Rugby trio

Watching a fair bit of the women's World Cup this weekend, plus a reference to women's rugby teams and pub crawls, was enough to send me down a rabbit hole of memories. I played for the newly established Exeter Women's Rugby Club between around 1986 and 1990, minus a period when my obvious condition as per the photograph rendered that impossible. I then played for Sale from about 1991 for a few years.

The funniest thing about the first season of rugby was that three of us got pregnant within a couple of weeks of each other around Easter 1987 and all gave birth in the same hospital within a couple of weeks of each other in January 1988. The woman on the left of the photograph was an early GB and England rugby international, and she and her husband set up the club when they moved down from London for work, as she had previously played for Finchley, one of the very first women's rugby teams in the UK.

It's all come a long way since then.

But when three women got pregnant in 1987, it attracted the attention of the local newspaper, so this photograph, and a write up, which we obviously happily colluded in, appeared in the Express and Echo. I'm pleased to see that the RFU now has a pregnancy and maternity policy to protect women players.