ABSTRACT
1. The culmination of the developments discussed in the last two chapters was the bifurcation—the ‘splitting up’—of Rugby into separate amateur and professional segments. This process was given institutional form in 1895 when twenty-two ‘gate-taking’ clubs, eleven from Yorkshire, nine from Lancashire and two from Cheshire, resigned their membership of the RFU and established the ‘Northern Rugby Football Union’. The present chapter is concerned with the events through which ‘the split’ occurred. However, since other sports in late nineteenth century Britain, most notably cricket and soccer, also experienced crises over amateurism and professionalism but managed to survive intact with nationally unified rules and an organizational framework incorporating both amateurs and professionals, it will be necessary later to undertake a comparative analysis of the tensions generated in Rugby in that period and the similar tensions generated in cricket and soccer. Such an analysis is necessary to show why, in a period of general conflict over amateurism and professionalism in British sport, it was only Rugby which underwent a fully-fledged amateur-professional split. More precisely, it is only by means of a comparative analysis of that sort that we shall be able to penetrate the fundamental social processes which led to the bifurcation of Rugby. We shall undertake such a comparison in the next chapter. For the moment, we have set ourselves the more modest task of describing the events through which this process occurred.
