Founded at a meeting at Newport's Dock Street Brewery, at the instigation of the Phillips brewing family, it proved impossible to obtain Football Association fixtures locally, which was the original reason for setting the club up in September 1874. Monmouth School, an independent boarding school re-founded in the early nineteenth century, had adopted rugby football in 1873. Such combination of circumstances contributed to a master at the school, H. W. Peill, persuading the fledgling Newport club to adopt rugby football.

In their Official History of the Welsh Rugby Union, "Fields of Praise", David Smith and Gareth Williams record "The Newport club was launched by a powerful alliance of forces: the financial initiative of the Phillipses, the playing expertise of a phalanx of Old Monmouthians - Charles Newman, Tom Clapp, George and Theo Harding, Baker-Jones, George Rosser, H. M. Purdon - and the attentiveness to legal and constitutional niceties of its solicitor playing-members Horace Lyne, Babbington-Jones (ex-Oxford), and A. V. Julius of Abergavenny."

The result, a rugby match was arranged with Glamorgan Rugby Football Club which was one of the Cardiff clubs. Two other Cardiff based clubs, Tredegarville and Wanderers, amalgamated with Glamorgan in 1876 to form the Cardiff club.

The match was played, and drawn, at Cardiff on 5th April 1875.