Our journey around the villages, towns, cities and regions that have rugby league running through their veins arrives in a specific area of Leeds.
LEEDS’ Royal Armouries Museum drew more than 350,000 visitors last year.
But how many would have known they were close to the site of a location of league which while short-lived, once held 20,000 for a Challenge Cup tie?
Of course the Yorkshire city has a central role in the history of the game.
Leeds and Hunslet, from north and south of the River Aire respectively, were founder members in 1895.
The former hosted the first-ever Challenge Cup final – in which Batley beat St Helens 10-3 – at their Headingley home in 1896-97 and the latter, led by homegrown fullback Albert Goldthorpe and then playing at Parkside, became the first team to achieve the celebrated feat of winning ‘All Four Cups’ in 1907-08.
Seven years before that, the final Yorkshire Senior Competition table of 1900-01 (at that time the league was split into county sections, largely due to the cost of and time involved in travelling from one to the other) included three other Leeds teams, all of whom had joined up for the professional code’s second season, 1896-97.
Bramley, from the west of the city and notable as being the first club to take on a touring team (New Zealand at their original Barley Mow ground in October 1907), were by far the longest-lasting of the trio, operating until 1999.
Holbeck played at Elland Road long before Leeds United Football Club, and were Northern Union members until 1903-04, after which they resigned after narrowly missing out on promotion from the Second Division, the regional structure having by then been abandoned.
Meanwhile Leeds Parish Church, the main focus of this article, spent five eventful seasons in the Northern Union, finishing above Leeds in the white-rose section of the league in all but the first (and fourth in their table in 1898-99), and reaching the Challenge Cup semi-finals in 1899-1900.
It was that season they attracted that 20,000 attendance to their Clarence Field ground, for a Challenge Cup quarter-final against Runcorn which finished 5-5, The Churchmen winning the replay 8-6 only to be beaten 8-0 by Oldham at Fartown, Huddersfield in the semis.
Their 7-2 third-round home win over Batley had drawn 15,000, and plenty of other gates were in five figures.
It’s fair to say the atmosphere would have been lively, because the club were noted for their partisan and sometimes troublemaking supporters, many of whom came from the deprived and highly-populated Leylands area close to the city centre and the Parish Church (now known as Leeds Minster).
A good number were Jewish immigrants, who took Leeds Parish Church – the team, not the institution – to their hearts.
Clarence Field, not to be confused with the former home of the old Headingley rugby union club three miles to the north-west which now forms part of the Rhinos’ Kirkstall Training Ground, was just across the water from Leylands, off Clarence Road and close to Leeds locks on the Aire and Calder Navigation as well as the site of the current Royal Armouries museum.
That location over Crown Point Bridge from the Parish Church led to them being known as ‘T’ lads from ower t’ bridge’ as well as The Churchmen.
The club were formed in 1874 as part of the Parish Church’s recreation section, with officials aiming to spread the concept of ‘Muscular Christianity’.
Amid the Church of England’s concerns that it was losing touch with the urban working classes and that more participation in and understanding of popular culture was needed, the movement was characterised by the belief that physical activity and playing sport enhanced the development of Christian gentlemen via the value put on athleticism, teamwork, discipline and self-sacrifice.
It aimed to stem the rising tide of gambling, drinking and depravity (ironic given the alcohol-fuelled future antics some supporters, which included intimidation, both verbal and physical, of both opposition players and match officials).
However it seemed those original ideals were being lost as amid suggestions of illegal payments and gifts to players, poaching them from other clubs and overly-robust tactics (there was a notorious tour of Ireland in 1892), the club grew in size, strength and success.
The ground had been enclosed in 1879, a sign of rising attendances, with a grandstand erected in 1884.
In 1887-88, Leeds Parish Church reached the last eight of the Yorkshire Cup (or ‘T’owd Tin Pot’), the following season their ground was chosen to host one of Yorkshire’s county championship matches (against Northumberland), and they entered the Northern Union as the county’s reigning rugby union champions of 1895-96.
The change of code took the Clarence Field outfit even further away from those founding Corinthian principles, but as renowned sports historian Tony Collins has noted, the Parish Church retained influence via their curates automatically becoming vice-presidents of the club.
It was through that route that from 1900, the Reverend Sidney Gedge, a Scotland rugby union international and a prominent advocate of the original code, became increasingly influential in the running of the club, whose days it turned out were numbered, seemingly as a result.
For not only did Gedge, who was good friends with Rugby Football Union secretary Rowland Hill, decide against turning out for Leeds Parish Church, he stopped anyone else doing so, when after the end of the 1900-01 season, he chaired a special meeting of the club at which it was decided to “abandon Northern Union rugby football for the present”, which it soon became apparent actually meant for good.
The lease on Clarence Field was up in 1901, but the club had know that well enough in advance, and had been offered an alternative ground not far away on York Road, making it hard to avoid the view that Gedge and his supporters simply didn’t like rugby league, what the game stood for, and the people it attracted.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 509 (June 2025)