Home British baseballProject COBB The Lance Todd Trophy: One of the many connections between rugby league and baseball in Britain

The Lance Todd Trophy: One of the many connections between rugby league and baseball in Britain

by Joe Gray

Today, New Zelander Jeff Lima was named as the 2011 winner of one of the most prestigious awards a rugby league player can receive, the Lance Todd Trophy. The trophy is given to the man of the match in rugby league’s Challenge Cup Final — won by Lima’s team Wigan this year — and it was named after a “New Zealand-born player and administrator, who was killed in a road accident during the Second World War,” as stated on the Rugby Football League’s website.

There are many links between rugby league and baseball in Britain, and the subject would make an excellent choice for a future article, but the connection that forms the focus of this short piece is Lance Todd himself: he served as chairman of Salford’s rugby league and baseball clubs.

Graham Rumble, British Baseball Hall of Fame Regional Expert for the north of England, spotted that Todd also managed a Lancashire select baseball team in 1935 against Yorkshire. The Lancashire line-up is shown below, and the full programme for the contest can be found in Project COBB’s digitized Anthony Taylor Collection.

1935-Lancs-line-up

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1 comment

Joe Gray August 27, 2011 - 9:27 pm

Also of note on the Lancashire line-up is Alf Hanson, a soccer player for Liverpool and Chelsea who picked up one war-time cap for England, and who can be seen sporting baseball uniform in this photo from the Project COBB archives:
http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/images/alf_hanson.jpg

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