Our time machine travels back 50 years to 1973, when two clubs, Hunslet and Huyton were battling for survival as a split into two divisions loomed.
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The Spring of 1973 might have been memorable for Dewsbury, who won the league title by beating Leeds at Odsal in the last of the old-style Championship Finals, and Featherstone Rovers, who lifted the Challenge Cup with a Wembley win over Bradford Northern, but elsewhere in Yorkshire, and Westwards along the M62 (parts of which were still under construction) in Merseyside, there were grounds for concern for the diehard supporters of Hunslet and Huyton.
For while the former were homeless and about to fold, with no guarantee of a phoenix rising, the latter had just finished rock-bottom of the Rugby Football League, having lost 30 of their 34 matches, and were struggling to make a success of their move from Liverpool to the ‘overspill’ town on the Eastern edge of the city best known for being the constituency of the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, who was in between his two spells as Prime Minister.
As the game’s governors sought to freshen up the sport against a backdrop of falling attendances and ever-tightening finances, the 30-strong competition was about to split into two divisions, a move which had happened eleven years earlier, but lasted for only two seasons – is some of this starting to sound familiar?
Both Hunslet and Huyton were destined for Division Two, but there were major worries over whether the white-rose club would still be around come the start of the following campaign.
Famed as the first team, in 1907-08, to win ‘All Four Cups’ – by 1973, an achievement no longer possible due to the abolition of the county championships three years earlier – Hunslet had reached the Challenge Cup final as recently as 1965, when they went down 20-16 after a memorable tussle with Wigan beneath the Twin Towers.
But since then they had been living in reduced circumstances, with the mines and foundries of South Leeds from which they traditionally drew their support shutting and Victorian terraced houses coming down to allow new industrial estates, employing fewer than the traditional labour-intensive workplaces, to go up.
Such was the slide down the table that in both 1970-71 and 1971-72, Hunslet were propping up the other 29 clubs.
Attendances were of only three figures, ‘A’ team players were turning out for nothing, first teamers were disgruntled and the club’s Parkside ground was falling into disrepair.
A minority of the directors who had acquired the bulk of the shares sold Parkside to a property company, and having finished third-bottom in 1972-73, the founder members folded.
That a new club, New Hunslet, rose from the ashes in time to start the 1973-74 season playing at the old greyhound stadium near Leeds United’s Elland Road base was down to a small but dedicated group.
It included former Great Britain second row Geoff Gunney, who had captained the old club in their last match at Parkside and played a couple of times for the phoenix version before becoming coach, then a director.
Hastily-constructed New Hunslet’s first match at the greyhound stadium, which became known for its American football-style ‘tuning fork’ posts, was a 23-0 win over Huyton, who were starting their sixth season after leaving their Knotty Ash ground, where the lease had expired, and rebranding from Liverpool City.
Having previously been Wigan Highfield, London Highfield and Liverpool Stanley, upping sticks was not unusual for one of Rugby League’s perennial strugglers, but even allowing for that, life in Huyton hadn’t been easy.
For starters, there had been delays in the building of their new ground Alt Park, with the club using a variety of venues before finally playing their first match there against Swinton towards the end of the 1968-69 season.
Huyton did their best to make the most of what was a rather rudimentary home, but struggled to win over the locals and defeat the scourge of vandalism, with even the most devoted, such as player-coach, fundraiser, groundsman and general factotum Geoff Fletcher, becoming disillusioned.
They finally left at the end of the 1983-84 season, when they finished third-bottom of the second tier and recorded an average home attendance of 172 (Hunslet, by now playing at Elland Road after a spell at Batley’s Mount Pleasant), were sixth with an average gate of 1,338).
Huyton made the first of three relocations to non-league football grounds, first Runcorn’s Canal Street.
They became Runcorn Highfield, latterly playing at St Helens Town’s Hoghton Road, then simply Highfield, before switching to Prescot Cables’ Hope Street (now known as Valerie Park), and taking the title Prescot Panthers for 1996 and 1997, after which they folded, having finished bottom of the table for five successive seasons.
By that stage, Hunslet had moved to their current South Leeds Stadium base, less than half a mile from the site of Parkside, and in 1999, defeated Dewsbury Rams 12-11 in the Northern Ford Premiership (second tier) Grand Final at Headingley, only to be denied entry to Super League, with their ground deemed to be too small.
Hunslet, who had the additional name Hawks between 1996 and 2017, when fans voted to drop it, last competed in the Championship in 2015, when they were relegated alongside Doncaster.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 486 (July 2023)
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