The Birth of Rugby Football
A BRIEF HISTORY OF RUGBY SCHOOLS ASSOCIATION TO THE GAME
RUGBY SCHOOL 1906
Playing football has a long tradition in England and football had probably been played at Rugby School for two hundred years before three boys published the first set of written rules in 1845.
The pupils, not the masters, had always determined the rules and they were frequently modified with each new intake.
Rules changes, such as the legality of carrying or running with the ball, were often agreed shortly before the commencement of a game.
There were thus no formal rules for Rugby Football during the time William Webb Ellis was at the school (1816-1825) and the legendary story of the boy “who with a fine disregard for the rules as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it” in 1823 is now legendary.
This story first appeared in 1876, some four years after the death of Webb Ellis, and is attributed to a local antiquarian and former Rugbeian Matthew Bloxam. Bloxam was not a comtemporary of Webb Ellis and vaguely quoted an unnamed person, possibly Bloxhams brother who was a contemporary of Webb Ellis or Bloxhams father who was a Teacher at Rugby School, as informing him of the incident that had supposedly happened 53 years earlier.
The Old Rugbeian Society has dismissed the story as unlikely since an official investigation in 1895. However, the trophy for the Rugby Union World Cup is named “Webb Ellis” in his honour (as is Ellis Park in Johannesburg a major international rugby union stadium), and a plaque at the school commemorates the ‘achievement’.
Rugby School has successful claims to the world’s first and oldest “football club”: the Guy’s Hospital Football Club, formed in London in 1843, by old boys from Rugby School.
Around Britain and Ireland, a number of other clubs formed to play games based on the Rugby School rules. One of these, Dublin University Football Club, whom Richard Lindon was Pincipal ball supplier, founded in 1854, is the world’s oldest surviving football club. The Blackheath Rugby Club, in London, founded in 1858, is the oldest surviving non-university rugby club.
