Heritage Spotlight - Australian Honour Cap - Tom Richards
In recent weeks Rugby Australia (RA) announced the creation of the Tom Richards Medal which will be awarded to the player adjudged as Man of the Series in respect of the upcoming Australia v British & Irish Lions test matches. This was reported in a RA press release and a Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) story. Each of these had varying photos and information. The SMH story online carried several images of items from The Rugby Club Foundation’s collection.
Our newsletter showed a maroon and blue Australian cap and a photographic portrait of Tom Richards in Australian blazer.
Many may be wondering what the maroon and sky-blue cap with a large’ A’ embroidered in bullion wire is?
The cap is an Australian Cap. The reason for the colours, is that, in 1899 the Australian team played their first international in sky blue as the NSW union picked the team, organised the test and selected the kit. For the second Test of that series in Brisbane, the Queensland Union did likewise, and the Australian team played the Brisbane match in maroon. That said, both jerseys bore an ‘Australian’ crest rather than the state emblems, to signify it was a ‘national’ team.
As Rugby was the main game in NSW and Queensland and therefore logically that was where the tests were played, that is why those individual colours were worn. The cap was a symbol of the ‘Australian’ nature of the team a combination of sky-blue and maroon (even if the individual jerseys didn’t encompass that)
The Rugby Club Foundation collection has several Tom Richards caps, which are a physical record of some of the places that Rugby took him in his extraordinary career.;
Australian 1908-1912
British Lions 1910
Queensland 1908
Transvaal 1906
Tom of course was the first Australian born player to represent both the Wallabies (1908-1912) and the British & Irish Lions (1910). The Tom Richards’ Trophy was contested by the British and Irish Lions and Australia in 2011 and 2013.