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Samuel Clark (rugby union)

English rugby union player and official

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 27, 2025
Entity authorityQ7411123 ↗
Source-derived summary

Samuel Simmonds Clark (1857 – 25 May 1947) was an English-born rugby union official and international rugby union full-back who played club rugby for Neath. Clark was the first Neath player to win an international cap for Wales while representing the club; and played in the second Welsh international match in 1882.

Rugby career

Clark was born in Dorset in 1857, but moved to Wales while in his childhood. By 1874, at the age of 17 he began playing for Neath Rugby Football Club, and on 27 April 1880 he was appointed as the secretary of the South Wales Football Association. The SWFU was a body, although only formed in 1878, which was attempting to organise rugby events within South Wales and was Welsh rugby's first union. When Richard Mullock organised a Welsh XV to play England in 1881, it was Clark who notified the press that "...the team which represented Wales was not elected by the committee of the South Wales Football Union; neither had they anything to do with it." Although this served in distancing the SWFU from the humiliating loss suffered by the Welsh team, it turned Mullock into the lone voice of Welsh international rugby.

On 12 March 1881, eleven representatives of rugby clubs and colleges from around Wales met at the Castle Hotel in Neath and formed the Welsh Football Union, which would eventually be renamed the Welsh Rugby Union. The biggest omission from the meeting was Neath RFC. Not only was the meeting held in Neath, the club was the oldest in Wales and both Clark as secretary and J.T.D. Llewellyn as president of the SWFU were both Neath men. The SWFU had decided not to attend the meeting, which would form a union, which in turn would replace itself. After the March meeting the WRU took up the functions of the SWFU which never met again.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Samuel Clark (rugby union)” as english rugby union player and official. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Samuel, Clark and rugby.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1857, 1947, 1882, 1874—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1857. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Samuel, Clark and rugby providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Samuel Clark (rugby union)”, the useful work is to connect “english rugby union player and official” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7411123. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1857, 1947, 1882 and 1874.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Samuel Clark (rugby union)” 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.