IRB Hall of Fame: 2006, William Webb Ellis
IRB Hall of Fame: William Webb Ellis
William Webb Ellis was born in Salford, England on November 24, 1806, the second son of James Ellis and Ann Webb, while his older brother Thomas was born two years earlier in London.
Their father James Ellis, son of Thomas and Ann Ellis from Upton-upon-Severn, married Ann Webb who hailed from Upton St Leonard’s at St Peter’s Cathedral in Exeter in 1804.
James, an ensign in the 1st Dragoon Guards served in Ireland in 1807 and returned to the regimental barracks in Manchester in 1808.
In 1809 he bought a commission in the 3rd Dragoon Guards for £735, a very substantial amount those days.
He died in action at Albuera in Portugal in July 1812 and was commended for gallantry.
After James Ellis’ death Ann Ellis applied for a pension and was granted £10 for each child.
She understood the value of good education and as a result the family moved to Rugby, where the boys could receive free education as “foundationers” – that is town boys living within a radius of 10 miles from the Rugby Clock Tower.
Both William and his older brother Thomas entered Rugby school in 1816.
In 1825 William was admitted as an exhibitioner at Brasenose College, Oxford, while Thomas, after brief and unsuccessful stint at the Sandhurst military academy, settled in Dunchurch, near Rugby, where he married a local girl and qualified as a surgeon and chemist.
He died in 1868, and is buried in the village cemetery.
William who had a successful academic career at Oxford graduated in 1829, then got his Master Degree at Magdalen College in 1831.
Ironically, though Rugby Football had secured his immortality, he excelled at cricket playing for Oxford against Cambridge in 1827, some years before ‘blues’ were awarded.
After leaving Oxford, he got ordained and became minister of St George's, Albemarle Street, London.
He was rector of St Clement, Danes on the Strand, the current Royal Air Force chapel, when his mother died in 1844.
He did not marry and for the following seventeen years of his life he was rector of Laver Magdalen church in Essex.
The only known portrait of William Webb Ellis is an engraving published in the Illustrated London News in 1854 following a sermon on the Crimean War.
He became ill with tuberculosis, at the time a major life-threatening disease and during the last decade of his life he traveled frequently to Menton, in France, which had an ever increasing reputation as a heath resort.
The town had a significant British expatriate community at the time and many of them, including Webb Ellis, stayed at the famous Hotel d’Italie, overlooking the sea.
Ellis died on January 24, 1872, a few months after the first rugby international between England and Scotland had taken place.
A few days before passing away, and aware of his deteriorating health he bought the land for his grave in the Vieux Chateau cemetery on the coast overlooking the town and wrote his will, in which he left a substantial part of his £9,000 savings to several London charities and to his brother’s widow in Dunchurch.
His tomb was rediscovered in 1958 by a local journalist and former rugby player Roger Dries and an Englishman Ross McWhirter
Additional information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Webb_Ellis
