Established in 1905 Perth Rugby Football Club is our oldest affiliated club with 118 years of unbroken lineage.
We had a chat with Ryan Brown from Perth Bayswater Rugby Union Club who very kindly has provided us with a little history behind the club widely known as the Numbats.
Perth Rugby Football Club. Perth Rugby. Perth Suburbs. Perth Bayswater Rugby Union Club. Baysie. The Numbats.
Our name may have changed over the years, as we adapted to an expanding Perth, and forged our own unique identity, but one constant has remained the same: we are Perth Rugby Since 1906.
Actually… About that…
See it turns out we are actually a wee bit older than we told you we were.
Now I am not precisely sure when or why the change was made. Was it an innocent typo that went uncorrected? Perhaps it is a case of our memory not being as sharp as it was when we were young (let’s see how good you are at remembering birthdays when you are 117). Or maybe like the archetypal Hollywood starlet looking to make themselves more marketable to movie studios, we have shaved a year off at some point in time, in a vain attempt to snag ourselves a promising young Fly Half or seasoned Tighthead Prop.
Who knows? But what I do know is this. We were actually founded in 1905!
The Perth Rugby Football Club was formed on 11th of April 1905 at the Criterion Hotel, and we played our inaugural match on Saturday 20th May of the same year, securing an 8-0 win against the Fremantle Pioneers in front of a crowd of 700 at The Esplanade, Perth.
For 46 years we continued to play as Perth Rugby Club from Langley Park on the city’s foreshore until merging with Northern Suburbs in 1951 to become Perth Suburbs. A move in 1975 to our current home at Pat O’Hara Reserve was the final phase of our metamorphosis into the Perth Bayswater Rugby Union Club that you know today.
We are exceptionally proud of our 117-year unbroken lineage, and our ability to trace our history back to the men that ran out vs. Fremantle that first day –
Wild, Jago, Jago, Langley, Molloy, Garcia, Lahiff, Todd, Lunt, Mann, Maloney (capt.) Gent, Brown and Bagley –
and our position as Perth’s oldest continually operating rugby club. So when it came time to design our new logo for the 2023 season and beyond, it was vitally important to us that we captured and celebrated elements of that history. The incorporation of a central shield and black graphic style Numbat and ball are subtle yet direct links back to our first ever Perth Rugby Club badge.
However, to be certain that as a club we have now truly learned our lesson from the sins of the past, and that never again would we find ourselves in a position that we forget where (or when) we have come from, we did the most logical thing we could think of.
We stuck the bloody foundation year on the badge!!!
We are still the ‘Best with Pride’. We are still one united club with one goal.
But now we are also once again: ‘Perth Rugby Since 1905’.
