Richard Sykes (Rugby player)
Overview
 
Richard Sykes was a pioneering rugby
Rugby football
Rugby football is a style of football named after Rugby School in the United Kingdom. It is seen most prominently in two current sports, rugby league and rugby union.-History:...

 player who helped found two major clubs and became a landowner in North Dakota
North Dakota
North Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States of America, along the Canadian border. The state is bordered by Canada to the north, Minnesota to the east, South Dakota to the south and Montana to the west. North Dakota is the 19th-largest state by area in the U.S....

, founding five towns there.

He was the fourth son of Richard Sykes, owner of the Sykes Bleaching Company
Sykes Bleaching Company
The Sykes Bleaching Company was a cotton bleaching business established in Edgeley, near Stockport in 1792 which grew to become one of the largest bleaching enterprises in the United Kingdom.-Origins:...

, and his wife Jane Hardcastle. He was born at Edgeley
Edgeley
Edgeley is a residential area within the town of Stockport, Greater Manchester, England. The suburb is characterised largely by Victorian close-packed terraced housing and council estates with some larger properties around Alexandra Park. Edgeley includes Edgeley Park, home of Stockport County F.C...

 House Stockport
Stockport
Stockport is a town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on elevated ground southeast of Manchester city centre, at the point where the rivers Goyt and Tame join and create the River Mersey. Stockport is the largest settlement in the metropolitan borough of the same name...

 and was known as Dick. He went to Rugby School
Rugby School
Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...

, where he was Captain of Rugby in 1857. The following extract is from First 125 years Liverpool Football Club Rugby Union
Liverpool St Helens F.C.
Liverpool St Helens Football Club are a rugby union team formed from the merger of Liverpool Football Club and St. Helens RUFC. The club currently plays in North 1 West....

 1857-1982 by I R A Daglish.

In the Autumn of 1857, Frank Albert Mather, who had recently left Rugby School, wrote to his friend Richard Sykes the Captain of Football at Rugby School inviting him to take part in a game of football in Liverpool and bring with him one of the balls in use at the school, made by Linden a Rugby bootmaker.
Quotations

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.

The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as Creationism|creationists and Flat Earth Society|Flat Earthers... They are denying the reality of a force that — unless we change the way we live pretty fast — will kill millions.

There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Hurricane Katrina|Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.

My feeling about the war was — given a choice between these two things — obviously I want to see a world with much better choices than that — but given that was the choice we were confronted with, the best way through it was to try to find out what Iraqis prefer.

The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Nagasaki|Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives — and millions may die there.

For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.

The greatest trick the rich — and their cheerleaders on the right — ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn’t exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

The lamest defence I could offer — one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear — is that I still support the principle of invasion, it's just the Bush administration screwed it up. ... The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster.

We are entering a world of rapidly multiplying nuclear stand-offs like this. India vs Pakistan. Iran vs Israel. America vs.China. Within decades, North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. Not one Cold War, but many — and the risk is doubled each time.

 
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