The year 1981 began with a tragedy. Hundreds of miles away from the heartlands of rugby league, a group of young people came together to celebrate a birthday party in New Cross, London. As the night unfolded, a fire engulfed the flat, killing thirteen and injuring many more. All those who died were black.

There was an immediate suspicion within the local community that it had been a racially motivated attack. Over the next few weeks, the media, the police, and the politicians failed to address their concerns as protesters called for change. And when racial tensions spilled over into Brixton—after the police began Operation Swamp 81, using century-old laws to stop and search black residents—Britain was hit by a summer of riots.

Historians would later reread the events as uprisings by a black population who had suffered decades of police brutality and discrimination. In Steve McQueen’s BBC documentary Uprising, 1981 is viewed as the key year in the battle for racial equality. And it was in that year that rugby league—a sport wrongly perceived as a conservative game played on the unforgiving fields of the North—played its own part in the battle for change. Just as Britain threw itself into a moral panic about the ‘political nightmare’ of inflation, unemployment, and immigration, Des Drummond, Henderson Gill, and Ellery Hanley set out to ‘make themselves somebodies’. As children of the Windrush generation which had arrived in Britain in the 1950s, they not only changed the course of rugby league history, but the very idea of what it meant to be a professional athlete.

The early 1980s were a hostile political climate for the Windrush generation and its descendants. In the wake of Brixton, old arguments returned to the political arena: Stuart Hall, in his seminal book Policing the Crisis, outlined how the media had turned concern about street robberies in the 1970s into a moral panic about ‘muggings’ by young black men. This was the decade when the National Front spoke about a ‘master plan for a master race’, where Mrs Thatcher warned about Britons feeling ‘swamped’ by people from a different culture.

Despite evidence that on every social indicator—unemployment, housing, and educational opportunities—black people were at a substantial disadvantage, the debate in 1981 was about culture and integration. Figures such as Enoch Powell were revived to warn of an inevitable ‘civil war’ between the races. Powell argued that the only solution was repatriation: ‘Voluntary, orderly, humane, even generous, no doubt, but repatriation’. Political commentators believed it was time to have a ‘serious and detailed argument’ about voluntary assisted repatriation to reflect the feelings of ‘ordinary people’ who thought that immigration by black and Asian people had been a mistake.

As Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher ruled out repatriation, but there was increasing pressure from her backbenchers to do something radical. The notoriously hard-right Monday Club, led by their Chairman Harvey Proctor, proposed a ‘multi-million-pound programme to repatriate 100,000 coloured people a year from Britain’. Ahead of the 1981 Conservative Party conference, the Times reported how ‘the offer would be open to all coloured people’, including those whose parents or grandparents were born in Britain.

At that exact same moment, however, the England rugby league side decided to put its faith in two ‘out of work West-Indians’—as the Times described them—to turn Its fortunes around. From the game’s heyday in the late 1940s, when almost five million people passed through the turnstiles in a single season, league had slumped into a malaise. Administrators pointed to irreversible changes in social habits and leisure pursuits turning crowds away; others lamented the lack of great wingers compared to the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s.

Des Drummond and Henderson Gill made for perhaps unexpected saviours. Drummond, having arrived from the Jamaican village of San-La-Mer aged eight, found the sport by accident when he was asked to fill in on the wing for Leigh one afternoon where he had been watching his brother play. Gill, whose family moved to Huddersfield from Barbados in the 1950s, was a controversial talent who was often criticised in the press for missing training to go clubbing in London. But anybody watching the game knew that they had the ability to bring a crowd to its feet. In 1982, Open Rugby magazine identified them ‘as the people with the charisma guaranteed to draw the crowds back’.

Despite the misperceptions, rugby league has often been at the forefront of progressive change, described as a game with ‘a remarkable ability to break down racial, religious and sexual boundaries’. As the historian Tony Collins has already argued in Tribune, this is in part due to the way in which league was born out of class struggle. By framing itself against rugby union, league has often seen ‘itself as a democratic and inclusive sport opposing a hypocritical establishment.’ It’s why black players like Billy Boston and Clive Sullivan were welcomed into the game in the post-war years when they felt shunned by rugby union.

But 1981 was arguably an even more hostile and toxic environment than previous eras. One of the recurring political arguments of the age was how the children of Windrush had no pride in or affinity for the nation. Enoch Powell had once remarked that ‘the West Indian or the Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman’, and Drummond and Gill were asked to talk about what it meant to play for their country. ‘Their eyes glow with genuine emotion when they talk of acceptance by the country and sport of their adoption,’ reported the Times.

Both players felt that by turning out for their national side they could change perceptions. Gill felt that he ‘was a somebody, somebody with a big job to do for Great Britain’. Drummond admitted to satisfaction when cheered on by those who normally engaged in racist abuse: ‘Usually the Hull speccies give me stick’, he revealed. ‘They got right behind me and cheered my tries. It was marvellous.’

Their popularity only continued to rise. Drummond became nationally famous as a contestant on BBC Superstars where he broke sprinting records. Gill gave the sport one of its rare ‘cut through’ moments in 1988 when he danced a ‘boogie’ for the television cameras on the way to defeating Australia for Great Britain. The pair were ultimately central to the development of the game as a national product in the 1980s.

But if there was any one individual who really changed how the public viewed both black athletes and rugby league that decade, it was Ellery Hanley. Brought up in Potternewton, near Chapeltown in Leeds, Hanley’s parents had arrived from St Kitts in the Caribbean in the 1950s. By the 1970s the Chapeltown area was seen as a magnet for deprivation and racial inequality. Known across the country in the wake of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, community groups had warned for decades about civil unrest if relations with the police weren’t improved.

How Ellery Hanley was caught up in an early life of crime remains part of his enduring enigma and mythology. After making a try-scoring debut for Bradford in 1978, he then disappeared from the game for three years. Stories subsequently emerged about time spent in a young offender’s institute. People who worked at Bradford said he was ‘mixing in ropy company’ as a teenager. When he returned to the sport in 1981, many watched and waited for him to slide back into old ways.

Hanley would go on to prove the doubters wrong in spectacular fashion. In the 1980s he developed into a once-in-a-lifetime talent who would transcend the sport in this country. Rugby league’s answer to Michael Jordan, Hanley ushered in the era of professionalism as one of the first players to treat sport as a full-time job. Long before Arsene Wenger arrived at Arsenal with ‘new’ ideas about diets, Hanley was training in ‘weighted vests’ to give himself a competitive edge and educating his team mates on the benefits of not smoking and drinking.

In 1986, when Britain had still never elected a black politician to Parliament, Hanley was captaining his country and leaving teammates, journalists, and spectators spellbound. Fashion brands such as GAP, not renowned for their interest in rugby league, recruited him for modelling campaigns. For a game that had been historically caricatured in the southern press for its ‘whippets and flat caps’ image, Hanley challenged long-held assumptions about the marketability of the sport.  All the more remarkable is how Hanley achieved his success while also being targeted relentlessly by the tabloid press.

We now understand that the 1980s was the beginning of the tabloid circulation war that led us to phone hacking and the demise of the News of the World. Journalists were keen to root around in Hanley’s past for stories and framed him as the ‘flash’ rugby star whose large wages divided him from the game’s working-class supporter base. That meant that when his home was besieged by tabloid photographers over a paternity case in 1988, it led to near total disengagement from the media.

Refusal to speak to media in the 1980s was rare, and journalists found it both arrogant and confusing. This inevitably had consequences for the way in which he was portrayed. An academic study by Thomas Preston has shown that a combination of press bitterness and his own hostility to the media ‘contributed to the press painting him as a menacing figure’. Even the Times and the Independent described him as ‘dark, brooding’, ‘malevolent, venomous’, and a ‘grim’ figure who had held the sport back.

Only now, in the fullness of time, can we better understand why Hanley refused to play the tabloid game. He often alluded to journalists twisting his words and misrepresenting him. In an era where players had no social media platforms or opportunities to speak on podcasts, the only way to control the situation was to say nothing at all. Hanley understood that he had the agency and the power to say no: ‘I am not a public property,’ he once said. ‘The public don’t own me.’

Hanley’s single-mindedness meant that people thought he was cold and distant. But the persona he created was also an act of survival. In a rare and revealing interview conducted in 1994, Hanley said that from an early age he realised he had to ‘roll up his sleeves’ and work ‘twice as hard’ as others because of the racial abuse he suffered from players and spectators. ‘I knew I had to be very strong in my mind … I never ever let that bother me because once you showed weakness in this game, you are finished.’

Instead, in the end, Hanley won over journalists by doing extraordinary things on the pitch. His career peak was leading Great Britain to a test victory over Australia in 1990. In front of a record crowd at Wembley, his performance was the sporting equivalent of a military commander leading his troops into battle by putting himself in front of enemy fire. Even the rugby union correspondent of the Daily Mail admitted Hanley’s performance was from ‘one of the finest rugby footballers I have seen since the war … in any code.’ And when he walked off the pitch to the sound of Land of Hope and Glory and a Union Jack flag wrapped around his shoulders, even Enoch Powell would have been hard pushed to say that he wasn’t the best of British sport.

As the Rugby League World Cup kicks off in England this month, organisers are describing it as ‘the most inclusive ever’, which is a testament to the pioneers who redefined the game in the 1980s. In a game with a higher media profile, the stories of Drummond, Gill, and Hanley would be firmly embedded in the national sporting psyche. Rugby league administrators often lament the lack of narratives to connect the game with the wider public beyond the North. But the story of these players’ uprising against the hostile environment of the 1980s reminds us of what working-class individuals can achieve through and for sport—for themselves, and more importantly, for the rest of us.