William Webb Ellis, stand up, boy

The man whose name is on the Rugby World Cup is a real person, once a real schoolboy.

New Zealand play France in Auckland on Sunday evening in the Final of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. The prize is The Webb Ellis Cup. That is the name inscribed on handsome trophy. Why Webb Ellis?

There is a story that on the Close at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, a game of soccer was in progress in 1823. Suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, a boy, William Webb Ellis, picked up the ball and ran with it. Alleluia, all exclaimed, that’s the way we want to play, and rugby football was born.

This has, literally, been cast in stone, on a tablet let into a wall next to the field: 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.
AD 1823

There is a book’s worth of debate about this. Just a couple of things. There was no game called soccer in 1823. The stone was put in place in 1895, some time after Ellis’s death.

Any rate, who was William Webb Ellis? It’s a good question, because in fact little is known of him and people may even be getting his name wrong.

His father was James Ellis who married Miss Ann Webb at St Peter’s Church in Exeter in 1804. They had two sons, Thomas and William. William was not yet six years of age when his father was killed.

On 1 November 1804 James Ellis was commissioned in the 18th Regiment of Foot. On 11 April 1805 he became an ensign in the 7th (Princess Royal’s) Dragoon Guards, a cavalry regiment. In 1807 he was an ensign, stationed at Dundalk, Clonmel and Dublin in 1807. On 14 September 1809 he bought, for £735, a commission in the 3rd (Prince of Wales’s) Dragoon Guards and was killed at the bloody Battle of Albuera on 16 May 1812, during the Peninsula War. Albuera is about 20 km from Badajoz.

Mrs Ellis, with an army pension of £10 per annum for each child and without other means, moved to Rugby, possibly because she had relatives there, possibly to see to her children’s education as residence in Rugby made her sons eligible to be foundationers at Rugby School, founded by Lawrence Sheriff in 1567 and on its present site since 1750. To qualify as a foundationer the pupil had to live within a radius of 10 miles of the Rugby Clock Tower. When the brothers Thomas and William entered Rugby School they were day boys and in reality charity cases. This is important for it is hard to imagine that the actions of a day boy could have any momentous results.

The name? His father’s surname was Ellis. There was no Webb in his name. The mother’s surname was Webb. William was called William Webb Ellis. There is no hyphen. He himself signed his name W.W. Ellis. It would seem that the family had no intention of creating a double-barrelled name as they named their first son (born December 1804) simply Thomas Ellis – no other names and certainly no Webb. The family obviously did not intend that he be Webb Ellis and he did not use it as a surname.

It would seem that Ellis was his surname and the Webb Ellis bit may have been to add a bit of posh. Matthew Bloxham who did the investigation into the origins of the rugby game which resulted in the tablet quoted above referred to him as Mr Ellis.

Thomas Ellis was baptised in St Martin’s in the Field, London, which suggests that he may have been born in London. William gave his birthplace as Manchester, though he is unlikely to have remembered the exact location. It is sometimes given as Salford, though the distinction between the two cities is vague. Sometimes his birthplace is given as Dundalk. He was baptised in Trinity Church, Salford, on 2 January 1807. It is unlikely that a child of under two months would have crossed the Irish Sea.

William Webb Ellis entered Rugby School in September 1816. He left it in 1825. In 1823 when he is supposed to have picked up the ball and ran with it, he was fairly high up the school which was suffering an unsuccessful period in its history under the headmastership of Dr J Wooll. When Ellis first entered Rugby School there were 380 boys in the school. When Dr Wooll left there were 143. The school did not pick up till Dr Thomas Arnold, one of the most famous headmasters in British public school history, took over, in 1828. It was Arnold who would set it in the way to producing muscular Christians capable of ruling an empire and using sport as a means to his end. It was in Arnold’s time that the rules of football as played at Rugby School became more popular than those at other schools such as Winchester and Eton. Arnold’s reign at Rugby School started after Ellis had left the school.

In the shrinking school a boy of reasonable academic and sporting ability, such as Ellis, would have been important. Rugby School, in common with many British public schools, had a great divide between staff and boys, the boys despising the staff. The headmaster was an autocrat and the boys themselves would have a system in which the strong ruled over the weak. Rugby School had a system of praeposters brought to the school from Eton by Dr T James. The praeposters exercised authority over the boys, often in a barbaric way in the days when fagging and flogging were common. James exercised no authority over praeposters. He was succeeded in 1794 by Henry Ingles, known as the Black Tiger.

In 1797 the boys revolted against Ingles. Explosives were used and eventually the militia were called out and the Riot Act read. Ringleaders were expelled and many more mutineers severely flogged. In 1806 Wooll succeeded Ingles. Wooll did nothing to curb the praeposters though he did rid the school of some of the worst excesses. In 1822 fags rebelled against praeposters and masters. When the protracted affair came to an end, some were expelled and some withdrawn. Thomas Arnold took over from Wooll in 1828 and was headmaster till his sudden death in 1842, on the day before his 47th birthday. Arnold replaced praeposters by prefects and charged them with moral guardianship of the school.

This was William Webb Ellis’s school. He left the school in 1825 and went up to Oxford as an exhibitioner to Brasenose College. An exhibition was a scholarship, which suggests that Ellis was no slouch academically. He in fact received the second Rugby exhibition, worth £60 per annum at a time when a schoolmaster received about £15 per annum.

Whether he played football at Oxford is unknown but in 1827 he batted number 3 for the university against Cambridge, in days before Blues were awarded.

In 1829 he received the BA degree, in 1831 the MA. In 1847 he also received an MA from Cambridge by incorporation.

Down from Oxford, the Rev. WW Ellis became minister of St George’s in Albermale Street, London, and then rector of St Clement Dane’s in the Strand. His mother lived with him there and died there. He placed a memorial to her in the church which was destroyed by German bombs in World War II. After the war the church became the church of the RAF whose rugby union erected a tablet in memory of Ellis. For the last 17 years of his life he was rector of Laver Magdalen, now Magdalen Laver, in Essex.

He never married, preached a sermon during the Crimean War which attracted attention and resulted in a daguerreotype in the Illustrated London News, the only available image of him. His only published work was a sermon on King Asa’s Prayer on the Eve of Battle, preached in the morning in St George’s and in the evening, in St Clement Dane’s on 26 April 1854.

He may also have written a poem in praise of beer.

When he died he left an amount of £9 000, which meant he was wealthy. He died at Menton in the Alpes Maritimes in the south-east of France, 24 January 1872, there apparently for his health. Ross McWhirter found his grave in October 1959.

During the 2007 World Cup the IRB visited the grave and placed a memorial there. Billy Beaumont, the vice-chairman of the IRB and a former Lions and England captain, carried out the ceremony.

In Ellis’s schooldays sport was organised and run by senior boys and everybody joined in a Big Side on the Close, which is still there and where the tablet now is. The game they played was not soccer, but Rugby Football – a form of football unique to Rugby School. Its rudimentary rules were the property of the players and decided on from time to time by agreement amongst the senior boys.

The ball was handled from time to time. Usually that was to make a mark from an opponent’s kick which allowed the catcher a free kick. Normally the catcher would then move backwards as the opponents were allowed to take up a position on the mark, as situation which obtained in rugby football for many, many years. Ellis may well have caught the ball and run forward with it. Running in to get a shot at goal was not uncommon. The great exponent of this was Jem Mackie in the late 1830s. The point is that games were haphazard and unrecorded.

But in 1895 Rugby School erected its tablet about his feat. This was seventy two years after the event, 23 years after Ellis had died. The man who did the investigation in to the origins of the running game was MH Bloxam, an Old Rugbeian who had left rugby in 1821. But Bloxham’s brother was an exact contemporary of Ellis’s.

There are doubts about the validity of all this, the unlikelihood of a single act by one fellow to change the game, and a boy not renowned for his footballing prowess at all.

One theory is that all of this was produced in 1895 as a counter to the dispute about broken time payment in Yorkshire and Lancashire, strong parts of rugby football but where men needed to take unpaid time off work to pay in the days of a six-day working week and a sport-less Sunday.

There had been representation from the men of the mines and the mills that they be compensated for wages lost in order to play the game at which gate money was charged. It is just possible that this plaque was installed at rugby school to show that the game had originated in clean air on a green field through the Damascus Road-style revelation to a young, innocent public schoolboy, not in the hearts of grouchy miners grubbing for money in the dark bowels of the earth.

This was also the age of invention. There was Stephenson with his locomotive, Watt, Faraday, Davy with his lamp, Lister, Alexander Bell and so on. After all individuals did things – discovered new countries and sea routes. Having an individual inventor and a single act added to the greatness of the game. That little was known about him added to the mystique and meant that there could be no grubby revelations about him.

Were the men who chose Ellis thus filled with devious intent? Highly unlikely. Bloxham seems to have been an honourable man and a noted antiquarian. Perhaps, like many myths, there is more truth in the affair than people think.

Fact file:
Full names: William Webb Ellis
Birth: Salford, England, 24 November 1806
Education: Rugby School, Brasenose College, Oxford
Occupation: Clergyman
Playing career: School only
Death: Menton in the Alpes Maritimes in the south-east of France, 24 January 1872