Timeline of The Foundation of National Rugby Unions
The first national rugby union was the Rugby Football Union, founded in England in 1871. This was followed over the next decade by the Scottish Football Union (1873, later SRU), Irish Rugby Football Union (1879) and Welsh Rugby Union (1881). In Australia, the Southern Rugby Union (later the New South Wales Rugby Union) and the Northern Rugby Union (later the Queensland Rugby Union) were formed in 1874 and 1883 respectively, before eventually helping form the Australian Rugby Union in 1949. Both South Africa and New Zealand formed their Unions before the end of the 19th century. The white South African Rugby Board merged with the non-racial South African Rugby Union in 1992 following the fall of apartheid. The other major rugby power, France, formed the French Rugby Federation in 1919.
Other notable foundations are Argentina (1899), Fiji (1913), Tonga (1923), Samoa (1923), Japan (1926), Italy (1928), the Rugby Union of the Soviet Union (1936), Hong Kong (1953) Canada (1965) and USA (1975).
Some of the pre-1925 foundations may be more surprising to those who speak of "traditional rugby playing nations": Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (1895), Germany (1900), Ceylon/Sri Lanka (1908), Morocco (1916), Malaya/Malaysia (1921), Catalonia (1922, later disbanded by Francisco Franco), Spain (1923) and Kenya (1923)
Many minor governing bodies have been set up in recent years, with the most recent being Jordan (2007), Ecuador (2008), Turkey (2009) and the United Arab Emirates (2010).
Read more about this topic: History Of Rugby Union
Famous quotes containing the words foundation, national and/or unions:
“No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man’s subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman’s subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the “tough guy;” today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“The newly-formed clothing unions are ready to welcome her; but woman shrinks back from organization, Heaven knows why! It is perhaps because in organization one find the truest freedom, and woman has been a slave too long to know what freedom means.”
—Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)