Is the story of rugby’s founding hero all fiction?

London: When the winners of the Rugby World Cup are crowned at Twickenham on October 31, they will hold aloft the Webb Ellis Cup, named after the boy who famously invented the game on the playing fields of Rugby School. Or did he?

While the story of William Webb Ellis catching a football and running with it will feature in the tournament’s opening ceremony, evidence of his role is flimsy, to say the least. The World Rugby Museum at Twickenham last week admitted he is little more than a “King Arthur” figure, around whom a romantic story has grown that simplifies the rather more complicated origins of the game.

Legend has it that Webb Ellis, a “foundationer” at the public school who was educated there for free because he lived in the Warwickshire town, cheated during a game of football in 1823, when he was 16, and instantly gave birth to a new sport.

Catching the ball was allowed under the school’s own rules of the game (football’s rules were not agreed on until 1863) but running was not. His teachers were supposedly so impressed with what was later described as his “fine disregard for the rules of football” that they embraced his innovation.

But no contemporary account of Webb Ellis’s famous act exists. He was never lauded as the inventor of the game during his lifetime and he seems to have given it up after leaving school, preferring cricket, which he played for Oxford University.

When he died in 1872 at the age of 65, it was his achievements as a clergyman that were honoured, not his connection to sport. Only one portrait of him exists, a drawing from 1854, which appeared in the Illustrated London News when he gave a sermon about the Crimean War.

Michael Rowe, curator of the World Rugby Museum, said: “Webb Ellis is like the King Arthur of rugby. As soon as you start to analyse the facts behind it, there is really very little or no evidence to support the story.”

Incredible as it may now seem, the first time he was named as the inventor of rugby came four years after his death, and more than 50 years after his famous match. Matthew Bloxam, a former pupil of Rugby School, wrote to the school magazine to say he had been told (he did not say by whom) that the growing sport of rugby had “originated with a town boy or foundationer of the name of Ellis, Webb Ellis”.

He put the date at 1824, by which time Webb Ellis had, in fact, left school. Four years later he wrote another letter, with more detail, and conveniently changing the date, saying: “William Webb Ellis whilst playing Bigside at football in [1823] caught the ball in his arms.”

The rules at the time stated that he should have retreated back, while the opposition advanced to where he had caught the ball, and then punted it or placed it for someone else to kick.

“Ellis, for the first time, disregarded this rule, and on catching the ball rushed forwards with the ball in his hands towards the opposite goal,” the letter said.

Another 15 years elapsed before Rugby School’s alumni association decided to try to verify the claim. They drew a blank, finding no first-hand accounts of what happened. Webb Ellis, of course, was no longer alive to be asked, and nor were his teachers. Boys who were at the school in the 1820s told the inquiry that running with the ball was still against the rules after Webb Ellis left, and one boy, an exact football-playing contemporary of Webb Ellis, said he knew nothing about the incident quoted by Bloxam.

Rowe said: “Bloxam had actually written another letter 15 years earlier, which contained no mention of Webb Ellis. And Webb Ellis himself never made any claim to have invented the sport. But the reality of how rugby evolved is so complicated that people like a nice simple story to latch on to.”

So if Webb Ellis did not invent rugby, who did? Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, told the school’s inquiry that another boy, Jem Mackie, was the first great “runner-in”, and popularised try-scoring in 1838/9, before it was officially adopted by the school in 1841.

There was, however, a problem: Mackie had been expelled from the school after an undocumented “incident”, making him an undesirable role model. Victorians loved hero worship, and Webb Ellis, the clean-living clergyman, made a far better hero.

That Bloxam had just donated an enormous sum to the school to help finance a new library may also have influenced the committee to favour his story.

Rugby, like soccer, evolved from mob football games that had been popular since medieval times, and may even have had its roots in a game called harpastum played by the Romans, in which the objective was to carry a feather-filled leather ball over the opponents’ goal line.

Forms of what we now know as football and games similar to rugby had been played in public schools for decades before Webb Ellis’s time. But Rowe added: “While there is a lot of ambiguity and mistiness around Webb Ellis, there is an absolutely solid link to Rugby School, because it was boys at the school who first wrote down an agreed set of rules for the game we recognise today in 1845.”

In the name of the game, then, we can at least have confidence.

— The The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015