Detail of an old French blotter ("buvard" for my French readers...) with a rugby theme.

Enjoy the quizz here : "Look for the ball"...

No need to send me the answer, there is no prize money...

Early XXth century rugby trade card advertising for a chocolate brand...

Nice...

I am back !

Here we go again for a new season of rugby memorabilia, rugby postcards, rugby prints, etc... (1) !

I will try to expand the scope of Rugby-Pioneers.com introducing new contents such as video, podcasts, links, books, etc... (but depending on the ability of this hosting plateform to upgrade and enable these fancy features...) But also maybe posting a little less often, say twice a week for instance...

As such, my first post of the season is a book, as there is a lot of buzz around the 100th anniversary of the famous 1905 All Blacks tour... During my summer holidays, I've read this wonderful "1905 ORGINALS" and I strongly recommend all fans to read it with no delay (and it is very reasonnably priced)... "The remarkable story of the team that went away as the Colonials and came back as the All Blacks" (as subtitle reads) comes as a diary of the tour where the journey (9 months between July 1905 and March 1906 !!), the life of the squad under the command of manager G.H. Dixon and all the 35 games (in England, Scotland, Ireland, France and the US !) are despicted and commented, richly illustrated with tons of original pictures, photos, press clips and exotic memorabilia... it renders all the passion around the tour and the All Blacks... can you just imagine crowds of 70,000 at Crystal Palace against England, or 50,000 at Arms Park against Wales and then 47.000 people 10 days later against Cardif, or 30,000 (including NZ Prime) in the wharf of Auckland on the day of their return home.... (2)

Full details of the book :
1905 ORGINALS
by Bob Howitt and Diane Haworth
208 pages
ed. Harper Sports
on sale here (amazon.fr) or there (amazon.co.uk) (3).

(1) the more I repeat, the more search engines locate these pages....
(2) only 10,000 people in Paris (check this former post) but on a cold and rainy January 1st... not bad for the very first match of the newly created Equipe de France.
(3) my first attempt with Amazon affiliation program... maybe I will make zillion of dollars...

taken from the "Illustrated London News"

Taken from the "Illustrated London News"

Irradiated food...

early 1930s I suppose

a reproduction postcard of a original ad from 1921