MEMORY sometimes plays curious tricks. When I received a Letter last week from Clem Lewis correcting my statement that the coming Northern Command match at Leeds was the first between representative Rugby Union and Rugby League teams I bowed before the personal recollection of my old Welsh friend.

Now I have a letter from a Liverpool reader who says I was right and Clem is wrong. The team which opposed Walter Rees’s Welsh Rugby Union side in Liverpool in 1916 was, he states, got together by W. B. Croxford, who now writes Rugby articles under the pen name of Advocate for the Liverpool Echo and was not entirely professional.

It contained some Rugby Union players, among them L. C. Blencowe, an Oxford forward of 1907-08, who was killed in the war, and S. Cook, of Gloucestershire. "I believe," writes my correspondent, "that Blencowe captained the side."

He mentions Seddon (Wigan) and Chick Johnson (Widnes) as other Rugby League members of it in addition to those named by Clem Lewis, and no doubt the team was overwhelmingly professional. It seems clear, nevertheless— unless memory is again at fault—that it was not entirely representative, and that history will after all be made at Headingley on Jan. 23.