Memorabilia

From a Gareth Edwards jersey sold for £240k and one of Dave Gallaher’s fetching £180k, to a Subbuteo-style tactics board from 1950 and a bespoke picture of a weeping kangaroo, memorabilia linked to the British & Irish Lions can be a big, and intriguing, business. Just don’t call it merchandise.

Locked away in secure storage, at a location that cannot be disclosed, lies a collection of the world’s most magnificent rugby memorabilia. Picture match tickets from games you never knew took place, beautifully illustrated programmes and, the most prized possessions of them all, match-worn jerseys previously donned by icons of the game. 

The unit, a treasure trove for oval-ball worshippers, belongs to Dai Richards, an obsessive collector and founder of Rugby Relics, the world’s leading supplier of rugby union memorabilia. “We have to keep some items under very tight security, because they’re just too valuable, that’s why I keep the location secret,” explains Dai. “We’ve got an office in Swansea, and we have other secure units with more ‘day-to-day’ memorabilia, closer to where we work.”

Dai started Rugby Relics in 1978, first as a hobby, buying and selling fascination, making some money here and there, but proving to be quite good at it. He began to trade full-time in memorabilia in 1991, taking his company limited in 2003. For Port Talbot-born Dai, it’s not only moved his career in a new direction – he previously served in the Territorial Army and was a house husband for five years – but it has taken him all over the world. “I used to travel every year to New Zealand to buy stuff, combining it with a race over there called the Coast to Coast which went from one side of New Zealand to the other,” explains Dai. “I spent five to six weeks in New Zealand and I went nine times between 1992 and 2003. It was lovely, it was such a great time.

“I don’t do those trips anymore,” he adds. “I’m not the richest man on the planet or even in my village. I started the business buying and selling stuff so that I could afford to buy more stuff; now it’s how I make my living so I have to look at things in a business sense and I can’t be buying stuff on a whim.

“The biggest individual item sale I have ever had was a 1906 Springboks signed photograph. That team was one of the best ever to tour in Britain: they only lost to Scotland. It sold for £10,000, and it was bought as a birthday present for a prominent former rugby player, that’s as much as I can say.” 

Memorabilia is far from the only thing Dai has going on in his life. He enjoyed a remarkable career as a sportsman, competing as a Welsh international in cyclo-cross, duathlon, triathlon (in which he also competed for Britain), mountain biking, mountain running, and marathon kayaking, and was the world champion in the veteran quadrathlon in 2000. In a Welsh Sport Magazine interview from December 2009, he was even dubbed “Wales’ Fittest Man”. Fitness was an obsession, just as his new job is today. “But that’s just what I’m like; lots of people who are into rugby collecting are obsessive to an extent.”

The collecting of rugby memorabilia, or sports memorabilia in general, is regularly pigeon-holed as a quirky, overly-expensive hobby. But it is a world where those with a vague interest in items of rugby’s yesteryear can easily be sucked in, and quickly grow sympathetic to it, through perusing some of the fine, sprawling collections which have taken years to build. 

Dai’s collection varies, but he currently has around 500,000 items, varying from clothing to autographed team sheets. “Every time I buy a collection, I only sell between five and twenty per cent of what I end up with, so there is naturally an accumulating effect which happens over time. I’ve gone into auctions before where I only want one item in a collection of 500 items, so I buy the whole lot.”

Items from past Lions tours are a mainstay of Dai’s collection. One recent Rugby Relics auction included myriad numbers from rugby’s famed tourists, including a Disney-produced drinks tray from 1966, on which the Lions are depicted as cartoonish dogs involved in a game against the All Blacks; a programme from when the British Lions played Otago in 1971; and a picture of a weeping Kangaroo drawn by an Australian artist after the team from the British Isles triumphed down under in 1904. The programme and picture both sold, reaching prices of £10 and £90 respectively. The Disney drinks tray, with its guide-price range of £50-£60, did not sell and remains in Dai’s collection. “I tend to sell more Lions stuff than anything else and generally Lions items command the greatest prices, even over early All Black stuff. I’ve got a museum side of my business and so I need to consider which items will interest people the most, and these tend to be either items which are quirky or high quality.”

Memorabilia from Lions tours often has a distinct quality, more so than other relics from international rugby. Ever since the team from the British Isles was first labelled ‘the Lions’ by a journalist during their tour to South Africa in 1924, people involved in the administrative side have latched on to the opportunity to create tangible objects to commemorate the team and further the mission of the early Lions tours – namely, to spread rugby union around the world. 

When the Lions toured New Zealand and Australia in 1930, small pendants and pin badges, each embossed with a roaring lion, were made up and given to the players, who proceeded to hand them out as souvenirs to fans and opposition players – in doing so beginning a tradition which carried on for decades. While jerseys and other miscellaneous items from tours pre-1938 exist, and are very much hot property in the rugby collecting world, the majority of valuable items circulating today are from the tours of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. 

This is all very familiar to Phil Atkinson, former head of the Rugby Memorabilia Society, president of Rhymney RFC, and someone who has literally written the book on it: Rugby Union Memorabilia: A History and Collectors Guide.

He also edits Touchlines, the thrice-yearly magazine distributed to members of the Rugby Memorabilia Society. A colourful, 32-page affair, Touchlines’ feature list includes formats such as “one I have and one I want” (where members both show off items in their collection and seek to grow them), and this year it has been celebrating the centenary of 1924, a busy rugby year with a Lions tour in South Africa and an All Blacks tour to Britain. 

Tucked away at the back of the magazine is an important double-page spread featuring the leading rugby prices from auction houses. In the most recent edition, Graham Price’s Lions jersey from 1980 is advertised for £4,200 in the Mullock-Jones April Rugby Auction. “There are dedicated Lions collectors, some who concentrate on one tour, others who will pick up anything to do with the Lions,” explains Phil in his booming, Welsh baritone. “You can, ideally, get items from a former player himself,” he adds. “The players have got the stuff that other people haven’t. They’ve got things that they were given on tour: a signed ball from a match, a man of the match award, ashtrays were a huge deal in the 50s and 60s.

“We sold Bryn Meredith’s memorabilia, the great Welsh hooker and three times Lion in 1955, 1959 and 1962. All of his Welsh and Lions stuff was in an old suitcase in his mercifully dry garage. He said to us, ‘Nobody will want this’. 

“We said, ‘Oh yes, they will! Let us have it!’. People not only loved the stuff that was in the suitcase, particularly the jerseys and the match ball and the ashtray, but they liked the suitcase itself. Meredith was amazed that it sold well. He said to us, ‘Good heavens, I’ve even got this old duffel bag that I was going to throw in the bin’. And I said, ‘Don’t throw it in the bin. They’ll want that as well. Don’t be absurd’. Well, it made hundreds.”

Terminology is everything in these circles, as there is a crucial distinction between memorabilia and merchandise. Memorabilia refers to items which were ‘there’, used personally by players or fans at a game or on tour. This could be a programme, an award, a jersey, a dinner menu, an autograph, an invitation to play for the Lions, or a Lions cap itself. Whereas “merchandise”, a word rather spat out by rugby collectors, refers to anything that, either at the time or subsequently, has been made to sell and make money. These are the kind of items sold by the official Lions store, like modern replica jerseys, mugs, and keyrings. 

“So, you might have a Lions jersey worn by Lewis Moody, that’s excellent,” explains Phil. “An invitation for Lewis Moody to go to Buckingham Palace with England after the World Cup, that’s great.

“But what we don’t want,” he says, pausing, “what we have no interest in is when the official store gets Lewis Moody to sign 100 or 200 shirts, in virtually illegible scribble, which are similar to, or in some instances identical to, the quality of what was worn on the day.

“Sometimes, if you’re a real collector, as we would deem ourselves, you feel a bit sorry for the people who pay big sums of money for something that has been signed by the people who were there, but often signed after they were there. For something that was signed by a player not because they wore it, but because they’re going to get a cut of the proceeds from jerseys that have been sold for £250.” 

As you can imagine, the differentiation between merchandise and memorabilia leads to serious questions concerning authenticity. The high prices being paid for rugby memorabilia worldwide and the advent of people selling items online in the last two decades has led to the production of “fakes”, a dreaded term in the rugby memorabilia world. Products are now picked up from eBay and online auctions, where the threat of fakes necessitates verification processes. These are as granular as one might expect from dedicated collectors who will leave nothing to chance. “As there are so many replicas or fibbers around, people have started to analyse the individual embroidery. This will include the player’s appearance number and sometimes the game. But these days, you’ve got blood jerseys, spare jerseys, second-half jerseys, so you’ve got to be careful. 

“If you were somebody who only wants a jersey which has been worn in the game, then you need to know the player, or it needs to be very authentic-looking with mud marks on it for example. Some people have even forged the embroidery, they’ve got a firm who will mock them up from a replica kit. But it’s very hard sometimes to get the font dead right. There are people who are expert enough to know the right size of the font.

“People who really are ace collectors will know whether or not it’s the right label, whether or not it’s the right size, whether or not it’s got the GPS pouch in the back, they will tell you, and they will send it back. Quite rightly too.”

The prevalence of ingenuity and fake items in the rugby collecting world is not so surprising when one considers the exceptional prices that rare pieces of memorabilia command. A Springboks jersey from the 1962 Lions tour of South Africa (JBG Thomas Collection) sold in the aforementioned autumn 2022 Rugby Relics auction, having had a guide price range from £800-£1,500, for £2,600. The fact that this particular item was so expensive is unsurprising, given memorabilia from South African tours tends to hold its value and rarity more than items from tours to New Zealand or Australia. This is mostly because, in the mid-twentieth century, fewer players travelled on Lions tours and fewer people attended the games in South Africa.

Programmes from 1971, the year of the iconic and only Lions victory in New Zealand, are less valuable than programmes from the 1962 and 1968 Lions tours in South Africa which are sold for hundreds of pounds. This relates to the size of the available market, which can be hugely affected by external factors. 

But one distinct threat to the market looms large over rugby collectors. “The market can be skewed temporarily by one person. It has been skewed over the last ten years by Nigel Wray [former Saracens chairman],” explains Phil. “He has a magnificent collection, you can see a lot of it at Saracens’ stadium.

“Nigel loves what we would call ‘firsts, lasts and onlys’ – very unique items. So, there was no doubt that he was likely to get the Dave Gallaher jersey in 2015 for more than £180,000. We used to fantasise on what price would be paid for Gareth Edwards’ jersey and it was bought for £240,000, once again by Nigel Wray. 

“For somebody like him, there’s a lot of respect weirdly, because we know that he genuinely loves it. And if you’ve got the money, then great. If he has a temporary uplift on the market, then you can sell a valuable jersey you own and make a load of money off it, that’s great. But, on the other hand, if you are a buyer, and most collectors are buyers, you’re not so happy when there’s an uplift in prices. People are so competitive, especially in the jersey world. There are people who are very keen to get the best collection by whatever means possible.”

The ‘who has the best Lions collection?’ question is open to interpretation and would lead to a debate most collectors would generally consider beneath them. That said, the Twickenham-based World Rugby Museum (WRM) has been exhibiting memorabilia since 1979 and has more than 41,000 recorded objects, 16,500 pieces of archival material and 11,300 photographs. It would certainly consider itself the home of rugby memorabilia. 

Phil McGowan began working at the WRM in 2007 as the education officer and became the museum’s lead curator in 2016. This was just before the museum closed to facilitate the redevelopment of Twickenham’s East Stand, meaning he had the arduous task of packing up all the collection and taking them off site, before designing the current museum and bringing all the items back.

The WRM’s collection is sprawling and, in terms of quality and rarity, unparalleled in the rugby memorabilia world. However, Phil recognises the challenges that face a modern rugby museum curator. “It can be a bit of a scrap to get the best and most historically significant items,” he explains, “especially now there are lots of very committed, enthusiastic collectors out there. That’s partly our fault for starting a museum and being successful, because now everybody wants what we’ve got. But knowing those people, they love the history, and they’re very protective over the heritage of the game, so the items are in safe hands. 

“In terms of our collecting, the vast majority of our collections have come through donations and are often from the families or descendants of players. They treasure that material and want it to be looked after and enjoyed by other people.

“We’ve got more material than we can ever put on display, so you’ve got to work out a framework for what an exhibition is going to be focused upon. I’ve got a working knowledge of the collection, but we’ve got more than 40,000 objects. So, every day, I find something that I didn’t know was there, and I’ve been with the museum for seventeen years. I will probably continue to do so until I leave.”

The WRM is located just above the enormous club shop in Twickenham’s (or, the Allianz Stadium’s) East Stand. The RFU’s presence in England’s national rugby stadium is palpable, similar to the presence of the FA at Wembley Stadium, but the museum strives to maintain control of what they exhibit.

“We, as in the World Rugby Museum, have full editorial control of everything in our collection,” continues Phil. “The RFU have never told us not to do something or to pursue something in a particular angle, because the RFU is proud that it has a respectable museum at the home of rugby. And if it was to get involved like that, then that would contravene our ability to be responsible curators. To its credit, the RFU has just never done that.”

Housed in the museum’s special presentation section is Phil’s latest curatorial output, The History of The British and Irish Lions exhibition. It has a cinema-style space screening grainy, grungy footage of old Lions games, and plenty of room to display jerseys, like the one from 1888 donated by the family of Alfred Peter Penketh, and other niche memorabilia, like the stuffed lion mascot [known as BIL] that Maro Itoje was the keeper of during the 2017 tour to New Zealand. However, the WRM makes it its business to provide thorough and comprehensive histories, so don’t expect a mere re-telling of famous Lions games or stories. 

“Everybody knows about the tours in the 70s, and they’re great, with some amazing characters, so obviously we’ll cover that. But the same is true of the tours of the 1890s that nobody alive remembers. Our opportunity is to point out how interesting they were as well and talk about some of the fun things that happened.

“The people who sit in my office and our researchers, we talk about the 1920s like they were yesterday. We probably know a bit more about them than we do some of the more recent seasons. But yeah, that’s what museums are for.”

The archives of the WRM are expansive: picture countless rows of library-style wheel-out shelves, each housing record books, tickets, programmes, jerseys and other treasures. They once housed a tactics board which was used on the 1950 British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand and Australia. The board has the look of an old Subbuteo set and includes fifteen miniature Lions lining up against miniature All Blacks, posts, corner flags and a referee. The players and coaches would have used it to develop tactics on the long journey to New Zealand.

In the archives, as Phil proudly shows off old pictures snapped by Lions players from early twentieth century tours, the conversation turns to curation and the decision around what to show to the museum’s visitors. “There have always been match tickets, and while there have not always been programmes, they started pretty early as well. People would collect tickets and programmes and keep them as a reminder of the game. Sports collecting really began in that way. 

“When players were selected to play for the Lions,” continues Phil, “they were going overseas, possibly for the first time in their lives, and visited places they’ve never been before. Naturally, they behaved like tourists, picking up
things to show off to people back home. 

“For a century, when these teams visited South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, they played rugby, but they also visited famous sites and sent postcards home. They collected travel brochures, they took photographs, made their own video recordings, so they were the first collectors as well, and some of their items have ended up with the museum several years after the players have passed away.”

Such has been the growth of the Lions into what it is today that for collectors, this means everything. “The Lions tend to be central to any conversation around the global rugby calendar thanks to the novelty of the tours,” explains Phil. “It is fair to say that items from Lions tours are, for many collectors, really the pinnacle of rugby memorabilia.” 

Story by Scott Duke-Giles

Pictures by Legacy + Art

This extract was taken from issue 28 of Rugby.
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