PENZANCE — It is half-time at Cornish Pirates’ Mennaye Field ground in Penzance, way out in the south-west of England, and Nick Knowles is throwing mini rugby balls into the crowd.
Wearing a bright-red Pirates fleece, Knowles twinkles in the floodlights – comfortable in making a case to a potentially sceptical public.
This pre-season friendly at home to Saracens feels like an evening-long pitch, as Knowles lays out why a TV presenter has become a co-owner of this club in Cornwall, and the exciting future he envisages for a huge county who have never had a team in the Premiership.
“I’ve spent my life telling stories, and not made-up stories,” Knowles says, as we break off from the second half to chat in a hospitality marquee.
“Twenty-six years on ‘DIY SOS’, telling stories of human fortitude and generosity and community. And here is a community that have kept this rugby club alive, because rugby is as much part of being Cornish as pasties and tin mines.”
It is undoubtedly a story-making coincidence that the 63-year-old Knowles’s love of rugby – he has played and watched all his life – and of Cornwall from family holidays and a darker experience in his youth have drawn him as an investor into the second-division Pirates, together with a couple of Americans from Pittsburgh and locals in a consortium.
Their aim now is to tap into a diaspora of six million Cornish-connected people worldwide. They have a five-year plan and a 10-year one. In the latter timeframe, according to Sally Pettipher, the Pirates’ chief executive, the club will be worth £100m.
We are at the end of a week in which Knowles and a team of colleagues from TV – including a cameraman from “Top Gear”, a drone operator who works on Formula One and live cricket and shot the intro to a Batman movie – have made a pilot for a documentary series to be offered to broadcasters and streamers.
They flew a drone under scrums and filmed the sunset at Tintagel Castle and abandoned tin mines in St Ives and fishing vessels going out to sea. Knowles boldly makes a link to the “Welcome to Wrexham” football series backed by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
“I’ve got to create a programme about this rugby club that’s a love letter to Cornwall,” Knowles says.
“I’m plainly not Ryan Reynolds, and rugby isn’t football. But they’ve done an amazing job of telling the story of Wrexham – about the mining going away, the difficulties people had, but the spirit never breaking.”
The Mennaye is a 2,800 sell-out even though the grandstand is empty – it is being renovated after Storm Goretti blew the roof off. And yes, Knowles smiles as every other person asks him when the “DIY SOS” boys are arriving.
He reminisces about how he quit “doing something with mainframe computers that I didn’t enjoy” to get into TV, which led through hard work and a winning personality to dozens of TV presenting credits: Saturday-night quiz shows and travel programmes on top of the DIY.
“I’ve done pretty good, on TV for 40-something years now,” Knowles says.
“I grew up on a council estate in West London, and if I keeled over tomorrow, I’ve been the luckiest man in the world. And I’m sure I’ll do well if this does well – but I could also lose if it doesn’t do well.
“That’s not why I’m in it. I’m in it because I love rugby: the travel, the people I’ve stayed in touch with, the discipline, camaraderie, standing by people, keeping your word to the people around you, control in physical situations.
“And I’m in it because I love Cornwall. Great memories of my father and my family when I was a child here.
“Then when I was 17, 18, and I first started driving, when I had my black-dog days, I would drive all the way down and sit on the beach at Trebarwith Strand, let the sea come in and be stuck on the rocks for a while… it was a great way to slow my head down and get up and go again. It matters to me a lot.”
The romance meets reality when Knowles says he and his fellow owners are not interested in the rugby trend of pouring their own money down the drain.
“I see a proper financial model, which brings a new audience to rugby, and which identifies with Cornwall. I saw some research that suggests this has the potential to be second only to the New Zealand All Blacks in terms of being identifiable. That’s a powerful, powerful thing.”
Watching the first half from behind the self-styled “Naughty Boys Corner”, open to the unseasonal rain, I found spectators well-engaged in the game, cheering Pirates’ scrum successes. They self-deprecate with the chant “Give us a P, give us an I, give us an Rrrrrrrrr.”
But the clear inference here is that, in a digital world, not all the Cornwall-connected people need to attend matches – they can be monetised from afar. Pettipher met Global Cornish, a strategic body part-funded by the UK Government, at the House of Commons last December.
As Knowles says: “The team can win the league by 30 points and fill the place up, and you’re still not going to be able to afford the millions to get into the Premiership and build a stadium.
“You have to develop a different revenue stream based on Cornish Pirates, and on what Cornwall and the Cornish are, and get that to a worldwide audience and create a community.”
I speak to Dave Meggs and Nick Webb-Wood, two long-time Cornish Pirates supporters. Neither is Cornwall-born, but Meggs has had a season ticket for 20 years, while Webb-Wood drives the “172 miles door to door” from Weston-super-Mare. They and some mates are dubbed “The Naughty Whisky Boys”, and they sponsor back-rower Tomi Agbongbon.
“The new owners are developing a community around the club, and that to me is what Pirates is all about,” Meggs says.
And how about the Americans and Knowles? Webb-Wood says there is caution, of course, but “it’s raising the profile of the club, which is good. And Nick obviously has a love of the game and Cornwall. So it’s a win-win.”
While a female sea-shanty choir sing “South Australia” and “Haul Away Joe”, Knowles advises a 13-year-old autograph-hunter to stick to being a flanker “because they make everything happen”.
He banters with Saracens’ Jamie George – who tells the crowd “Cornish rugby is a sleeping giant” – and other England players he knows from the celeb circuit, and talks coaching with the Pirates’ Alan Paver.
The Pirates’ second row Steele Barker tells me Worcester Warriors and Ealing Trailfinders will again be tough to beat in this season’s Champ.
Crucially, though, in the Prem’s new franchise world, access will no longer hinge on winning the Champ. They want geographical spread, and positive numbers. Cornwall famously took 40,000 fans to Twickenham for a County Championship final in 1991, although much more recently a stadium in Truro failed because council and public support wasn’t unanimous.
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Knowles cannot say where a bigger stadium might be built. Then he breaks off as a cheer from outside greets a Pirates try.
“Isn’t that lovely? These are people that have paid for their tickets, having spent a week out in the Atlantic, fishing. That’s hard. That’s tough. I got a lovely text tonight from one of the lifeboat crew saying ‘the pager’s off for tonight, just for the duration of the game’.
“There’s something very lovely about a club that has just landed some American money but, at the same time, the players are individually sponsored by the scaffolding company, by the fish-and-chip place on the seafront, by the farm shop down near Land’s End.
“Being in the Prem would bring thousands of away spectators from Leicester, from Gloucester, the Cheltenham area, from Bristol, Bath, Harlequins – they’ll spend money in the restaurants, staying in hotels, falling in love with Cornwall. We have feeder clubs all over the county and we don’t want a player like Jack Nowell to go from Pirates to Exeter Chiefs to England. He should go from Pirates straight to England.”