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As October drew to a close in the year 1900, a Moseley Wanderers rugby side from the West Midlands was in Paris earning a bronze medal in the Olympic Games.
This bizarre episode in British sporting history was rediscovered by two former Moseley Football Club officials, former club president Peter Woodruff and former chairman Ken Birrell.
The first modern Olympiad had taken place in Athens in 1896. The Games were revived by the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) and so it was no great surprise they were held in Paris after the original Athens revival.
The baron's influence also no doubt explained why the list of events included the game of rugby union football. As Woodruff and Birrell discovered, de Coubertin was the referee in the first ever French Rugby Union Championship final in 1893. Then laterin 1906, he was the official when France played their first international.
On Saturday October 27 1900, it was reported in the Birmingham Daily Gazette :
England v France. Sunday football is neither popular nor frequent here but it is one of the latest diversions that help to make the French Sabbath so much unlike ours. On Sunday an English fifteen will meet the French Rugby Union at the Paris Exhibitiongrounds. The following players representing the English Union left London last night for that purpose: H. A. Loveitt (Coventry), Back; H.S. Nichol (Old Edwardians), L. Hood (Rosslyn Park), C Whittindale (Coventry), K. Whittindale (Aston Old Edwardians)Three-Quarter Backs; J. H. Birtles (Moseley), J. Cantion (London Irish) Half-Backs; J. G. Wallis (Old Edwardians), C. P. Deykin (Moseley), V. Smith (Old Edwardians), A. J. L. Darby...