Ellis · 1823
Webb Ellis picks up the ball at Rugby School
On a soft November afternoon in 1823, on the long sloping playing field below the Doctor's Wall at Rugby School in Warwickshire, the sixteen-year-old fifth-form pupil William Webb Ellis, the son of a deceased dragoon officer of the 3rd Light Dragoons and a clergyman's daughter from the parish of Brownsover near Rugby, in the middle of a routine school football match between the senior boys' houses (the football match of the period was a heavily-improvised kicking-and-catching code that the Rugby boys had developed across the preceding decade, with substantial regional variation between the senior public schools), in defiance of the established Rugby School rules of the time (which permitted the catching and the carrying of the ball but required the catcher to retreat behind the line he had caught it on before kicking it forward), picked up the ball with both hands, tucked it under his arm, and ran forward with it across the half-way line and into the opposition territory. The act was, by the 1880 account of his fellow pupil Matthew Bloxam (the principal contemporary witness, who set down the recollection fifty-seven years after the event in the Rugby School magazine The Meteor), with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game. The act has been universally remembered ever since as the founding moment of rugby football. Rugby School adopted the carrying-and-running variant within fifteen years; the Rugby Football Union was founded in London in 1871 on the Rugby School rules; the international game of rugby football today is played in over a hundred countries with a global participation of approximately ten million players and a Rugby World Cup audience of approximately eight hundred million viewers. The Rugby World Cup trophy, contested at four-year intervals since 1987, is the Webb Ellis Cup.
A game is rarely founded by a single act of a single boy on a single afternoon. The classic English organised sports of the nineteenth century (cricket, association football, lawn tennis, rowing) all emerged from decades of gradual standardisation of regional variants under the patient codifying work of committees of adults. Rugby is the exception. Rugby has a founding myth that places the origin of the running-and-handling game in a single act of defiance by a sixteen-year-old schoolboy on a November afternoon in 1823, and the game has chosen ever since to remember itself in those terms. Whether the act actually happened as Matthew Bloxam recorded it in 1880, fifty-seven years after the event, is a question the historians of the game have never been able to settle. The fact that the game has decided to be founded that way is the legend.
THE BROWNSOVER BOY
William Webb Ellis was born at Salford in Lancashire on the twenty-fourth of November 1806, second son of Lieutenant James Ellis of the 3rd Light Dragoons and Ann Webb of Exeter. His father was killed in action at the Battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War on the sixteenth of May 1811 when William was four. His widowed mother moved with her two sons to the small Warwickshire parish of Brownsover near Rugby in 1816 on the strength of the parish living being held by her elder brother Thomas Webb. William and his elder brother Thomas were entered at Rugby School on the strength of the residence-qualification of the new mother's residence at Brownsover; the standard Rugby foundation-place was open to any son of a clergyman or military officer residing within five miles of the school, and Brownsover qualified at four and a half.
He entered Rugby School at twelve in October 1818 in the lower form and was in the fifth form by November 1823 at sixteen. He was, by his school-master reports, a competent but unremarkable scholar with a strong cricket-and-football record on the inter-house playing-fields. He left Rugby School in 1825 to take the Brasenose College Oxford scholarship that had been kept for him by the Brasenose connection of his maternal uncle, took his BA at Brasenose in 1829, was ordained in the Church of England in 1831 in his twenty-fifth year, served as a curate at the parish of Albert Street, Camden, in north London 1831 to 1855, and held the rectory of the small Essex parish of Magdalen Laver in the Ongar Hundred 1855 to 1872. He never married and never returned to Rugby School after his 1825 departure.
THE FOOTBALL OF 1823
The football played at Rugby School in 1823 was the local Rugby variant of the substantially-unstandardised school football that the senior English public schools (Rugby, Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury) had each developed independently across the preceding fifty years. The Rugby variant of 1823 had the following general rules (preserved in the small handwritten Rugby School football-rules booklet of 1845, which had not been formally written down at the 1823 period of Webb Ellis's involvement but was substantially the same code): the ball was an inflated pig-bladder approximately ten inches in diameter; the game was played on a long playing-field of approximately a hundred and fifty yards by sixty yards (the Doctor's Wall pitch behind the Headmaster's House); the two teams of the inter-house matches were of roughly equal size (between fifteen and forty boys per side depending on the houses' senior-form numbers); the central scoring achievement was the try (the act of touching the ball down behind the opposition goal-line at the foot of the long playing-field), which conferred the right to a try at goal (a free-kick at the cross-bar from the spot of the try-down).
The Rugby football rules of 1823 permitted the catching of the ball from a kicked pass (the standard mark-catch rule of the period) and the carrying of the ball back behind the line of the catch before kicking it forward again (the standard retreat-and-kick rule), but did not permit the carrying of the ball forward across the line of the catch. The carrying-forward act that Webb Ellis is recorded as having performed on the November afternoon of 1823 was, in the Rugby rules of the time, technically a foul.
THE BLOXAM ACCOUNT
The principal contemporary source for the Webb Ellis story is the 1880 account by Matthew Bloxam (1805 to 1888), a Rugby School pupil of the same form as Webb Ellis in the 1820s and later a Rugby antiquary who served as the Mayor of Rugby and as the local Rugby historian for the last thirty years of his life. Bloxam published the account in the Rugby School magazine The Meteor in December 1880, in his seventy-fifth year, in a small letter to the editor headed The Origin of the Rugby Game. The letter set down (in Bloxam's careful late-Victorian prose) that during the football season of 1823 a certain William Webb Ellis of the fifth form, with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game.
Bloxam's account was based on his recollection of conversations with elderly Rugby School alumni of the 1820s through the 1860s and 1870s. He was not himself an eyewitness to the act (he was in the lower form in 1823 and not on the senior playing-field). Webb Ellis himself had died in 1872 at the small French Riviera town of Menton in his sixty-sixth year on his retirement to the south of France, without ever publicly claiming or commenting on the act. The contemporary academic-historical opinion on the Bloxam account (the 1895 Old Rugbeian Society investigation under the chairmanship of the rugby-historian John Macrory) was sceptical-but-respectful: the Society concluded that the Bloxam account could not be independently verified at this distance in time but that there was no positive evidence against it. The Society installed the commemorative plaque on the Doctor's Wall at Rugby School in 1900 that reads: THIS STONE COMMEMORATES THE EXPLOIT OF WILLIAM WEBB ELLIS WHO WITH A FINE DISREGARD FOR THE RULES OF FOOTBALL AS PLAYED IN HIS TIME FIRST TOOK THE BALL IN HIS ARMS AND RAN WITH IT THUS ORIGINATING THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE OF THE RUGBY GAME A.D. 1823.
THE RUGBY GAME
Whether or not Webb Ellis was the first boy to pick up the ball and run with it on the Doctor's Wall playing-field, the Rugby variant of the carrying-and-running football game took hold at Rugby School across the late 1820s and 1830s, was formally codified in the 1845 Rugby School football-rules booklet (the first written rules of any school football code in England), and spread from Rugby School across the senior public school system through the 1850s and 1860s on the strength of the Rugby alumni going on to take teaching-and-coaching positions at the other senior schools. The Rugby School rules were adopted at Marlborough College from 1846, at Cheltenham College from 1849, at Wellington College from 1859, and at the senior English universities of Oxford and Cambridge through the 1850s.
The Rugby Football Union was founded at the Pall Mall restaurant in London on the twenty-sixth of January 1871 by twenty-one English rugby clubs on the formal Rugby School rules. The first international rugby match (England versus Scotland at the Raeburn Place ground at Edinburgh on the twenty-seventh of March 1871) was played on the new RFU rules. The international game spread across the next twenty years to Wales (Welsh Rugby Union founded 1881), Ireland (Irish Rugby Football Union founded 1879), France (Fédération Française de Rugby founded 1919), South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and the southern-hemisphere national governments. The rugby league code split from rugby union in the Northern English breakaway of 1895. The modern Rugby World Cup, contested at four-year intervals since 1987, is the central single international rugby union competition and the trophy is the Webb Ellis Cup, the silver-gilt trophy commissioned from Garrards of London in 1987 in the memory of the November afternoon at Rugby School in 1823.
Webb Ellis is buried in the small French Catholic cemetery at Menton on the Riviera coast. The grave was lost across the late nineteenth century, was re-located by the New Zealand Rugby Football Union historian Ross McWhirter in 1959, was restored at the expense of the French Rugby Federation and the International Rugby Board in 1961, and is now a small but well-tended Rugby pilgrimage site visited by approximately five thousand rugby pilgrims per year on the strength of the standing Webb Ellis Cup heritage. The Ellis name in modern world sport carries the weight of the small Doctor's Wall plaque at Rugby School and the Webb Ellis Cup at Garrards of London.