‘Rusty’:
The Remarkable Life of a  ‘Wallaby’ who became a ‘Lion’

In July this year (2025) The British and Irish Lions as holders, will compete for ‘The Tom Richards Cup’, when they play Australia in the three match rugby union test series ‘down under’.

The trophy, which was first introduced for the 2001 series, is named after the Australian Rugby player Tom Richards; but who was he and why does the cup bear his name?

Tom Richards known as ‘Rusty’ (due to the colour of his hair) was born in northern New South Wales (NSW) in 1882  the son of a  Cornish father who had arrived in Australia in 1868, during the ‘Gold Rush’ (it caused a huge influx of people from overseas when gold was first discovered in NSW in 1851) but the family moved to Queensland when he was as a young boy and Rusty began playing ‘football’ due to the influence of his older brother Bill, who would go onto to play in five tests for Australia, which included the 1904 series against The British Isles Rugby team.

Rusty began his rugby career with ‘The Charters Towers Natives’, who had amongst their ranks Henry Collinge Speakman , who had been a member of the first British Isles rugby team to tour in 1888 and had subsequently stayed and who within a few years, was coaching northern Queensland with great success.

Rusty showed huge promise and was duly selected to play in a representative match for Queensland’s ‘Next Fifteen’ against NSW in 1905, before the whole family moved to Johannesburg in South Africa.

He continued his rugby apprenticeship by playing for Transvaal in the Currie Cup (South Africa’s (SA) premier domestic competition, which was first played for in 1892), but was considered not to be eligible for the SA tour to the UK, so he decided to travel to Britain anyway where he settled in the west country , playing for both Bristol and Gloucester before returning to Australia in 1907 in the hope of being selected for his country prior to the 1908 tour to England.

Selected as a ‘breakaway forward’, Rusty made his way back in 1908 and found himself playing in the ‘ Olympic Final’ of the rugby competition in London in late October where, due to a lack of interest from most of the other rugby playing nations, only two teams had entered; Australia played Cornwall (the county of his father’s birth who were representing Great Britain ) in a very one sided match, which saw The Australians win by  32-3 at The White City Stadium , where due to thick fog they kept losing the ball in the Olympic swimming pool which was adjacent to the rugby pitch.

There was one highlight however, as F.B Wilson of the ‘Daily Mirror’ reported:

Tom Richard’s try was a beauty. Coming along at full speed he jumped some four feet in the air, took the ball high and raced on between the posts with no one within twenty yards of him.

The Daily Telegraph described him as,

The cleverest forward in the world today.

However, despite the fact that the ‘Wallabies’ (the players chose their nickname for the tour and it stuck ) had won Australia’s only gold medal of the games, the victory did not really excite the team and Rusty didn’t even bother to attend the ceremony, as he felt that the match had been ‘a sham’ due to the poor standard of the opposition.

Cornwall represented Great Britain because they were the reigning ‘County Champions’ in England and were chosen by the RFU as the best available team due to the British Isles tour of New Zealand, which clashed with the games in London.

Described as a ‘fast versatile and opportunistic breakaway forward, with a natural rugby brain’, he played against England and Wales, scoring a try in the 9-6 defeat at Cardiff Arms Park, but returned to Australia a year later where he coached and played for Charters Towers and North Queensland.

In 1910 Rusty journeyed back to South Africa to work as a mine manager, which happened to coincide with the visit of the British Isles squad captained by Dr Tom Smyth of Newport and Ireland, who found themselves ‘short of players’ due to the injuries incurred as a result of the gruelling tour schedule; they would play 24 matches over a four month period and needed reinforcements, so due to his British connections the suggestion was that he should be asked to join the touring party.

In mid July Rusty received a letter inviting him to join the British squad and was drafted in for the match against The Cape Colony, which the tourists lost 19-0, however his performance was widely praised and against Transvaal in the next match, he scored ‘a fine try after a combination which completely nonplussed the home defence.’

Rusty was duly selected for the first test (a 14-10 defeat) making him only the second player to date, to have played for both Australia and The British Isles and the only player born in Australia to do so.

The Englishman Blair Swannell (who was awarded the Military Cross at Gallipoli) had played for The British Isles on their tours of Australia in 1899 and Australasia in 1904 and then played for Australia a year later on a tour of New Zealand;  it appeared that he had been overlooked, but after a campaign by his great nephew to honour his memory, a decision has now been made to award ‘The Player of the Match’ medal to the player who ‘best exemplifies skill, courage and commitment’, in the match between the invitational Australia and New Zealand side and the Lions in Adelaide on  July 12^th.

In the second test in 1910, the British XV shocked the home team and fans by winning 8-3 with Rusty, ‘conspicuous the whole time for consistent work in the scrum and the loose’, but having been named in the starting XV for the deciding test, he was surprisingly ‘dropped’ at the last minute, which the hosts won convincingly by 21-5 and was described in the media as, ‘a bad tactical blunder’; Rusty watched from the touchline astounded by his late omission, but never ever discussed his feelings in public.

Rusty rarely mentioned in later life, that he had played for The British XV, but when pushed, he was critical of the management and quality of some of the players he played alongside despite feeling very pleased that he had contributed to the victory in the second test.

He returned to Australia and played for Manly in Sydney, which began his long association with the area and was selected for a tour of North America in 1912; the team would be called ‘The Warathas’ rather than the Wallabies, but to all intents and purposes, this was an Australian representative team who would play 13 matches, culminating in an ‘unofficial test’ against an ‘American All-Star team’, which in a very close match the tourists eventually won 12-8 in front of 10,000 screaming fans.

After losing all their games in Canada, where teams had been reinforced by British imports, which included several international players, most of the squad headed home, but Rusty had other plans.

He decided to head back to Britain and while representing ‘The East Midlands Counties ’ in France, he stayed on and played for Toulouse also helping to train the French team for its match against Wales in Paris in the five nations championship of 1913 (Wales winning 11-8), however with war looming on the horizon, he returned to Australia and after retiring from playing due to a chronic ankle injury, he joined ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ as a sports writer.

At the outbreak of war, he enlisted in ‘The Army Medical Corps’ and was sent to Egypt in October 1914 with the 1^st Field Ambulance as a stretcher-bearer, where he would spend several months before being sent to help the British by invading the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, where the Australian soldiers were to be used as a ‘diversionary force’ to distract the enemy in readiness for later invasion by the British.

Rusty was mentioned in ‘divisional orders’ for acts of gallantry on the battlefield, but throughout this time all he wanted was to fight, so in 1916 he returned to Egypt en route to The Western Front in France; he would be commissioned as a second lieutenant and in May 1917 he led a 19 man ‘bombing party’ on a raid which would earn him ‘The Military Cross’, for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty.’

At Ypres, the scene of many bloody battles, Rusty was attached to a battalion as a ‘liaison officer’, but within minutes of re-joining the front line a piece of shrapnel lodged in his forearm, forcing him to be stretchered from the region and within four days he was in a London hospital where he stayed for five months; he returned to France, but was eventually invalided out of the Army with ‘osteoarthritis of the lumbar vertebrae’.

Like so many, he never got over the war, but he found solace in the company of Lillian Sandow who he eventually married in 1922; they would have two children Jim and Joan, but Rusty would sadly die in September 1935 aged 53, after many years of ill health and is buried in the cemetery in his adopted home of Manly, the beautiful seaside suburb of Sydney.

However, he has not been forgotten and has received many accolades over the years since his untimely death and was once described as ‘the first person to be picked by Earth to play Mars.’

In 1990, author John Griffiths described him as, ‘probably the most interesting rugby player to win test caps for the Lions’ and in 1999, he was named on a list of ‘The Top Ten Australian Rugby Players of All-Time’, alongside illustrious Wallabies such as, David Campese, John Eales, Mark Ella and Ken Catchpole.

Historically, no ‘test’ matches were played in 1888, when a British Isles Rugby team first ventured to Australia, although sixteen ‘rugby matches’ were played alongside nineteen ‘Aussie rules’ and one cricket match.

In 1899, a British Isles squad, which comprised of players selected from all four home unions, provided Australia with their first international opposition and victory( The British eventually winning the series 3-1), but it would take another ninety years before ‘The British Lions’ would visit the country again as a sole destination, as critics had questioned whether Australian rugby contained the depth of talent and infrastructure required to host a Lions tour.

The magnificent ‘Waterford Crystal’ trophy, which bears the name of Tom Richards, was commissioned in 2001 when The Lions toured Australia for the first time in the professional era and was presented to The Wallabies captain John Eales after his side had taken the series 2-1, which coincidentally, was also the first time that the Australians had ever won a test series against ‘The Lions’; the 2001 series also finally acknowledged the contribution of Irish players, many of whom hail from the independent south, by changing its name to ‘The British and Irish Lions.’

To date there have been 23 test matches between the two teams, with The Lions winning 17 and The Wallabies 6, but this summer’s three match test series promises to be very close, based on The Wallabies performances in the Autumn Internationals of 2024, which provided them with victories over England (42-37) and Wales (52-20) followed by narrow defeats against Scotland (27-13) and Ireland (22-19).

Whichever of the two captains is presented with the magnificent trophy at the end of the series in July, the name Tom Richards will once again be heralded for his contributions to the history of both ‘The Lions’ and ‘The Wallabies’ and for his remarkable life as Australia’s first ‘rugby troubadour.’

Article copyright of Bill Williams