A tale of two dinners: New Zealand rugby and the embrace of empire, 1919-32

Abstract

This article challenges the standard portrayal of rugby as a vibrant component of New Zealand’s emerging national identity during the first third of the twentieth century. Deriving from a critique of the 1905 All Blacks tour of Britain, it argues that New Zealand rugby methods and attitudes attracted more condemnation than adulation from Britain and that the Antipodean game was itself sharply divided between reformers determined to modernise the game and allow greater leniency on questions of expenses and professionalism and conservatives loyal to the International Rugby Board. By 1932 the New Zealand Rugby Football Union had been thwarted by its British masters in every campaign for reform – an outcome that reveals parallels with a broader historiographical interpretation of retreat from some earlier notions of independence and claims of superiority to an acceptance of New Zealand’s junior role as a dominion within the British imperial partnership.