Rugby’s number-one player. By Christopher Sandford

At this year’s Rugby World Cup Final on 28th October, the winner of the Webb Ellis Cup will be celebrating 200 years after William Webb Ellis’s sporting breakthrough. In 1823, Webb Ellis, in the words of the commemorative stone at his old school, ‘with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran ... thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby Game.’

Or did he? There’s a degree of Arthurian myth about the origins of the world’s ninth most popular sport, played competitively in more than 100 countries.

William Webb Ellis (1806-72) was real enough. We know he was up at Rugby as a ‘foundationer’ (scholarship boy) and that the game he was playing that autumn afternoon in 1823 was probably a form of hybrid soccer peculiar to the school.

The idea was to kick the ball between the posts and over the crossbar to score a goal, like certain recent English football penalty-takers.

The most likely scenario is that Ellis caught the ball, which was allowed under the rules of the game. But instead of retreating ten yards to ponder his options, he ran headlong with it towards the opposition’s line, which wasn’t.

The earliest surviving reference to the Webb Ellis story comes 53 years after the feat. In 1876, Matthew Bloxham, a Rugby old boy, wrote to the school magazine, relating the incident as told to him by an anonymous eyewitness.

Bloxham initially dated the event to 1824, then to December 1825 (which would have been tricky, as Webb Ellis had actually left the school the previous July), before settling on the Michaelmas term of 1823.

But, again, we’ll probably never know. By the time the Old Rugby Society came to investigate the matter in the 1890s, both Bloxham and Ellis himself were dead, and no one has ever established the identity of the eyewitness apparently responsible for the story in the first place. So Webb Ellis may or may not be the founding father of rugby. But his life is still a classic Victorian story of its sort.

The younger of two surviving sons of an army officer killed in the Peninsular War in 1812, William was sent to Rugby at age ten. The family seems to have been financially strapped, because they moved to the Midlands town from their home in Salford specifically so that William could qualify for one of the free places made available to local boys ‘of reduced means but good character, and in that sense worthy of a [Rugby] education’.

He was recorded in the school magazine as being a good scholar and sportsman, although, perhaps significantly, ‘rather inclined to take unfair advantage at cricket’.

Webb Ellis won an exhibition to Oxford, where he read theology – a popular choice among younger sons at the time. He appeared in the first recorded Varsity cricket match against Cambridge, a rain-affected draw at Lord’s in June 1827.

‘Ellis batted correctly’ for his 12 runs, said the Globe, not knowing or not caring about his other sporting exploits.

The next we know for sure is that he left Oxford in 1829, entered the Church, and became successively Anglican chaplain of St George’s Church in Albemarle Street, London, and rector of St Clement Danes in the Strand.

Beyond that, little is known of Ellis’s 30 years in the cloth. In April 1854, at St Clement Danes, he preached a sermon on the subject of the Crimean War sufficiently robust for a daguerreotype of him (the only known portrait) to appear in the Illustrated London News.

Webb Ellis never married. His widowed mother, Ann, lived with him at St Clement Danes, and he later placed a tablet there in her memory. It read, ‘A mother, whose piety is recorded in Heaven and requires no praise upon earth... Her spirit rejoices in God her saviour. Let my last end be like hers.’ It was destroyed by German bombing in the Blitz. He may also have written a poem in praise of beer.

After a further dozen years’ service as rector of St Mary’s at Magdalen Laver in Essex, Webb Ellis retired to a cottage at Menton, close to the Italian border on the French Riviera.

He was thought to have been suffering from tuberculosis, for which sunshine was then the preferred treatment. On a last visit back to London, he wrote that he ‘never thought any place could be so changed, as were from a pleasant village to a strident metropolis’.

Webb Ellis died at Menton on 24th January 1872, at the age of 65. He left an estate of £9,000 – roughly £1.2 million today – mostly to local charities.

His grave lies only 20 miles up the coast from Nice, where England played one of their World Cup group matches this autumn. So perhaps a few rugby fans will pay their respects to the man who – possibly – invented the sport.