Tabby Wynyard
cricketer (1867-1938)
William Thomas "Tabby" Wynyard (1 January 1867 – 15 March 1938) was a rugby union footballer who toured with the 1888–89 New Zealand Native football team and the 1893 New Zealand team. He also played first-class cricket for both Wellington and Auckland.
Rugby career
Wynyard was first selected for provincial rugby for Auckland while playing at the Grafton club in 1887, and in 1888 along with his brothers George (Sherry) and Henry (Pie), Tabby was recruited by Joe Warbrick for an ambitious rugby tour of the British Isles. The team assembled by Warbrick became known as the New Zealand Native football team, and was initially intended to contain solely Māori or part-Māori players, but eventually included a number of non-Māori in order to bolster the team.
The final team consisted of 26 players, and toured New Zealand before departing to Melbourne. They then toured Great Britain, Australia, and finally New Zealand again — the trip lasted 14 months. Tabby Wynyard played three-quarter, and played at least 75 of the team's 107 matches; including a minimum of 52 in Britain. The team lists for eleven of the matches on tour are either incomplete or non-existent. Therefore, the figure of 75 appearances in total, and 52 in Britain, is only a minimum value.
In addition to his exploits in rugby, Wynyard gained fame for singing On the Ball – a rugby song composed in 1887 that became popular at the time.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tabby Wynyard” 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.