Strange Tales: The Calcutta Cup kickabout

With the next installment of the Calcutta Cup kicking off this year’s Six Nations, here’s the boozy story of what happened to the poor trophy in 1988.

The history of the cup dates back to 1872 when 20 English players took on 20 Scottish, Welsh and Irish in Calcutta.

These rugby enthusiasts created the Calcutta Club the following year but a combination of India’s less than ideal rugby climate, a switch to more popular polo and cricket and, as one story has it, the discontinuation of the free bar, led to a drop off in membership a few years later.

In 1877/78 the remaining members took the club’s last remaining funds, which were in silver rupees, out of the bank, melted them down and had Indian craftsmen make an 18-inch high silver trophy, beautifully engraved, with three cobras for handles and topped with an elephant.

The cup was presented to the Rugby Football Union for use as the prize in the burgeoning England-Scotland rivalry. The first Calcutta Cup was held in Edinburgh in 1879 – it was a draw. It has been an annual fixture ever since.

Fast-forward now to Edinburgh and the 1988 Five Nations Championship*. England have won the game 6-9, close but it was hardly a classic. England’s Rob Andrew scored a drop goal and Scotland’s Gavin Hastings and England’s Jon Webb two penalties apiece, with England playing a tight, defensive game throughout.

“England may have been the birthplace of rugby but today they killed the game stone dead,” complained Scotland’s coach, Derrick Grant afterwards.

Rugby has always been a sport closely associated with (heavy) drinking, particularly beer and in 1988 the game was still played by amateurs**. As a result it was a game not yet under the thumb of nutritionists and the like and boozy knees-up after matches were the norm.

As such, after the ’88 game England and Scotland prepared to meet up for the customary banquet. However the English team turned up slightly late and found that the Scots, presumably as a consolation prize and also because it was their last match of the tournament, had drunk all of the whisky that had been provided.

The evening swiftly got out of hand as the drinking got heavier and heavier. The venerable Calcutta Cup, by that point 109 years old, was at the event being passed around and used as a drinking vessel.

At some point, Dean Richards, the England and Leicester Tigers number eight and a police constable in the Leicestershire Constabulary, and Scottish flanker and Borders farmer, John Jeffrey, got hold of the cup.

They filled it with Champagne (or possibly more Scotch), which they promptly emptied over England’s Brian Moore and then they disappeared into the Edinburgh night – Richards wearing a tea cosy on his head.

Details of what happened next are conflicting given the inebriated state of the principal protagonists but essentially the pair used the trophy to show off their passing skills along Princes Street, badly damaging it when they dropped it – according to a 2010 interview with Jeffrey who denied they also used the cup as a football.

The cup after the incident

In that 2010 interview he admitted: “It’s a chapter of my life that I am not terribly proud about. There were four Scots in bed before the end of the dinner – I so wish I had been.”

Nonetheless, they began to sober up and both recall the growing realisation that the cup, “wasn’t in a very good state”.

Shame-faced they went back to the hotel, handed the cup to the night porter and went to bed.

The next morning, with sore heads all-round, it was time for the reckoning. Jeffrey owned up to the damage the next morning, not giving away Richards’ name initially but he was quickly found out.

An Edinburgh jeweler was tasked with knocking the poor old trophy back into shape – at the cost of about £1,000.

Jeffrey was handed a six month ban, Richards just a one-game suspension, an inequality of punishment that understandably rankled with Jeffrey.

Largely as a result of that night it was decided that the original cup was too venerable to be left to the (less than) tender attention of international rugby players any longer.

The original is now on display in the Rugby Museum in Twickenham and replicas are used instead for the victorious players to hoist.

That said, given the generally less boisterous behaviour of rugby players today (10 pint binges no longer much approved of) it’d probably be in safer hands now.

The 137th Calcutta Cup is being held in Edinburgh this Saturday (6 February).

*It became the Six Nations in 1999 with the addition of Italy.
**Rugby Union only went fully professional after the World Cup in 1995.