History: From no-one to sole judge
In the beginning there were no referees. The need for referees is ongoing proof of the existence of original sin and human fallibility. Man could not honestly or objectively run a game. He needed somebody impartial to do the judging for him.
Of course, to start with it was a simple game. You met the people from the other village and you took the object used in the game (a bundle of rags of hides, later to become a ball) back to your village. You used whatever means you had at your disposal. So, some men were armed with swords, clubs or staves, and some road on horseback. It was a great opportunity to even old scores. It caused great consternation and in Britain the game was banned 31 times by monarchs in just over 300 years and was subject to the Riot Act.
When you got the object, which would symbolise an animal in a hunt or, more dramatically, the opposition leader, back to your village you "killed" it by drowning it or rubbing it in the ground. We still get home for a try, we then ground the ball, ancient concepts and then the ball is dead.
Then they started playing the game within villages. The aim of the game (goal = purpose) was to take the object, which in Chester on one grizzly occasion was a Dane's head, to your leader's home, and his doorway gave the goal its shape.
Games of this sort, known in Britain by the generic term football which included many species of game, were played all over the world and even in ancient times. The oldest recorded international match was, according to Li Ju, between China and Japan in the 1st Century BC, and there is no record of a referee.
The big development in the game came in the 19th Century in Britain when schools started taking to the game. Ironically, what had been subject to the Riot Act previously was now used to curb the riotous behaviour of schoolboys.
That century saw the rise of the public (= private) school in Britain. The more ancient ones grew in numbers and many new ones were founded. They were essentially single-gender schools. A conglomeration of young men has always been fertile ground for football to grow - whether at schools or universities, in the army or on the mines.
In the 19th Century there were many scholar uprisings. The boys tended to be of the upper class and looked down on the schoolmasters as socially inferior. Further more their board and lodging were enough to drive a boy to rise up. At Winchester the boys fought the army. At Rugby they blew up a classroom. Games proved the answer.
Schools started playing and adapted the game to the land they had available. Each school thus developed its own game.
The games were run by boys, which was later seen as an opportunity for them to exercise leadership. They would make up the "rules" as they saw fit. The result was a simple game, certainly not a spectacular one. But the big change was that the goal was changed. Now instead of getting it home, you took it forward to your opponents' goal, and naturally the game ended once the goal was reached.
From the various schools boys would bo to the great universities, and they would want to keep on playing. But they had problems with the various ways of playing. This led to the search for common sets of "rules". The first were the Cambridge Rules if 1842. Then came the formation of the Football Association in 1863, the birth of a game which would eventually be called soccer. Then in 1971 a group of 21 clubs and schools broke away and formed a Football Union. The founding spirits, mainly driven by Blackheath FC, were largely old boys of Rugby School where the headmaster Thomas Arnold had done so much to encourage manly pursuits such as football as a way of developing muscular Christians who could govern an empire. So the Football Union adopted the rules as played at Rugby School and as a s result called itself the Rugby Football Union, as it still is today.
At Rugby School, founded in 1567, the piece of ground for football was the Close, and many great things happened there. Because it was the custom to pack the goal with a multitude of boys from lower down the school the posts were extended to their present H-shape to make a goal possible. It also became a custom that if you grounded the ball beyond your opponents' posts you were allowed to take it back and try to convert (= improve) it into a goal.
The game was developing and gradually the various lines were introduced. Also the rules became increasingly complex, caused, as is still the case, to prevent people from spoiling the rest's fun. But it was a boys' game and they decided how they wanted to play and the leader of each side would decide whether what happened was right or wrong.
Rugby Schools rules, as written in 1840 state: "Heads of sides, or two deputies appointed by them, are the sole arbiters of all disputes."
It all sounds delightfully innocent, but the truth is that it did not work. A rudimentary knowledge of human nature would tell you that it would not work.
Then they decided that the matter would be made more formal and that each team would have a designated player to make help to make decisions should the captains disagree. These men were called, optimistically, umpires. The word comes from the French non pere, meaning not partial. Non pere became numpire and a numpire became an umpire. But umpires, being human, tended to side with their side. And so they needed a third party. If a decision was disputed, they would go off to some respected gentleman and refer the matter to him - the referee.
In 1885, they hauled the referee out of his easy chair and thrust him onto the field, giving him a whistle and his umpires a stick each. The umpires were the first line of action, raising or lowering the stick depending upon whether they agreed or disagreed with a captain's appeal. If one stick was up and the other down, then the referee had to act. If the referee allowed the appeal he then blew his whistle.
New Zealand is sheep country. Dogs are used to control the sheep and the dogs are in turn controlled by the shepherd's whistle. It is not surprising, therefore, that the referee's whistle was developed in New Zealand. The man who developed it was William Atack of Canterbury.
William Harrington Atack, born in England in 1857, went out to New Zealand when he was only two. He was a good scholar at school, played rugby for Canterbury, became a journalist and died on 16 September 1945. In 1884 he used his dog whistle to referee a match. In 1892 the IRB made the use of a whistle compulsory.
Disputes raged on. They could last for ages on the field and go on for weeks afterwards, until the union under whose jurisdiction the match was played gave its verdict. And then there was a dispute which lasted for years.
England played Scotland at Blackheath in 1884, and the Irish referee, George Scriven, awarded a try to England which the Scots disputed for some ten minutes. The try, scored by Richard Kindersley and eventually converted by Baby Bolton, won the match for England. But the Scots were unhappy and broke off international contact with England.
The Irish eventually got the parties together and three high court judges tried the try and found in favour of England. Complain about the time taken by the TMO; that try took years before it was awarded.
The problem was that for an international match there was no union under whose aegis the match was played. This led to the foundation of the International Rugby Board in 1889. This is when the touch judges were relegated to the touch lines and the referee was hauled out of his easy chair to do some work and then a massive responsibility was placed on his shoulders. He was made the sole judge of fact and law.
This was not to signify that whatever the referee decided was in fact infallibly right - that a forward pass became a backward pass at his word. It simply meant that there would no disputing his decision. If he said it was a try, it counted as a try, however doubtful the circumstances.
The next step was the relegation of the umpires to the touch lines with little flags on their sticks by way of compensation, leaving the referee to decide on his own about a captain's appeal. And then in 1892 they got rid of disputes by making the referee the sole judge of fact.
There we have it all - sole judge and possessed of a whistle. The referee was born.