Ruck over former MP Peter Fry’s rugby defence

Sr Peter Fry, Conservative MP for Wellingborough for 28 years, who has died at the aged of 83, pictured with his wife Edna in 1969. He defended rugby union’s ‘amateur’ status in the Commons. Photograph: PA

The obituary of Sir Peter Fry (28 May) omitted to mention that he was among a small group of Conservative MPs who, along with Roy Hughes, the then Labour MP for Newport, mounted a last-ditch defence of rugby union’s “amateur” status when it was being exposed in parliament as a blatant attempt to prevent the playing of – even amateur – rugby league. When, in 1994, I introduced a bill to make it illegal for union to exclude those previously playing league, Fry was the only MP to table amendments to try and wreck the bill at committee stage. He was part of a handful of politicians defending union’s “amateurism” to the death, despite considerable evidence of longstanding professionalism in union before the code went open in 1995. The spread of league at both amateur and professional level since 1995 is testimony to the very significant past impact of union’s “amateur” regulations which Fry sought to defend.
David Hinchliffe
Labour MP for Wakefield, 1987-2005