Reading this article (compiled by Douglas Hamilton) most people will be amazed that in the early days there were so many rugby teams in the Tynedale district and especially in Hexham.

Tynedale Football club was founded in Hexham in 1876. The game was also taken up elsewhere in the district and there were teams at Redeswater, Border Rovers, Bellingham, Haltwhistle, Corbridge, West Wylam and other places.

Although Bellingham weren’t able to raise a team one year to play Tynedale in a cup-tie in 1886, they nevertheless carried on until the 1914-1918 War. West Wylam was founded in the mid-‘Twenties. The Haltwhistle club was revived after a lapse of 30 years, in 1926.
Both Redeswater and Bellingham’s teams were built around the ‘Four Graynes of North Tynedale’ – the Charltons, Robsons, Dodds, and Milburns (who sound like very famous, more recent, association football players.

There were also a considerable number of rugby teams based in Hexham. The Rovers (with 72 members), Hexham Wanderers (35), Excelsior (30), Heart of All England (24) merged with Tynedale (20) in April 1887 – giving the new combined Tynedale club a membership of 181.

However, there were other teams in the town, some with exotic names, like Hexham Violets, Church Lads Brigade, Tyne Green Juniors, Parkend Rangers, Hexham Unionists and Tyneside Rovers. They were all eventually swallowed up around the time of the First World War. Hexham Violets had been the first winners of the Northumberland 4th XV Cup, in 1890 and were successful later.

Where did all these teams play their home matches? Very little is known. We do know that in December 1876 Tynedale played Elswick “in Mr. Cook’s field in which the flower show was held, at the top of Skinnersburn”, and between 1876 and 1880 matches were played on the Sele (often written as Seal) in Hexham.
Thereafter the club made use of the Brewery Field at Hexham Bridge End, then moved to Halliwell Dene at the east end of the town for two seasons, from 1883. In 1885 they returned to the Brewery Field, before playing on Mr.Little’s field at Tyne Mills in 1886 for three years.

In season 1899-1900 Tynedale obtained “a new field of play not far from their former one, which had to make way for a road-making scheme” This road construction work was a problem which would recur thirty years later.

In 1902 the club rented Dene Park in the east part of Hexham, a field which had been used by Hexham Cricket Club for twenty-four years. In 1926, in Tynedale’s Jubilee year, the club exercised an option to purchase the field at Dene Park for £1,550, raised by donations, special efforts and a loan from the Rugby Football Union.
Was this to be a stable, permanent home for the first time for 50 years for a nomadic club? No, it was not quite so simple. Witin four years, in 1930 a new trunk road was proposed which would run right through the club’s land and across the pitch, which at that time ran in a north/south direction. However, the club were able to purchase Broad Close, an adjoining field, which enabled the cub to have two pitches, running east/west. However the pavilion was left stranded on the other side of the new road! The new ground was officially opened in October 1932.

In 1971 the purchase of the 33 acre site at Corbridge for £12,000 was secured by borrowing £9,400 in personal loans from 23 club members. The Hexham ground’s 5.5 acre site was sold to Northumberland County Council in 1974 for £75,000, and the clubhouse and car-park to the National Coal Board Opencast Executive for £27,500 in 1975.The total Tynedale Park project cost about £142,000 by the time the new clubhouse was officially opened in the 1976/77 season.
After a century playing in Hexham, seventy-five of those years at Dene Park, the club was on the move again, to Tynedale Park, Corbridge, where it has remained for for 45 years.

The Violets are in the record books – at a venue unknown1

D.F.Hamilton