History

The season Newcastle beat England twice

In 1954 the touring Great Britain side lost two matches in the Hunter, and Cessnock fullback Dave Parkinson kicked the goals in both.

By Craig Dunstan · 29 September 2026

On a Saturday in May 1954, a record crowd of 22,855 filled the Newcastle Sports Ground to watch the local side play the touring Great Britain team. Newcastle won 11-10. Three months later a Newcastle Coalfields side beat the tourists again, 28-22 at Maitland.

The Newcastle Morning Herald called the second win “a Newcastle Rugby League record of two defeats of England in the one season”. At the centre of both was a Cessnock man.

A winning goal from wide out

The first match was played on 22 May. Newcastle’s coach, Frank Hawthorne, had told his forwards to play tight and work up the field “as a compact body of six”, the Herald reported. It did not work at first. England led 7-0 before halfback Bobby Banks scored Newcastle’s only try, 20 minutes in, and it was 7-all at half-time.

Fullback Dave Parkinson converted Banks’s try from the sideline and kicked three penalty goals. The last of them, in the Herald’s words, was “his fourth, and winning, goal from wide on the 25 mark”.

The crowd paid a record gate of £3,380. Banks and lock Barry Levido were given cups as Newcastle’s two best players, and hooker Bob Crane, at 30 the lightest man on the field, won the scrums 20-17.

“It was tough going,” Crane told the Herald. “In one early scrum I took an elbow in the face, a kick on an ankle and a good scruffing, but in this job you’ve got to take it.”

Down again at Maitland

On 22 August the tourists were back in the Hunter to play a Newcastle Coalfields side at Maitland Showground, with Parkinson as captain. Injury had ruled out Frank Threlfo, Don Schofield and Levido before the game.

It was a game of swings. England led 22-20 in the second half until Parkinson levelled it with a penalty. Winger Lester Batey then scored in the corner, and Gus Gray dived over for his second try as the bell rang. Parkinson kicked five goals in the 28-22 win, and the Herald named Hawke, Mantle, Brown and Gray as the forwards who outplayed England’s pack.

Before the game, the tourists’ co-manager, H. Rawson, and tour captain Dickie Williams laid a wreath in St Paul’s Church of England, Maitland, for Robert Seddon, who led an English rugby team to Australia in 1888 and drowned in the Hunter River.

Cessnock’s year

1954 was Cessnock’s year at home as well. The club won the Newcastle premiership, beating Maitland 14-13 in the decider, and won it again in 1955.

Parkinson was born in Cessnock and also played for Balmain, New South Wales and Australia. He kicked goals in all three of Cessnock’s grand final wins in the 1950s: 1950, 1954 and 1955.

Cessnock’s full premiership record is on our Cessnock page, and every decider since 1910 is in the grand finals table.