A for Alan ‘Ned’ Ashcroft, Waterloo, Lancashire, England, and the Lions. A giant of the game. Also the Ace, or Rob, Bob, or Bertie Atlay, formidable Chairman of Football, who rebuilt Waterloo for the top flight in 1972-85. Also for Absent Friends, and in particular, Nick Allott

B for Gill Burns MBE, the first woman inducted into the Rugby Hall of Fame; Waterloo, England, the Lionesses; President, WRFU and Waterloo. Also for Blundellsands (see Memorial Ground)

C for the Connor brothers; Lol of Waterloo, Lancashire and the Barbarians; and Rocky, not always the best, but always the bravest.

D for Dynasties and their inter-generational continuity: as in Bark-Jones, Bartlett, Cain, Crank, Fisher, Greenwood, Kay, Meikle, Uren, but most notably, ten Pinningtons, who included Gordon Macintosh by marriage.

E for Ever-present: at least one Waterloo man played in the home internationals  from 1923 until 1960.

F for Fisher, Alistair and Colin, father and son, who hooked for Scotland. Also for Fixtures Secretary, notably Alan Stenhouse, who built Waterloo into a ‘national’ team during 1925-35, and Dennis Bowman, who kept us there in darker days some 35 years later.   

G for Greenwood, Dick and Will, father and son. Dick, England captain and coach, invented international squad training and did 500 press-ups a day to set new standards of fitness; Will, who passed through Waterloo en route to a World Cup winner's medal and an MBE. Also for Bobby Glass, captain 1900-03, who won Waterloo’s first Lancashire cap in 1902

Hfor Jack Heaton, captain of Waterloo, Lancashire and England, inspiring creator of combination in the backs, guiding spirit of the Barbarians, and a giant of the game, despite a career interrupted by the Second World War.

I for Internationals: the 36 men and 30 women who carried Waterloo’s name onto international team-sheets, the latest, Chad Erskine (USA) and Ander Monro (Canada), in the 2007 World Cup. Dick Greenwood’s perspective: ‘Some of us were lucky; some of us were very lucky; but only two of us were great: Jack Heaton and Alan Ashcroft’ – (2007)

J for the John Player Cup Final, 1977. Waterloo beat London Irish, Middlesbrough, Bedford, and Saracens to face Roger Uttley’s great Gosforth team. Lost, but crossed the Geordie line twice, virgin in the competition until then.   

K for George Key, captain, 1923-24, team builder and secretary, 1924-48, President, 1951-53. Recruited Joe Periton, J.W.Scott, Watcyn Thomas, Jack Heaton, Bert Toft, Dicky Guest and Allan Roy; also for Sir John Kay, President 1994-96 and his son Ben, who was so tall when playing in the minis he had to take his birth certificate to matches.

L for Lancashire, once the route to the stars, which had a Waterloo backbone for decades and sparked the first club versus county row by taking 14 Waterloo players in 1937 – the 15th played for Cheshire. The county won.

M for Memorial Ground, or Blundellsands, home of Waterloo from 1921.  Constructed by members’ weekend work-parties from a nine-hole golf course to commemorate 51 Waterloo dead in the First World War. M is also for Sammy McQueen, Waterloo's first international in 1923, stand-off for Scotland

N for Napoleon, without whom… 

O for the lost tradition of half-time Oranges, but also for any word beginning with O, an old line-out call abandoned after spectator complaints of overuse of ‘Orifice’ and ‘Orgasm’

P for Percy the Pike, an unwanted bequest to a Major Turk, who dumped it on Northern Cricket Club, where Waterloo held post-match dinners. Unmaintained and disintegrating, Edric Weld, Waterloo hell-raiser and captain 1933-37, asked the visiting Wanderers team of 1934 to bury it at sea on their way home to Dublin. Instead, they refurbished Percy to make it the challenge trophy for matches between the clubs. The tradition withered with the advent of leagues, but was revived this year by the two clubs’ Veterans’ XVs, when Waterloo’s ageing warriors brought Percy back again across the Irish Sea.  P is also for Joe Periton, a giant of the game with 21 caps (1924-30) who was Waterloo’s first England captain.

Q for ‘Spider’ Quiggins, President 1934-36, who met Roscoe Harpin, Rex Schofield, Bobby Glass, Dicky Heywood, Billy Fontannaz, Tom Brakell, Tommy Roddick, Dick Annersely, Alan Stenhouse, Sammy McQueen and C. Dawson Hayward in the Exchange Hotel in spring of 1919 to pick up the pieces of a decimated Waterloo after The Great War.

R for Referees, always right, even when wrong, with special mentions for our own Fred Howard and Steve Meikle, who refereed at the top international level, Gordon Macintosh and, not least, Geraint Davies, who kept the Pontypool front row in order by addressing them in Welsh.

S for the Shortest Speech made at a Waterloo post-match dinner: ‘This year, your ground, your referee. Next year, our ground, our referee,’ – Terry Cobner, captain of Pontypool, after his side’s first whitewash (19-0) in living memory. And so it went.

T for Bert Toft, captain of England, the game’s first ‘technical’ hooker, who ensured gluts of possession for Heaton to exploit. 

U for Uncapped Barbarians, the ‘nearly’ men of international rugby of whom Waterloo has had too many, including with George (later General) Taylor, a dynamic wing forward who was posted abroad on the eve of international fame, Lol Connor and David Carfoot.  

V for Veterans Rugby, a stage of male evolution en route to the ultimate life-form of WOPS – Waterloo Old Players and Supporters.

W for Waterloo’s World Cup alumni of Ben Kay, Will Greenwood, Paul Grayson, Kyran Bracken, Ander Monro, and Chad Erskine, and not forgetting Gill Burns, who played in the Women’s version three times.

X for the Exchange Hotel, at the Liverpool terminus of the Southport line, the club’s selection and social headquarters for half a century. 

Y for Youth, and our thriving ‘Minis’. Who will be the next Kyran Bracken or Ben Kay?

Z for Second Lieutenant Francis Herbert ‘Jimmy’ Zacharias, physican, who fell at the Somme, October 1916, one of 51 Waterloo players who never returned from the Great War, John Zacharias, killed in action, Italy, 1944, one of 58 who died in WWII, and F.A.P. Zacharias, elected President in 1945 to lead Waterloo to a less noble, but better form of confrontation.