DIY SOS star Nick Knowles backs Cornish Pirates’ Premiership ambitions

TV presenter Nick Knowles can usually be found at a rugby ground on a Saturday when he isn’t filming his BBC show DIY SOS, but he has gone one step further than being a fan: he has invested in Champ Rugby outfit Cornish Pirates.

Knowles, who played flanker at Skinners’ School in Tunbridge Wells and then for the local club before spending two seasons in Australia at Kiama, New South Wales, says he always takes his boots abroad while filming, hoping to find a game.

When at home, he developed into the rugby equivalent of a football groundhopper, travelling to Bath, Bristol, Worcester and Gloucester, or even across the Severn Bridge to Cardiff, in search of a game.

Knowles has now invested in the Pirates, who recently became the first club to receive investment from the USA when Pittsburgh-based private equity group Stonewood Capital Management pumped in a seven-figure sum.

“The new CEO who went in there is an old friend of mine whom I’d worked with on Jason Lennard’s charity, Sally Pettipher, and she started talking to me about it. In the end, it came down to: I like pasties. I like Cornwall.

“I’ve been going there my whole life, so I’m almost adopted Cornish. I’m not Cornish, but I’ve literally been going there since I was six months old, despite being a Londoner. I was keeping an eye on it.

“During the winter, they were up against it anyway, struggling financially, and had some real problems. Then, in the winter, the roof blew off their stand, and they realised there was all kinds of horrible stuff in the stand that made it unsafe.

“So I published a fundraiser for them. Then we were talking to them more and more, and what started as going down there for a few games to show support developed. When I got talking to them, I thought, ‘Well, there’s a real opportunity here.’

“We’ve been working on getting investment in, and there’s been some American investment, which is really, really positive. So we’re like, ‘Let’s just see if we can lay out a plan, like a five-year plan, to get Cornish Pirates and Cornish rugby back where it should be,’” he said.

Knowles remains tight-lipped about the club’s five-year plan, but applying for a franchise when the Prem adopts the model for the 2029-30 campaign, when the league is expanded from 10 to 12 teams, is on the cards.

The potential catchment area is huge, with only National League One’s Plymouth Albion currently playing between them and Exeter Chiefs, who are two hours away via the A30 and M5.

“In 1991, Cornwall went up to Twickenham to play Yorkshire in the county championship. Forty thousand Cornish turned up to watch the game, which they reckoned was 10% of the county’s population.

“You think about that and how important rugby is in Cornwall. Cornwall has such an identity of its own, you know. It thinks of itself more as a nation than a county. So they’ve got a real sense of identity down there.

“And, of course, they’ve always produced great rugby players at an international level, the most recent examples being Luke Cowan-Dickie and Jack Nowell. There’s a massive tradition of these boys coming out of fishing villages.

“I think it’s very much like New Zealand. We’ve got a lot of farmers in New Zealand, and, like fishermen, they are people who work with their hands and have very physical jobs. That lends itself automatically to rugby, I think.

“The Cornish have always had a proud tradition of rugby and, if you think about it, the Pirates have always been there or thereabouts at the top of the league, either first or second. I mean, this year just gone, we missed the playoffs, but they’re usually there or thereabouts.

“We know they talk about, you know, the Premiership being sealed off and all the rest of it, but I think, if you think about it, if we could get Cornish Pirates really up to where they should be, you’ve got a massive fan base there that would come,” he added to RugbyPass.