The following details Harrower’s hike around the BRL.

Season	Games	Tries	Goals	Points
Valleys 1909	5	0	0	0
Valleys 1910	5	1	0	3
North Brisbane 1910	4	0	0	0
North Brisbane 1911	5	0	0	0
South United 1911	1	0	0	0
Woolloongabba 1912	2	0	0	0
West End 1913	11	0	0	0
West End 1914	5	1	0	1
West End 1915	3	0	0	0
Wests 1915	1	0	0	0
Woolloongabba 1916	4	0	0	0
Westerns 1918	2	0	0	0
Railways 1919	5	1	0	3
Totals	53	3	0	9

While he was mostly a fringe player, Harrower did have some interesting moments. In 1911, he was part of a group of North Brisbane players, led by Hughie Mullins, who defected to the short-lived South United team midway through the season.

Why this happened is not entirely clear, but one suspects that as Norths’ prospects of success slipped away, and with a few big names and egos among the playing group, things quickly descended into blame and acrimony. Defecting to lowly South United was no career move.

When South United went belly-up, Mullins and most of the defectors formed the Natives club and won the premiership in 1912. Harrower was the only one not included in the new venture, ending up at the ill-fated Woolloongabba electoral district team in 1912, before becoming a key part of West End’s premiership team in 1913.

West End won the 1913 title thanks to a narrow victory over Natives in the final round which put them four points clear atop the table. Given their substantial lead, the league scrapped the finals and awarded the cup to the ‘All Blacks’ there and then.

Mullins was not impressed and in a fit of pique wrote to the editor of the Brisbane Courier asserting that Natives were “still the best team in the league”, challenging “any senior team… preferably West End” to a game for “13 honour caps” and claiming “West End’s victory was due solely to luck and the cussedness of things in general”. I think that’s code for ‘it was the ref’s fault’.

Neither Natives nor Hughie Mullins ever played in the BRL again. I like to think the great journeyman, Mr Harrower had a good chuckle at all that.

The lone stalemate

The nil-nil draw between Canterbury and Newtown in 1982 is the only one in first-grade history, right? Wrong, there were two in the BRL.

One was a hum-drum wet weather slog between Brothers and University at the Exhibition in 1925 which prompted the Daily Standard to remark that “a second edition of Noah’s flood was being staged when the final half commenced”.

The first was a stalemate between Valleys and Wests at the Gabba in 1918 which was according to the Telegraph “a splendid display of football” and according to the Standard a game of “outstanding speed” in which both teams were “within inches of scoring” only for last-ditch defence and the “luck of the game” to conspire against them.

Valleys went on to win the premiership. Wests, very much a premiership contender at the time, would field a chap by the name of ‘Ricketty’ Johnston against Merthyr the following weekend, be sanctioned by the BRL and resign from the competition in protest.

Rewarding mediocrity

If you think the eight-team finals format of the NRL rewards mediocrity, you might not be familiar with the 1919 BRL finals series.

For some reason, QRL Secretary and noted raconteur Harry Sunderland decided all six premiership teams, including winless West End, would compete in the finals. While this surely defeated the purpose of finals, it could conceivably work with the right format.

Trouble was, the format was indefensible. The two leading teams, Valleys and Wests, met on the first weekend – in a knockout final. Valleys won and second-placed Wests were out. Third-placed Carlton and fourth-placed Coorparoo won their knockouts and what was left of logic at this point surely dictated that Carlton and Coorparoo would play to face Valleys in the final.

But no, Carlton was promoted straight to the final, while Valleys and Coorparoo played for the other spot. Coorparoo won and it was only the old challenger rule that saved Sunderland from a complete farce, with Valleys coming back to beat Coorparoo in a grand final a few weeks later.

The historian Steve Haddan suggested, among other things, that Sunderland was making it up on the run, and the papers at the time seemed to have little idea of what was supposed to happen as the finals progressed.

There are other examples, like in 1976 when the team running second-last qualified for a playoff for the last finals position, forcing one of the teams above them (Souths) into a gauntlet of four games in eight days to make it through, but that story can wait for another day.

One game, two results

Here we move into the realm of oddities and the game between Brothers and Wests at the Gabba in June 1935. On the face of it, the game was nothing remarkable. Even the fact that it was both a league fixture and a cup tie – the Redcap Shield final to be precise – was not unusual at the time.

But it might be unique in Australian rugby league history. Depending on your choice of source material, it was either a 5-5 draw or a 13-10 win to Brothers. This discrepancy was difficult to reconcile until it became evident that both results were right. The draw was the league result, while Brothers’ win in extra time decided the Redcap Shield.

The inimitable Sunday paper, Truth solved the riddle and reported that in a mostly drab affair, one of the “thrills” of the second half was Wests fullback Brady losing his shorts and standing up “in his birthday undies”.

All at sea

There were 18 forfeits across the history of the BRL and good excuses for most of them: world war, Spanish flu, half the team defecting to a rival club, and the end of semester break at the University of Queensland.

The great Ipswich team who won the premiership in 1910 were greatly in demand and became the Harlem Globetrotters of Queensland rugby league. While they failed to mount much of a premiership defence in 1911, even forfeiting their semi-final, they did much to spread the good word statewide.

Then there was Wynnum-Manly’s forfeit to Wests late in the 1951 season. The ‘Seasiders’ no-show was reportedly due to much of the team being professional fisherman who were unable to get back from the boat in time for a Wednesday afternoon kick-off. They were quite literally all at sea.

The secret rugby league player

One of the chief attractions of that champion Ipswich team of 1910 was a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ halfback who went by the name Yanto Lewis. If you think the name ‘Yanto’ sounds a little unlikely, you would be right.

Yanto was really a Welsh rugby union player called Evan Howells. While he was quite fond of rugby league, he was apparently far from convinced it would catch on and wished to avoid prejudicing his options if and when the new code fell over.

Fair enough – vengeful rugby union types still denounce apostates – but it seems Howells wasn’t fooling anybody. The Ipswich Times invariably printed his nom de plume inside commas, and while they stopped short of revealing his true identity, it seems few in Ipswich were unaware of ‘Yanto’s’ secret.

The mystery rugby league player

AN Other is a popular choice for folk who dislike certain selections of the team they follow. Strangely enough, AN Other actually got a game for Wests in 1923.

After the triumph of their unbeaten premiership season in 1922, Wests’ title defence began with inspirational skipper Norm Potter accepting a better offer from Rockhampton, a thrashing by Carlton in the Scott Cup semi-final, defeat in their first three league games and most of the remaining premiership team being taken away by injury, representative selection or both.

Running a lonely last and struggling to get a team together, Wests entered their round 11 game against Carlton at Davies Park with a forward described by the Courier as “an emergency”, the Daily Mail as “A Fillup” and the Standard as “AN Other”. Despite Other’s best efforts, Wests were beaten 39-18.

Who was this mystery man – a prominent player in disguise, somebody they dragged off the street? We may never know.

This article is original work by Redcap. An earlier version, including some errors introduced by an external editor was first published in The Roar.