For many supporters of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, not to mention France and other nations, Twickenham is the home of the arch-enemy, and a rugby international there is war conducted by other means.
Until this year, my only visit to Twickenham was as a schoolchild in 1965. I have vivid memories of Rolls Royces parked outside before the match, their occupants enjoying hampers with smoked salmon and champagne. As a lifelong Ireland supporter, it has always been easy for me to dislike Twickenham.
There has been a museum of English rugby at Twickenham for some years. Few international rugby stadiums have a museum worthy of the name and, in general, they are not best in show. This is scarcely surprising.
The main purpose of the English Rugby Football Union (RFU) is to win international championships, not to create world-class museums. In any case, rugby games are in essence performances that frame collective emotion. Such experiences are particularly difficult to capture later through the medium of museum exhibits.
In Cardiff, the Welsh RFU (WRFU) – with the support of the Arts Council of Wales – has adopted an alternative strategy and embraced the arts.
This year, Owen Sheers, the WRFU’s writer in residence from 2011-12, gave readings from his new book, Calon: A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby, in the Welsh dressing room at the Millennium Stadium on the night before Wales’s international with France.
The World Rugby Museum has achieved a lot on a relatively small budget. Its interactive exhibits, which allow visitors to test selected rugby skills – such as scrummaging and line-out jumping – to their physical limits, are robustly designed and very popular.
The museum also offers engaging historical insights; one display reveals how little historical evidence there is to support the story that William Webb Ellis of Rugby School was the inventor of the game – if indeed there ever was one inventor.
But the budget pressures show through in the over-reliance in some galleries on long text panels, and the reuse of exhibits from earlier displays.
The refreshed galleries have a dual, and conflicted, identity. On the one hand, this is a museum of the history of rugby in England, for England fans.
Around 2003, England perfected a particular style of rugby of its own – not pretty, in the eyes of its opponents, but certainly effective. In that year, the team won the northern hemisphere Six Nations championship and, for the first time ever, the World Cup.
This was the most successful year in the history of English rugby. References and videos relating to England’s World Cup victory feature large in the displays.
This would be all very well, if simplistic, if the museum did not also aspire to tell the history of the sport from a global perspective. One gallery provides thumbnail stories of the beginnings of rugby in a wide range of countries across the world, and players and games involving other rugby nations are included in many displays.
Given that this is in essence a corporate museum and that Twickenham is one of the citadels of English nationalism and identity, this might be generous. But for an institution that aspires to be a World Rugby Museum it is nothing like enough, and even colonialist.
An objective analysis of the history of the game over the last century would, for example, acknowledge that it is the New Zealand All Blacks who have consistently been the world’s most successful rugby nation.
Taking a long view, the European teams have all too often been in the second tier of world rugby nations. On this hard truth the museum is silent.
As it is on the extraordinary contribution of the Pacific Islanders to the game worldwide. How has such a tiny population produced so many great players? And why do they play the game with a flair, skill and commitment that few northern hemisphere teams can match?
The academic and Plaid Cymru politician Adam Price has suggested that minority nations such as the Welsh excel in sport as a response to colonial occupation; sporting victories over England can be seen either as the legitimised protest of the colonised or, alternatively, as an opiate diversion from the fundamental political and social changes that are really needed.
Another historical reality – shamefully not acknowledged in the museum – is that England and the British and Irish Lions carried on playing full internationals with South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, when black rugby players were excluded from all South African teams.
In 1970, a group of students at my school petitioned the head to cancel a planned trip to see England play South Africa at Twickenham.
While acceding to our request, the head of our state school argued that what he called “miscegenation” (the mixing of different racial groups) was contrary to nature. Worldwide protests against apartheid in sport continued over many years.
Perhaps the English RFU is now embarrassed by this period in its history. Whatever the reason, the World Rugby Museum has space to describe how many pints of beer are sold at the stadium at a typical international (150,526) and the number of people who pass through Twickenham station on a match day (40,000), but not to acknowledge the protests.
The museum’s most engaging exhibits are those that, through a series of personal stories, show the contribution that the game can make at a grassroots level to fostering health and wellbeing.
In one display, Phil Mead of Lewes Rugby Football Club describes the impact on him of losing his mother when he was just 15, and the warmth and support of the club and its players in helping him to find a way through his grief and towards a more positive future.
The World Rugby Museum is at its best when it breaks free from being a corporate museum for the English RFU and speaks to its visitors of universal human experiences.
I just wish it had been more consistently brave and bold in addressing the global cultural, social and political context of the sport.
David Anderson is the director general of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
Until this year, my only visit to Twickenham was as a schoolchild in 1965. I have vivid memories of Rolls Royces parked outside before the match, their occupants enjoying hampers with smoked salmon and champagne. As a lifelong Ireland supporter, it has always been easy for me to dislike Twickenham.
There has been a museum of English rugby at Twickenham for some years. Few international rugby stadiums have a museum worthy of the name and, in general, they are not best in show. This is scarcely surprising.
The main purpose of the English Rugby Football Union (RFU) is to win international championships, not to create world-class museums. In any case, rugby games are in essence performances that frame collective emotion. Such experiences are particularly difficult to capture later through the medium of museum exhibits.
In Cardiff, the Welsh RFU (WRFU) – with the support of the Arts Council of Wales – has adopted an alternative strategy and embraced the arts.
This year, Owen Sheers, the WRFU’s writer in residence from 2011-12, gave readings from his new book, Calon: A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby, in the Welsh dressing room at the Millennium Stadium on the night before Wales’s international with France.
The World Rugby Museum has achieved a lot on a relatively small budget. Its interactive exhibits, which allow visitors to test selected rugby skills – such as scrummaging and line-out jumping – to their physical limits, are robustly designed and very popular.
The museum also offers engaging historical insights; one display reveals how little historical evidence there is to support the story that William Webb Ellis of Rugby School was the inventor of the game – if indeed there ever was one inventor.
But the budget pressures show through in the over-reliance in some galleries on long text panels, and the reuse of exhibits from earlier displays.
The refreshed galleries have a dual, and conflicted, identity. On the one hand, this is a museum of the history of rugby in England, for England fans.
Around 2003, England perfected a particular style of rugby of its own – not pretty, in the eyes of its opponents, but certainly effective. In that year, the team won the northern hemisphere Six Nations championship and, for the first time ever, the World Cup.
This was the most successful year in the history of English rugby. References and videos relating to England’s World Cup victory feature large in the displays.
This would be all very well, if simplistic, if the museum did not also aspire to tell the history of the sport from a global perspective. One gallery provides thumbnail stories of the beginnings of rugby in a wide range of countries across the world, and players and games involving other rugby nations are included in many displays.
Given that this is in essence a corporate museum and that Twickenham is one of the citadels of English nationalism and identity, this might be generous. But for an institution that aspires to be a World Rugby Museum it is nothing like enough, and even colonialist.
An objective analysis of the history of the game over the last century would, for example, acknowledge that it is the New Zealand All Blacks who have consistently been the world’s most successful rugby nation.
Taking a long view, the European teams have all too often been in the second tier of world rugby nations. On this hard truth the museum is silent.
As it is on the extraordinary contribution of the Pacific Islanders to the game worldwide. How has such a tiny population produced so many great players? And why do they play the game with a flair, skill and commitment that few northern hemisphere teams can match?
The academic and Plaid Cymru politician Adam Price has suggested that minority nations such as the Welsh excel in sport as a response to colonial occupation; sporting victories over England can be seen either as the legitimised protest of the colonised or, alternatively, as an opiate diversion from the fundamental political and social changes that are really needed.
Another historical reality – shamefully not acknowledged in the museum – is that England and the British and Irish Lions carried on playing full internationals with South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, when black rugby players were excluded from all South African teams.
In 1970, a group of students at my school petitioned the head to cancel a planned trip to see England play South Africa at Twickenham.
While acceding to our request, the head of our state school argued that what he called “miscegenation” (the mixing of different racial groups) was contrary to nature. Worldwide protests against apartheid in sport continued over many years.
Perhaps the English RFU is now embarrassed by this period in its history. Whatever the reason, the World Rugby Museum has space to describe how many pints of beer are sold at the stadium at a typical international (150,526) and the number of people who pass through Twickenham station on a match day (40,000), but not to acknowledge the protests.
The museum’s most engaging exhibits are those that, through a series of personal stories, show the contribution that the game can make at a grassroots level to fostering health and wellbeing.
In one display, Phil Mead of Lewes Rugby Football Club describes the impact on him of losing his mother when he was just 15, and the warmth and support of the club and its players in helping him to find a way through his grief and towards a more positive future.
The World Rugby Museum is at its best when it breaks free from being a corporate museum for the English RFU and speaks to its visitors of universal human experiences.
I just wish it had been more consistently brave and bold in addressing the global cultural, social and political context of the sport.
David Anderson is the director general of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
Project data
- Cost £300,000
- Main funder Rugby Football Union
- Exhibition and graphic design Imaginate Creative
- Exhibition installation Paragon Creative
- Graphic production BAF Graphics
- Photography Simon Derviller Photography
- Audiovisual production Ay-Pe
- Archive services Landscape Film and Television Productions
- Project consultants At Large; Colin Mulberg Consulting
