I agree wholeheartedly that the story of William Webb Ellis’s “invention” of rugby football is a myth (Rugby’s big lie, Sport, 17 September), but question the claim that your article provides “new evidence to prove that Ellis was not the first to run with the ball”.
Eric Dunning and I thoroughly debunked the Webb Ellis story in Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (1979, 2005), with a further attempt made in the New Dictionary of National Biography (1997). Dunning and I were also among the first to argue that: “By giving pride of place in their report to the William Webb Ellis story, which correctly located the beginnings of rugby football in their school, the Old Rugbeians were attempting … to reassert their proprietorship of the rugby game at a time when it was escaping their control and changing in ways of which they disapproved.”
We can learn much from a study of the past, but replacing one highly individualistic origin myth with another is not the way forward, even in this celebrity-obsessed age.
More relevant to the development of rugby union today would be an examination of the early years of the professionalisation of northern rugby, when the elite Yorkshire clubs of the Senior Competition attempted to ringfence their position by opposing promotion and relegation, a move designed to preserve their own status and economic advantages. It ended badly! Perhaps it’s not too late to heed this message from history?
Dr Ken Sheard
Cambridge
• It’s good to learn from Ben Ryan (Thrills and ball spills, Sport, 19 September) that things are looking promising for “the home side” under Eddie Jones. For readers in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the news that there is only one home side in the Rugby World Cup may come as something of a surprise.
Anne Cowper
Bishopston, West Glamorgan
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