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On Sunday night, the acclaimed documentary The Rugby Codebreakers will once again be shown on BBC Wales.

Here, in a column first published in 2018, presenter Carolyn Hitt tells the remarkable story of what she found when making the programme.

I grew up thinking rugby league was the enemy. Luring our noble Corinthian Welshmen away with the promise of filthy lucre, it was the code that stole my heroes and decimated my Wales team. They even took our captain. When Jonathan Davies went north it felt like a form of sporting bereavement.

But that’s the mindset of the rugby fan raised on union. It wasn’t until I went north myself that I discovered the story of the Welsh codebreakers was far more nuanced and complex.

Invited to trace 100 years of the Welsh rugby league player for a BBC Wales documentary, I followed in the stud marks of over 150 Welsh rugby union internationals and hundreds more uncapped players on an odyssey through the northern English heartland of the 13-man code.

It was a quest to find out why so many men gave up their dreams of playing for Wales by committing an act that was considered tantamount to treason.

Huddersfield, Halifax, Hull, Bradford, Leeds, Widnes, Salford, Wigan, St Helens…the journey took me through English club houses crammed with Welsh rugby memorabilia, into streets and roads and across bridges named after Welsh league legends and past a 10 foot statue of a Cardiff boy immortalised in a town in Greater Manchester.

I heard stories of Welshmen ostracised back home, idolised up north. I listened to tales of rugby espionage worthy of Cold War spies as intelligence was gathered on the greatest names in the Welsh union game, including Cliff Morgan, Gareth Edwards and Barry John. I saw grown men cry recalling the hurt the enmity between the two codes could create. And I discovered the hidden history of the great black Welsh players who were shamefully ignored here but given an opportunity in league almost 50 years before our union game capped its first man of colour.

As this testimony unfolded and my perception of the bitter union-league relationship was changed forever I realised this was as much a story of Welsh social history as sport, exploring the impact of class, racial prejudice and devastating economic change on the game at the heart of Welsh identity.

Rugby league itself, of course, was the product of a class war. In Huddersfield’s George Hotel I stood in the room which witnessed the sport’s Great Split of 1895. In the late 19th century rugby was a new and exciting game. Although increasingly a People’s Game, it was run by the public school-educated elite. England’s Rugby Football Union insisted it was strictly an amateur sport to be played for the love of the game and moral education.

But in the north of England and Wales, rugby was being played and enjoyed by largely working-class men. As they entertained the masses, they were missing work to play so naturally felt they should be paid.

The leading northern clubs suggested a system of payments to compensate the player for taking time off work – called Broken Time but the RFU were having none of it. So the northern clubs felt that they had no alternative but to break away from their middle class masters.

As the game split, the battle lines were drawn in rugby’s civil war. The industrial working class in the north and the establishment elite of the south. The Welsh Rugby Union were caught in the crossfire. You might imagine culturally Wales would align itself with its working-class rugby brethren in Lancashire and Yorkshire rather than England’s Oxbridge blazerati.

But joining the Northern Union – which would become known as rugby league – would effectively mean the end of international contests and also the game wasn’t entirely working class in Wales, as rugby historian Professor Tony Collins explains:

“The real reason why Wales didn’t join the Northern Union was that although it was a very working class game in Wales it was also a cross-class game. It encompassed all the classes in Wales and that was one of the things the Welsh game was very proud of. A significant portion of the game was the Welsh middle classes, privately educated people who’d been to Llandovery, Lampeter and other private schools in Wales and that meant they were linked to the English Rugby Union in a way that many of the northern clubs weren’t. The leadership of Welsh rugby decided to defer to the English.”

Defer to the English and not get paid for playing? Well not quite. From the gold watches and medals awarded to Welsh players in the 1900s to the boot money of later decades, the rules on “blindside renumeration” could always be bent by those in power. But for the ordinary men who played the game, posters on the wall of every club - detailing union’s draconian code - warned them that even talking to a rugby league scout would mean a life ban from the union game. Not to mention being shunned by their local community.

This wasn’t an issue for Wales’ educated grammar-school boys who could afford to play the game for purely recreational purposes but for manual workers hit hard by the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s a talent for rugby could be the only way of putting food on the table.

The player drain to rugby league in these desperate times was huge. “Seventy Welsh internationals went north between the two World Wars,” says historian Professor Gareth Williams. “Perhaps as many as 900 uncapped players went north. Is it any surprise that Wales didn’t win the Triple Crown between 1911 and 1950?”

I found the economic context of Welsh rugby union failure one of the most fascinating things to come out of the programme. We vilified those who switched codes but when you consider the peak periods for losing players coincide with the most devastating times for Welsh industry – the interwar Depression and the 1980s – how could anyone blame the men who used their sporting gifts to secure their families’ future?

From a sporting perspective, it also made me wonder if we are an exceptional rugby nation after all. In the darkest times for union, there has been great success in league. The Welsh league team of the 1930s won three European championships on the bounce.

Between 1989 and 1995 the Welsh rugby union team finished bottom of the Five Nations table five times yet the generation that went north in that period took Wales to the semi-final of the 1995 Rugby League World Cup. So arguably we’ve had consistent achievement through 100 years of Welsh rugby but we’ve chosen to only celebrate success in one code.

But the most damaging sin of omission is Wales’ ignorance of its rich history of great black rugby players. They didn’t just go north for the money, they went because, against a backdrop of institutionalised racism, they were never going to get the opportunity to express their talents in the union game.

As Terry Michael, who left Tiger Bay for Halifax in 1965, told us: “I would have loved to play for Cardiff and I dreamt of playing for Wales, but it was never going to happen. A black man was never going to play for Wales in those days. You can’t let it eat at you – you do the next best thing and go north.”

Black players overlooked for international union selection in Wales became icons of league. Men like Roy Francis, Johnny Freeman, Billy Boston, Colin Dixon and Clive Sullivan

Raised in Brynmawr, where he turned out for his local side, Roy Francis left Wales as a teenager in 1937, became the first black man to play for Great Britain and the first to coach a professional team after his retirement from Hull. According to Professor Tony Collins, such were his revolutionary coaching methods he deserves to be as well known in Wales as Carwyn James.

Billy Boston was the most feared and revered player of them all, breaking all try-scoring records with his feats immortalised in a ten feet bronze statue that stands proudly in Wigan, equal to that of Gareth Edwards in Cardiff. There’s one of him in Wembley too – but nothing in his city of birth.

Splott-born Clive Sullivan became the first black man to captain Wales and Great Britain in Rugby League in 1971, making history as the first black man to captain any British team more than 20 years before Paul Ince skippered the English football team. Sullivan went on to lead Great Britain to World Cup victory.

When Sullivan died of cancer in 1985 aged just 42, the city of Hull declared a national day of mourning. They held him in such high regard that Hull’s main approach road between the Humber Bridge and the city centre was renamed Clive Sullivan Way. Last year, as Hull enjoyed the mantle of the City of Culture, there was an acclaimed play – entitled Sully – written and performed in his honour.

I met his widow Rosalyn who told me how proud Clive was of his Welsh heritage. But have we returned the favour? She smiled and said: “I don’t think Wales had realised what’s been achieved in the north by the Welsh players – I don’t think it’s been celebrated. I’m sad for Clive, I’m sad for Wales and I’m sad for the Welsh lads that have done so well here and the Welsh people don’t realise what talent they’ve got.”

(Image: copyright unknown)

Terry Michael agrees: “It’s diabolical really. When you think about all that talent that has come up here – Sullivan, Boston, Dixon, Freeman – and that’s excluding the white boys that came up as well. They’re all part of it as well and I think it’s shocking they are not recognised. They’ve honoured Boston and that was long overdue. Freeman unfortunately has gone, Dixon is no longer with us, Sullivan is no longer with us. It’s sad. They’ve missed the opportunity to embrace those lads.”

Terry pauses. His eyes fill with tears and he puts his hand to his heart. “It hurts me here,” he says. “Yeah it hurts me.”

The north of England has never forgotten these players. They cherish them to this day. In Wales, however, we have chosen to ignore them. It’s time to heal that hurt and reclaim these men as true Welsh sporting heroes.

The Rugby Codebreakers is presented by Carolyn Hitt, produced by Alan Golding and directed by Tariq Ali. It is a Hoi Polloi production for BBC Wales and can be seen again on Sunday night at10.30pm on BBC One Wales