Chapter 1 Introducing Matthew Holbeche Bloxam 1805-1888

Matthew Bloxam was, like me, an enthusiast that nobody but his friends had ever heard of - with the one exception that he is the sole source of the William Webb Ellis myth. We therefore need to know something about who he was, and how he came to know about WWE.

He was himself a pupil at Rugby School, where his father was a master. Born in 1805, he entered the school in 1813 and left in 1820. He qualified as a solicitor and lived the rest of his life in the town. He acquired a reputation as a diligent antiquarian, and wrote a very successful work on Gothic architecture.

He remained a lifelong enthusiast for all things Rugbeian, and maintained close links with the school. In his day there was no school magazine, but when the Meteor was started, he contributed articles reminiscing about the old days, his days.

Rugby football was one of the subjects that attracted his interest as it grew to be a national and even international pastime. When a correspondence arose in The Standard newspaper about the origins of the game, he wrote to the Meteor with a description of the game as played when he was at the school. A later letter, in October 1876, first mentioned the William Webb Ellis story, which he had been told by some unidentified person. The details were (slightly) expanded in an article in 1880.

By the time the Old Rugbeian Society decided to conduct an investigation in 1895, he was sadly no longer available, having died in1888.

Page updated 29 July 2004 by Peter Shortell