William Webb Ellis died without realising he invented rugby

Brendan Gallagher begins his expert and authorative look at the history of Rugby Union

Beginnings: The young Webb Ellis runs with the ball at Rugby School in 1823

The History of rugby: PART 1

1823-1870

NEXT WEEK: THE GREAT SPLIT

THE official history books will tell you rugby was invented in 1823 at Rugby School in Warwickshire and while there is no denying the seminal role played by that establishment in the game’s development you won’t be surprised to hear that the reality is not quite so clearcut.

Indeed William Webb Ellis – recognised as the founder of the game and after whom the World Cup is named – died in the south of France in 1872 without ever knowing he had “invented” a major sport nearly 50 years earlier.

Rugby with its beery clubhouse culture does like to embellish a tale and just as a prop’s exhausted two-foot flop over the line to score a try can quickly morph into a jinking 15-yard run, the Webb Ellis story is essentially an agreed fiction, a convenient indulgence.

The fact is that ad hoc roughhouse games involving a ball or inflated animal bladders with numerous young men on opposing sides aggressively thumping into each other pre-date the game practiced at Rugby by countless centuries and are clearly part of Rugby’s DNA.

In Britain from at least the fifth century onwards there have been various incarnations of mob football or Shrovetide football as it is sometimes known, usually between neighbouring villages and towns, that became so violent that the authorities often tried to ban them. These games were a hybrid between what we might loosely recognise as rugby and modern-day soccer but the emphasis was definitely on brawn and physicality and kicking and handing the ball rather than intricate dribbling or running skills.

Alnwick in Northumberland and Ashbourne in Derbyshire were noted venues, there were annual games at Corfe Castle, Sedgefield, Workington, Kirkwall in Orkney – in fact all over the land. All the Celtic races played a form of Caid with caid being the Celtic word for a bull’s scrotum. Cornwall was a particular hotspot while Gaelic Football, with its many skills but limited running, is also part of the shared DNA.

Further afield there is evidence of similar games in France, Italy with its Caicio Florentino, modern day Georgia where it was called Lelo Burti – the Georgians of course style themselves as the Lelos these days – and Japan where it was known as Kemari.

All this was going on for a millennium or more before rugby’s official start day in 1823. And those early versions caused quite a stir. In 1531 Sir Thomas Elyot wrote that that “Footballe is nothinge but beastile furie and extreme violence.” Sound familiar?

Gradually these games were refined and what Rugby School undoubtedly did, in 1846, was to write down and codify the first set of Laws for the version of football they had been playing for decades. Strangely nobody had thought to do that before.

In the introduction the author lists 37 Laws but also rather snootily states: “The following book of Rules is to be regarded rather as a set of decisions on certain disputed points in Football, than as containing all the Laws of the Game, which are too well known to render any explanation necessary to Rugbeians.”

No explanation necessary? This sounds like early evidence of the comical delusion that players know all the Laws of the game. And time was clearly not of the essence at Rugby when it came to sport.

Law XXX11 stated: “All matches are drawn after five days or after three days if no goal has been kicked.” In your own time lads.

The possibly unintended effect of committing the Laws to paper was immediate because very quickly old boys of the school scattered far and wide where they established clubs and continued playing the game they played under Rugby Rules.

Guys Hospital Football Club – the world’s first senior rugby club – was founded by Rugby alumini in 1843. A huge number of early rugby clubs, here and overseas, had an old Rugbean as a founding member. That is their unquestioned contribution to the game we know.

The date of 1823 is, however, extremely random but people have an instinctive need to know when something started. Sport needs a timeline.

So why 1823?

What happened is that in 1876 Matthew Bloxham – an old boy of the school – wrote to the school magazine The Meteor claiming that he had been told during his time as a student there that a certain William Webb Ellis introduced the running with the ball element into the Rugby version of football in 1824.

Bloxham was subsequently corrected when it was pointed out that Webb Ellis left Rugby in the 1823 but undeterred, in 1880, Bloxham wrote a second time with his definitive version. His testimony is the only mention anywhere of Webb Ellis’ part in the founding of rugby.

“In Britain from the fifth century there have been various incarnations of mob football”

“A boy of the name Ellis – William Webb Ellis – a town boy and a foundationer… whilst playing Bigside at football in that half-year [1823], caught the ball in his arms… Ellis, on catching the ball, instead of retiring backwards, rushed forwards with the ball in his hands towards the opposite goal, with what result as to the game I know not, neither do I know how this infringement of a well-known rule was followed up, or when it became, as it is now, a standing rule.”

The general consensus is that even if the Webb Ellis incident happened it didn’t lead to any change in the way football was played for sometime. An investigation by the school in 1895 concluded that a certain Jem Mackie, who attended between 1838-39 was in fact the first great ‘runner in of tries’ and it was the mastering of that skill that led a few years later to Laws being drafted.

Whatever the truth, by the middle of the 19th century the Rugby version of football was increasingly gaining currency and clubs were being formed all over country – Guys, Marlborough College, Barnes, Blackheath, Trinity College Dublin, Edinburgh Academicals, Richmond, Oxford and Cambridge Universities and even Neuenenhem College in Germany. In the age of Empire the game also went global, with young men educated at rugby-playing schools taking their British ways wherever they settled. The Sydney University club was formed in 1864. In 1868 the Nelson RFU was established in New Zealand.

Rugby and football go their separate ways

There were two great schisms that shaped the course of rugby in its early decades. First, towards the end of 1863, came the parting of the ways of those who preferred the rugby version of the game to what the world came to know as simply football or soccer. And then in 1895, as we will see next week, came the split between those who wanted rugby to be strictly amateur and those who accepted that broken time payment was legitimate enough. This saw the birth of Rugby League.

The first of these upheavals was precipitated by the formation of the Football Association at the Freemason’s Tavern on October 26, 1863. It came into being mainly with the intention of producing one set of rules for all the various variants of football that existed. The idea was to produce one homogenous game.

There was much dissent as you can imagine and some clubs were left chuntering and complaining during a series of four meetings that autumn as the universal rules were thrashed out. As a last ditch measure, the rugby diehards drafted two contentious rules for consideration.

Immortalised: The Webb Ellis statue outside Rugby School

IX. A player shall be entitled to run with the ball towards his adversaries’ goal if he makes a fair catch, or catches the ball on the first bound; but in case of a fair catch, if he makes his mark he shall not run.

X. If any player shall run with the ball towards his adversaries’ goal, any player on the opposite side shall be at liberty to charge, hold, trip or hack him, or to wrest the ball from him, but no player shall be held and hacked at the same time.

“The Webb Ellis incident didn’t lead to any change in the way football was played for sometime”

At the fifth meeting these draft rules were voted against and at a final meeting on December 8, Blackheath walked out insisting they would play football only under the rugby rules. Others followed and the die was cast.

By 1870, with a clear split within the football code firmly established, it was time for those who played the rugby version to unite under one banner. The sport we know was coming together.

On December 4, 1870, Edwin Ash of Richmond and Benjamin Burns of Blackheath published a letter in The Times suggesting that “those who play the rugby-type game should meet to form a code of practice as various clubs play to rules which differ from others, which makes the game difficult to play”.

A special meeting was organised for representatives of 21 clubs on January 26 at the Pall Mall restaurant and from that quorum the Rugby Union was formed with Algenon Rutter elected as its first president.

All 21 clubs for simple geographical reasons were from London which doesn’t mean to say the rugby football game wasn’t being played extensively elsewhere, it was. For the record they were Addison, Belsize Park, Blackheath, Civil Service, Clapham Rovers, Flamingoes, Gipsies, Guy’s Hospital, Harlequins, King’s College, Lausanne, The Law Club, Marlborough Nomads, Mohicans, Queen’s House, Ravenscourt Park, Richmond, St Paul’s, Wellington College, West Kent, and Wimbledon Hornets.

Six remain in existence today – Belsize Park, Richmond, Quins, Blackheath, Wellington College and Guys who continue in the form of GKT, an amalgamation of Guys, Kings and St Thomas’ Hospital.

Wasps were also well established by this time – when the Hampstead club had split in 1866 it spawned both Quins and Wasps – and Wasps were meant to attend the special meeting but their representative got his wires crossed and went to the wrong watering hole. Rugby’s tradition of the hapless alickadoo was thus established early on.