Preston Typhoons: 9/11, the Bingham Cup, and the story of Lancashire's first inclusive rugby club

On board, he sat by Tom Burnett, who joined Mark, Todd Beamer, and Jeremy Glick in trying to stop the hijackers. They stormed the cockpit and while they disrupted the terrorists’ aim of targeting the Capitol Building or the White House, they couldn’t prevent them from crashing the plane into a field at 580mph. Nobody survived.

A 6’4”, 102kg gay rugby player, Mark had played for San Francisco Fog, an inclusive club set up in 2000. The biennial Bingham Cup is now played in his honour with his mother Alice Hoagland, a staunch champion of LGBT rights, attending every match. The 2016 edition in Nashville saw 45 teams from around the world take part.

And it was in Tennessee that enthusiasm for an inclusive club in Lancashire first gained serious traction.

Inclusive rugby in the UK goes back to 1995 and the formation of the Kings Cross Steelers, the UK’s first so-called ‘gay’ rugby club. Despite having to tackle rampant homophobia, which manifested itself in issues like not being able to rent equipment due to irrational fears of AIDS, the pioneers persvered. And they were at the vanguard of a now-established movement.

“Every so often, conversation would turn to the potential for an inclusive team in Lancashire,” says Lawrence Howard, who lives in Preston and who was playing in the 2016 tournament for the Liverpool Tritons. “I just said ‘let’s go for it’.”

A regular player until he broke his ankle after falling at Manchester Oxford Road train station in the late 90s, Lawrence went 12 years without setting foot on a rugby pitch. “After breaking my ankle, I just thought ‘that’s it, I’m done’,” he says. “Then, in 2012, a friend said he was going to join Manchester Spartans and asked if I wanted to come along. That was me hooked again.”

Lawrence played for the Spartans for four years before joining the Tritons and, by 2017, the proliferation of inclusive teams meant that a dedicated league was now viable. Keen to get a Lancashire team off the ground, Lawrence and a few friends were sitting at the bar at Preston Grasshoppers spit-balling potential names for this new team when a BAE test flight went overhead.

Preston Typhoons it was.

Despite just five people turning up to the first training session in early 2018, numbers soon grew and the Typhoons held their first match against Chester Centurions in April as part of the International Gay Rugby North League. Based at Preston Grasshoppers’ Lightfoot Lane, Lancashire officially had its first inclusive rugby union club.

“Rugby is an amazing sport” explains Lawrence, 45, from Manchester. “I always say anybody could walk into any club and be welcome, but there’s that macho reputation, and so we’ve deliberately set out to be a less intimidating environment where anybody can come and have a good time. We want as many people to come down; our principle is that anyone who wants to be on a pitch gets that chance.”

Still turning out for Grasshoppers’ fourth or fifth team when he’s not representing the Typhoons, Lawrence says with a chuckle: “’Play’ is a strong word for what I do. I participate. But we have an absolute whale of a time and we’re all genuinely friends, which makes it such a good environment.”

And not only is he still a ‘participator’, but Lawrence was also recently elected onto the board of International Gay Rugby to represent Europe, something he claims he is still ‘getting my head around’.

“I’ve been a member of a lot of clubs over the years and Typhoons honestly the friendliest place I’ve ever been,” he says. “There’s a lot of pride knowing that.”