Legend has it that the game of rugby football was inspired by the actions of one William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby School, in 1823. According to a stone plaque at the school, it was he who ‘with a fine disregard of the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it’.
To put this unexpected action in context, catching the ball was allowed in football at this time; running forward with it was not.
The story is firmly entrenched in the folklore of the sport, to the extent that the World Cup trophy is named in honour of Webb Ellis. Yet there is little contemporary evidence to support it, and many consider it a myth.
Webb Ellis certainly existed — he lived from 1806-72 and was a prominent Anglican clergyman — but his favoured game was cricket, which he later played for Oxford University.
Birth of the unions
Whatever the truth about the origins of the game, we do know that the first set of rules was published in 1845, and that 21 rugby-playing clubs broke away from the Football Association to establish the Rugby Football Union in 1871.
Initially the RFU was dominated by London-based clubs, but Scotland, Ireland and Wales also proved fertile ground for the growth of new teams. The Scottish Football Union (now Scottish Rugby Union) was founded in 1873, the Irish Rugby Football Union in 1874 and the Welsh Rugby Union in 1880.
In Wales, rugby would eventually become the national sport. In England, it would diverge into two separate sports after a group of northern clubs split from the Union in 1895 to form what would become the Rugby Football League.
British and Irish stamp issues celebrated the centenaries of the RFU, the IRFU and the WRU in 1971, 1974 and 1980 respectively.
Worldwide expansion
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