William Webb Ellis(1806–1872)

William Webb Ellis was born on 24 November 1806 at the Salford parish (in the Manchester western-bank Irwell-river suburbs), eldest son of James Webb Ellis, a dragoon officer of the Third Dragoon Guards, and Ann Webb. The father was killed at the Battle of Albuera in southern Spain on 16 May 1811 in the Peninsular War campaign of the period when William was four; the Webb Ellis family was left on the small army-widow's pension. The mother moved with the two boys (William and his younger brother Thomas) to the market town of Rugby in Warwickshire in or about 1816 on the recommendation of a Webb family connection of the Rugby School foundation, with the intention of placing the boys at Rugby School on the foundationer's scholarship that the small army-widow's-children-of-the-Rugby-parish-and-Lawrence Sheriff endowment provided for. The family took small rented rooms in the Sheep Street property opposite the school across the next ten years.

He was admitted to Rugby School in 1816 at ten as a Rugby foundationer (the endowment-supported scholarship that the founder Lawrence Sheriff had provided in his 1567 charter for the free-of-charge education of small Rugby-parish boys). He stayed at Rugby from ten to twenty (1816 to 1826), the ten-year run that the foundationer-scholarship of the Lawrence-Sheriff endowment provided. He distinguished himself across the Rugby School academic-and-sporting record of the 1820s period: he was Captain of Bigside (the football-and-cricket squad of the upper-school) in his year of 1825-26, took the open Major Scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford on the 1825 examination, and went up to Oxford in October 1826 at twenty.

The senior foundation-of-rugby-football story that the Webb Ellis name has been attached to since 1876 is the Matthew Bloxam-narrated story of the 1823 Bigside match. The small story (told by the Rugby School master-and-old-boy Matthew Bloxam in a letter to the small school magazine *The Meteor* of December 1876 and then again in 1880 in a public lecture at Rugby School) runs that William Webb Ellis, then a sixth-form Bigside footballer of about seventeen years old in the autumn of 1823, took the football in his hands at a dead-ball situation during a Bigside match, broke the foundation-school football-rules of the 1820s period that forbade running-with-the-ball, and ran the ball through the opposition line to score the first running-with-the-ball try in the foundation story of the modern rugby game. The senior small Bloxam-narrated story has been the foundation myth of the modern game across the subsequent century and a half.

The senior small historiographical question of the story's truthfulness has been a Rugby-football-history controversy since the 1870s. The small Bloxam letter of 1876 was the first record of the story, was published forty-three years after the alleged event, was sourced (on the Bloxam-letter internal evidence) to the recollection of an unnamed Rugby-old-boy contemporary of William Webb Ellis; no other small contemporary record of the event has ever been produced. The senior Rugby Football Union's Webb Ellis Cup Commission of 1895 (the body that the Rugby Football Union had set up to investigate the foundation-myth) found the story to be of small uncertain historical authenticity but recommended the public-record adoption of the story on the grounds of small foundation-myth-utility. The senior small Rugby-Football-Union public position since 1895 has been that the foundation-event is of small historical-but-mythologised character.

Webb Ellis took the BA from Brasenose in 1829 at twenty-two, was ordained Anglican deacon by the Bishop of Carlisle in 1830, and took up the Anglican parish curacy at the St Clement Danes parish in the Strand area of central London in 1831. He was small chaplain to the St Clement Danes parish from 1831 to 1855, and was the Rector of the Magdalen Laver parish in the north Essex country from 1855 to 1872. He never married. He took the Anglican Holy-Land tour of 1871 on the Anglican-clerical-tourism small movement of the post-Crimean-War-Suez-Canal-decade and, on the return-journey through the south of France in early 1872, contracted small pulmonary tuberculosis at the Mediterranean coastal town of Menton. He died there at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Menton on 24 January 1872, sixty-five years old. He is buried at the Cimetière du Vieux Château in Menton; the grave was rediscovered in 1958 by the Rugby-Football-Union historian Ross McWhirter on a post-war Menton research-trip. The senior small Webb Ellis Cup (the Rugby World Cup trophy that the International Rugby Football Board commissioned in 1986 on the foundation-of-the-Rugby-World-Cup of 1987) has carried his name since the inaugural 1987 Rugby World Cup. The Ellis name in the English-side catalogue is the Anglo-Norman patronymic of Elias (the Welsh-Marches Norman variant of the Old Testament prophet's name carried into the Welsh-borderland English-parish baptismal record from the Anglo-Norman period); he carried the Salford-army-widow's-son variant of it into the foundation-mythology of the modern rugby game.