With the Black & Whites having originally being scheduled to take on Toronto Wolfpack in their first-ever transatlantic game this weekend, Club Historian Bill Dalton takes a look at the club’s international travel throughout its history.
The Coronavirus lockdown has scuppered our first Super League visit to the Lamport Staium in Toronto this weekend.
Whilst we have come to accept travelling abroad for an annual fixture against the Catalan Dragons, it might come as a surprise to realise just where our tackling arms have reached over the last 150 years.
Some of our very earliest fixtures were played against clubs in Lincolnshire, generally under Association Rules, and a tour in October 1882 took in games against London Falcons and Clapham Rovers, but it was not until January 1885 that the first journey over the Pennines took us to Rochdale Hornets.
The following month, the annual club tour took in fixtures against Newport and Llanelli in Wales. Scottish opposition (Gala-Melrose) was encountered on Holderness Road in January 1886 and the famous Swansea club visited us a month later, whilst Hull visited Whiskeyville in December 1886 to play a West of Scotland XV. In November 1887, the first games outside of the British mainland took place in Dublin against Lansdowne and Dublin University.
The Autumn of 1889 brought the famous Maori team to our shores and Hull welcomed them on 24 October. Hull were the only team to play them twice and not suffer defeat.
Some of these fixtures were replicated during the years leading up to the ‘split’ from the Rugby Union but it would not be until 24 March 1934 that Hull first met French opposition when the fledgling France XIII beat us on the Boulevard 23-26 – the first victory by a French team. Jean Galia brought his Villeneuve team on 13 September 1934 and Hull gained revenge 24-20.
During the early years after WW2 when the French Rugby League were re-forming after having their assets stripped by the Nazi-puppet Vichy Government, Champions Marseilles visited The Boulevard on 18 May 1950 and Celtic de Paris also came over a year later as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations.
The French National team also came to the Boulevard in November 1953 to play Other Nationalities in the International Championship – a game which has gone down in folklore as “The Battle of The Boulevard”. They subsequently took on Great Britain there in a couple of test matches in the 80’s.
Hull made two trips to Cardiff in 1949 (a friendly) and in 1951-52 to engage Cardiff during their short lived stint in the Northern Rugby League.
After Hull had won the Rugby League Championship in May 1956, a European Club Championship tournament was organised for the respective champions and runners-up to compete for on a home-and-away basis, so Hull visited Albi and Carcassonne in November 1956 and the visit was reciprocated at Easter 1957. Albi secured a 19-19 Draw which was the only point Hull conceded, therefore becoming European Champions.
In May 1979, Hull were on the brink of achieving the unprecedented feat of winning every league match in the season. However, there was a final match to play – against runners-up Hunslet, but not before a player’s holiday in France where they took on a regional side in Tonneins, winning 12-5 in a bruising encounter.
Four years further on, after winning the Championship, on this day in 1983 coincidentally, the club staged a tour of the Antipodes, where the team took on Auckland, New Zealand Maori, Newcastle NSW and a NSW District XIII.
The Challenge Cup draw in 1984 took us to Ninian Park, Cardiff to take on the short-lived Blue Dragons, and a team from Auckland visited The Boulevard as part of a British Tour in 1987.
We would move into a new Millenium before foreign opposition faced us again outside of the cyclical tour games against Australia and New Zealand, as the Kiwis provided the opposition in the final game on The Boulevard in October 2002.
Hull first encountered Catalan Dragons in a pre-season friendly in January 2006. Since then, the teams have met on 40 occasions. Hull have played at four different venues on their travels to France; Stade Aimee Giral and Stade Gilbert Brutus in Perpignan, Stade de le’Amitie in Narbonne and at Stade Meditteraneo in the wonderful town of Beziers.
Last of all, thus far, was the memorable occasion in Wollongong and Sydney in February 2018 when Hull and Wigan played the first-ever Super League match outside of Europe, before meeting NRL opposition in the form of St George Illawarra Dragons in a friendly clash at the ANZ Stadium.
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