Richard Mullock
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| Full name | Richard Mullock | ||
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| Born | 3 May 1851 Newport, Wales |
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| Died | 1920 | ||
Richard Mullock (3 May 1851 – 1920) was a Welsh sporting administrator and official, who is most notable for organising the first Welsh rugby union international game and was instrumental in the creation of the Welsh Football Union, which became the Welsh Rugby Union in 1934. Mullock came from an Anglo-Irish family; his family's firm in Wales, Henry Mullock & Son, was a printers based on Commercial Street in Newport, South Wales.
Mullock had a history of connections with sports clubs around Newport and in 1874 became the secretary of the Newport Athletic Club. In 1879 the South Wales Football Club, which represented the interests of Welsh rugby union, attempted to organise a group of matches between a South Wales team and clubs representing Blackheath F.C., West of Scotland F.C., Oxford University and the South of Ireland. Mullock, wishing to improve the profile of his Newport club, secured a match against Blackheath before the S.W.F.C. could finalise any arrangements, stealing their fixture. Oxford University and West of Scotland lost interest in a match with either organisation, while a team from South of Ireland played a match against Newport on 18 November 1879, a day before the match with the S.W.F.U. By 1880 the S.W.F.U. was losing face as a governing body, with teams pulling out of matches after embarrassing fixture clashes and a lack of firm commitments.
A meeting was held in the Tenby Hotel in Swansea in 1880, organised between rugby union clubs in an attempt to produce a representative team to face the English national team. Little was gained from the meeting, but it did produce an agreed desire from the parties present to meet with the English Rugby Football Union to arrange a match between Wales and England. Mullock became the architect of this movement and it was through him that the RFU arranged a fixture with a Welsh team on 8 January 1881. Mullock arranged a set of trials in December 1880 to choose the team that would face England, to be captained by Cambridge University player James Bevan.
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