Scarce 1871 - 1872 Pillbox Rugby Football Cap

 

This post and the post to follow will feature two of the rarest examples of football headgear. It took us close to two decades to locate an example of a rugby football pill-box cap, the subject of this post, and the only other example we know of is in the National Football Museum, Manchester, England, dating from the same years.

This cap is an 1871-1872 Manchester Football Club Member’s Pillbox Rugby Cap. A hooped pillbox style cap, labelled by the manufacturer thought to be Christys Hat of London or Carver & Company of Bristol, and "confidently dated" by the club. In an excellent state of preservation. 

This cap was ‘deaccessioned’ from the prestigious Manchester Rugby Football Club collection along with a number of other early and rare caps and jerseys. Most of the 1870s and 1880s caps and jerseys from their collection belonged to known players or were from notable competitions, and have “been in the possession of the Manchester club for generations”. 

“The founders of the Manchester Football Club (Rugby Football) can justly be described as the pioneers of the Rugby game, not only in Lancashire but also in the North Of England”. Its chief founder was Richard Sykes (a onetime Captain of football at Rugby School) who had been arranging Rugby games back into the 1850s. The MFC was officially founded in 1860.

These caps are incredibly rare, even in England, and the limited number of those from the early days of the sport in this country, from the 1870s up through the early/mid 1880s, imported or manufactured here, appear to be nonexistent at this point. Outside of museum collections this is the only football pillbox cap we know of.

As early as 1871, Peck & Snyder of New York advertised in “The Book of Rules of the Game of Foot Ball” the importing of Rugby and English Match Balls, Association balls as well as football pants, shirts, caps and belts.  

A scarce and most important example.

Examples of such football pillbox caps:

The 1878 Brown football team (it’s first team), photo in “Evertrue: The History of Brown Football”, 2003, pg 2.

See the Antiquefootball.com write up on “The Football Cap”, from March 9, 2020.

Harpers Weekly, Illustration “Football-Collared”, December 1, 1883.

Illustrated England v. Scotland, 1872, from Sporting Dramatic News, 1875

Also see a cropped section of a c. 1870 CDV, which I bid on and lost, copied off the internet and pictured below.

               Please see related posts on this blog, March 31, 2022 and April 7, 2022.