Simon “Shoulders” Baker is proof that grass-roots rugby is still alive and kicking
Where the South Circular, A20 and A2 meet in South-East London lives Old Brockleians RFC.
Behind the World of Leather roundabout and next to Mottingham’s Middle Park estate, a corner of the world dedicated to grass-roots rugby exists in its purest form.
A single-storey clubhouse made of reinforced concrete sits above two slightly askew pitches that run down to the River Quaggy.
Whenever the club’s doors are open, behind the bar you will find Simon Baker. Although everyone who isn’t a blood relative has called him ‘Shoulders’ for the best part of 40 years.
You will also find Shoulders cutting the grass and painting the lines or in the changing rooms fixing a bench or applying a new lick of paint.
On Tuesday and Thursday nights he is teaching the first XV the art of a rolling maul and making sure the clubhouse is locked up before driving the best part of an hour back home to Colchester in Essex. And sometimes when the second XV are getting turned over at scrum time, you will also find him lacing up a pair of eight-stud Gilberts to “shore things up”.
A lifelong obsession
When Rugby World found Shoulders, he was trying to work the clubhouse television to get the rugby on ahead of the club’s 100th anniversary party.
Having grown up playing the game in this part of the world, the legend of Shoulders was never far away. It was him and Dicky Swallow of Cranbrook RFC, although his infamy was for a very different reason.
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I’m warmly greeted by Baker’s bear-like paws and immediately told the story of how the club’s signwriter has recently lost his sight and that finding someone else capable of doing the writing in gold leaf – an expensive job – is proving difficult, hence why the club captains’ and presidents’ board is a few years out of date.
He then points to a frame from Meiji University rugby club, a Tokyo-based team who toured the UK in 1989, stumbled upon Old Brockleians and loved their hospitality so much that they returned every other year for the next two decades.
Tokyo tourists Meiji University have been regular visitors to Old Brocks (Dom Thomas)
You see, Shoulders is a man with a story for every occasion and it is these stories that make his own personal one all that more addictive.
“I first came down to the club when I was 11 years old in 1982 and I’m the last Old Brockleian, the last one still here who went to the old Brockley Grammar School before it combined with Roger Manwood and Lewisham Girls soon after,” explains Shoulders.
“When I was 13 or 14, I’d play for my school on a Saturday morning and then my school teacher would drive me down to the club and let me play for the fifth or sixth team in the afternoon. Then we would go into the clubhouse, I would have half a pint of Guinness to “top up my iron” and then I’d be driven home. I’ve never left.”
Shoulders walked through the doors of Brockleians 42 years ago and has been part of the furniture ever since.
At first, working his way up the senior teams during his teenage years before becoming a fixture of the first team in the 1990s and the first XV captain in the 2000s.
After that came more consuming roles.
“I’ve been the bar manager here since the early 2000s because I was a publican as my day job, running different pubs and bars in nearby Lewisham and Ladywell, so I already held a licence. I ran the bar, ordered the stock, brokered deals with breweries for the beer, stuff like that.
“Then when I was first XV captain in the early Noughties, we looked at the club finances and found out we were paying around £14k per year for someone to cut the grass. So we clubbed together, bought a lawnmower and I became the groundsman too,” explains Shoulders.
“Although when I first started I had to cut all these pitches with your standard garden lawnmower. Do you know how long that took? Put it this way, by the time I’d finished down one end, I was starting down the other end again.”
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Thanks to a bit of old-school deal-making, however, Shoulders has since been able to convince nearby rugby club Old Colfeians, linked to the £7,000-a-term private school, to rent the ground during the middle of winter for the juniors and mini section to train on.
That has funded his new ride-on, industrial lawnmower, something, as we are shown, that he can proudly wheelie across the grounds.
Wheelie good stuff(Dom Thomas)
You see, being nifty with a pound coin is something that Shoulders, Brocks and most grass-roots clubs need to master.
Cash is tight for clubs like these and every little helps. Like the time Shoulders gave some road workers from the local council £50 to lay their spare chipping in the club’s car park. Or when one of the large pitchside trees came down in a storm which he subsequently chopped up and sold as kindling. You make things work.
A club for everyone
Shoulders also has a rule. Every new member of the club must provide their occupation and birthday as well as the occupations and birthdays of their loved ones upon joining, all jotted down in his notebook.
In return, you get a card from the club on your special day but are also called upon if the clubhouse needs some work doing and you have the skills to do it.
“One of our players is a bricklayer, so I paid him to build our store shed out the back. The dad of our first XV’s fly-half is a carpenter, so I paid him to do all the doors around the club too,” he proudly states.
Next year, the club will be hosting a club dinner to celebrate the centenary. Rather than use a fancy, external facility, it will be hosted at the club in a marquee which they have bought.
It will be £100 a ticket but everything will be free on the night, with the club helping out those who might not be able to afford it.
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Shoulders has also created a checklist of when club members are on holiday, with the demand that all bring back a bottle of spirits for the do. Give and take, it’s what the club runs on.
“Ultimately it’s just hard for clubs like us. There’s always something needing doing and we don’t have the money.
“Add to that we are surrounded by bigger clubs with loads more cash. You’ve got Blackheath, Westcombe Park and Old Elthamians, big semi-pro clubs that attract the top players and pay people to play.
“Then you’ve got Old Colfeians, linked to an expensive public school which can offer perks. Clubs of our size are disappearing. Erith and Shootershillians have recently folded and Bexley and Greenwich are also virtually gone. We have to be different.”
Brocks are certainly different.
There have been legendary lock-ins into the early hours for away teams, fuelled with questionable pints of tangy lager being served on draft at unbeatable prices for the London suburban sprawl.
Those away teams were then fed a local delicacy known by all those to have tried it as “air pies”, a buttery shortcrust pastry warmed in the microwave filled with, well, air thanks to the lack of filling provided by the nearby cash and carry.
On one late Saturday night-early Sunday morning a few years back, the first XV were enjoying a lock-in only to find a thief falling onto their laps through the skylight during a botched robbery attempt.
And then there is the guarantee that anybody and everybody who wants a game will get a game.
Pouring pints behind the bar (Dom Thomas)
“It doesn’t matter who you are, if you want to play rugby, you’ll get game time here,” explains Shoulders.
“Like we have a bloke called Adrian. He is a black-cab driver who turned up when he was in his 40s to play rugby having never really played before. We quickly called him ‘The Speed Bump’ because people just run over the top of him. But we took him in and showed him love. Now I know I can ring him up the morning of a game and he’ll turn up and play wherever we ask him. I’m a firm believer that everyone gets at least 25 minutes of game time a week, regardless of ability.”
Doing all the right things
Fostering a sense of community is the lifeblood that allows clubs like Brocks to survive. That and having the self-professed “best showers in Kent”.
There was a time, back in the 1990s, when Brocks were quite a big club. Yet when professionalism came, they were unable to keep up, willingly dropping out the leagues from London South-East Two to the lowest rung on the ladder, Kent Four, and relying on friendlies.
It may seem perverse to see that as a good thing but it is what makes Brocks the club it is today. Not one that is made up by high-performance analysis on the pitch and the pathway players it has progressed through ‘academy systems’, but one made up of a life and soul of those who call themselves Brockleians.
Occasionally, old names and faces from yesteryear return to the club. Shoulders warmly welcomes them in but only after fining them with a ‘voluntary contribution’ for unpaid club membership fees. All handed over with love, of course, with the knowledge that it is keeping the lights on.
“I also make note of everyone’s name because it’s so important for making people feel part of something. And if I don’t know their name, I’ll make up a nickname and just keep calling them that,” Shoulders adds.
“If we are going to survive, we need to rely on people joining us from the local area, showing them that we can be something good for them to do on a Saturday afternoon and never leaving. A bit like me.”
Every rugby club has a Shoulders. Not exactly the same, mind, I’m fairly sure that he is utterly one-of-a-kind.
But every club has a version of him. Someone who selflessly gives their entire life in service to their local rugby club not for money, not for adulation, but for the sheer love of the game.
Without the game of rugby, we would still have people like Shoulders. But without people like Shoulders, I’m pretty sure we would not have the game.
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