Russell Stone: Barracks and swamps in Eden Park annals

The debate over whether Eden Park or an alternative site should be developed for the 2011 World Cup inevitably raises the question: how did rugby and cricket come to be there in the first place?

Rugby took root in Auckland about 1870, a little later than in southern centres such as Nelson. But it was taken up in Auckland with no less passion.

The first game fully reported by the press was played on a wet Saturday afternoon in June 1870 on the parade ground of barracks just vacated by the British Army.

This ground, which shortly after became known as the Metropolitan Ground, sprawled across a portion of what we now know as Albert Park.

It was not, in both senses of the word, a level playing field.

One critic complained the declivity of the field gave the downhill team a distinct advantage.

This first contest was between members of the crew of the Royal Navy vessel HMS Rosario, who turned up bearing both goal posts and ball, and a team of locals led by Frederick Whitaker jnr, son of a former premier.

The game, which started about 3pm, stopped only with the onset of darkness. Other games followed on the Metropolitan Ground.

These were usually scratch affairs between sides sometimes bizarrely named: Colonists vs the World; Volunteers (territorial soldiers) vs Civilians; and Lightweights vs Heavyweights.

The sport quickly became popular. By 1875 district clubs had come into being: City, North Shore, Ponsonby, Grafton and Parnell.

Games often took place on vacant paddocks.

The new sport caught on in country areas, proving popular with settlers in the Waikato, goldminers on the Thames and gumdiggers and timbermill workers on the Northern Wairoa.

In 1875 Auckland inaugurated provincial rugby. A side went south where it played five provincial teams.

It lost every game.

But this inglorious tour had blazed a trail. Home and away provincial games, bitterly contested, followed in the years ahead.

In 1879, the city council decided the old barracks ground should no longer be used for sport but should be laid off and planted with gardens and provided with walkways. This is how Albert Park, as we know it, came into being.

From this point, Auckland's Domain became, for the time being, the home of both rugby and cricket. But the grounds were crude and unserviceable, and remained so until 1893 when the Domain was vested in the City Council.

Only the council had the will and the financial resources to develop this reserve, but did so slowly.

At an early stage, rugby had become the victim of its own success. Many wanted to play the game, but the Domain grounds were too few, too cramped, and frequently waterlogged.

By the mid-1880s provincial games had begun to draw in large crowds. Even midweek afternoon fixtures were treated as public holidays.

The more important games had to be shifted to large suburban farms such as those of Robert Graham at Ellerslie, James Dilworth at Remuera and William Potter at Greenlane.

In 1887, on the death of his father, William Potter jnr sold a portion of his farm where Alexandra Park is today, to the newly formed City of Auckland Tramways Company.

This company leased a substantial portion of its holding to the Auckland Rugby Union (ARU), who developed Potters Paddock, (as the playing field became popularly known) as the centre of the code.

But by 1900, problems of tenure and rising rentals were forcing the ARU to look elsewhere.

However, it was cricketers not rugby players who took the initiative in the move to Eden Park. The prime mover was the small Kingsland Cricket Club.

It chose an unlikely location.

Readers should erase from their mind any notion of today's Eden Park.

The Kingsland-Sandringham area, was a shallow basin, prone to winter flooding, and its natural drainage outlets were partly blocked by volcanic rock.

Consequently parts of the location were a swamp in the summer and a lake in the winter.

A resident complained in 1912 that locals needed a ferry service, not a train service. The popular name of the area, Cabbage Tree Swamp, tells its own story.

In 1912, the cricket association, who had the year before followed up on the Kingsland club's initiative and bought the Eden Park site, got together with the rugby union and arranged for the ARU to take up a 21-year lease over the winter months.

The first rugby fixture was a seven-a-side tournament that took place in May 1914.

But for long periods in the next years, winter rains made the grounds unplayable.

By the end of World War I, drainage work, removal of volcanic debris and pasture improvement had created a playing surface adequate for summer and winter sport.

On August 27, 1921, the first international game was played on Eden Park, between South Africa and New Zealand before a crowd of 30,000.

The All Blacks lost that test 9-5. But Eden Park won the battle of the grounds.

Though its amenities were still very primitive, it won public approval as a fine rugby amphitheatre.

Thereafter, any international team on a full tour has invariably played a game on the park.

An Auckland club final for the Gallaher Shield elsewhere is unthinkable.

Yet few are aware that this new era in rugby which began at Eden Park after the Great War, really had its beginnings almost a half-century before on the barrack grounds of Albert Park.

* Russell Stone is an Auckland historian.