ABSTRACT
This was a society where there was a shortage of women, and where those who did marry very rarely did so before their late twenties. It was also a world where men were thrown together for long periods in intense relationships but where the taboo on homosexuality was strong. One possibility is that men starved of physical contact with other human beings were able to find it in rugby. This is not to say that the game was latently homosexual. It is simply to claim that most human beings need the affirmation of touching other people, that colonial men often could not obtain that affection from women and turned for support and intense fellowship to other men, and that rugby provided one place in which the tensions of their situation could be relieved. Men could quite legitimately touch each other - and they did so not merely in the scrum but also once the game was over. Thomas Eyton recalling in 1896 his earlier football days wrote: 'St. Jacob's oil, at first bought by the bottle, was afterwards procured by the case, and the pungent smell of this embrocation used to pervade our quarters; the spectacle afforded visitors of half-a-dozen men vigorously rubbing each other's legs etc., in the sitting room in our hotel must have been rather startling.' Rugby allowed colonial men a physical expression of mateship without shame or suspicion of deviancy. What makes this suggestion more pointed is the fact that rugby first flowered in another exclusively male community, the English public school.12
