Dan Griffiths (rugby union, born 1857)
Welsh rugby union player (1857-1936)
Daniel Griffiths (20 June 1857 – 29 October 1936) was a Welsh international rugby union forward who played club rugby for Llanelli and international rugby for Wales. Morgan was a collier by profession.
Rugby career
Griffiths came to note as a rugby player when playing for club team Llanelli. In 1888 Griffiths twice faced the 1888 touring New Zealand Natives, once with Llanelli and then three days later with Wales. The Llanelli game against the Māoris was the first time a touring Southern Hemisphere team had played a rugby match in Wales, and a crowd of 3,000 turned up at Stradey Park to watch. Griffiths finished on the winning team, when Harry Bowen scored the only points of the game with a dropped goal from near the halfway line. On the 22 December, Griffiths won his first international cap when he was chosen to face the New Zealand team again, this time against Wales at St. Helen's in Swansea. The game began badly, when the crowd began booing their own team, mainly from Swansea and Llanelli fans who thought their clubs had been overlooked with only two Swansea players on the pitch and Griffiths being the only representative of the 'Scarlets'. Even with a hostile crowd Wales played well, using the four threequarter system, which was adopted by the team after the game, to good effect.
“Dan Griffiths (rugby union, born 1857)” enters the record as welsh rugby union player (1857-1936). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Griffiths, rugby and union can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5213612. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1857, 1936 and 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dan Griffiths (rugby union, born 1857)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.