Our journey around the villages, towns and cities that have rugby league running through their veins arrives at the birthplace of the game.
WITH A return to their spiritual home Fartown under serious consideration for a spell, it might have been a remake of ‘Back to the Future’ for Huddersfield in their bid to build their own ground as part of a bold plan to reinvigorate the club.
But now determined owner-chairman Ken Davy is looking for another location from which to direct his latest attempt to reprise a period when there was a champion team from the town where rugby league was formed at the George Hotel adjacent to the fine neo-classical railway station facade in 1895.
Back in 1961-62, when the title last came to Huddersfield (for the seventh time), James Mason, one of its most famous products, was a major Hollywood star, having just appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s version of ‘Lolita’.
The Fartowners upset the odds to beat Wakefield 14-5 in the Championship (play-off) Final along the road at Bradford, where 37,451 were in the Odsal bowl a week after the teams clashed in the Challenge Cup Final at Wembley, where Trinity triumphed 12-6 before 81,263.
The only Huddersfield coaches to have since come within a sniff of emulating Dave Valentine are Nathan Brown, whose Giants made it to within a win of the Super League Grand Final in 2010, and Paul Anderson, who got to the same stage in both 2013, when his side claimed the League Leaders’ Shield, and 2015.
Davy, at the helm since 1996, has done his best to bring back the glory days to a club who were deeply in the doldrums in the 1980s, when they were briefly known as the Barracudas but distinctly toothless.
At that stage, attendances at Fartown had dipped to three figures, and while there has been a rise, Davy accepts that with its 24,000 capacity, the club’s current John Smith’s Stadium home, shared with Huddersfield Town Football Club since 1994 and the stage for a string of big rugby league matches, is simply too big for the Giants, whose gates have been struggling to hit the 5,000 mark.
Davy, who also held the reins of Huddersfield Town between 2003 and 2009, believes there are potential new fans out there, but says it would be easier to attract them to a more compact venue.
“It’s a wonderful stadium (the John Smith’s), but the reality is that we are rattling around in there. It is far too large for our purposes,” he explained.
“We have a plan to transform the fortunes of the club and build back up again, and owning our own stadium of the right size, a place our supporters can really call home, is very important to that.
“It will help create a better atmosphere which will in turn help attract new fans, and it will be a community asset used far more than for 15 or so home matches a season.”
Davy says three sites in the town for a stadium which would hold up to 8,000 with the potential for expansion are under consideration, with the Giants in discussions with Kirklees Council, who Davy says are being “as supportive as possible”.
But Fartown, where the club who were founded in 1875 played between 1878 and 1992 – when they moved to Leeds Road football ground in advance of the current stadium being built – and where the pitch still exists, is not one of them.
“We understand the historical links, looked into it seriously and gave going back there our best shot, but it just wasn’t practical,” added Davy.
While it also had a cricket ground sometimes used by Yorkshire, bowling greens and a running track, and hosted an FA Cup semi-final between Blackburn Rovers and Sheffield Wednesday in 1882 (long before the existence of Leeds Road), Fartown was most associated with rugby league.
It hosted the Championship Finals of 1906-07 and 1935-36 (the larger Leeds Road was used in 1951-52, when 48,684 saw Wigan beat Bradford), the Challenge Cup Finals of 1907-08 and 1909-10 (when a replay, also at Fartown, was required) as well as numerous semi-finals, a 1937 Ashes Test, the John Player Trophy Final of 1972-73 and the Premiership Final of 1978-79.
The highest attendance for a Huddersfield match there was 32,912 for a visit of Wigan in 1949-50, three seasons after a ground-record 35,136 watched Leeds and Wakefield in Challenge Cup semi-final action.
Huddersfield’s most memorable season is surely 1914-15, when their ‘Team of All Talents’ became the second to win All Four Cups (the Challenge Cup – against St Helens – for the second of six times, league title for the third of those seven times, Yorkshire Cup – versus Hull – for the fourth of 12 times and Yorkshire League for the fourth of 11 times).
Stars of the show were ‘Prince of Centres’ Harold Wagstaff, Australia halfback and try machine Albert Rosenfeld and Welsh back Johnny Rogers.
Meanwhile the 1920s must have been a dream period for sports fans in the textile town, starting with the Challenge Cup win of 1919-20.
The same season Huddersfield Town reached the first of their five FA Cup finals up to 1937-38, and two years later, with legendary manager Herbert Chapman working wonders, won the competition, before becoming the first club to land the Football League title three seasons running from 1923-24 to 1925-26.
Town finished runners-up in the old First Division for the following two seasons, while Fartown won the Championship Finals of both 1928-29 and 1929-30, each time beating Leeds, in the second of those seasons in a replay.
Huddersfield last won the Challenge Cup in 1952-53, seeing off St Helens, and in the summer era, have three times reached the final, losing to St Helens in 2006, Warrington in 2009 and Wigan in 2022.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 502 (November 2024)
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