Tom Richards (rugby player)

Tom Richards

Player information
Full name	Thomas James Richards
birthday	April 29, 1882
place of birth	Vegetable Creek, New South Wales , Australia
date of death	September 25, 1935
Place of death	Rosemount , Queensland , Australia
size	1.83 m
Nickname	"Rusty"
society
society	Career ended
position	striker
Clubs as active
Years	society	Games (points)
1898	Charters Towers Waratahs	()
1900-05	Charters Towers Natives	()
1906	Johannesburg Mines	()
1906-07	Bristol	()
1909-10	Charters Towers	()
1911	Manly RUFC	()
1913	Stade Toulousain	()
Provinces as active
Years	province	Games (points)
1905	Queensland	()
1906	Transvaal	()
1907	Gloucestershire	()
1907	Queensland	()
1909	North Queensland	()
1911	Sydney Metropolitan	()
1913	East Midlands	()
National team
Years	National team	Games (points)
1908-12	Australia	3 (6)
1910	Great Britain	2 (0)

Tom "Rusty" Richards (actually Thomas James Richards ; born April 29, 1882 in Vegetable Creek , today Emmaville , New South Wales , † September 25, 1935 in Rosemount , Queensland ) was an Australian rugby union player. He is considered one of the best third-row strikers of all time, but also played further up front than Lock . Richards was an adventurer of early rugby. In addition to playing on a total of four continents and in the club or provincial championships of South Africa , Australia, England and France , he was the only one to complete rugby union internationals for both Australia and the British selection . With Australia he also became Olympic champion in 1908 .

youth

Richards was born the fourth of six children to Cornwall- born miner John Richards and his Victoria- born wife, Mary Ann . His older brother Edward William "Bill" Richards also played for the Queensland and Australia selection . He passed five tests for Australia .

In the mid-1880s, the Richards moved to Charters Towers , where Tom Richards started working as a blacksmith when he was 15 . Visiting a selection of players from New South Wales in 1897, he first came into contact with rugby. He played for the Waratahs and Natives from his hometown, from 1903 also for regional selections and finally in 1905 for the B team from Queensland.

Rugby world traveler

In 1905, Richards succeeded his father, who had been mining gold in South Africa since the 1890s. There he took part with the selection of the Transvaal in two games of the Currie Cup and was shortlisted for the South African selection for a tour of Europe, but sorted out as not eligible to play. Richards nevertheless traveled to England. In 1906/07 he played for Bristol Club Rugby and was called up to the Gloucestershire county selection, ironically, among other things, for an encounter with the Springboks . In 1907, Richards heard of plans to send a rugby union national team on tour to the northern hemisphere for the first time in Australia. He therefore traveled to Sydney and was also appointed to the selection. On the tour through North America, Great Britain and France he was a regular in the flexible position of the winger . He was used in one test each against England and Wales and in the only game of the 1908 Olympic rugby competition.

After the tour ended, Richards traveled back to South Africa. When the British selection was badly injured during a tour of the country, he reported to the team and was accepted as a substitute because of his time in English rugby. He played twelve times, including two internationals against South Africa. After the tour, Richards went back to his native Australia, where he played for Manly RUFC club rugby and was selected after a few months as vice-captain of the Australian selection for a North American tour in 1912. In the only international game of the tour against the US selection , he came to his last test. At the end of the tour he did not return to Australia, but traveled on to England.

In the winter of 1912/13, he was one of a selection of the English East Midlands , which toured southern France. He stayed in France for a few months, during which he was part of the coaching staff of France for a Five Nations game against Wales . During the year he was a player-coach for Stade Toulousain in the French championship .

After rugby

In the summer of 1913 he traveled back to Australia, where he wrote in Sydney as a journalist and correspondent for various newspapers, such as the English The Referee or the Sydney Morning Herald . Even before the First World War began, Richards was drafted into the 1st Australian Field Ambulance in June 1914 and shipped to Cairo in October 1914. On April 25, 1915, he was part of the first line of the ANZAC troops as a paramedic on the landing on Gallipoli . In 1916 he was transferred to the Western Front via Egypt, in the meantime promoted to lieutenant and deployed at Bullecourt . In August 1917 he was awarded the Military Cross . Richards was wounded so badly several times that he had to be evacuated to England and from mid-1918 he was no longer fit for duty due to poison gas damage and was also no longer able to play rugby. Richards kept an extensive diary during his military service that is kept in the archives of the Australian War Memorial .

In Australia, in 1919/21, he headed the employment services department of the authority for the reintegration of war returnees in Sydney. He then became a traveling salesman for electrical appliances and rubber products, but also wrote series of articles for the Sydney Mail . In 1921 he married Lillian Effie Jane Haley , with whom he had two children, but from whom he soon separated. In 1935 the family reunited in Brisbane . Richard's health deteriorated noticeably as a long-term consequence of his war injuries. During the summer, when he contracted tuberculosis , he was admitted to the Veterans Hospital in Rosemount, where he died in September.

Honors

Richards was inducted into the North Queensland Sporting Hall of Fame in 1996 and one of five players as a founding member of the Wallaby Hall of Fame of the Australian Rugby Union in 2005. The Tom Richards Trophy has been played between the Lions and Australia on tours of the British and Irish Lions to Australia since 2001 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ According to the entry on Richards in the Australian Dictionary of Biography , other sources give the Windsor district of Brisbane as the place of death.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Spiro Zavos: From Rugby Heaven to Battlefield Hell. In: The Rugby Reader's Review. Retrieved September 21, 2009 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p} Don Wilkey: Richards, Thomas James (Tom) (1882–1935). In: Australian Dictionary of Biography , Supplementary Volume, Melbourne University Press, Online Edition. Australian National University , 2005, pp. 366f , accessed on September 21, 2009 (digitized 2006; ISSN  1833-7538 ). 
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Kevin Berry: Tom Richards - A Unique Rugby Player. (PDF; 133 kB) In: Journal of Olympic History, Vol. 10. S. 77f. , accessed on September 16, 2009 (December 2001 / January 2002). 
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Five rugby legends inducted into Wallaby Hall of Fame . Australian Rugby Union Limited October 14, 2005, archived from the original on May 11, 2009 ; accessed on September 19, 2014 (English, original website no longer available).  
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Tom Richards. (No longer available online.) Charters Towers Rugby Union Football Club, February 8, 2009, archived from the original on December 3, 2008 ; Retrieved September 21, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Vol. 3: Diaries of Thomas James Richards, January 26 - November 8, 1916 . Australian War Memorial , accessed April 26, 2018 .