Melbourne University Rugby Football Club
Legend has it one mid autumn day of 1908………. late afternoon Arthur Spindle had just returned to his Ormond College study. The angled sunrays beamed through his third floor window dimly illuminating an opened letter on Spindle’s crowded desk.
Written in an even, consistent hand and bearing the crest of St Andrews College, University of Sydney, its contents included an invitation, the acceptance of which would shape and affect the lives of thousands in the following hundred years. It read…”The students of the College are pleased to issue a challenge to the students of Ormond and Trinity at the University of Melbourne to play a game of Rugby Football at a place to be arranged during our XV’s visit to Melbourne in September this year”.
Arthur brooded over the implications for the next two hours during which he scratched out some notes. He dined as usual in the great hall and on completion of ‘triggle’ and port wrapped his woollen gown against his wheezing chest and strode off to the anatomy department where he knew his oldest friend, Griff Mackintosh, would be dissecting his latest cadaver.
Mackintosh had recently returned to Melbourne from an extended stay at Oxford where he had successfully played rugby football in the most recent varsity game held during December at The Queens Club, Fulham. The proposition was put and over the next hours, with Mackintosh slicing between the spleen and the pancreas, they plotted a scheme of action to ensure a team would be gathered and a game would be had in the following September against those gentlemen of the University of Sydney. Thus, in the depths of the dissecting room at the Department of Anatomy amidst the stench of formalin, the genesis of a glorious continuity was found. The game was played with great success and while the ultimate scores were either never recorded or lost forever in the annals of time, the seeds of a yearning for more of this “foreign” game were sewn.
The following year, 1909, saw the birth of regular competition between Ormond and Trinity while the MURFC afforded a most competent side in the early years of Victorian rugby.
Welcome to the Centenary year of the Melbourne University Rugby Football Club. You are invited to take part in celebrating the existence of Melbourne’s founding rugby club. Please make use of the links which will take you to the Registration of Interest, a Calendar of Centenary Events, and a Short History of the Club.
