William Webb Ellis(1806–1872)

William Webb Ellis was born at Salford, Manchester, on 24 November 1806, eldest son of a dragoon officer of the Third Dragoon Guards. His father was killed at the Battle of Albuera in 1811, when William was four; his mother moved with the two boys to Rugby in Warwickshire to place them at Rugby School on the Lawrence Sheriff foundation scholarship for boys of the Rugby parish.

He was admitted to Rugby School in 1816, at ten, as a Rugby foundationer on the endowment Lawrence Sheriff had provided in his 1567 charter for the free education of Rugby-parish boys, and stayed for ten years. He distinguished himself in the academic and sporting record of the 1820s, was Captain of Bigside in 1825-26, won the open Major Scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, and went up in 1826.

The foundation story of rugby football attached to his name is the 1823 Bigside match: that William Webb Ellis, a sixth-form footballer of about seventeen, took the ball in his hands during a Bigside match and ran with it, the first running-with-the-ball try in the game's foundation legend. The story was set down by the Rugby master and old boy Matthew Bloxam in The Meteor in December 1876 and has been the foundation myth of the modern game ever since.

He took his BA from Brasenose in 1829, was ordained an Anglican deacon in 1830, and served as curate of St Clement Danes in the Strand from 1831 and Rector of Magdalen Laver in Essex from 1855. He took the Anglican Holy-Land tour of 1871.

He died at Menton on the Mediterranean coast on 24 January 1872, sixty-five years old, and is buried at the Cimetière du Vieux Château there; the grave was rediscovered in 1958 by the Rugby Football Union historian Ross McWhirter. The Webb Ellis Cup, the trophy of the Rugby World Cup commissioned in 1986, has carried his name since the inaugural tournament of 1987. The Ellis name, the Anglo-Norman patronymic of Elias, he carried from a Salford army-widow's family into the foundation mythology of the modern rugby game.