“This is a song of the Valleys | Of rivalries, communities and tries | Where rugby breathes and never dies,” read the pages of Athleta Magazine Issue 13: more precisely, those of the ‘Up and Under’ reportage. The words draw inspiration from the verses of the brilliant comedian and singer-songwriter Max Boyce. Rising to the upper reaches of the British charts in the 1970s by singing the rugby myths of the Welsh Valleys—a land that has never ceased to produce and pass them down—his career stands as a testament to what the oval ball has represented, and continues to represent, within this distinctive corner of the world.

Cultural heritage. Social dynamo. Familial identity. Natural structure. Interconnected definitions that together render something tangible of the significance rugby has assumed, since the mid-nineteenth century, within small communities enclosed by undulating hills. Villages and towns populated largely by miners who, between the posts, composed an unforgettable—and still unforgotten—sporting melody: one that continues to produce international talent and fiercely contested local derbies even today, despite profound socio-economic change and ongoing depopulation.

This is the song of the Valleys. A song with rugby at its very centre. So attest the voices of collector Dai Richards and Treorchy RFC Vice Chairman Ralph Waldin. Their lives and testimonies, accompanied by a series of exclusive photographs, reveal why rugby continues to breathe and endure in a part of Wales that made a religion of the Game.

Dai Richards – Rugby Relics

“My first real encounter with rugby as something material came almost by accident. Every November, for Guy Fawkes Night, our neighbours and my family would build a bonfire together, and as kids we would go around collecting old newspapers and anything people were willing to give us to burn. One day, somebody handed me a programme from Wales against England in 1965. I looked at it and thought, I can’t burn that. It’s too good. In many ways, that was where everything began.

My father had probably taken me to local rugby matches before then, but I wasn’t particularly interested in watching. I would spend most of the time exploring whatever was around the pitch. But in the Welsh Valleys, rugby eventually becomes part of your life whether you consciously choose it or not. We played it at school. I scored my first try when I was nine. My teachers were rugby players; my PE teacher played for Aberavon, one of the leading sides, and so did my physics teacher. Rugby was simply everywhere. It was social, cultural, part of the fabric of the place. You couldn’t really avoid it.

During my adolescence, another relationship with the game was developing. I had started collecting football programmes, but gradually football gave way to Neath rugby club programmes and then to rugby memorabilia more broadly. When I was seventeen, I went to a dealer looking for some programmes I wanted and discovered that he had already sold them. I remember thinking: How do I get to these things first? The answer was to become a dealer myself.

Initially, buying and selling was simply a way of reaching material for my own collection before anybody else could. Then it grew and grew. That was around 1978, so I have now spent almost half a century accumulating rugby history. There is so much of it that I’ve had to hire twenty-foot containers simply to store everything. Since 1991, it has been my full-time profession. At a certain point I realised that what had begun as wheeling and dealing to sustain my own collecting could actually become a living. Today there are really two sides to what I do. There is Rugby Relics, which buys and sells, and there is the museum collection. 

They are connected, but there is a very clear line between them. The museum material is not there to be traded. There is one exception that matters to me. If somebody has a deeper connection to an object than I do, I will consider returning it to them. If I own a cap and the son of the man who originally wore it comes to me wanting it back, then his relationship with that object is greater than mine. That matters. I need to know that the object is going somewhere it belongs, rather than to somebody who simply wants to buy it and sell it again. Because although this is a business, I still see the beauty in these things. Certain objects possess something beyond their physical form. There is an aesthetic value, certainly, but also something spiritual. And I think there has to be an integrity in the way you handle them, because ultimately you are dealing with people’s histories.

My favourite object probably explains that better than anything else. It is a small book called a Thumbograph, which belonged to a young woman in 1905. Originally, there was an ink pad inside: people would press their thumb into it, leave their thumbprint on the page and sign their name beside it. When I first bought the book from somebody in the north of England, I knew almost nothing about her. Then I appeared on a British antiques programme with it, and her granddaughter contacted me. Incredibly, she lived less than a kilometre away from me. I discovered that the house mentioned in the book was actually in Swansea and that its owner was the daughter of the Lord Mayor of Swansea. Suddenly, this object I had found hundreds of miles away had returned to its own geography.

Because of her family’s position, she moved among some of the most important rugby figures in Swansea and Wales. She met members of the famous 1905 All Blacks and, the following year, the Welsh team. Ten of the Welsh players associated with that extraordinary 1905 victory over New Zealand appear in the book. Among the names is Gwyn Nicholls, the captain of that Welsh side, and then there is Arthur Gould, generally regarded as the first Welsh rugby superstar. And the book is still alive. Where blank spaces remained, I began inviting more recent players to add their own thumbprints and signatures. So an object that began with one young woman meeting rugby players more than a century ago continues to accumulate the game across generations. That is what fascinates me. The object carries time.

My collection has always been revolving. It is a business, so things inevitably come and go, but the purpose has never really been to possess everything. What matters to me is recording the history of rugby through its memorabilia, using objects to explain the story of the game. That is why I am interested in everything, not simply the great names. I have boots here from the 1880s or 1890s, the kind of boots some of those early Welsh players would have worn. And when you look at them, you have to remember that many of these men were miners. Those might have been the same boots they worked in during the week before putting them on again to play rugby on a Saturday.

That relationship between mining and rugby is fundamental to understanding the Valleys. I grew up in Port Talbot, which was a steelworks town rather than a mining community, and I think there was a difference between the mentality of men working in steel and those going underground. Mining was harder, more dangerous. When I played in the very early 1980s, I played alongside men who had been miners, and they were hard men. Very hard men. The rugby reflected that. The team I played for never really went out to play rugby. We went to war. And that is what rugby had been like here through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: almost a war between mining villages, between one community and another. That mentality wasn’t naturally mine, but once you were on the field you had to enter it because everybody around you was fighting in the same way.

The mines created communities in a very particular way. People lived close to where they worked. You might walk half a mile to the mine or five miles, perhaps even climb towards one at the top of a mountain, but your work, your home and your community all belonged to the same geography. Even the coal itself was part of that intimacy with the land. In the valley opposite here, all seven layers of the geological strata come to the surface. Every seam had its own name, and they used to say that a miner could identify which seam a piece of coal had come from simply by looking at it. That world has largely disappeared. People now travel in from elsewhere to work. They are no longer necessarily born, employed and socially rooted within the same few miles. So inevitably there has been a disconnection between the communities and the mines, and rugby has been affected by that too.

The game is still deeply present in parts of Wales, particularly when you move through the Heads of the Valleys. Those remain rugby strongholds. The coastal towns are different. Historically, rugby belongs much more intimately to the mining communities and the Valleys. But even here the balance is changing. I would say rugby is dying in terms of participation. My old club is struggling to field one senior side now. At one time, it ran two. Part of the problem is simply the nature of the game. Rugby is a contact sport, and people have jobs and lives outside it. It is difficult to put your body through a match and then return to physical work. When I played, it could take me two or three days to recover, and I wasn’t even a forward. Society has changed as well. I think we are moving away from that kind of contact sport. Perhaps that is one reason I have become increasingly interested in going backwards, towards the origins of the game itself.”

Ralph Waldin – Treorchy RFC

“We are in our 140th year now, and we are very proud of that. Treorchy has a rich rugby heritage, particularly for a village of this size. We have always produced players who have gone on to play at a very high level, including internationally, and I think a lot of that comes from the strength of our mini and youth rugby. Our latest example is Tomos Williams, who played for the British & Irish Lions last year. He is a Treorchy boy. He came through our mini rugby system, just as so many others have done before him. I know his parents very well and his best friend is my son. There are photographs of the two of them together here from ten or fifteen years ago. That is what makes it special. You see somebody as a child playing rugby here, within the village, and years later he is playing for the Lions.

This is a pattern shared across the Valleys, a true breeding ground for Welsh internationals thanks to the remarkable standard of rugby found throughout the region. And it is a process driven not only by its best-known or highest-level clubs, but by the smaller ones too. But rugby in the Valleys is not as strong numerically as it was thirty or forty years ago. When I was playing, we had two senior teams. There might be forty-five or fifty players training twice a week. We don’t have that anymore. We no longer run a second senior side, and very few clubs around here do because there simply aren’t enough players.

Our strength is that we still have mini rugby and a strong youth system, so there is a flow of young players coming through. Other clubs are not so fortunate. There are teams only a few miles from here struggling every week simply to put a side on the field. Some clubs may eventually have to fold. Part of the problem is that there are so many of them. Around here you can find a rugby club every two or three miles. In purely practical terms, perhaps there are too many clubs for the population we have today. But try telling a village that its rugby club has to disappear. You can’t. The identity is still too strong. Rugby here remains tribal. When you play the club down the road, it becomes a real local derby, something much larger than an ordinary league match. Every community has its own identity and its own club, and people remain deeply attached to both. 

Last season we played a local side and there were thousands of people around the field. For a normal senior home game, we might get around five hundred spectators. For a bigger match it can be more. And when Treorchy plays away, people travel. We take a proper crowd with us. That tells you what the club still means to the community. We couldn’t survive without them. We have an initiative called Friends of Treorchy, where supporters, members and friends of the club contribute fifteen pounds a month. We have around a hundred people doing that. That money keeps the club going. If those people stopped contributing, there would be occasions when we would struggle simply to open the doors. But they don’t stop. They have been doing it for years. Every month, they give their fifteen pounds without question because that is their way of supporting the club. 

And the significance of this place has never ended at the touchline. Max Boyce played here before anybody really knew who he was. His first live album was recorded in this club, Live at Treorchy. At the time, they were struggling to fill the hall. It was a weeknight, he was still relatively unknown, and initially they could barely sell a hundred or a hundred and fifty tickets. Eventually they filled the place, it became a great night, and the record went out into the world. That album helped launch his career. He came back recently, fifty years after that performance, because he still has such fond memories of Treorchy. There is something special about the fact that a record which travelled so far began inside a village rugby club like this one. But that is what these clubs have always been. 

The clubhouse is not simply somewhere players come after a match. People have weddings here. They celebrate birthdays here. There is live music, parties, family gatherings. For generations, places like this have provided a space in which the community can come together. And that role has probably become even more important as other gathering places have disappeared. We used to have so many churches and chapels along the high street. Most of them are closed now. Many of the pubs and social clubs have disappeared as well because there simply wasn’t enough trade to sustain them. Every time one of those places closes, the community loses another space where people used to meet. 

The rugby club is still here. In that sense, we have become something of a stronghold for the community. Rugby gives the building its identity, but what happens inside it extends far beyond the game. Perhaps that is why preserving these clubs matters even when playing numbers decline. If a rugby club disappears from a place like Treorchy, you don’t simply lose a team or a pitch. You lose one of the remaining spaces in which the community can recognise itself. The match may be what happens on Saturday afternoon. The club belongs to the rest of the week as well.”