Book Review: Hellfire Awaits: 150 Years of Redruth RFC, by Nick Serpell

Reading time: 5 minutes

Hellfire Awaits: 150 Years of Redruth RFC, by Nick Serpell

Foreword by John Inverdale

Pitch Publishing, 2025

352 pages, plus illustrations

ISBN: 9781801509343

RRP: £14.99

…the active intervention of the historian’s literary skill is essential if sporting history is to be made meaningful and not reduced to a superficial, dry listing of fixtures, results and personalities…¹

The signpost on the road said ‘To Redruth and the graveyard’ and that was enough to strike fear into you…Their players were a nasty bunch…Hellfire Corner’s the right name for that place…²

Redruth RFC has found its ideal biographer in Nick Serpell. A professional genealogist and one-time obituary writer for the BBC, Nick is also a lifelong supporter of the club. This makes him formidably qualified to do the job.

It’s taken him two years, and what a job he’s done.

Although Hellfire Awaits is, first and foremost, a celebration of one of Cornwall’s most famous and successful clubs, I stress that this is not just a book for the die-hard Redruth fan.

(That a Camborne man such as myself can bear to read it from cover to cover ought to tell you as much.)

Nick has eschewed the approach of many enthusiastic compilers of club histories, which is to bombard the reader with as many statistical details as possible. A good example of this is the history of Leicester Tigers³. I salute the authors’ research endeavours but, as a cogent and interesting narrative, the effort falls short. Indeed, the book is more like an encyclopedia for Tigers supporters and nobody else.

The story has been sacrificed at the altar of fact.

Nick has gone for story first – but he’s also done his homework. Besides spending months scouring contemporary newspapers, he’s been fortunate to have earlier club histories to hand and the committee minutes stretching back to the 1890s.

Yes, it’s all about the story, and not just the story of Redruth RFC. Want to know how rugby football developed in Cornwall? It’s here. Want to know who Cornwall’s very first clubs were? Try the appendix. Want to know about Penzance, Penryn, Falmouth or Hayle’s XVs down the years, and how they fared against Redruth? Dip in. The development of the Cornwall RFU and the rise and fall of the County Championship? The antiquated mindset of the RFU? Nick ticks a lot of boxes.

(Naturally, the story of the rivalry with Camborne is awarded a separate appendix. But we also learn that the rivalries with Torquay Athletic in the inter-war years, and with Launceston in National League Two, were just as intense, but lacked the longevity⁴.)

Year on year, season by season from 1875, Nick has placed the story of Redruth RFC – and, to some degree, Cornish rugby – in its socio-historical context. He hasn’t just endlessly regurgitated old match scores and reports, an approach which, after a few pages, rapidly gets stale.

We know what the BBC’s Grandstand and ITV’s World of Sport did to attendance figures in the 1970s and 1980s. We know how relying solely on rail travel in the 1890s played merry hell with match schedules. We know the introduction of National Leagues in the late 1980s suddenly meant journeys like the 900-mile round trip to Aspatria in Cumbria was in the offing.

Though a Redruth man through and through, Nick’s sense of historical balance stops Hellfire Awaits from being a mere exercise in pro-Red tubthumping. For example, in the 1890s Nick describes Redruth as

…the uncontested premier side in Cornwall…They certainly proved too good for their near neighbours, Camborne…

p58

Nick, doubtless with some relish, proceeds to quote the Cornubian, which condemns Camborne’s play as “hackneyed, degenerated”, and “miserable”.

I confess to gritting my teeth through this section, but was pacified a couple of pages later when, in the opinion of the Cornish Telegraph,

…it might be as well if the Redruthians would not adopt such a high and mighty tone in their dealings with all and sundry…[it] is calculated to put other people’s backs up…

p60

Hear-hear. It is this sense of balance that carries the story, as does Nick’s writing, and ingrained knowledge of Cornish rugby:

A thick skin was a prerequisite for any referee who took charge of a Redruth home match and remains a necessary characteristic to this day.

p108

Here’s Nick, on an away trip in the 1990s:

The arrival of a busload of supporters at away grounds could be something of a culture shock for the hosts, particularly at some of the posher clubs like Blackheath, and Cheltenham…

p300

On the professional game, and the RFU’s hamfisted attempts at running the New World Order, Nick borders on the polemical:

The gap between the haves and the have nots would continue to widen, and still threatens to split the game in two.

p313

Above all, though, this is a celebration of Redruth RFC – its good, bad and ugly bits. Its status as the ‘home’ of Cornish rugby is fully emphasised. Club legends such as Bert Solomon and Roy Jennings get their own chapters. Richard Sharp, Maffer Davey, Billy Phillips, Terry Pryor and Bonzo Johns get lengthy mentions. There’s cameos too for the likes of Rob Thirlby, Tony Cook and the (gloriously outspoken) Nigel Hambly.

All the club’s Cornish ‘firsts’ (floodlit games, charity fixtures, County matches, admissions etc) are discussed. On the other hand you get told all about the punch-ups, suspensions, arguments, arrogance and controversies. Nick has gone for warts-and-all, and succeeded admirably.

If I have one caveat, it’s regarding the lack of oral history – the personal recollections of the players themselves. What does Mike Downing think of holding the record for most club appearances? How did Mark Richards find joining Redruth from Camborne in the 1990s? Or Marcel Gomez on his controversial suspension in 1995?

But maybe this would be my approach, not Nick’s, and in any case his book is strewn with detail. How many pints of beer does the club sell in a year? How many squad members were suspended after a single incident in 1981? What did the fans do to the Glamorgan Police XV? How did JPR Williams arrive at the ground in 1975? There’s a wealth of information here to delight any Cornish rugby fan.

Beautifully written and immaculately produced by Pitch Publishing, Hellfire Awaits is the first full-length club history in Cornish rugby, about Cornwall’s longest continually-running club.

And running a club, non-stop, for 150 years, has been damn hard work. The limited local opposition, collapsing industry, emigration, changing leisure patterns, Rugby League, the rise of soccer, professionalism and geographical remoteness has made the life of Redruth RFC extremely challenging.

To be around for 150 years, though, is also an amazing achievement. So is Nick’s book.

Many thanks for reading; follow this link for more top blogs on all things Cornwall: https://blog.feedspot.com/cornwall_blogs/

References

1. “Cornish Rugby and Cultural Identity: A Socio-Historical Perspective”, by Andy Seward, The Sports Historian, Vol. 18.2 (1998), p78-94.
2. Coventry RFC visit Redruth in the 1930s. From Hellfire Awaits, p280.
3. The Tigers Tale: Official History of Leicester Football Club, 1880-1993, by Stuart Farmer and David Hands, Polar Print Group, 1993.
4. Of course, I’ve also written extensively on the subject: https://the-cornish-historian.com/2023/09/02/camborneredruth-the-oldest-continual-rugby-fixture-in-the-world-part-one/