THE massive operation to distribute Heritage Certificates to well over 1,000 men who have played senior rugby league for Oldham — and thanks for that to Michael Turner especially and to both the Heritage Trust and the Players’ Association — focuses the mind on several things, namely club history, the longevity of rugby league in Oldham, the guys who blazed the trail and the fact that the players in the early years were players like they are today and far more than names in a record book.
I don’t know about you, writes ROGER HALSTEAD, but I find it’s natural to think of the hundreds of players I’ve known personally as somehow “different” to those who, to me, are merely names in a book. Wrong, I know, and its both refreshing and realistic to be reminded that the legends of yesteryear were more than just rugby players, more than “names in a book” as it were, and were just like the rest of us with full-time jobs, with families, with children and the like. Times may have been different back then, but human beings were pretty much like they are now.
More than anything, contact with a direct relative of one of those legends, R L (Dickie) Thomas, focuses the mind; reminds us of what our great club is all about; and gives us a clear indication that we owe it to our Oldham Rugby forefathers to keep the flag flying, to do our best for the club at all times and — as they did to pride ourselves on membership of, and support for, a club like ours and all those who have gone before us.
I am indebted to Michael Turner for the following info about R L Thomas, whom he described as a true Oldham legend and a club captain for two of his many seasons at he club, for which he made 363 appearances as well as playing five games for Lancashire, his adopted county.
Richard Llewellyn ‘Dickie’ Thomas (Heritage Number 43) was a mainstay of the Oldham team, said Michael, in the 1890s and the early 1900s. Born in 1877, he played his first rugby for the Crusaders team in Newport, South Wales, in the 1891-92 season. He then went on to join the premier team in the area, Newport FC, in 1895 and was soon creating a big impression at full-back.
He joined Oldham in 1897 and after a few games in the threequarters he was switched to full-back for the Roughyeds and was dominant in that position for the next decade, He was club captain in 1905-6 and 1906-7 and, as such, would have skippered the side in the 1907 Championship Final and the same year’s Challenge Cup Final, both lost on consecutive Saturdays to Halifax and Warrington respectively.
Michael also said he had sent R L Thomas’s Heritage Certificate to his grandson in Switzerland, Alan Smith, who later emailed me this:
“Dickie joined OFC in 1897. He had played RU for his hometown club, Newport, and was on the fringe of the Wales team, having played in the East vs West trial match. He came to Oldham at the age of 19 and met his future wife, Edith, an Oldham girl. They had three children, RLT (2nd) who was an Oldham committee man in the 1950s, daughter Ivy who married Jack Read and his younger daughter, Edith, who was my mother. Dickie’s wife sadly died from TB when my mother was only nine years old. Dickie himself died in 1943 just three months after I was born.
“I was brought up in Clarksfield; we lived a couple of streets away from the Read family, Jack being my uncle. After obtaining a degree in Biochemistry, I worked for a pharmaceutical company and lived in Ulverston having married Elaine, an Oldham girl, in 1966. In 1981 I was offered a job by a Swiss company based in Basel. We moved there with our two daughters and our Springer spaniel. We have been resident in Switzerland ever since and now live in a semi-rural village called Utzigen, about 8 miles east of Bern where our younger daughter and grandchildren live.
“After our move to Switzerland, my father sent me a copy of the Oldham Chronicle every week with a report on Oldham’s match. I had started watching rugby as a young boy when my cousins (Jack and Allan), sons of Jack Read, played amateur rugby league for Greenacres and Royton. My Watersheddings debut was in 1953 just after Dick Cracknell joined. It was in 1954 when I really became an avid follower and had the chance to see that great team. I have lots of happy memories of great matches, tinged of course, with all the Challenge Cup disappointments. It wasn’t until the 1990s that we went to Wembley for the first time, unfortunately not to see Oldham, but nevertheless a great Wigan team.
One final thought. At the George Hotel in Huddersfield in 1895, clubs voted to split from the Rugby Football Union following the row on broken time payments. If that vote to form the Northern Union had not taken place it is pretty certain that R L Thomas would never have ventured north to Oldham with the lure of semi-professional rugby. He would never have met his future wife, they wouldn’t have had their three children including my mother. In other words, but for that historic vote at the George Hotel I (and Dickie’s other descendants) would not exist!! A sobering thought!”
There were three versions of R L Thomas — the original legend, the son who was on the club committee and his son, the top-class rugby league referee (Alan Smith’s cousin), who died in 2001, aged 81
That’s what Heritage is all about. It’s about our history and the men and women who went before us. Long may those certificates go flying out across the world.
